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Most businesses already own the systems they need. The trouble is that those systems do not talk to each other, so people retype orders, copy details between screens and reconcile reports by hand. GEN connect those systems through their APIs, and where a product has no usable API, we build one.
Over many years we have built our own frameworks for the platforms we meet most often, and most of them run our own services every day. That is what lets us integrate quickly and reliably, and support what we build for the long term.
Each framework wraps a platform's own API, fills the gaps in it, and handles authentication and errors, so new integrations start from tested code rather than from nothing.
Complete programmatic control of clusters, nodes, virtual machines, containers, storage and networking, plus HPE RAID monitoring. Used for automated provisioning, resource balancing, backup and recovery, and self-service portals where users deploy within set limits.
Nearly everything the DSM desktop can do: users, shares, DNS zones, LDAP and AD, packages, Active Backup for Business and Hyper Backup, with monitoring of processor, memory, volumes, iSCSI and disks. As Synology partners we use it to manage devices across many sites.
Authentication and control over a primitive but effective API: domains, users, groups and mailboxes. We run our own hosting clusters on it, and customers use it to manage their hosted instances.
Extensions, queues, ring groups, trunks and the blacklist, which FreePBX's own API does not reach, with phone provisioning, contact sync, call transcription and caller ID lookups. More under telephony development.
Uptime and performance data, devices and groups, alerts and events, graphs and reports, pulled remotely and combined with business data for service level reporting to management.
Tickets and comments created and updated from other systems, and commands acted on from internal notes. A $ZONE line in a
note, for example, adds a record to the customer's DNS zone automatically.
Pages and namespaces created, updated, listed and deleted, and ACLs managed, so documentation can be kept up to date automatically from tickets, code repositories and logs.
Bug reports raised, updated and moved through their workflow from outside: issues created from support email, linked to version control commits, and reported on.
OAuth handled for you, then records read, searched, listed and updated, for customer synchronisation, lead handling, reporting and links to accounts and e-commerce systems.
Every module, including Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Cases and custom modules, synchronised with accounts, e-commerce, email marketing and ERP systems. We host and support SuiteCRM itself too.
GEN's own services are available through a single RESTful API, Arkane, with dozens of endpoints behind one interface. We use it in the systems we build for customers, so a project that needs a postcode lookup, an SMS gateway or speech to text starts with that part already done and already supported.
The same capabilities sit behind many of our own tools and services, so they are exercised every day, not kept for the occasional project.
We automate everything we can, because automation removes human error, gives the same result every time, and lets a business grow without growing its headcount in step. We have automated customer onboarding, order processing, stock control, billing and reporting for our customers, and most of our own operations.
The real gains come from connecting systems that were never meant to talk to each other. We start by looking at how the work is done today, find the repetitive tasks and the points where information is copied by hand, and automate those first, so the savings arrive early and your staff spend their time on the work that needs a person.
Open source platforms can be adapted in ways that proprietary software cannot, and that is often the fastest route to a system that fits how you work. We host open source platforms, tailor and extend them, connect them to your CRM, ERP and payment systems, and migrate your data into them from legacy and proprietary systems.
Every change is made so the platform can still take upstream releases and security patches, because a customised system that can no longer be upgraded is a liability. The platforms we host and support, including office suites, Nextcloud, Matrix and Linux, are under the Open-Source menu.
Open source software is free to download and free to use, in a business as much as at home, with no licence fee and no count of seats. That freedom is real, and it is why so much of the world's infrastructure runs on it.
It is not free to make. Every release is the work of developers, testers and translators, and of the foundations and companies that pay them. A project that only ever gives and never receives eventually runs out of the people and the money that keep it going, and the software you rely on today is only there tomorrow if enough of the organisations using it put something back.
So our advice is simple. If an open source project works for you and your organisation benefits from it, support the people behind it: a donation to the foundation that runs it, a subscription from the company that develops it, or a contribution of your own, whether that is code, testing, documentation, translation or a well reported bug. It costs a fraction of the licence it replaces, and it keeps the choice you have made open to you and everyone else.
GEN Software Systems and Development, at www.gensoftware.dev, is our team of software architects, developers and engineers. They work from a development staging platform with test environments, data collection and bug tracking, on frameworks in PHP, Bash, Node.js and C that we have built and maintained over many years. Those frameworks are much of why our delivery is quick, reliable and predictable.
GENSoftware works on a "we build it, we own it" basis. We still support code we first wrote 25 years ago, and we will not turn you away: if we wrote it, we will support it.
We build one. Several of our frameworks exist because a product's own API was limited, as with FreePBX and osTicket, or poorly documented, and we can do the same for other systems, including ones written in house.
Yes, most of them run GEN's own services every day. The Proxmox and Synology frameworks are part of our own monitoring and response systems, the Virtualmin framework runs our hosting clusters, and the osTicket framework drives the automation in our HelpDesk.
Yes, that is most of the work. A typical example is an enquiry from your website that creates a helpdesk ticket, notifies the right person, schedules the follow-up and updates your CRM, with nobody copying anything between screens.
Yes. We host, tailor, extend and upgrade open source platforms, and migrate data into them from legacy and proprietary systems, keeping our changes maintainable so the platform can still take upstream updates and security patches.
We do. We build diagnostics and error handling into everything we deliver, keep documentation for every custom implementation, and support it through the HelpDesk under a service level agreement to suit the system, from next business day up to 24/7 with a 30 minute response.
The quickest way to find the value in integration is to list the things your staff copy from one screen to another, and the reports they assemble by hand. Send us that list, with the systems involved, and we will tell you which of them we can connect and what it would take.
Moving data out of a system that is being replaced is covered under data interchange, and data that needs enriching and analysing as it arrives under real-time data.