Software consultancy · Melbourne & Brisbane · since 2010
DaD Digital is an agentic software consultancy. Our architects direct AI agents on a proven delivery platform, so organisations get enterprise-grade software for a fraction of the cost and time they would typically budget for.
We deliver end to end, or we work inside your organisation alongside your own teams. From the hyperscale clouds to bare metal, on web, mobile and desktop, from a focused bespoke system to an enterprise platform.
What we do
We are technology-agnostic by design. AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; dedicated virtual machines and bare metal in your own data centre; .NET, Linux and open source; iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux desktop: we choose what suits the problem and the organisation, not what suits our hiring. The engagements range from a focused bespoke system for a single team to an enterprise platform serving thousands of users.
The operational core of an organisation, shaped around how it actually works rather than how a packaged product assumes it does. For organisations that have outgrown spreadsheets and off-the-shelf tools, or are about to fund an in-house team to build it.
Design, migration and ongoing operation across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, or on dedicated VMs and bare metal you control. Security, resilience and cost are designed in, and the environment is reproducible from code rather than configured by hand.
Customer-facing platforms and SaaS products, with the native iOS and Android apps and the Windows, macOS and Linux desktop applications that sit alongside them. Built so that the product in your customer’s hand stays in step with the systems behind it.
The systems that have become expensive to change. We audit legacy and often complex codebases, keep the business logic that is worth keeping, and clean up and modernise around it, rather than throwing away years of hard-won rules and fixes in a full rewrite. A particular strength is moving .NET Framework systems off Windows hosting and onto modern, containerised .NET on Linux, for a fraction of the cost of bringing in a team to start again.
Why it costs less now
For most of the last thirty years, delivering serious software meant assembling a large team, and most of an engineering budget went on the volume of the work. That is no longer the constraint. AI agents now carry that volume, quickly and tirelessly, under direction.
What agents do not reliably supply is judgement. An agent is fluent and confident, and too often wrong when nobody who knows what good looks like is reading the result. Knowing what to build, structuring it so it is still cheap to change in year five, and recognising a plausible answer that is wrong: that has always been senior work, and it is the part we sell.
The result is a different shape of engagement. A small number of senior architects, directing agents on a platform that already enforces the standards, can deliver what would otherwise take a much larger team, with fewer hand-offs and less to manage. The saving is passed on, and in our experience the quality improves rather than suffers.
Every product trades speed for quality somewhere, and year three is usually decided in year one. Version one has never been cheaper to produce, but good software has rarely been about version one.
Real engineering, accelerated. The tooling changed. The engineering did not.
Working with us
Some clients want an outcome delivered. Others want senior capability inside an existing programme. Many engagements move between the two over time, and they start from the same proven foundation.
An agreed scope, delivered end to end by our own team. You deal with the people doing the work, not an account layer, and you see working software early and often.
Senior architects embedded in your programme, inside your governance, change control and ways of working. We bring the platform and the practices, help the engineers you already have get more done, and leave the knowledge with them.
We build the system, help you hire and train the people who will own it, and license the foundation so it runs on your infrastructure under your control. Take it over on day one, or when you are ready.
A managed service for a predictable monthly fee: hosting, monitoring, security patching, backups and support, with your own developers free to extend it through a defined boundary that protects both sides. We have been running production systems of our own since 2011.
Enterprise solutions
Enterprise systems that once took a large team and cost millions can now be delivered for a six-figure amount. The saving does not come from a thinner scope or a cheaper team. It comes from starting on the large share of what most business systems need, already built, tested and running in production, so the budget goes on what is particular to your organisation.
Identity, access control, encryption and secrets management are part of the foundation each system starts from, then configured to your security policy, your identity provider and your compliance regime.
Every change to business data is recorded and traceable, by design. When an auditor, a regulator or a customer asks what happened and why, the answer is usually already there.
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, standalone VMs or bare metal in your own data centre, deployed consistently wherever it lives and without tying you to a single provider. Data residency, audit and security requirements for health, government and other regulated sectors are largely a matter of configuration rather than a rebuild.
A new regulation, an acquisition, a partner with their own systems. Clean separation means a new requirement is usually a contained change rather than a rewrite, and third-party vendors can be swapped with little disturbance to the rest.
Funding an in-house team, outgrowing your tools, or replacing a system that has become expensive to change? Arrange an introductory conversation, and we will give you an honest view of what it would take.
Our platform
Every engagement starts on a delivery platform we have built and refined over five years, now in its third generation and running live systems in production. It holds the practices strong engineering teams have relied on for decades, built once so they carry into each new project rather than being rebuilt, or skipped, each time.
We lean heavily on automation, not to cut corners but because a step a machine performs is done consistently, leaves a record behind, and is cheap to repeat. Development, testing, regression testing, integration, deployment, security hardening and penetration testing run as automated pipelines built on established best practice. The work is efficient and repeatable, the results are reportable, and the saving is passed on to you.
The model is a protected core with room to grow outward. At the centre, senior architects own the parts that matter most: security, data, integration and deployment. Agents work in the outer ring, inside standards the platform itself enforces, so most weak changes are caught automatically, early, and long before they reach production.
Our platform is assessed against the ACSC Essential Eight and ISO/IEC 27001, and we are working towards formal certification. Where a project calls for it, alignment with either framework, with the evidence to show it, is available on request.
Experience
DaD Digital is partner-led, by Jeff Hoffard and Damien Sawyer, and deliberately small. The experience behind it goes back thirty years, across health, legal technology, wagering, government, manufacturing and supply chain, and much of it was delivered as part of larger teams and programmes.
Enterprise
cloud
Azure workloads for a global technology provider, where performance and correctness carry a direct cost, delivered inside a large organisation’s governance and change process. Hosting costs came down measurably through profiling and reworking the slowest parts of the system.
Tier-1
customers
Technical design and leadership of a legal operations platform from inception through to hundreds of large corporate customers, including airlines, universities and government departments, handling commercially sensitive data. The engineering team was recruited and developed along the way.
Government &
regulated
A business-intelligence project for a large federal government department, and work under formal change control in wagering, legal and enterprise environments. Our own practices are guided by the ACSC Essential Eight and ISO/IEC 27001.
Modernisation
Moving long-running .NET Framework applications off Windows hosting and onto modern .NET in Linux containers. Rather than defaulting to a full rewrite, we audit the existing codebase, salvage the business logic and the years of fixes built into it, and rework and clean it up onto a foundation built for automated testing and deployment. Legacy data is migrated under tests against real production records, and much of the work is carried by AI agents under close architectural direction, which brings the cost well below that of a team-led rewrite.
Operations
Systems we have operated end to end since 2011: infrastructure, security, backup and recovery, capacity, releases and incident response. We know the gap between what a system is documented to do and what it does at three in the morning.
Integration
Secure client portals, integrated accounting, a national supply-chain mobility rollout and business-to-business integration, master-data leadership through a national SAP implementation, and mobile apps in both stores.
Get in touch
An initial discussion with one of our partners, to understand your organisation and what you are looking to achieve: a system to build, a programme that needs senior capability, or a platform that has become expensive to change.
We will give you a candid view of the options, the likely investment and timeframe, and the way of working best suited to your organisation.
jeff.hoffard@daddigital.com damien.sawyer@daddigital.com
Based in Melbourne and Brisbane. Working with clients wherever they are.
Select a time that suits you, and a partner will be in touch to confirm.
