Southstar Computers Limited

Southstar Computers Limited was founded in 1996 to supply information technology services to businesses. With expertise in software engineering and a strong base of analytical and meta-development skills, Southstar has a track record of taking on systems that have lost their original development teams, and documenting, extending and maintaining them. Where necessary, we have also guided the migration of systems to new environments and have used our code generation technology to trim development times by automatically generating large numbers of the classes required to manage system entities.

In recent years, Southstar has fostered a growing expertise in open source alternatives to costly and inflexible proprietary solutions. We have taken advantage of the cost reductions these offer to provide competitive, low cost (and sometimes free) services to a growing number of small, local charitable organisations.

Southstar Computers is currently not trading.

Southstar Computers Limited was founded in 1996 to supply software engineering services to the business community. Our first contract involved analysing hundreds of thousands of lines of source code, in a mix of C, COBOL and PERL, in order to document for our client the mainframe emulation environment developed by a company they had recently purchased, on the back of which, an Austrian bank which had purchased their proprietary Unix hardware, were migrating all of their ATM network to run on Unix to replace the previous mainframe system.

In our first eighteen years, Southstar supplied further analysis and development services for clients such as a British Telecom subsidiary, the mobile phone company One2One, Cable & Wireless, an NHS Trust, Xerox, Centrica/British Gas, Autoglass, Allergy Therapeutics, Northern Rock, NATS and ACE Insurance. We have also instigated the emergency rescue of software development for a research project working with ACPO and SOCA that enabled them to demonstrate a working identity management system that subsequently attracted independent venture capital to fund the development of the service required by SOCA, enabling the founding of K4R Systems "Kidnap for Rescue" "Personal Information Profile".

Since 2011, Director Jeffrey Best has been employed by Travel Places as Analyst/Programmer with responsibility for reengineering legacy IT systems into a modern, cloud-based microservices architecture. Access/Jet databases are being migrated to PostgreSQL. 940,000 lines of proprietary Visual Basic 6 code are being replaced with a series of Java micro-services, deploying enterprise integration patterns via Apache Camel, using an Apache ActiveMQ message broker. An Apache CouchDB database has been used to centralise configuration management and supply a simple web caching service. Git provides source code repositories. Apache Maven provides build services. Jenkins is providing continuous integration. Eclipse is used as our IDE. During this period, trading by Southstar Computers Limited has been suspended. Trading will resume once the Travel Places project is completed and Jeffrey Best returns to Southstar.