About Atira A/S

Atira A/S is a privately owned Danish company operating in North-West Europe and Great Britain. Our technical domain is computer science and software engineering with a focus on server-side software architecture and systems integration.

Atira is founded in 2002 and employs 26 full-time employees not including finance and other service functions. These numbers per January 2010.

We specialise in customer- and domain-specific solutions for knowledge intensive sectors such as higher education- and research institutions, and the pharmaceutical industry. Our technical area is advanced server-side applications and integration in Service Oriented Architectures. Our development- and project management methods are SCRUM and other Agile methods.

We offer six primary services: Project scoping, system architecture, user-interface design, software programming and maintenance, documentation, and on-site implementation. Very often, implementation includes services such as systems integration or data conversion and aggregation. We also supply user education and 2nd level support as part of an implementation project.

Since the start of the company in 2002, a particular area of specialisation has been software engineering within the domain of research information management. Today, our standardised Research Information System Pure is used by Higher Education Institutions and other research organisations in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, and Belgium.

Within this domain, our core customers are universities and other research-intensive HEIs. We are also involved in national research information infrastructure in a number of the same countries, and in these projects we work closely with national policy makers.

Further, we retain in-depth knowledge about the industry standards of this domain; e.g. standard data models, standard exchange formats and protocols, industry-wide data suppliers and their formats and interfaces, and varying national-level legislation in different countries. We also keep up to date with other commonly used systems; e.g. repository systems, financial- and HR-systems, single sign-on systems, Active Directories and LDAPs, student administration systems or Clinical Trials Management Systems. We even develop and maintain standard integration components for some of these systems.

More information about our research information management activities is available at under the Pure pages, and references are available on the References page.

Atira is a publicly registered company based on privately owned shares. The company is 100% owned and managed by partners employed by the company.

The company was founded in 2002. The public company registry number and European VAT-number is 26 83 55 26. The company's fiscal year is 1st of January to 31st of December. Each fiscal report since the company was founded in 2002 has shown positive results and considerable growth. Including 2009, the past four annual reports show positive results with a growth of 25% in turnover.

The company has never had any debts or credit facilities with any bank or similar organisations. Per January 2010, that is also the current situation. We offer to make our fiscal reports available for external review in relation with tenders, formal pre-qualification processes, and similar situations.

Finally, Atira was awarded the Gazelle award for business achievements in 2007 and in 2009.

Activities within the research sector are organised into two primary teams: The Pure Core Development Team and the Pure Implementation Team. Each is headed by a Group Manager. The Core Team’s Group Manager is Thomas Vestdam, Ms.S. CS (Computer Science) and PhD. The Implementation Team’s GM is Claus Nyhus Christensen, also Ms.S. CS.

Testing and other QA activities are handled within each group. The same is true for release management, code repository maintenance, resource planning and day-to-day HR.
A smaller team referred to at the “GUI Team” services both primary teams with user interface designs, usability testing, and customer relations concerning both areas. Finally, a small team services both main teams with internal server maintenance and other internal infrastructure operations.

Task Groups are formed specifically for activities outside the research sector.

The company is managed by Managing Director Thomas Jorgensen and commercial and legal relations are maintained by Bo Alroe. Accounting and other service functions are outsourced.

The largest group of our technical staff is M. Sc. in either Software Engineering or Computer Science. Additionally, we employ a number of college degree computing professionals. We employ a small group of dedicated user interface specialist, as well as certified project management professionals.

Our technical platform is Java (http://java.sun.com/j2se/). Further, we work with a number of Open Source frameworks and components.

Atira is a member of euroCRIS. We take active part in euroCRIS activities: In November of 2006, we were part of the hosting committee of the euroCRIS membership meeting in Copenhagen. In 2007, two of our employees joined the euroCRIS CERIF Task Group and took part in meetings leading up to the new release of that year. In 2008, we had a member on the CRIS2008 conference programme committee, and we have been on the speaker list of several euroCRIS events. We make annual, voluntary donations to euroCRIS in proportion to our fiscal results.

We support the CERIF standard (Common European Research Information Format) whenever possible. We retain in-depth knowledge about this data model standard and we keep up to date with the latest developments.

Pure is CERIF compliant on two levels: The recommendations at the level of data-base schemes are followed in each of the nationalised datamodels available with Pure, and further, valid CERIF-XML is exportable from Pure. CERIF-XML is even available in some of the technical exhibition interfaces.

We have built CERIF-compliant systems both for the Higher Education sector and European government institutions since 2006.