Enterprise Software Development Company in Houston

Ranges, tied to scope, because a fixed number before discovery is a guess dressed up as a quote. Discovery and architecture, meaning a boundary and integration review, a threat model, a target architecture, an architecture decision record set, and a costed delivery plan, typically runs USD 50,000 to 120,000 over six to ten weeks and is deliberately sold standalone so you can take it to another builder if you want to. A production platform for one site or one service line, including integrations, an operator console, observability, security review, and deployment, typically runs USD 300,000 to 900,000 over six to twelve months. A multi-site operational platform spanning several plants, terminals, or hospitals with OT integration, a shared semantic layer, and 24-hour support runs USD 900,000 to 3 million and up. The rate that actually moves the number is not the application developer's, it is the OT-literate engineer who can read a P and ID alongside a Purdue model diagram, and that combination is scarce enough here that we staff it deliberately instead of assuming availability. Cloud infrastructure, historian and platform licensing, and any third-party connector costs are quoted separately and modelled over five years, because on operational platforms those often outrun the build. We quote fixed fee per phase against a signed statement of work.

By never putting a write path across the boundary and designing so nobody can add one later by accident. We map every source to its Purdue model level. Level 0 and 1 are instruments and controllers and we do not go there at all. Level 2 is the supervisory layer, the DeltaV, Experion, or CENTUM environment, and we read from it only through the vendor-supported interface into the historian. Level 3 is site operations, which is where the AVEVA PI System typically lives and where our read boundary sits, using the PI Web API or PI AF with a service account that has read-only rights enforced at the historian, not just requested in code. Everything we build lives at Level 4 and above. Where the site security policy requires physical enforcement rather than configuration, we design behind a unidirectional gateway or data diode so the network topology itself makes a write impossible. Zones and conduits follow IEC 62443. If an operator genuinely needs to act on what our platform shows, the action happens in the control system through the control system's own interface, and our platform records the recommendation and the outcome. That constraint is written into the architecture decision record and reviewed with the plant safety lead.

Standards-based, never screen scraping. Read paths use FHIR R4 through the health system's Epic APIs for patient, encounter, observation, condition, medication, and appointment resources, with SMART on FHIR when the application needs to launch in clinical context and inherit the user's identity and patient context. Event-driven work uses HL7 v2 interfaces, typically ADT for admission and transfer events, ORU for results, and SIU for scheduling, through the health system's interface engine. Where a workflow needs to surface guidance inside the clinician's flow we use CDS Hooks rather than building a parallel inbox nobody opens. Three compliance boundaries shape every build. HIPAA plus the Texas Medical Records Privacy Act, HB 300 effective September 1 2012, which defines covered entity far more broadly than HIPAA and makes an integrator directly liable, with training obligations and a fifteen business day electronic record release requirement. Texas SB 1188, effective September 1 2025, which adds electronic health record duties where artificial intelligence contributes to care. And the FDA line on clinical decision support: if the software would drive a diagnostic or treatment decision without the clinician being able to independently review the basis for it, it is a regulated device and we design away from that line deliberately.

For the non-export-controlled scope, yes, and we are explicit about where the line falls. NASA flight and ground software is classified under NASA software engineering requirements into safety and criticality classes, and the required rigor, independent verification, and documentation differ sharply between a Class A flight system and a Class D ground analysis tool. We scope which class applies before estimating, because pricing a Class C or D ground system and then discovering it feeds a Class B path is how these programs go wrong. On export control, ITAR under 22 CFR Parts 120 to 130 restricts controlled technical data to US persons absent authorization, and a foreign national viewing controlled data is a deemed export regardless of where the server sits. Our Chandigarh team does not touch ITAR-controlled technical data. In practice we either keep the controlled scope with a US-person-eligible team, work in an advisory role alongside your own cleared engineers, or decline the controlled portion. Defense-adjacent work in the Houston space and industrial cluster also carries CMMC obligations flowing down through DoD contracts, and we plan the controlled unclassified information boundary during architecture rather than after the audit letter arrives.

As a normal operating condition, not a disaster scenario. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Hurricane Beryl in July 2024 both took out Houston-area power and connectivity for days, so every design starts from the assumption that a site will be islanded. Edge collectors buffer locally with enough retention to survive a multi-day WAN loss and replay in order on reconnect, so the historical record has a gap in delivery but not in data. Operator consoles have a defined degraded mode that shows last-known values with an unmistakable staleness indicator rather than a blank panel or, worse, a stale value that looks live. No control-plane component of a platform we build sits solely in a Gulf Coast facility. Azure deployments use South Central US in Texas paired with North Central US in Illinois, which is Microsoft's own documented pairing, and AWS deployments keep the primary region in us-east-2 in Ohio even when the Houston Local Zone us-east-1-iah-1a serves latency-sensitive reads from inside the metro. Recovery point and recovery time objectives are agreed per data class, not as one site-wide number. And we run a failover and grid-loss drill before June 1 every year, because a runbook nobody has executed is a document, not a capability.

Texas does have a comprehensive privacy statute, so this is not a state where you fall back on federal law alone. The Texas Data Privacy and Security Act was enacted as HB 4, signed June 18 2023, effective July 1 2024, and it applies without a revenue or record-count threshold to anyone doing business in Texas and processing personal data who is not an SBA-defined small business. Its practical effects on a platform build are opt-in consent before processing sensitive data including precise geolocation and health data, honoring universal opt-out signals such as Global Privacy Control, and making deletion and correction propagate into warehouses and derived data stores rather than only the primary database. It excludes individuals acting in a commercial or employment context, which matters for workforce-facing operational tools. On AI, the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act was enacted as HB 149, signed June 22 2025 and effective January 1 2026. It is intent-based rather than risk-tier based, prohibiting specified uses, and the Attorney General has exclusive enforcement with a notice and cure period. Alignment with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework functions as a safe harbor defense. Separately, if you sell your platform to a Texas state agency, TX-RAMP certification applies under the program created by SB 475 in 2021.