Pivotal is a single man IT consultancy located in Cambridgeshire, UK.

Founded by Ralph Seeley in 1992, Pivotal initially specialised in the field of logistics modelling. That choice reflected an considerable interest in things logistical — born of a longish exposure to them — combined with good analytical skills and the ability to apply computers to solve some of the intractable problems that can arise.

Since those days I have diversified, building on the original IT foundations, but targetting the needs of smaller, or wilier companies, who want the benefits that IT can bring, but don't want to pay premium prices to achieve them.

So I have absorbed new IT-related knowledge and skills as soon as it became clear that practical benefits at economic prices were within the grasp of the enthusiastic, but discriminating user. This continued an earlier (pre-Pivotal) tradition when I embraced PC's at the dawn of the 80's, MSDOS when it subsequently appeared, Win 3.0 on launch, networking (initially with WfW), the Internet somewhat before Bill Gates "discovered" it '95 and then WinNT, ADSL (in 2000) and numerous other software and hardware goodies.

Providing as it does, very cost effective solutions in a wide range of areas, Linux (or more properly, the open source/GNU software movement) is very much in this tradition. Unfortunately, like many developments in their early stages, Linux does not give up its secrets without a significant measure of effort. So quite a bit of my discretionary effort is taken in getting to grips with Samba (file servers), Sendmail/Postfix (e-mail servers), Rsync, IPChains, SSH, plus of course, the Apache webserver, PHP server-side scripting and MySQL--by which means this material is being delivered to you.

Services

I happily undertake consultancy, for companies that seek guidance, but want to do the work themselves; or development and implementation work for those that would rather hand the problem over. Go to "Services" to get a better idea of what I might be able to do for you, but don't assume that omission necessarily implies ignorance or lack of experience. If in doubt, contact me .

Projects may be undertaken either on or off-site (or both). Deliverables include any combination of: oral presentations, written reports, computer models, system specifications, or bespoke software. Clients are in industry (manufacturing & service), in commerce and in government.

I am able to draw on experience of the oil, defence, computing, manufacturing and consultancy industries and can deploy skills which include statistics, management sciences, information technology, software development, logistics and market research.