Partner Companies
ACE has established long-term strategic partnerships with software houses in other countries, giving ACE international marketing opportunities, whilst providing our partners with specialised development capabilities. Additionally, we enable our partners to offer UK-based support for their international offerings.
For over 30 years we have worked closely with two other companies.
In Australia, our Sydney-based partner is Card Access Services, who specialise in banking and card-based systems.
In the US we have a similar relationship with Systelecom, based in Reston, Virginia. Until recently, Systelecom specialised primarily in developing arcane software for US Government departments and agencies. Now they are involved exclusievly in ground-breaking research and development in AI systems.
With both of these partners, ACE have jointly developed a number of complex and sophisticated software packages.
We worked with Card Access on a major upgrade of their e-commerce system, developing code to handle credit card validation, auditing, currency code validation and conversion, encoding and decoding transactions, handling multiple simultaneous payment gateways and developing an API.
Card Access were commissioned to install both banking and taxation software in Nigeria, that involved multiple locations that had to be permanently synchronised. This posed significant technical problems: the local infrastructure was very fragile, so both power loses and failing internet connections occurring multiple times a day. ACE developed software that could maintain synchronisation between multiple remote locations (including the UK and Australia), through a network of dynamically self-configuring master and slave systems, with automatic promotion of masters, and automatic synchronisation of failed systems as they came back on-line. Nigeria is far closer to the UK than to Australia and, more importantly, in the same time zone, so ACE offered first-line support .
We have also worked on more minor projects for Card Access, such as developing a device driver for the InfoTalk voice board.
We worked closely with Systelecom on a document indexing system running on huge laser disk arrays attached to IBM main-frames. The system offers almost instant access to any page of a report in databases of millions of pages, and is used by organisations such as the US stock exchange and Kodak. While Systelecom handled the user front-end, ACE designed and wrote the indexing software, developing a proprietary indexing and storage mechanism.
Much of our work with Systelecom was on drivers for specialised devices for the US government, such as secure networking cards, and encryption devices.
Most recently we worked with Systelecom on the development of software to take advantage of the legacy secure fax equipment installed in all US government departments, as well as many large organisations world-wide. This software facilitated desk-to-desk transmission of sensitive documents over the secure fax network (thus bypassing use of the internet, rendering the encrypted transmissions uninterceptable) This eliminates the need to feed vast piles of paper into scanners and remove vast piles of paper from printers. Additionally, it could handle any file type, not just documents, and, in the event that a recipient had an earlier version of the file, could transmit only the differences, effectively improving band-width by many orders of magnitude.