Okenwa Labs is a technology consultancy. We design and build custom software for businesses that need serious engineering capability without standing up an in-house team. Then we host it, monitor it, and stay on the call when it breaks. Engagements run from short, time-boxed advisory work to multi-year managed retainers.
Four practices under a single point of accountability. Engage us on one. Or let us run the whole stack, so your team isn't hiring engineers for problems that aren't your core business.
Custom applications, internal tools, APIs, and data pipelines. Yours to own from day one. Documented well enough that another team could pick up the codebase if you parted ways with us tomorrow. Stack chosen to fit the work, not pre-committed before the brief is read.
Monitoring, metering, field operations, and IoT platforms built for the conditions of distributed work: patchy connectivity, messy data, and consequences when things break. Hosted on infrastructure designed for hard isolation between clients, with monitoring and on-call cover for retainer engagements.
Architecture reviews, technical strategy, delivery leadership, and technical due diligence. We embed with your team and write you a short, plain-English account of what needs to change, in what order, and why. Time-boxed at two to six weeks, deliverable-anchored, and explicitly designed not to drift into a permanent retainer.
Middleware, API gateways, ETL pipelines, and legacy integration. We make old systems talk to new ones, without the expensive rewrite your vendor would prefer to sell you. Most integration problems take a careful layer between systems, not a wholesale replacement of either.
The four practices apply across industries. The depth is concentrated in operational contexts where reliable software is business-critical and the cost of downtime is paid in something other than inconvenience.
Energy, water, and metering operators. Customer-facing platforms for live and historical usage data, in-home device integrations, billing-adjacent systems, and the operational layer that ties them together. Where most of our infrastructure work has been done.
Dispatch, job tracking, mobile-first apps for crews, and the offline-tolerant sync that makes them work when the network does not. Built for organisations whose people are in the field rather than at desks, and whose users will not give software a second chance if it gets in the way.
Telemetry ingestion, alerting, and operational dashboards for distributed physical estates. Sensors, meters, and devices feeding into platforms operations teams will use without working around them, with alerts that signal what to do rather than just what is wrong.
Companies that have grown into a stack of disconnected systems (CRM, accounting, operations, spreadsheets) that need to behave as a unit. Integration first; replacement only when it is the right call, and only after the cost of doing nothing has been quantified.
Most engagements start narrow and widen as trust builds. Pick the shape that fits today. Move between them as your needs change.
Okenwa Labs becomes your technology function. Design, build, host, monitor, support. One partner, one invoice, one phone number when something breaks at 11pm. Hosted on the Okenwa managed platform, with strong client isolation, monitoring, and on-call cover included by default.
Pick the services you need: development, infrastructure, consultancy, or integration. Keep ownership of the rest. Works well for teams with partial in-house capability, and for organisations who want to test the working relationship before consolidating more of it under one roof. Many engagements start here and convert to a fully managed retainer later.
A deliberate four-phase structure. No open-ended discovery, no waterfall pretending to be agile. Every phase finishes with something concrete your team can act on.
We map your problem, your constraints, and your existing stack before recommending anything.
You get: a written findings documentA technical plan agreed before we start. What we'd build, how it fits together, what the trade-offs are.
You get: a signed-off designShort cycles. Working software at the end of each one. Regular demos so there are no launch-day surprises.
You get: working software, weeklyDocumentation, knowledge transfer, and ongoing support, structured so you can take it in-house when you're ready.
You get: a system that keeps runningSoftware fails for boring reasons. The team that shipped it moves on. The documentation goes stale. Nothing gets monitored. Small fixes pile up until a small problem becomes a project. Okenwa Labs is structured to do the opposite: we ship, we operate, and we stay on the hook for as long as the client wants us there.
A selection of the work currently under the Okenwa Labs name. Each one publishes as a full case study once the engagement completes and the client signs off; until then, the shape of the work is what we share.
A unified dispatch, metering, and reporting platform replacing a tangle of spreadsheets and a CRM that was never designed for the job. Phase one: an operational dashboard live in eight weeks. Subsequent phases adding mobile field tooling, automated invoicing, and a reporting layer that retires the Sunday spreadsheet exercise.
A mobile-first dispatch and job-tracking platform for crews working across multiple sites, with offline-capable sync for low-connectivity environments. Real-time status to the operations lead, automated time-tracking for invoicing, built to run on the tablet hardware crews already carry rather than requiring a fleet refresh.
A middleware integration layer connecting an inherited CRM, an accounting tool, and a custom operational platform that have never spoken to each other cleanly. The cost of doing nothing was quantified at fourteen hours a week of manual data movement; the integration layer pays for itself inside the first quarter.
A pre-investment technical assessment of a target company's software, infrastructure, and engineering practice. Written findings, ranked recommendations, and an honest read of what would need to change before the platform could absorb the kind of growth the deal assumes. Anonymised case study to follow if the deal closes.
A staged replacement of the internal tooling a fast-growing services business has outgrown: customer management, project tracking, billing, reporting. Replacing a CRM the team has been working around for three years, with a clean handover plan from the start so the in-house team can take it on once it's stable.
A graduation engagement for a client whose static-site footprint has grown into something that needs a real backend. Migration off a lightweight hosting setup onto a fully operated platform, with monitoring, runbooks, and on-call cover from the day the new platform goes live.
Each entry on this list goes live as a full case study only with explicit client approval. Where a client prefers anonymity, the case study publishes anonymised; the operational shape and outcomes are preserved, the identifying details removed.
See methodology & sampleFour rules that run through everything we do, from the first discovery call to the last line of code we ship.
We take on work we can do well. If something sits outside our competence we'll say so, and point you to someone who can.
Clear scopes, clear fees, no surprise invoices. Any change in scope is agreed in writing before the new work begins, never discovered at billing time.
Every system we ship is documented for someone else to pick up. If you ever want to move on from us, you should be able to without rebuilding what we wrote.
Once we ship something, we're still the people answering when it breaks. The clients we do our best work for are the ones we've been with for years.
First enquiries get a reply within two working days. Retainer clients get on-call cover and named first responders, with response windows written into the engagement letter, not improvised after launch.
One firm, one invoice, one point of accountability for everything we touch. No subcontractor chains, no surprise third parties, no "we'll just bring in someone for that bit".
A short note about your situation is more useful than a long one. We reply within two working days. If we're the right fit, we'll say so; if we're not, we'll point you somewhere better.
The easiest start is a 30-minute call. No deck, no sales pitch. A conversation about what you're trying to build.