How we partner, in real terms.
New systems built, established ones modernised, and existing estates taken on: designed, delivered, secured, and improved every quarter by a UK team you know by name.
- Security patch deployed via pipeline 09:12
- Latency alert triaged, root cause logged 10:47
- Backup restore verified on staging 13:05
- Monthly service report published 16:30
Holistic solutions, delivered with honesty, humility, proactivity, and simplicity, creating lasting peace of mind
Holistic
The whole estate and the people who use it: platform, data, integrations, process, and how it feels to work with, never one layer in isolation.
Honesty
What we find, we say, including when the answer is "leave it alone" or "you do not need us for that". Evidence before opinion, and no surprises later.
Humility
We never presume we understand. We listen to the people who live with the system, we learn how it really works, and then we validate what we think we know with you before we act.
Proactivity
Problems raised before you notice them, roadmaps that look ahead, and the next risk already on the list. We would rather tell you than be asked.
Simplicity
Plain language, one team, one SLA, one number a month. Complexity is our job to absorb, not yours to manage.
Five values, one outcome: you stop worrying about the system.
Don’t let IT complexity hold back your goals
Committed support gets the most out of the technology you already own and moves the organisation towards its objectives. Integrity, craftsmanship, and dedication to your success turn IT spend into an engine for growth.
Integrity
Straight answers, published terms, and a report that is yours whoever you appoint.
Craftsmanship
Senior engineers, code review on every change, tested releases, and nothing shipped by hand.
Dedication
A named team that stays, a roadmap that looks ahead, and your objectives on every monthly review.
Complexity is ours to absorb. Momentum is yours to keep.
Your situation first, then straight answers.
Seven parts, one story. We start with you, then answer the questions you would ask any partner: how we take ownership, how support works, how your estate stays protected, and how it moves forward.
- Your situationWhat you run, what keeps you up at night, and the date that matters. We listen before we say a word about us.
- Who we areA senior UK team that builds new systems, modernises old ones, and takes on estates built by others.
- Taking ownershipThree phases: discover, onboard, support. How we understand your estate, what transfers, and how a partner handover works.
- Support, day to dayResponse times, what we put in writing, the team you deal with, monthly reporting, and how we cope under pressure.
- Security and continuityAssurance you can verify, escrow if we ever stopped trading, everything as code, and releases with no downtime.
- Beyond keeping the lights onTwelve capabilities, automation and dashboards, responsible AI, integrations, and modernisation when it pays.
- Next stepsWhy our values make us different, and the three things that happen this week.
Tell us what you run, and what keeps you up at night.
Phase 1 has already started: what you tell us is digested and translated into technical options and working processes, and that understanding keeps deepening for as long as we work together.
- What triggered this, and what is the date that matters?
- What does the estate consist of: applications, databases, integrations, hosting?
- Who supports it today, and what is frustrating about that?
- What would you want to be true in twelve months?
- Who is involved in the decision, and is there a formal process?
NDA available today, yours or ours, before any detail is shared.
A compact, senior UK team. We build, we modernise, and we take on.
CarlFounder & Technical Lead
DavidHead of Client Engagement
JanPrincipal Project Manager
SiobhanProject Coordinator
JohnPrincipal Architect / Developer
George.NET Blazor Developer
AliSenior Database Administrator
DeepakHead of QA and Automation
KristinaSenior UI/UX Designer
AshleighUX & Social Pro
StephPrincipal Operations Manager
DoerteCompany Secretary & Head of Compliance
GeorgeHead of RecruitmentCarlFounder & Technical LeadDavidHead of Client EngagementJanPrincipal Project ManagerSiobhanProject CoordinatorJohnPrincipal Architect / DeveloperGeorge.NET Blazor DeveloperAliSenior Database AdministratorDeepakHead of QA and AutomationKristinaSenior UI/UX DesignerAshleighUX & Social ProStephPrincipal Operations ManagerDoerteCompany Secretary & Head of ComplianceGeorgeHead of RecruitmentLeverage Microsoft Cloud to drive your IT transformation
We enhance scalability, security, and productivity with Microsoft Cloud services: building, running, securing, and moving the systems your business depends on.
Azure Cloud Services
Deploy and manage applications with the power of Azure: built, deployed, and run for scalability and reliability.
Security and Compliance
Advanced security measures to protect your data: encryption, access controls, and regular security audits across your Microsoft Cloud environment.
Data Analytics
Valuable insight from powerful analytics tools, so decisions are informed and growth is measured, not guessed.
Migration and Integration
Seamless migration to Microsoft Cloud, with your systems fully integrated with Microsoft Cloud services when they arrive.
Six situations we start from
A new system from a blank page
Discovery, design, and delivery in weekly releases, with support built in from day one.
Development partner winding down
Structured takeover while the outgoing team is still available.
In-house developer leaving
Capture what is in their head, run alongside them, take the load.
.NET Framework and SQL Server systems
Patched, monitored, audit-ready. No rebuild required.
AI-built application in production
Stabilise, secure, test, then support it properly.
Due diligence before committing
Independent, severity-rated assessment with costed options.
All six end in the same place: a documented, supported system with a named team behind it.
Understand it. Run it alongside whoever runs it now. Own it.
Discovery & assessment
Code, architecture, infrastructure, integrations, security posture. AI-augmented analysis, verified by senior engineers.
Onboarding & go-live
Knowledge transfer sessions, access transferred and verified item by item, runbooks, monitoring, pipeline validated, escalation rehearsed.
Support & improvement
Named team, agreed SLA, monthly service report, quarterly review of the SLA and the roadmap.
- Monitoring, 24/7
- Monthly service report
- Patch released via pipeline
- Quarterly SLA review
- Roadmap updated
We listen, understand, map, and validate with you before we draw any conclusions
- 1ListenStructured interviews with every senior stakeholder and the people who use the system every day
- 2UnderstandHow the business actually runs on the system: processes, personas, hand-offs, and where it hurts
- 3MapEvery layer of the architecture: UI, application, data, integrations, infrastructure, pipelines
- 4ValidateThe map played back to your stakeholders and corrected, and signed off, before any analysis
- Then: gap analysisFrustrations, performance bottlenecks, security gaps, evidenced and rated (next slide)
Then the gap analysis: frustrations, bottlenecks, and security gaps, evidenced
- Core order flow stable for twelve months
- Domain logic well understood by finance
- Nightly backups running and restorable
- Warehouse users re-key data between two screens
- Finance waits two days for month-end reports
- One developer holds the deployment knowledge
- P95 page load 6 s on the order screen
- Reporting queries lock tables at month-end close
- Accounts sync runs serially, four hours nightly
- Credentials in config files, no MFA on admin
- .NET Framework 4.5 and SQL Server 2014 out of support
- No rollback path; releases by hand
- Validated estate map, every layer from UI to infrastructure, signed off by your stakeholders
- Personas and journeys: who does what, where it hurts
- Gap analysis: frustrations, performance bottlenecks, security gaps, evidenced
- Security findings rated by severity and business impact
- Performance and UX findings with measured baselines
- Risk register, ranked
- Recommended SLA tier and coverage model
- Costed options: support, modernise, or both, and a proposal
Findings shown are illustrative examples.
A typical twelve-month transition, planned against the real exit date
If the outgoing team will not cooperate, we reconstruct the estate from code, infrastructure, and production behaviour. Slower and costlier, but routine.
Six things that must move, and how we move them
- KnowledgeRecorded sessions: architecture decisions, deployment quirks, workarounds.
- Access & controlSource control, Azure, DNS, certificates, secrets, app stores, verified item by item.
- DocumentationArchitecture maps, data flows, API specs, AI-drafted and engineer-completed.
- Regression suiteAutomated tests around the highest-risk paths first.
- Operational ownershipMonitoring, alerting, incident and problem management, a defined SLA.
- RoadmapModernisation and improvement plan, reviewed every quarter.
Response and resolution targets, written into your SLA
| Severity | Typical example | Business-hours plan | 24/7 plan | Resolution target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 Critical | System down, trading stopped | Within 1 business hour | Within 1 hour, any time | Restored or workaround within 4 hours; root cause fixed in the next release |
| P2 High | Major function unusable, no workaround | Within 4 business hours | Within 2 hours | Fix or workaround within 1 business day |
| P3 Medium | Degraded with a workaround; data correction | Next business day | Next business day | Scheduled into the next planned release |
| P4 Low | Cosmetic, question, enhancement | Within 2 business days | Within 2 business days | Prioritised with you in the monthly review |
Indicative. Severity definitions are written in your language and the exact targets are agreed in the SLA.
Six things we put in writing
Severity definitions
Driven by business impact: what stops trading, what degrades service, what can wait.
Response & resolution targets
Per severity, honest about whether a fix needs a release, measured against the pipeline.
Coverage & maintenance windows
Hours of cover and planned work windows, agreed in advance so patching never surprises anyone.
Escalation paths
Who is contacted, in what order, and what triggers escalation. Rehearsed at onboarding, not discovered in an outage.
Incident & problem management
Incidents restore service. Problems remove the cause. Run and reported separately so recurring issues visibly shrink.
Reporting & review cadence
Monthly report on incidents, health, security, and cost. Quarterly recalibration of the SLA and allowance.
A named team and a monthly report you can put in front of the board
Support lead
Your primary contact. Coordinates the team, owns SLA reporting, manages escalations.
.NET engineers
Fixes, patches, enhancements, and performance across the application and its data.
DevOps engineer
Pipelines, Azure, monitoring, deployments, backups, disaster recovery.
QA analyst
Regression coverage that validates every fix and stops new issues reaching production.
Every fix ships through the same tested pipeline as feature work. No manual deployments, ever.
Five moments that test a support partner, and what happens in each
A P1 out of hours
Monitoring raises it before your users do. The on-call route is already rehearsed; the named engineer restores service or a workaround, then the problem record removes the cause.
A busy morning
Severity decides order, not arrival. The support lead triages, the board shows every ticket, its owner and status, and nothing waits on one person.
A spike in work
The plan flexes: the bank of hours scales for the month, engineers are added from a bench we keep deep, and the quarterly review resets the baseline.
A person unavailable
Runbooks, recorded sessions, and a second engineer on every account mean no single head holds the system. Cover is planned, not improvised.
An unfamiliar codebase
AI-augmented analysis maps the estate in hours; senior engineers verify before anything changes. Most of what we support was written by someone else.
The specialists behind the service, coordinated by one team
You hold one contract and one SLA. We hold the partners to it.
We do not pretend to do everything. Where a managed service needs something outside software engineering, we bring in a specialist partner we already work with, and you keep one contract, one SLA, and one point of contact.
IT support
Desktops, networks, identity, and Microsoft 365 alongside the application, so the IT team and the application team never leave a gap between them.
Coordinated by usCompliance
Cyber Essentials Plus assessment and audit support for the frameworks you report against. We prepare the evidence; an independent assessor verifies it.
Independent assessorPenetration testing
Accredited testers who have never seen the code, on a schedule and before major releases. Findings go straight into our problem log and the monthly report.
Independent testersCall centre
Out-of-hours first line: a person answers, logs the call, and escalates on the agreed route, so a P1 at 2 a.m. reaches a named engineer within the SLA.
Escalates to our engineersThe domains we have supported, taken over, and moved forward
Insurance
Support and migration of business-critical legacy .NET applications and services, Azure DevOps pipelines, and adviser-facing tooling for a major UK insurer.
Travel & ferry booking
Keeping booking timetables in sync through custom booking-system integration for a ferry operator, where an outage means missed sailings.
Health & fitness
Azure fitness API and member portal for a global gym chain: digital transformation backed by full-stack development on Microsoft Azure.
Pharmaceutical supply chain
Cloud-native solutions counteracting falsified medicines entering the legal supply chain, built to a regulated standard.
Construction & ERP
An established line-of-business ERP supported and extended: the kind of bespoke system that runs a company day to day.
Finance & invoicing
Our own .NET Blazor invoicing product, 150+ currencies and 7 languages, cloud-native on Azure. We run what we recommend.
200+ projects since 2009. Named case studies at assemblysoft.com/case-studies; references in your domain on request.
Trust you can verify before the questionnaire arrives
- Zero secrets in code: credentials in Azure Key Vault. MFA and least privilege on every administrative account.
- Azure estates built and reviewed against the Microsoft Well-Architected Framework: reliability, security, cost, operational excellence, performance.
- Infrastructure and deployments as code, version-controlled: traceable, rehydratable, no manual portal changes.
- Backups stored independently of the live environment and the development team; restores verified on a schedule.
- A documented disaster recovery plan with agreed RTO and RPO, before it is ever needed.
- Developer access and security administration kept strictly separate.
- Incident response with customer notification within 24 hours of a confirmed breach. UK/EEA data residency on Azure.
- Published MSA, UK GDPR Article 28 DPA included, NDA on request: assemblysoft.com/compliance
Protected even if Assemblysoft ceased to trade
Source code, key documentation, and runbooks are lodged with an independent escrow agent, released to you on the trigger events written into the agreement.
- Deposits refreshed with every release and verified by the agent, so what is held is what is running.
- Everything is already in your name regardless: Azure tenancy, repositories, domains, certificates, accounts.
- Release triggers, insolvency and ceasing to trade among them, written into the agreement, not left to goodwill.
Infrastructure is provisioned and applications are deployed from code, so every change is traceable and the whole estate can be rehydrated from the repository.
- No manual portal changes: every change carries an author, a review, and a timestamp you can audit.
- A full environment can be rebuilt from the repository for disaster recovery, a new region, or a new supplier.
- Nothing lives only in one engineer's head or on one laptop.
Change without downtime, and a way back in seconds
- Unit
- Integration
- Regression
- Smoke
Blue-green staging
Every release lands in a staging slot identical to production: same infrastructure, same configuration, same data shape, warmed up before it takes a request.
Slot swap
Traffic moves to the new slot in one operation. No downtime, no DNS wait, no maintenance window for your users.
Regression, every time
Unit, integration, and regression suites run in the pipeline on every change, then smoke tests after the swap. Nothing swaps until they pass.
Rollback in seconds
The previous slot stays warm. A rollback is one swap back: no rebuild, no restore, and it is rehearsed, not improvised.
- Ticket
- Approval
- Review
- Pipeline run
- Audit trail
Twelve capabilities, one team: the platform and the people who use it
Looking ahead
Emerging trends, vendor roadmaps, and end-of-support dates, read for your estate every quarter, so the roadmap looks forward as well as back.
Friction finding & UX
We listen to your people: their personalities, their frustrations, the workarounds they have stopped noticing. Then we turn what we hear into UX and process changes technology can actually deliver.
Automate everything. See everything. Move forward when it pays.
Automate everything
Build, test, deploy, patch, back up, verify restores, rotate certificates, alert: all from pipelines and code, so every change is traceable and an environment can be rehydrated. Reviewed against the Well-Architected Framework.
See everything
Custom dashboards for your estate: response times, error rates, integration health, business KPIs, and cloud cost on one screen, shared with you.
AI insight, backed by an engineer woven into both
AI reads logs, traces, and code faster than any of us. A named engineer reviews every insight before it becomes an action, and secrets never enter a prompt.
Integrations and modernisation
Every integration, from accounting and payments to CRM and supplier feeds, is a monitored dependency with its own runbook. Stabilise first, then a quarterly costed view of what is reaching end of support. Support never requires a rewrite.
A published rate card, a plan sized to your risk, and no lock-in
Discovery
Short, fixed-scope, at published day rates. Ends in a proposal with the SLA tier and monthly cost. The report is yours whoever you appoint.
Ongoing support
A monthly plan sized to the SLA tier plus a bank of engineering hours, reviewed quarterly. Where we manage Azure, a 30% infrastructure management fee applies; cloud costs stay in your name.
Terms
Published MSA. Deliverables assigned on payment. Thirty days' notice. Everything stays in your accounts, so leaving is a handover, not a rescue. We participate in formal tenders.
Our core values make us different
Five values, each one a habit you will see every week, not a poster on a wall.
Holistic
The whole estate, and the people who use it.
Honesty
What we find, we say. Even when the answer is "leave it alone".
Humility
We never presume. We listen, learn, then validate with you.
Proactivity
We tell you before you have to ask.
Simplicity
One team, one SLA, one number a month.
We are ready for your questionnaire and NDA
- Ready nowSend your supplier questionnaire today: most of it is already answered on our Trust Centre, the rest comes back under NDA. Our NDA or yours, signed this week.Today
- If you would like to go furtherScoping: a short, fixed-scope discovery, ending in a written proposal with the SLA tier and a monthly figure.When you are ready
- The natural next stepMeet the engineers: a second session with the people who would actually run your account.When you are ready
The written version of this conversation: assemblysoft.com/services/managed-support