An engineer-led Microsoft analytics consultancy

The name

The vigiles were Rome's night watch: the people whose job was to notice something going wrong while everyone else slept. It is a reasonable description of what a data platform should do for a business, and of what a consultancy should do for a client, notice the problem early, say so plainly, and fix the cause rather than the symptom.

What we are

A specialist consultancy on the Microsoft data stack: Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse and Data Factory, with Purview for governance. We are not a reseller, we have no product to licence to you, and we take no commission on your Microsoft spend. That matters, because it means we have no reason to recommend a larger capacity than your reader population justifies, and several times a quarter we tell someone the opposite of what a reseller would.

We work with organisations between roughly fifty and ten thousand employees, which is the range where analytics is genuinely load-bearing but there is rarely a dedicated platform team. Below that, the honest answer is usually a well-built import model and a licence. Above it you are probably buying from a systems integrator, and we are happy to say when that is the right call.

What we refuse

We do not take open-ended time-and-materials work for a first engagement, because neither side can judge value without a defined scope. We do not disable or skip tests to hit a date. We do not present fabricated figures as client evidence, where a case study is anonymised we say so, and where a number is illustrative we label it. And we will not take on support for a platform we have not been allowed to document first, because that is how people end up owning somebody else's outage.

How we price

Discovery is fixed-price and paid, typically in the low five figures, and the output is yours whether or not anything follows. Build work is fixed-scope wherever the scope can be fixed, and day-rate where it genuinely cannot, a migration wave, for example, once the inventory is known. Managed service is a monthly retainer sized to the estate, with unused change days rolling over for one month so nobody is pushed into make-work.

Where we work

The United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium. Delivery is remote-first with on-site workshops at the points where being in the room changes the outcome: definition sessions, validation and go-live. We work in English and German, and handle Dutch and French-language stakeholder sessions through our network. We publish a local view for every city we cover, the industries, the metrics, the licensing arithmetic and the compliance position, rather than claiming offices we do not occupy.

Who you actually get

The person who scopes the work is an engineer who will also do some of it. We do not run a model where a principal sells and a graduate delivers; it produces the documentation problems we spend half our time repairing in other people's estates. On a typical engagement you get a lead analytics engineer, an architect part-time on larger programmes, and a named backup who already knows your estate.