Company Background
Charlie Armor, Managing Director
The screech of brown packing tape coming off the roll is one I grew up with. My father wrote books about selfbuild, as well as appearing in bookshops we sold them ourselves by mail order. Every morning before breakfast my mother would pack up the orders received the day before and have them ready for the postman to collect. When the tape dispenser started screeching downstairs it was time to get up and get ready for school. One of my first bits of code was a little mailmerge program that printed address labels and payment receipts.
I started work as a project manager in the IT industry. First with McDonnell Douglas in the UK and then working in Sydney and Brussels, managing software teams in electronic trading projects. I moved back to the UK to project manage interactive TV and web Ecommerce projects.
Over the years I worked on a number of IT projects that required the services of a fulfillment house to receive order information and despatch goods. This experience convinced me there was a need for a fulfillment service that was designed to meet the needs of Etailers.
In April 2000 I launched the Realtime Despatch fulfillment service from a warehouse in Daventry. I was unable to find cost-effective software to do the job we required so all the warehousing and fulfillment software was developed in-house.
After three years and a lot more brown packing tape I sold the fulfillment side of the business in order to concentrate on developing the software.
I have used my experience in running a fulfillment operation and warehouse to develop what I believe to be the most flexible and user-friendly solution on the market.
Phil Zoio, Director and CTO
Phil is the guru and technical visionary behind Realtime Despatch.
A trained economist, Phil was bitten by the technology bug after a few years working as a journalist and media researcher. He brings to Realtime Despatch the lessons learned from over 10 years as a hands on software developer working on a wide range of projects, mostly in the media and telecommunications sectors.
As an acknowledged expert in the field of Java and web-based software development, Phil has published articles in leading industry web sites. He has also spoken frequently at professional user groups, as well as at international developer conferences.
Phil is an expert in the use of open source frameworks to enhance developer productivity. He has demonstrated his flair, creativity and capacity for innovation through the creation of a number of open source frameworks. He is the creator of Strecks, a set of extensions to the well-known Java web development framework, Struts. In the last couple of years, he has led the development of Impala (http://www.impalaframework.org/), a dynamic module framework based on the hugely popular Spring framework. Impala is a project of strategic importance to Realtime Despatch, because it supports an especially flexible, modular approach to software development.
This allows Realtime Despatch to easily create the specific enhancements our customers need to support their business processes, while allowing the core software to remain lightweight and easily maintainable. We strongly believe that our customers should not be tied the limitations of a one-size-fits-all system.
Phil is very well versed in modern software development best practice, which he applies at Realtime Despatch, helping to ensure software we produce is always of the high standard that our customers expect.