One building in Portsmouth concentrates more of our actual buyers than the rest of the city put together: Lakeside North Harbour, the 120-acre campus that was IBM’s UK headquarters until late 2024. When the council bought it in 2019 for £138m and IBM finished its move to Hursley, what was left was not a tech HQ but a multi-tenant park: 80-plus occupiers, around 97% let, floor after floor of mid-size operators running real operations with no developer in the building. This page is about the software problem that creates, and the related one out in the naval-base supply chain.
The biggest names in Portsmouth are not in the market for what we do. HM Naval Base, BAE Systems Maritime Services, QinetiQ on Portsdown Hill. Organisations that size carry their own engineering and resolve software internally. The firms that pick up the phone to an outside team are a tier down: the operators leasing space at Lakeside and the subcontractors feeding the base, both carrying enterprise-grade complexity on tooling meant for something far smaller.
Lakeside North Harbour: one campus, dozens of operators, no engineering floor
A former enterprise-IT headquarters turned multi-tenant campus is an unusually dense pool of the businesses we build for. The occupier list runs from Babcock and LexisNexis to Southern Co-op, Regus and a long tail of logistics, multi-site and professional-services firms, each operationally complex and none of them a software company. Walk the floors and the same gaps recur regardless of sector.
- A core process lives in spreadsheets and a shared inbox, and falls apart the moment it has to run across several sites rather than one.
- Two systems that ought to exchange data instead get reconciled by a person copying figures between them every morning.
- The report a director actually needs takes half a day to assemble from three places, so it gets produced late or not at all.
Nobody on the payroll can build the internal tool that closes those gaps, and a firm at this size cannot justify a full-time engineer who would sit idle between projects. That is the decision Lakeside operators keep arriving at: not whether the system is worth building, but how to get it built without carrying a permanent developer salary. A UK-based team on a retainer answers that better than a single hire: it covers the build, then stays reachable for the next integration or the next site’s rollout. We start by mapping a workflow as it runs today, then build the internal systems and integrations that let the data move on its own. Often the quickest return is an API integration that simply gets two tools the firm already pays for to share what they each hold.
The naval-base supply chain and its certification trail
A few miles south, a different set of firms feeds HM Naval Base, and their pain is narrower but just as costly. Defence subcontracting runs on accreditation: a manufacturer like Portsmouth Aviation in PO3 holds AS9100 and ISO 9001, sits on the JOSCAR register, and carries Cyber Essentials Plus across the whole organisation, all verified. Each of those gates has to be re-evidenced at tender time, and each demands that a delivered part can be traced through its batch, work order and inspection record.
Where this hurts is that the proof tends to sit apart from the work. Quality records, inspection results, works orders and the prime’s accreditation portal occupy separate places, so when an audit or a customer’s documentation request lands, the trail is rebuilt by hand from folders and re-keyed job numbers. We treat this as an integration job before a new-application one: connect the systems that already hold the evidence so a part’s history is assembled on demand, not reconstructed against the clock. (Plymouth’s supply chain carries a similar burden, and our Plymouth page goes deeper on that side of the work.)
Based in Portsmouth?
Whether you run a five-site operation out of Lakeside or a precision shop bidding into the base, point us at the spot where the manual work happens: the morning copy-paste between systems, the report that takes half a day, the audit pack you assemble from scratch. We will scope the first build around that one thing. Start from the locations overview, or send the detail straight over and we will come back with a plan. If what you need is a small-business website rather than a system, see web design in Portsmouth.
