Bermuda firms could save hundreds of thousands of dollars by fine-tuning custom software to increase processing speed, an industry expert said yesterday.

Dmitry Mnushkin, president of Treefrog Consulting, said a review and code optimisation could be used to speed up processing — without the need to invest huge sums in new hardware.

Mr Mnushkin said: “Many companies write custom software to solve their various business needs.

“Oftentimes, this software works well for what it was designed to do but changing business requirements strain its capabilities and cause performance degradation.

“Businesses will typically solve this by purchasing faster hardware. Although this is generally guaranteed to boost speed, the level of speed increase is typically limited to two or three times, while the associated cost may well run into the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars.”

But Mr Mnushkin said an algorithm review and code optimisation of existing systems could produce improvements of five to ten times the original speed and the needed work could take as little as a week or two.

He added: “Such improvements can delay the need for new hardware by years, although coupling them with new hardware can double or triple the combined benefit.”

Mr Mnushkin said: “The approach we employ can be used for any company that handles large amounts of data, from reinsurance companies to trading companies and it could save a small fortune.”

Treefrog, based in the nineteen office block on Hamilton’s Queen Street and with a team of five experts in the field, has done work for US-based companies like TransRe and Weston Insurance, as well as Bermuda-based CatCo.

And he pledged that — if clients’s processing speeds are not at least doubled — Treefrog will not charge them for its services.

He said: “There is a temptation to believe that calling in our optimisation team is an admission that internal developers are not up to snuff. This cannot be further from the truth.

“Computer science is a broad and deep field with many areas of potential specialisation. To use a medical analogy, although your general practitioner serves 95 per cent of your needs, it’s the knee specialist you go to when there’s a knee problem.”

Mr Mnushkin added that Treefrog signs a standard non-disclosure agreement to protect the security of the intellectual property of clients and works on code exclusively on client supplied machines.

And he said: “We understand that sharing code algorithms with a third party is a trust issue.”

Mr Mnushkin spent 14 years in the reinsurance sector developing software before becoming president of Treefrog and previously worked for a Canadian software development company.

Treefrog specialises in creating underwriting platforms for the insurance and reinsurance industries and also building systems capable of handling large amounts of data.