Writing software since 1989

1989

EDI middleware over X.25 and X.400, moving orders between IBM, ICL, HP, Prime and AlphaMicro systems that shared neither a protocol nor a character set

1990

Firmware for a series of communications satellites: triple redundant, hard real-time on OS-9000 and MIPS, and still in orbit

1990

Our first machine learning network, predicting when telephone calls would end

1991

GEN Central Storage, cloud storage before anyone called it that, with a back end in sh and Perl and our own NCP to Zmodem converter

1992

GENMail, one platform joining SMTP, FidoMail and X.400, and from its second release the first email service with PGP built in

1996

A single sign-on directory across internet, email and storage, years before Active Directory

1997

Intel Insight, developed with Intel for its Express switches, a forerunner of RMON

1999

GENActive, an online payment platform that by 2004 worked with more than 7,500 financial institutions in 199 countries

2000

VoIP on Asterisk, and dialplans and AGI ever since

2001

Building automation: lighting, heating and alarm monitoring, run over our own connectivity

2005

Encrypted voice on Asterisk, with encrypted IAX2 and RTP

2019

Serenity, our big data platform, with 640 cores given over to data and the ETL that feeds it

2020

GAIN, our own AI platform, where specialised models check each other's work and agree before answering

2024

Oversight, real-time infrastructure monitoring with Proxmox cluster intelligence

Now

LLM agents, telephony, provisioning, data pipelines and the products below

The stories behind these are on GEN's history page.

Business systems

Bespoke applications, customer portals, ERP middleware and system integration, and custom modules for platforms such as Odoo, ERPNext, SuiteCRM and MantisBT.

Embedded

Firmware and control software for hardware that has to look after itself: satellites, QNX automotive systems, robotics controllers, medical positioning equipment, time and attendance terminals, Victron Cerbo systems, SIP phones, industrial plant and buildings.

Integration

Connectors and middleware between internal and external systems, from live ERP stock checks for ecommerce to tracking feeds and data exchange over Matrix.

Telephony

Asterisk dialplans and AGI, FreePBX modules, call routing and provisioning.

Data and ETL

Pipelines, migrations and big data processing, from flat files off a mainframe to clustered MariaDB.

AI and LLM

Private models on our own GPU cluster, agents, document analysis, transcription, and GENChat chatbots.

Inherited code

Taking on software someone else wrote, then maintaining, refactoring and documenting it, or containerising it so it keeps running.

Mostly PHP, HTML and JavaScript, Node.js, Go, and C and C++, with other languages where the job calls for them.

Cross platform

Desktop and command-line tools for Windows, macOS and Linux: diagnostics, deployment, staged rollouts and SQL query tooling.

Mozilla

Thunderbird and Betterbird provisioning and central administration.

Web based

Multi-tenant chat with AI orchestration, customer portals and web tooling.

Asterisk

Modules, utilities and integrations for Asterisk and FreePBX.

Proxmox

VM lifecycle, backup orchestration and operational scripts for infrastructure teams.

A small team in an office, writing software, and doing it well. We are part of GEN, the UK's longest established business IT provider, and the partners who founded it in 1989 still run it.

You will not find client names here. Confidentiality is written into our contracts, and it does not end when the contract does.

If you have a system to build, rescue or keep running, tell us about it.