IT Solutions

Grosvenor House Associates (Cornwall) Limited was formed in 1989 to provide IT Solutions to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link Project (CTRL)) and now provides solutions to a wide variety of clients.

In the mid nineteenth century the building of a new railway required drawings prepared and presented in a format laid down by statute. 150 years later this statue still applies and one of the many challenges for the CTRL was the application of these standards to CAD together with the development of programs and applications that would enable 109km of new railway to be planned using only a handful of CAD Operators instead of an army of draughtsmen.

GHA are proud to have been instrumental in developing the programs and applications that enabled the engineering team to hold weekly reviews of the route plotted in detail on an Ordnance Survey provided digital mapping layer. Layers were essential for enabling views incorporating any or all aspects of the engineering and environmental data as well as the specific views required by statute.

The Internet provides many opportunities for platform independence and web based solutions and GHA specialises in designing and developing these for small and medium businesses as well as tailored solutions for larger organisations.

Solutions range from specialised ISP hosted databases to complete web based solutions where applications for managing business processes can be both localised and on the Internet using an ISP. These solutions can enable organisations to manage their resources much more flexibly taking advantage of wholly hosted solutions that enable access from any browser enabled device. This approach reduces the need for technical staff and the 'hardware refresh cycle', allowing the organisation to focus resources on key business processes. Such solutions often utilise 'Open Source' software, further reducing operational costs. To the end user, it makes little difference which browser is used, or whether on a desktop, laptop or smartphone; the applications are always available.

Notwithstanding innovation in the Internet, traditional desktop applications are still required and are often necessary for local solutions that interact with specialist software/hardware and GHA can provide these as well.

Current projects include the development of a complete operational solution to a moving image archive for South West Film and Television Archive as part of their programme to convert the assets to digital formats helping to preserve the nation's heritage. Developing a web based solution using a browser based interface gave the opportunity to extend the life of older desktops by replacing the proprietary operating systems with Open Source alternatives.

Further works include a web solution for London's Screen Archives which incorporates data from over 70 contributing film archives, each one of which is managed by the participating archivist. The web site is supported by a bespoke database, populated with data through bespoke import routines developed by GHA.