Our Expertise

We bring extensive experience to bear on distributed computing, enterprise
application architecture solutions, and have a proven track record of identifying
and using the latest Microsoft-based technologies to produce next-generation solutions that have redefined industries.

> Case: Delivering more agility to retailers

Levitate’s principals not only designed and built one of the world’s most popular COM-based Point of Sale and back-end office systems for major, Tier I retailers, but then became the first to embrace the powerful .NET environment to produce the industry’s first .NET based Point of Sale systems for Tier I retailers.

The harsh nature of a retail computing environment required 24/7, error free operation, on-the-fly data updates with faultless transaction consistency and an interface easily understood and operated by users with little to no computing skills.

We were challenged to provide robust, hardened solutions that are uncompromisingly reliable, run seamlessly and swiftly on a wide variety of PC’s with varying levels of processing power, and support peripheral devices from a range of different vendors.

The retail environment also presented peculiar challenges in developing solutions that seamlessly integrated with dated, legacy (and often proprietary) systems while scaling easily to accommodate growth and new technologies. In doing so, we developed advanced and industry-leading expertise on the integration of disparate systems and technologies.

.NET enabled us to offer retailers – for the first time – to leverage loosely-coupled components in a distributed architecture to provide the ability to use ultra-thin clients at the point of sale, with the heavy lifting of transaction processing taking place on an in-store server. Furthermore, the flexible and scalable nature of our solution not only allowed retailers to grow their systems incrementally as demand increased, but delivered to them an overall agility to react more quickly to changing market trends than ever before.

>Case: Redefining how we interact with our homes

Building on the experiences of providing multi-million dollar solutions for retail,
we turned our attention to another computing field primed for advancement – home automation. Home installations bring similar hardening requirements as retail operations - robust systems capable of 24/7 operation by users with limited computing skills, clients communicating across powerful networks with control servers.

Home Automation is an industry traditionally dominated by proprietary, single-source solutions, a model that has kept costs high and adoption limited. Turning this model on its head, we delivered a truly standards-based system capable of working with hardware from a wide variety of vendors, communicating across an IP network using Web Services, the computing paradigm that is quickly dominating the programming landscape.

What’s more, we actively and aggressively worked with hardware providers to help them understand the benefits to themselves and to the industry of adopting standard protocols, and
in many cases, facilitated the direct implementation of a Web services stack
on their products.

In short, Levitate’s experience is in designing and delivering future-focused solutions for some of most difficult computing environments in both commercial and home settings.