Premium Technology Consulting

by Headera

We are a boutique IT Consultancy business with first class consultants based around London and the South East.

With our consultants and our extensive partner network, we have the skills and experience to successfully deliver your technology solution.

What we do

Our team of professionals offer a wide range of technology services. Here are some of the highlights, but if you need something not listed, give us a call – we have probably done it before. Or if we haven’t, we can almost certainly direct you to someone that has.

Prepare for the unexpected. Sadly, from time to time bad stuff can happen. Data gets corrupted; network lines break; natural disasters occur. If bad stuff happens to you, how do you get your show back on the road?

We have implemented (and tested!) dozens of Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions over the years and we can help to implement yours. We’ll understand your critical assets and risk assess each. We’ll understand your Recovery Point Objective (or RPO – how much data can your organisation afford to lose) and your Recovery Time Objective (RTO – how long can your business survive without services). We’ll formulate a recovery plan – and then document and test it for you.

As more and more business transition their IT systems to public cloud providers, we are well placed to help them on their journey. We have been running systems for clients with multiple cloud providers for over 10 years. Principally running on Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, but we’ve also helped clients with workloads on Google Cloud, Rackspace and Digital Ocean.

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud or Multi-Cloud? Server or ‘Serverless’? Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Function as a Service (FaaS)? There are a number of factors to consider and we can guide you to the right choice for your business.

You can be assured that you will receive the very best advice and service. Your cloud architect will hold relevant certification from one or more of the big cloud providers.

We can supply IT Leadership on a part-time (or “fractional”) basis. A couple of days a month? A couple of days a week? Project based assignment? No problem – we can help you out.

Your IT Leader will have at least 20 years’ experience leading teams and delivering cost-effective Infrastructure and Software solutions.

Want to build your own teams? No problem – let us help you.

We can advise you on hiring the very best performing teams. From assessing your current capability through to recruitment and onboarding, we can help you every step of the way.

We’re not a recruitment agency, so you won’t find a 20-something who can barely turn on a PC “helping” you to identify technology talent and charging you through the nose. We are people who’ve been there and done it. We know what makes an amazing technologist and we’ve built high-performing teams several times before.

Want to outsource your IT support? We can maintain configuration of your on-premises or cloud infrastructure and look after your end-users.

Our standard cover is 08:00 – 18:00 Monday to Friday, with extended cover also available. We work through a ticketing system and you can log requests through our Support Portal – or call our support line for help.

A basic network for a new office or something more complex? Network connectivity between offices or data centres? National or International? VPN (Virtual Private Network) or dedicated circuits?

Network switches, routers, firewalls and load balancers. For more than 20 years we have been providing secure, fault tolerant networks for business-critical applications. Give us a call to discuss your requirements 

Greenfield, in-flight or turnaround? Large or small, we’ve done them all.

Successfully delivering technology projects and programmes is where we really excel. From initiation through to closure, we are experts in the full project lifecycle. We are pragmatists and we deliver. We work with whatever methodology is appropriate for the assignment and flex where necessary. We favour Agile ways of working for technology programmes, but we don’t get too hung up on it. We have our own tools to track and manage projects, but we are also happy to adopt to tools you already have in place and want to use.

We’re also honest: some projects fail. No one likes to see that, but it happens (most research suggest something like two thirds fail). We are scolding hot on risk management and mitigation – and if something is not going to work, we ensure it fails fast and cheaply. Experiments and prototyping play an important part in validating the project will deliver the anticipated value – and regular updates give an honest assessment of how we are tracking.

We partner with some fantastic software houses who write beautiful code. Our strength is in defining software solutions and overseeing the development, testing and deployment. We can use our development partners or equally happy to use your internal teams or existing partners.

We favour configuration over code, and the chances are there is an off-the-shelf package that may exist to solve your business problems with only some minor configuration changes. We don’t like to re-invent the wheel, so if we can leverage existing products, we will – it’s less risky and often much cheaper

We have more than 20 years’ experience of architecting mission critical infrastructure and software solutions. From traditional data centres to public cloud, we deliver cost-effective solutions, using a combination of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS where appropriate.

We have been quick to spot emerging technology trends and have been early adopters of x86 virtualisation technologies, cloud computing, containerisation and serverless computing amongst others.

We have spent a lot of time working within regulated environments and fully understand the challenges that regulators can impose on a businesses. We take time to understand and include all requirements

We’ve been charged with delivering a number of system integration programmes over the years. We frequently come across these pieces of work when helping with business Merger and Acquisition (M&A) programmes, but we have also helped several organisations to integrate disparate systems to achieve business goals.

System integration work is notoriously difficult – often due to the nature of legacy, monolithic systems being asked to function in a way in which they were not originally designed – but with our expertise we will safely integrate to achieve the objectives.

We’ve lost count of the number of system migrations we’ve done over the years. It has been a lot.

We’ve done hardware upgrades. We’ve done software upgrades. We’ve moved and consolidated data centres all over the world. We’ve migrated systems to the cloud. We’ve done data migrations from legacy systems to new ones. We’ve worked on business acquisitions and consolidated two systems into a single one

We are your first-choice trusted partner. Our work has had direct impact on thousands of internal users and millions of customers – so we are well versed in executing migrations with the minimum amount of disruption or impact.

For over 20 years we have been running VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) networks and legacy PBX (Private Branch eXchange) systems. But all that has now changed…

Now we’re helping companies move to cloud telephony services. Whether you need a basic Cloud PBX, or a full Unified Communications or Contact Centre solution we can help. We have access to over 300 leading supplies through our trusted partner, All Things Telephony. We surely have the right solution for you.

If you need help with procurement, we will help you through a vendor selection process. We’ll take time to understand the business problems you are trying to solve and then go to market with a request for proposal (RFP). We’ll analyse the responses and identify the best solution for you. We always have been, and always will be, vendor agnostic – so you can be guaranteed you will be getting a solution fit for purpose.

Who we are

We are all experienced professionals and among the very best at what we do.

Richard Heade

Principal Consultant

Richard is a Chartered IT Professional with over two decades spent as a strategic IT leader, building and running high-transaction, mission-critical IT infrastructure within highly regulated environments.

Carl Cauchi

Consultant

Carl is a Solutions Architect and DevOps/SRE Engineer.
Passionate about the latest technologies he’s been helping some of the busiest websites in the world to improve their speed and stability.

Mark McKeown

Consultant

Mark has spent 30+ years helping over 40 companies to deliver their mission critical projects and programmes. A background covering online gaming and media he’s even been nominated for a BAFTA!

Daryn Robinson

Consultant

Daryn is our telephony expert. A former engineer he now specialises in UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) deployments, helping organisations transition to next generation Voice and Video platforms.

Guy Robinson

Consultant

Guy is a Project Manager and Applications Support expert. He has looked after thousands of end users across hundreds of locations in dozens of countries and managed multiple roll-outs of critical retail systems.

How we got here

Helping businesses since 2009

After a successful career building cutting edge eCommerce technology and leading the teams that run it, in August 2009 Richard Heade founded Headera (/hɛdˈɪərə/)​ as a consultancy company with the ambition to share his knowledge and help other business benefit from his experience.

10 years later, after mainly working as a “one man band”, Headera branched out and started building a group consultancy – selecting only the finest talent from the field. The result is that we can now offer a broad service with the smartest minds to deliver technology solutions.

We have helped over twenty companies so far on a variety of engagements – undertaking both tactical and strategic initiatives, lasting anything from a couple of days to several years.

Mission, Vision & Values

To strip complexity from legacy IT systems and ensure clients have right-sized systems for the tasks they need to perform

That all companies, no matter how small, should have a reasonable opportunity to access technology usually only available to large organisations or IT departments

To provide honest, impartial advice and remain vendor agnostic

Some of our clients...

...and what they have said about us

We engaged Headera to help with a diverse portfolio of high-profile projects within UK Tote Group. We were impressed with their broad technical skillset and the way they effectively managed senior stakeholder expectations and delivered promises precisely to plan.
Joe Eldridge
CTO, UK Tote Group
Headera supplied Richard Heade as a fractional Infrastructure & Operations Director. Working just 1 day a week he was able to hit the ground running, assessing our environment and making direct improvements to infrastructure operations and stability, all with significant cost savings.
Hussein Chahine
CEO, Yazino

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