About Atira A/S

Company profile, Research Information, Research sector activities, Other activities, General management and service functions, Staff, Other information

Atira A/S is a Danish company currently operating in North-West Europe and the British Isles. Our technical domain is computer science and software engineering with a focus on server-side software architecture and systems integration.
Atira was founded in 2002, and acquired by Reed Elsevier PLC in August 2012.

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.

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

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.

Release management and code repository maintenance is done by both major teams in collaboration, and overall resource planning is also done in collaboration between the two team managers.

A smaller team referred to as the "GUI Team" services both primary teams with user interface designs, usability testing, and conceptual data modelling. This team also has all customer relations concerning these areas.

Testing and other QA activities are handled centrally by our Quality assurance- and support team.

Finally, our internal server infrastructure is handled by a small team that services both main teams as well as customers? local IT departments when in need of assistance related to installation and hosting maintenance.

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

We employ a large group of Masters (M. Sc.) in either Software Engineering (SE) or Computer Science (CS) as well as a large group of college degree computing professionals. Further, we employ a small group of dedicated user interface specialists, certified project management professionals, and two former university librarians, both Masters in Library Science.

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.

Atira is a member of ARMA in the UK.