History

Tony Tibbles remenisces on the technical development of Terrier SC Ltd:

In 2002 we got ADSL Broadband. Our sons were used to faster Internet speeds at university and we were fed up with them hogging the telephone line for a dial-up connection. A recent redundancy gave us time to work at refurbishing our French house and have a break to consider what to do next. When my son told me “The Broadband is in”, I realised that the alarm signalling medium I had been looking for was now available. Individuals and business would adopt Broadband and alarm signalling could get a free ride!

Unable to find any system anywhere that might meet the UK market’s requirements, the project began to create an alarm signalling system that was low cost and met the highest technical standards of the UK electronic security industry and relevant worldwide standards. Technical development was intense and started as a family affair – my younger son Richard created the first website and then moved on in education in the UK and USA. Alex, my elder son, was in need of a programming job when the market was awash with freelancers and had a life-time interest in encryption. Fortunately the project inspired him and he created a software suite for products and servers using as reference, not only UK security standards, but worldwide Internet security standards. The software suit that he created is still at the heart of our products and system today while Alex moved on in the IT world and now has a senior technical role in an international hi-tech company.

Early on, Richard, no relation, became involved in creating our first communicator products and our hardware products have benefited from his broad technical experience and exacting specifications ever since. A bought-in module supplied the brains of the communicator for several years until we made the great leap to prototyping a complete communicator design for the first time with the SPT3. Around this time Phil took over the firmware design for the communicators and brought to bear a wealth of experience from a range of micro-processor applications. Others were involved on the development of servers and their user interfaces until John came on board and his wide programming experience has kept our applications moving on ever since.

Customers have provided massive input to our product development as well as being the focus of our every day processes. We are fortunate in having strong relationships with our customers, many of whom have inspired new developments that have created the product capabilities that exist today. We started out to signal intruder alarms and now the product has several safety and industrial applications.

In 2008 we moved to our current East Peckham office where our Quality Management system was first certificated to ISO 9001. The QMS has been used to coordinate the development of internal business systems to this day and been a particularly useful discipline in realising medium and long-term benefits from the various problems and mistakes that a company can make, particularly in its earliest years. We are always trying to learn how to do things better!