Red Oak is the leading independent high-performance computing consultancy in the UK. As a business, we focus solely on HPC services and Cloud strategy. Founded in 2004, Red Oak was established to meet the market need for high quality, independent, specialist advise for HPC. Over the years, Red Oak has been key in assisting many industry sectors including; academia, corporate and government on their HPC and Cloud journey. Our business infastructure enables us to remain agile, providing fast and effective solutions for all our customers.

Our business success has been built on our values: Professionalism, Trust, Integrity, Expertise and the Customer.

As a company, Red Oak’s track record showcases our ability to work in partnership with many organisations, delivering success after success, including:

Involved in the procurement and installation of two of the worlds’s top 20 supercomputers

Our business has been instrumental in the delivery of over 100 projects providing insight and expert advice into High Performance and Cloud computing environments

Our team of leading independent HPC and Cloud specialists will work with your business to ensure all your HPC and Cloud business objectives are met.  We guarantee results and stand by our proven track record of success. Experience has taught us that there are four critical questions in the HPC and Cloud markets that all businesses need to ask and we work tirelessly to ensure you get the answers.

Forming a balanced view of project success and impact is absolutely crucial. At Red Oak, we specialise in working with our customers to understand and quantify the value of activities. Your specialist HPC and Cloud consultant will draw from Red Oak’s wealth of experience, to build two robust cost models: one centred around inclusive cost, and the other focused on benefit and risk models. By collating and forming these two costs models, senior management will be able to make decisions in an “eyes open” fashion.

Our experience has taught us that by actively and critically observing our activities and those of the wider teams, we can use clear metrics to determine the likely success, or otherwise, of a project. Some of these are in the “make sure you do this before you start any project” category that will be familiar to anyone that has spent any amount of time in delivery. Others are more domain and technology focused, based on hard-earned lessons learnt.

A rule of thumb is that it is generally 1,000 times cheaper to apply an intervention at the front of a project than to try to fix the issue at the end of the life cycle. In some cases, however, it can be 10,000 or even 100,000 times more expensive. The Red Oak methodology is based upon merging our body of critical success factors with a critical assessment of the project deliverability and risk assessments to provide clear actionable points.

We all intellectually understand risk and the value of  insurance; however, in order to properly manage risk and its impact on our deliveries, we need to embrace risk and uncertainty in our methodology and assessment plans. By approaching projects with more of a mind towards risk management than delivery-at-all-costs, Red Oak repeatedly bring projects in earlier, on budget, and at a higher quality. This change of perspective is subtle, but profound in it’s impact.