Emerging technologies that really deliver
We are always on the lookout for new technology or approaches that will deliver real value for our clients. However we combine that with an element of healthy skepticism from years of operating in complex organisations. We know that adopting the latest and greatest trend technology can easily become a hindrance if the broader organisational context and technology landscape hasn’t been considered. So while we love tech, we value real results more.
If you’re looking at initiatives in areas such as Cloud, DevOps, Continuous Delivery, NoSQL or Containers, and want to ensure you achieve the business outcomes you want to happen, OpenCredo can help.
Challenges we help our clients with
Re-establishing an Internal Technical Capability
Many organisations struggle to innovate and keep pace with competitors because they have the wrong suppliers or the wrong relationship with those suppliers. Often organisations have given so much responsibility to those suppliers that they can no longer effectively own IT strategy and deliver on that. In this situation OpenCredo can help by providing both high level strategic advice and people on the ground to augment client teams. Read more
De-risking Adoption of Technologies, Techniques and Methodologies
Adoption of new technologies, such as Docker, Cassandra or Go(lang), or the introduction of new approaches, like Agile, Lean and DevOps, can be fraught with potential pitfalls. OpenCredo has a history of being on the leading edge of important trends – such as cloud computing, containerisation and DevOps – meaning we can often bring that "been there and learned the lessons" experience that keeps new initiatives moving in the right direction. Read more
Addressing Infrastructure Costs
Many have assumed that embracing cloud computing, virtualisation and containerisation technologies would automatically deliver greater infrastructure utilisation and, in doing so, lead to cost savings. However, in our experience this is not often realised. OpenCredo's skills in software architecture, cloud computing, container technologies and DevOps, allow us to deliver real costs savings for clients, while avoiding pitfalls such as vendor lock-in. Read more
Time to Market and Quality Issues
OpenCredo have experience in assessing and implementing change in IT groups that are facing significant problems. These challenges may appear as quality issues, time to market problems, or a general breakdown of trust with stakeholders. We have experience in assessing and making meaningful change across technology and architecture as well as the people, teams and general organisational structure. Read more
OpenCredo offer a broad and deep range of services
Making changes in IT is like throwing a stone in a lake. Each change causes ripples, which reach much further than you would think when just looking at the problem you’re helping with. When advising our clients which emerging technology to adopt, we always consider the broader organisational context and technology landscape.
OpenCredo offer a broad range of services, from organisational transformation, architectural expertise and technology leadership, to the implementation of continuous delivery and real-time analytic solutions. By properly aligning technical and business strategy, we deliver meaningful business outcomes quickly and cost effectively.
Sharing our knowledge
OpenCredo continually strive to be leaders within the domain of software development technology, and we recognise that engaging with the larger IT community is a key part of this. Our consultants regularly blog, present at local events and international conferences, and run public training courses. We also work closely alongside our clients to share learnings from successful joint projects, and have published several whitepapers and other publications. OpenCredo are founders of several meetup groups, including the London Mesos UG, the London HashiCorp User Group and Software Circus London.
Common Problems with Cassandra Tombstones
Cassandra is optimised for writes and everything, including logical deletion of data, results in extra records being inserted. Every deletion in Cassandra results in a tombstone, a record marking deletion. We have noticed that lack of understanding of tombstones is often the root cause of production issues our clients experience with Cassandra. We have decided to share a compilation of the most common problems with Cassandra tombstones and some practical advice on solving them. Read more
Simulating GitHub OAuth2 Login for Tests with JUnit, Webdriver & Hoverfly: Record, Sanitise, Playback and Assert
Sometimes, it can be difficult to write automated tests for parts of your application due to complexities introduced by an external dependency. It may be flaky or have some sort Read more
How Not To Use Cassandra Like An RDBMS (and what will happen if you do)
Cassandra isn’t a relational database management system, but it has some features that make it look a bit like one. Chief among these is CQL, a query language with an Read more
Patterns of Successful Cassandra Data Modelling
A growing number of clients are asking OpenCredo for help with using Apache Cassandra and solving specific problems they encounter. Clients have different use cases, requirements, implementation and teams but their similar issues. We have noticed that Cassandra data modelling problems are the most consistent cause of Cassandra failing to meet their expectations. Data modelling is one of the most complex areas of using Cassandra and has many considerations. For a business it is essential to invest resources into data modelling from the early stages of Cassandra projects; unlike operational settings that can be tuned, an Cassandra data model is very costly to fix. Read more
New Blog Series: Cassandra - What You May Learn the Hard Way
At OpenCredo we have been working with Cassandra since 2012 and we are big fans of both open source Apache Cassandra and the capabilities of DataStax Enterprise. Over the years Read more
Our clients' success stories
OpenCredo work with a range of clients, from large well-established blue chip organisations to small disruptive startups. Browse the list of client case studies on the left to learn more about our recent engagements.
Case study
notonthehighstreet.comCase Study
“In this 4 day weekend we take 6% of our annual turnover and have 6x our average peak traffic; OpenCredo worked with us to completely overhaul our infrastructure including a complete migration to a container based solution running on AWS... This could not have gone smoother!”
Read the case studyCase study
IntetechAgile Development
“We are more streamlined and faster – and we catch problems sooner. We can deal with problems immediately, which is crucial as the longer we leave a problem the more costly it becomes to fix.”
Read the case studyCase study
WoorankMesos Project
“WooRank reduced its infrastructure from more than 100 servers to 15 servers. This has increased efficiency and resulted in savings of up to 45% on server costs.”
Read the case study
Autonomy, purpose, mastery
OpenCredo strive to embrace the concepts of autonomy, purpose and mastery, both internally and when engaging with our clients. Building upon the themes found in Daniel Pink’s seminal book ‘Drive‘, we will work closely alongside your team, sharing knowledge and skills in order to develop mastery, explaining our approach to goal-setting and decision-making to build purpose, and ensuring any technology developed can be operated, maintained and extended autonomously.
OpenCredo consultants are a diverse group of technology specialists that are committed to continual learning, and we aren’t afraid to share our opinion in a professional context. We also partner with large and small technology leaders, and although we never resell solutions, we frequently exchange knowledge and skills with these partners. The combination of these qualities allows us to continually drive innovation within organisational transformation, leading-edge technology, and the larger software development community.
