About Alvechurch Data

This page gives the address and history of the company and describes our facilities and staff. It also leads to some notes about Alvechurch village and some necessary legal notes.

Address

History

We formed Alvechurch Data as a partnership in 1993 with offices at Bordesley Hall near Redditch but moved out in 1996 to the added security and convenience of a home base in the village of Alvechurch. In 2003 we grew into a limited company.

The business began began by concentrating on software development in FoxPro and moved into Access and then briefly into Visual Basic as these languages became available for database systems. Training work evolved as we were asked to show clients how to use the systems we had written for them.

Our clients range in size from a one man consultancy to multinationals. We both have backgrounds in engineering (HM Dockyards and EMI respectively) and much of our work is still done in this industry.

Facilities

We have been writing FoxPro and Access databases for fifteen years. Databases are an unusual category of software in the fast-moving age of the Internet. The integrity of the data they hold is important and companies do not abandon database systems as often as they change their web site. Because of this long term commitment we keep various versions of the development environment available so that we can support databases that are still in use many years after they were originally written.

We are also committed to keeping up to date with the latest versions of the software. We have the new beta versions of FoxPro as soon as they are generally available and move them into production use as soon as is sensible.

Staff

Geoff Franklin is a mechanical engineer who moved into software development when computers replaced pen and ink chart recorders in power stations. He has degrees in Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, is a Member of the British Computer Society, a Chartered Information Professional, and a Microsoft Certified Professional.

Glenda Franklin, a mathematician turned bookkeeper, ran the administrative side of the business until her death in 2006.