Former Tikit heads Simon Hill and Mark Garnish have launched a new software development business aimed at providing organisations with project managed developers, involved in anything from ad hoc projects to full time development work.
Garnish and Hill last week formally launched Xperate following a period of gardening leave, after Advanced acquired Tikit in March 2020. Hill reprises the role of CEO and Garnish COO.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the new business, Garnish said: “No-one at the moment can get developers but we have opened an office in India and we will have UK project managers. If you need a developer for a project we can do it, or they can be kept on retainer for projects plural.”
He adds: “What makes us different is the UK project managers, which will act as an interface between the offshore and onshore teams.”
Pricing for developers is currently extremely high and Garnish maintains that Xperate will be competitive on price. He said: “If you are a 200 or 300 staff company the chances of you having your own developers is small and often the people you use let you down, but we have a bucket load of experience working in India and can overcome those pitfalls.”
And he adds: “Every CIO I’ve spoken to has said they are not delivering projects because they don’t have the resources.”
While Garnish and Hill’s expertise is in the legal sector, they hope to branch out to non-law organisations.
They are currently recruiting project managers and Garnish says that they may have grown close to 50 people by Easter 2022. The plan is to remain bootstrapped, and they are not looking for investment.
Here is what Garnish had to say on LinkedIn:
After over 30 years or so in the tech industry, I have had a bit of time off recently (my garden looks lovely) but it is time to be getting back into the world of work.It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am going to be working with Simon Hill again and over the last few weeks it has been great getting back on the horse and doing all the things you need to do for a new business. There has been so much to do and I have loved (nearly) every minute of it.Starting again means you can ensure you can build on the past and are not tied down to any legacy systems or traditions. “We have always done it this way” just doesn’t exist for us. This is really refreshing.So what are we doing?Xperate has been created to do one thing and that is to offer a full software development service, primarily aimed at those organisations who are unable or unwilling to do this themselves but still need to get software and systems developed to maintain their competitive advantage. The idea started when, in my previous role, a number of customers would ask us to develop this or that and unless their request was specifically tied to one of our products we had to nearly always refuse.Essentially if you want something developed from a small program to a fully featured application Xperate can help. We know that really large enterprises have plenty of development capacity scattered all over the world to work on their projects but that isn’t a luxury available to SMEs. Xperate can provide that.We can work in one of two ways.For those organisations that want their own development team(s) available fulltime we can provide a team with UK based project management dedicated just to you. Anything from 1 person to 20 or more and we can then work with you to understand the work you need doing and the likely size of the team you might need. Your costs will be fixed over the long term for the resources you need so your budgeting is taken care of. In most cases using Xperate will cost less than employing your own resources.If all you need is a project to develop something specific that might take anything from a couple of weeks to a few months or longer we will provide a dedicated team for the duration of that project. We will work with you to understand your requirements in detail, design and then develop the system with you for a fixed price including all project management. There is no commitment after the final project is delivered although you may want us to continue to look after it in the future or we can hand it all over to your teams.Please get in touch if you would like to know more and please follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and on our Website to keep in touch with what we are up to.
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