Tier 2 Consulting
Tier 2 Consulting is a team of expert software developers, who deliver custom software using an agile, cloud-native approach. Tier 2 works in partnership with customers to understand their business challenges, and deliver solutions using modern, open-source technology.
Tier 2 is the UK & Ireland’s first Red Hat Premier Middleware Partner, an award based solely on accredited skills and experience. We are also one of the first partners in the UK to be awarded the Container Platform Specialism, recognising our expertise in RedHat’s OpenShift.
Tier 2 Consulting are experienced, skilled, technical experts. Our team holds formal accreditations in Red Hat Middleware, OpenShift and Ansible technologies, and are recognised as experts in their chosen technologies.
We provide high quality middleware consultancy, best-practice Red Hat development advice and advanced training and support. Our accredited Red Hat consultants and developers are highly skilled and highly regarded – with two of our senior team voted #1 and #2 in the Red Hat EMEA Training Awards.
Our project development teams work closely with our customers to deliver software using an agile approach, based on SCRUM, and adapted to meet the governance requirements of many organisations.
We are award-winning, and have been twice voted #1 in the Red Hat EMEA training awards, and awarded Red Hat ‘Stronger Together’ award, to recognise our approach to collaborative working.
If you have any software development or Red Hat queries, please get in touch.
Our Red Hat Premier Partnership
Tier 2 Consulting became the first Red Hat Premier Middleware Partner for the UK & Ireland in 2014, an award based on proven skills and experience. We pride ourselves on being the best in our chosen disciplines, evidenced by our Red Hat Premier Partner award for the 7th consecutive year.
We recently (2021) earned the Red Hat Container Platform Specialist accreditation - based on our current sales, engineer and delivery, and continue to be recognised as Red Hat experts.
We have proven expertise in the most popular Red Hat® technologies, including:
- Red Hat JBOSS EAP
- Red Hat Integration
- Red Hat Process Automation
- Red Hat Open Shift Container Platform
- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Find out more about our premier partnership, and the consultancy and support services we offer around Red Hat products and solutions.
Software Development & Support
We base our standard project delivery approach on ‘Scrum’ - an agile methodology based on iterative and incremental development. We have extensive experience in using and adapting this approach to fit your business needs. For example, we are able to meet the typical governance needs of commercial organisations and can support software development in regulated environments (including biotech).
Discovery
Working closely with our customers, we gather high-level requirements to determine an overall solutions architecture, and define, estimate and plan future project phases.
The Discovery phase does exactly that - it’s all about discovering your requirements, and how we can support you to deliver this. Tailored to your specific needs, Discovery provides an overview of your project profile by delivering:
- A prioritised list of requirements.
- Technical solutions.
- Estimated effort, costs, and timeline.
Discovery will help you determine what you want to do, and how to achieve it, focusing on three elements –
- Requirements backlog: A list of what is needed to improve the product, gathering high-level functional and non-functional requirements.
- Solutions architecture: Describing how the project would be delivered.
- MVP definition: “Minimum Viable Product” implementation – Defining a version of the product with just enough features to go live with and be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development.
Have you got a requirement - but are not sure where to start?
The Discovery process will provide a high-level project profile tailor-made to your needs, and is a great way to get to know us too – with no commitment to move the project further than this first stage. Get in touch.
Next steps: What comes after the Discovery phase?
We’d love you to continue to work with us on a Discovered Project, but there is no obligation. The Discovery deliverables can be used for a variety of purposes, including preparing budgets, and detail for tender processes.
If you are interested in moving forward with us, here’s what we do next: Custom Software Development. Find out more about how we deliver custom software in a series of agile sprints, using industry standard Java & UI technologies and frameworks.
Discover how we can help you
Find out how we can support your project to get started with Discovery, and get in touch with us today.
Custom Software Development
We deliver custom software in a series of agile sprints, using industry standard Java & UI technologies and frameworks.
At Tier 2, we make extensive use of modern software architectures, adopting processes optimised for agility and automation. As a way of building new applications - and modernising existing applications - we use cloud-native techniques, based on cloud principles.
Industry-Standard technology
Basing our development stack on industry-standard Java / UI technologies and frameworks, such as;
- Java
- Spring framework
- JPA
- REST/ SOAP web services
- Hibernate
- Camel
- Fuse
- AOP
- JMS
- JUnit
- Spock
- And more.
We often deploy within Red Hat Middleware technologies such as JBoss EAP and Red Hat Fuse, and other popular open-source platforms including WildFly and Tomcat.
We follow the recommended coding practices and guidelines for all of the given frameworks within a project when developing Java backing services, and ensure a high degree of unit test coverage. This way, we can ensure all code is delivered to a high industry standard, is both testable and tested, and is easy to maintain for future updates or amendments.
Understanding the user journey - or just UI / UX
We take great care to understand the user experience and interface when designing web applications. Using storyboarding techniques throughout, with page mock-ups approved by customers, we take great care to understand the required user journey, and deliver an optimum user experience.
We provide a clear, clean, and easy to use applications, built as single-page applications (SPA) with the Angular framework, and calling secure REST endpoints to obtain and manipulate data. Implementing the latest HTML5 & CSS 3 standards/techniques in a responsive manner, we ensure the page will dynamically adapt to the size of the device being used.
Accessibility
We are experienced in developing 'programmatically accessible' applications up to the highest standard, AAA – as set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Compliance at this level makes your site accessible to the maximum number of users. Put simply, we offer the gold standard when it comes to accessibility, ensuring your content is clean and easy to navigate.
We ensure that the design, development, and testing of our applications are tailored to the end users. For example, we can adapt or develop content to allow people to zoom in, or use ‘assistive technologies’ such as screen readers – allowing people who are blind, visually impaired, or have disabilities to access the content. We welcome any opportunity to ensure our applications are inclusive for all users.
Testing
We have a skilled, dedicated team of ISTQB certified testers, who use manual and automated techniques. Ensuring high-quality software, our testers plan and execute test scenarios against functional and non-functional requirements - for example, performance and volume. Additionally, we provide support for customer test teams during the various acceptance test phases, including user, PVT, and integration.
Getting started with Software Development
Find out how we can deliver Software Development - custom to your needs. Please get in touch with us today.
Support & Maintenance
We provide post-implementation support & maintenance services, all with defined service levels (SLAs) based on incident severity.
From the outset of every project, we work closely with our customers to define how our support and maintenance service will look. You will know exactly what to expect from us, from project beginning to end.
Our support and maintenance service provides first-line technical support of the custom software. We can also perform a structured hand-over to your application support team, and continue to provide an ad hoc ‘backstop’ if required.
In the discovery phase, we will agree on the particular aspects of what the support service will cover, including the level of availability and responsibilities. Communicating this mutual understanding of performance standards ensures quality service and a positive experience for all involved parties.
We will lay out metrics to measure and achieve the agreed-on service levels - and we will deliver what we promise every time.
First-line technical support for your project
Get in touch today to find out more about our Support & Maintenance services.
Products and services
Technical Skillset Overview
View our software developments skills portfolio and technology platform expertise with this handy one-pager
At-a-glance document showing what we use to build, test and deploy applications
About Tier 2 Consulting
PDF slidedeck showcasing our work and clients
Everything you need to know about Tier 2 Consulting in one place!
MoveWithUs Case Study
Mobile Applications for UK's largest network of independent estate agents
Innovative iOS applications puts property data in the hands of home owners
Motability Operations Ltd uses enterprise integration to drive operational efficiency
Case Study reveals the decision making, processes and benefits achieved from working with Tier 2 Consulting and the Red Hat FUSE integration technology
How the UK's biggest car leasing business migrated from slow, admin-heavy processes to an efficient enterprise service bus (ESB) platform to help deliver outstanding customer service, whilst building a motivated team of developers.
EDMI Smart Meters Case Study
Discover how the smart meter roll-out program is being managed with custom integration work and triage applications built by Tier 2 Consulting for EDMI
Millions of smart meters, one company managing the supply chain with ease, thanks to Tier 2 Consulting
Search Consultancy Case Study
Client overview
Search Consultancy is one of the UK's leading recruitment consultancies with a vast array of long standing blue chip client who benefit from a clear value proposition and a demonstrable commitment to corporate and social responsibility.
Search Consultancy first opened for business in Glasgow in 1987, shortly followed by offices in Edinburgh and Dunfermline. From 2000 onwards the business spread south of the border to Manchester and Crawley and is now established as a nationwide recruitment company with 13 offices, a turnover in excess of £156 million and over 600 employees.
Search has a proven track record of outstanding service provision, often working in a strategic partnership with clients who rely on Search to support their long term talent pipeline
Business Challenge
With commercial success comes the ever increasing need to improve management information systems and in early 2014 the Search management team recognised that they had become reliant on vital client contract information being stored manually, with file maintenance and report production taking up increasing amounts of time.
The process was inefficient and cumbersome to manage, with little or no automation around reporting on contract variables, ranging from payment terms to contract renewal dates.
Timely decision-making and operational agility sit at the heart of successful businesses, and so a project team was created to identify a solution that could provide a secure, searchable repository of contracts and facilitate management information reporting with ease.
After a thorough analysis of Contract Management Systems (CMS) available it became apparent that the ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions were geared towards large scale enterprise deployment. For Search, this meant they came with many unnecessary features. The price tag of these CMS products reflected their scalability. What Search needed was a simpler, ‘core’ system with the flexibility to be configured and tailored to their specific needs.
Tier 2 Consulting were identified as the ideal partners for the project (following a recommendation) and the deployment went live in late 2015.
The Tier 2 ARENA Solution.
ARENA is product of over 10 years’ experience of delivering document control solutions in the pharmaceuticals and insurance sectors.
ARENA is an extensible, web-based document assembly and control platform providing security and control over all phases of an electronic document’s lifecycle and is based on open industry standards to provide impressive levels of performance, resilience and scalability.
While providing a rich set of configurable features ‘out of the box’, ARENA’s underpinning technology allows new, custom functionality to be rapidly delivered ‘on top’ of standard features.
In the Search deployment, ARENA embeds the Exari document assembly engine to allow each contract to be uploaded into the system whilst applying meta-data to a pre-agreed list of contract variables selected from drop-down menus - creating a Contract Summary Sheet which acts as the ‘wrapper’ for each contract document.
The process is delivered in an interview style session via a web browser, allowing for easy identification of the appropriate values to be assigned to that contract, specific to the various data fields.
Business Benefits
The result is a searchable repository of contracts, using 25 contract clause variables – from client rankings by contract value to payment terms and renewal dates – critical management information which can shape the workloads of contract managers and secure vital recurring revenues.
The ROI from this type of information is already validating the business case for adopting the ARENA system and the commercial teams are seeing the benefit of real time reporting. Equally, the team previously responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the old master spreadsheet system are freed to perform more commercially beneficial tasks.
The system is completely scalable and will eventually hold over 500 contract summary sheets. The management team are now able to create and view performance dashboards to highlight areas where remedial actions are needed, such as flagging Professional Indemnity renewal dates for example.
The ARENA system requires no specialist skills to maintain and has been embraced by the administration team using it – even to the extent that change requests have been made to the original specification and search criteria refined following the one-day training and demonstration session run by Tier 2.
Equally, the senior management team are calling up reports with growing frequency as they see how easy it is to get the data from ARENA, compared to the tortuous extraction of information from the old spreadsheet.
The Client Perspective
“Search Consultancy first engaged with Tier 2 Consulting in April 2014. Our requirement was for a central repository in which to store a large number of client contracts with the capacity to categorise the information, quickly search the data and run various types of both standard and bespoke reports.
Having gone to market and spoken with a number of different organisations, the Tier 2 option appeared the best and most flexible; the ability to tailor a system to our specific requirements was particularly appealing as an ‘off-the-shelf’ product did not meet our needs.
Tier 2 spent a huge amount of time learning about our requirements and understanding the nature of our business, ensuring that with minimal input from us we got the system we wanted.
Tier 2 were always on hand to discuss any queries and totally flexible in making changes to the system, before and after it went live. Tier 2 Consulting delivered exactly what we needed, within the timescale we wanted and in a cost effective way.
I would have no hesitation in recommending Tier 2 Consulting.”
Monica O’Neill, Director - Client Relationships
