Fixology builds data platforms, customer dashboards and integrations for Glasgow businesses, especially in space, earth observation and financial services. A data pipeline with a customer dashboard typically takes 12 to 18 weeks, and an internal reporting tool 6 to 10 weeks. You see working software every two weeks, and the code and hosting are in your name from day one.
Satellites, banks and the Clyde: Glasgow's software economy
Glasgow has built more satellites than any other city in Europe, with AAC Clyde Space and Alba Orbital among the companies behind that (Invest Glasgow). Most of those satellites are small, and their value is in the data they send back, which is where ordinary web and data software comes in.
The city is also a large financial services centre. Invest Glasgow counts a financial and business services workforce of more than 58,000 and nearly 34,000 people in digital technology, with Barclays, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas and others running major operations here (Invest Glasgow, fintech and data).
Those two clusters create most of the demand for bespoke software in the city, along with the firms that supply them.
Data products for the space cluster
We do not write flight software or anything that runs on a satellite. That is specialist work with its own standards, and the people who do it well are already in Glasgow.
What a space or earth observation business also needs is the software on the ground: pipelines that pull data from ground stations or partners, process it, check it and store it, then a dashboard or API that customers subscribe to. That is SaaS development, with a few twists:
- Large files and long processing jobs, so queues and object storage matter more than in a typical web app.
- Maps and time series as the main way customers read the data.
- Usage metering, so customers see exactly what they have used and nobody works it out by hand.
- Export controls and customer agreements that limit who sees which data.
Back-office software for financial services teams
Large banks build their own core systems. The opportunity in Glasgow is around them: specialist lenders, insurers, wealth managers, outsourcers and the many smaller firms that sell into the big operations centres.
Their problems are usually operational. Reports assembled by hand each month from three systems. Client onboarding steps tracked in a spreadsheet. A workflow that lives in a shared mailbox. These are good candidates for workflow automation or a small internal tool, and often for an integration between systems you already own. See our financial services page for the controls regulated firms need.
A single contractor or a full team
Glasgow has a deep pool of contract developers, and for some projects one of them is the right choice. A single contractor works well when you have a technical lead in house who can manage them, write the specification and review the code.
A team is the better choice when you need design, testing, hosting, security and project management as well, and a delivery plan someone is accountable for. It also removes the risk of one person holding all the knowledge. If you need extra capacity alongside your own developers, a dedicated team can work in your repository and follow your release process.
Inside a typical data platform build
Take a hypothetical first commercial version of a data product: ingest from two or three sources, process and quality-check the data, show it to customers on a dashboard with maps and charts, and meter their usage. It typically takes 12 to 18 weeks.
The dashboard and ingestion carry most of the uncertainty, because they depend on data formats and volumes we only know after a data audit in discovery. Cloud capacity depends heavily on storage and processing volumes, so we model it then too, along with retention rules for raw and processed data.
Business Gateway and other support in Scotland
Business Gateway provides free, publicly funded business support to anyone in Scotland, including one-to-one advice from business advisers and help with digital skills, and has a Glasgow office (Business Gateway).
It is a good place to check what funding is open before you commission software. If the project involves genuine technical uncertainty, UK-wide R&D tax relief may apply, but take specialist advice before relying on it.
Working together from a distance
We are not in Glasgow. Fixology is a remote team with its registered office in Luton, England. We travel to Glasgow for the discovery workshop, user testing with your staff or customers, and launch. Everything else runs in two week sprints with a demo on a test link and replies within one working day.
Code sits in your repository from day one and hosting is in your name, in UK or EU regions. After launch, support plans run month to month and can be ended with 30 days' notice. The how we work page explains each stage, from discovery to handover.