Optima Systems was started in the U.K. in 1990 with 5 employees, all engaged on APL contracts.
Optima Systems have a broad range of customers, including major engineering, financial, pharmaceutical, and market research companies based in the U.K., Europe, and U.S.A..
Optima Systems’ principle business remains firmly centred on APL, where they build new applications on the PC using Dyalog; they also maintain a portfolio of applications on the mainframe.
In recent years, Optima Systems have been developing tactical applications for their clients. Using extreme programming techniques has generated significant business cost and time savings for them.
Optima Systems developed the 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. COSMOS 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, although 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
- the ability to deliver to production regularly and quickly
- the staff at Dyalog Ltd”
Application Development Partners
We work with a network of qualified APL consultants to offer application development services and training.
