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 journey. As a business, our infrastructure enables us to remain agile which allows us to provide fast and effective solutions for all our customers.

Our business success has been built on our values: Professionalism, Trust, Integrity, Expertise and customer focused

As a company, Red Oak has a proven track record of working in partnership with many organisations to deliver success, that success includes;

Experience has taught us there are 4 critical questions in the HPC and Cloud markets that all businesses need to ask.

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. Drawing from our experience your specialist HPC consultant will build two robust cost models those being; one centred around inclusive cost and the other focused on benefit and risk models. By collating and forming these two costs models will enable senior management to take decisions in an “open eyes” fashion.

Our experience has taught us that by actively and critically observing our activities and those of the wider teams, we have clear metrics for determining 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 and 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 general rule of thumb is that it is generally 1000x 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, this can reach 100,000x. The Red Oak methodology is based upon merging in 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 into our methodology and assessment plans. By changing the thinking towards more of risk management rather than delivery-at-all-costs, Red Oak repeatedly bring in projects earlier, on budget and at a higher quality. The changes in thinking and approach are subtle, but profound in their impact.