The Coding Factory
Component-driven software, built to outlast the project.
A Brighton development team with deep Java expertise and code that's still running in production today.
The Coding Factory, formerly 451digital, was a Brighton-based development team specialising in bespoke software and component-based architecture. Small, focused, with deep Java expertise. They built web applications, APIs and integration layers with an emphasis on code that could be maintained, extended and reused.
When AxisOps acquired them in 2018, it wasn't just about adding developers. Their software helped businesses process payments, manage customer data and connect systems that had never talked to each other. The component framework and modular patterns behind that work became the technical foundation of Microcelium. Java services they originally built are still running inside our microservices stack today.
What they built
Web Applications
Platforms built around real business workflows, not the other way around.
Enterprise Java
Deep JVM expertise that produced services still running in production today.
API Design
Clean, well-documented interfaces that made integration straightforward, not painful.
Systems Integration
Legacy and third-party services unified into coherent stacks. No rip-and-replace required.
Component Architecture
Reusable Java building blocks that became the technical foundation of Microcelium. This is where our platform started.
Engineering Discipline
Comprehensive testing, documentation, code reviews as standard. Code that can't be maintained is technical debt with a timer on it.
Their DNA in AxisOps
When AxisOps acquired The Coding Factory in 2018, their component-based approach and engineering standards changed how the combined team builds software. Modular architecture and maintainable code became core development principles, not aspirations.
The Java components and microservices frameworks they built formed the technical seed of Microcelium. That code is still in production. Quality over quantity. Clean code over quick fixes. That runs through everything we build today.
AxisOps Timeline
2001. The companies that would become AxisOps start building. The Network Factory, Firestone IT and other specialist companies, each solving different parts of the same problem across software, networking, managed services, DevOps and cloud.
2001 to 2012. Over a decade of delivery. These companies grow by doing hard work well, picking up smaller specialists along the way.
2013. AxisOps is formed to unify these operations. One company, one team, combined expertise.
2014. Containers in production. We start migrating live client workloads into containerised environments early, before most of the industry catches up.
2016. We build our own infrastructure platform micro-glue that unifies and abstracts away the underlying cloud. Azure, AWS or on-prem, clients get the same tooling, the same deployments, the same reliability. Zero lock-in.
2018. The Coding Factory joins. Their software component architecture and engineering discipline strengthens our development capability.
2019. Full-stack observability. A monitoring and tracing platform, built in-house. Every request traced, every metric captured, every alert meaningful.
2020. We begin building our own software component framework codenamed Andromeda. The foundation for what will later become the building blocks of Microcelium.
Today. Agentic engineering and AI-assisted operations. Twenty-five years of production systems, now powered by Microcelium, our unifying platform. The tools change. The discipline doesn't.
See what we've become
The Coding Factory's architecture is still running inside Microcelium today.