Optima Systems
Optima Systems was started in the U.K. during 1990 and at that time had 5 employees all engaged on APL contracts. Today Optima employs 19 people; 10 of these are full time APL consultants and the rest look after our networking, CRM and other business interests. To complement all the work that we do, we now employ a graphic designer who deals with the Web front end and User Experience side of our software design business.
We have a broad range of customers who include major engineering, financial, pharmaceutical and market research companies based in the U.K., Europe and U.S.A..
Our principle business remains firmly centred on APL, where we build new applications on the PC using Dyalog from Dyalog Ltd and also maintain a portfolio of applications on the Mainframe.
In more recent years we have been developing tactical applications for our clients, and by making use of Extreme Programming techniques have generated significant business cost and time savings for them.
Most recently we have been developing our COSMOS platform, which is a tool designed to allow the visualisation of large quantities of data and explore it in a real-time, intuitive way. This product is currently being targeted at pharmaceutical and medical data, but soon will be marketed to any large data source in any industry.
Why does Optima Systems use Dyalog?
Over the years we have worked with various flavours of APL – to a certain extent we still do – but our experience has shown us that Dyalog offers a complete, clean and robust working environment. In addition, when problems do occur, Dyalog Ltd is always available to give help and advice, plus their staff are very knowledgeable and approachable – a trait rarely found elsewhere.
The Dyalog working environment is also very conducive to the way we work with our clients. Often we will be writing code alongside the ultimate users and, whilst they may not understand all aspects of the written code, they can understand in principle what is going on. Since the development desktop is so clean and well laid out, their view is not cluttered by unnecessary objects or other "helpful" devices. This has led to us making significant improvements in the development process and reduced "time to production" by orders of magnitude when compared to other more traditional methodologies.
Some of the key attributes of Dyalog from our point of view would include:
- The superb development environment
- Fully implemented Namespacing with consistency inside and outside the APL environment
- .NET capabilities
- Overall functionality
- Extensive interfacing ability
- Stability
- Gives us the ability to deliver to Production regularly and quickly
- The staff at Dyalog Ltd