Aventius Limited provides support, development, training and consultation services around the Microsoft Azure data platform
As a company, we help clients develop and build their Azure data platforms whilst also developing Azure web apps for any custom needs you may have.
In a nutshell, when we were founded, we wanted to become an organisation that provided the kind of support we’d dreamt of when we working at our previous employers, who had drafted in external support such as contractors or other support companies. We didn’t want to leave clients with essentially a black box of work after we’d left, putting the local team in a difficult position where they were unable to support what we’d done or left behind.
What can Aventius Limited do for you?
In terms of our clients, we’ve worked with both public and private organisations. Much of our work has been with NHS organisations such as hospital trusts with several of our staff having years of experience working in the NHS, in both the provider and commissioner roles.
Some clients just want some best practice advice, others, we’ve helped design and build completely new Azure data processing architecture and migrated their existing on-prem data processing into the cloud. With one client, we have even developed a custom transport management web app.
We focus mainly on the Microsoft Azure data and data warehousing technologies such as SQL server, Synapse analytics, data lakes, data bricks, logic apps and data factory. However, we also advise on the networking side of Azure, as this can be quite overwhelming to newcomers. We can help clients understand how it’s all tied together.
Bringing multidisciplinary skills to you
As many of our team come from a multidisciplinary skills background such as data warehousing and IT networking. With many having worked in either the NHS or private sector, or both, we can usually offer insights beyond what you would get from standard support and development companies.
A good example would be if a client is not aware of some IT configuration that may need setting up before they can embark on their vision for a data platform. It could be something simple from an IT perspective but could prove a blocker for the data processing team. We try to look from a wider perspective whilst also not forgetting the devil is in the details too.
Our IT and informatics journey
As a company, we were co-founded by a long time NHS employee and a contractor who regularly worked together. We’d both spent many years working in IT and informatics and expected to carry on doing that until retirement. The idea of setting up a business together didn’t cross our minds; however, I decided it was time to move on from the organisation I was working for at the time, and it was suggested to me that I try contracting. I then suggested to my contractor friend that we should combine our efforts and start a company together. The rest, as they say, is history.
Delivering the Aventius Limited experience
One client we’ve been working with recently is an NHS organisation and we’ve been helping them with their migration from a very old on-prem bunch of SQL servers to Azure Synapse data warehouse.
Working closely and collaboratively with their team to help design their new architecture and training their team on the finer points of data warehouse development such as star schemas, facts, dimensions and measures etc…
Potential vs Pitfalls: Improving companies understanding of Azure
We used Microsoft Teams to provide video training sessions and wrote a large wiki on their Azure DevOps site, which explains all parts of the architecture, best practices, how to do certain things in Azure and even the basics of data warehousing principles. We’ve made sure to put references and links to official Microsoft and industry-standard documentation so that no one thinks we’re just making stuff up.
We’ve helped them build an automated dynamic process to get data out of a number of source system into the data warehouse and helped them to optimise the PowerBI reports and data models which are pointing to this data so they can get meaningful insights out quickly and efficiently.
Lastly bringing this all together into a data catalogue that allows them to trace the lineage of source data through to transformations and business rules into final reports. Using this they can quickly trace where information has come from and also what business logic was applied to calculate any custom measures anywhere along the line.
