Saxonica: Contact us

Contact Saxonica

For information on how to contact us for technical support, please see Support.

For all enquiries concerning the commercial versions of Saxon, please contact us by email at saxon-orders@saxonica.com.

The Saxonica team

Norm Tovey-Walsh joined Saxonica from MarkLogic in 2020, and took over from Michael Kay as CEO in October 2023. Norm has had a high profile in the XML community for many years (and SGML before that). He's best known for his work on DocBook and XProc, but has also been active in a number of other areas including long-term membership of the XSL working group (he was editor of the XDM specification), the XML Core Working Group, the W3C Technical Architecture Group, the initial specification work on JAXP, the Oasis/Apache catalog resolver, and specifications such as XML Base.

Norm is a member of the Balisage conference committee, and sometimes runs demo jams at various XML conferences.

Follow @ndw on Mastodon.

Michael Kay is the original developer of Saxon. He founded Saxonica in 2004, and remained at the helm until October 2023. His knowledge of XSLT and XQuery is second to none: he was the editor of the specifications for XSLT 2.0 and 3.0, and XPath 3.1 Functions and Operators; a joint editor of XPath 2.0 and XPath 3.0; and an invited expert on the W3C XQuery Working Group. He is also the author of the best-selling XSLT Programmer's Reference from Wrox Press, currently in its fourth edition.

Michael has over forty years' experience in the software industry. He gained a PhD at the University of Cambridge for research on database management technology, and then joined ICL, where he led design teams for a number of software products including several generations of database systems: his technical contributions were recognised by appointment as an ICL Fellow. During that time, ICL evolved from a mainframe computer manufacturer to a $4bn software and services company, and became part of Fujitsu. In October 2023 Michael transferred ownership of the company into an Employee Ownership Trust, and moved into a part-time role as Director of Innovation; he remains actively involved in designing new product features and providing technical support to users.

O'Neil Delpratt joined Saxonica from a research project at the University of Leicester in 2010. He is a co-developer of the Saxon product, with specific responsibility for Saxon on .NET, and the C/C++, PHP and Python product SaxonC.

Before joining Saxonica, he completed his post-graduate studies at the University of Leicester. His thesis title was "In-memory Representations of XML documents" which coincided with a C++ software development of a memory efficient DOM implementation, called Succinct DOM.

O'Neil regularly publishes and presents papers at various XML conferences, and was an invited expert on the W3C XQuery Working Group.

Debbie Lockett joined the Saxonica development team in 2014 following post-doctoral research in Mathematics at the University of Leeds. She has worked on performance benchmarking, the implementation of XQuery 3.1 features, and on developing the tools for creating Saxonica's product documentation and website.

Debbie has worked on SaxonJS since its inception in 2016, and is now the lead developer. Activities include: performance improvements, increasing the test coverage, extending the XSLT conformance and IXSL capabilities (for instance implementing the serializer, and developing the HTTP client), and maintaining the documentation (and its SaxonJS application).

Ankita Mohinta joined the team in 2020 as Marketing and Commercial manager, and deals with Saxonica's clients and contracts. Ankita graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Commerce (Honours) from Xavier's College, India, and Master's degree in Advertising and Marketing from Leeds University (2011).

Matt Patterson joined Saxonica in 2023 after several years consulting on XML and XSLT in the legislative markup space, a stint as CTO of a streaming media startup in Berlin, being one of the first developers at the UK's Government Digital Service, and several years as a freelance full-stack web developer, even including a brief time in Game development. He has been working with XML, XSLT, and in web development professionally for more than 20 years.

He studied Typography & Graphic Communication at Reading University, gaining a BA (Hons) in 2001, co-authored a book on CSS in 2002, and has spoken on design, programming, and their intersection at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as teaching web development to beginners.

Previous employees

Penny Kay was a founding Director of Saxonica and the Company Secretary, and retired in 2023. Penny handled banking, tax, insurance, legal and personnel matters for the company. Previously Penny was a Civil Servant in the British Civil Service.

Sue Schreiber joined Saxonica in 2010, and retired in 2020. Having spent the majority of her career at ICL (now part of the Fujitsu Group), Sue worked as Saxonica's commercial manager dealing with Saxonica's clients and contracts. Sue returned to the fold in October 2023 as an independent director of Saxonica EOT, the employee ownership trust that now controls the company.

John Lumley joined the Saxonica development team in 2013, and retired in 2020. John spent most of his career at the HP Research Labs in Bristol UK, working mostly in the field of Software Engineering; he subsequently took his PhD at Nottingham University.

John completed a number of specific projects for Saxonica including implementation of the EXPath library, tools for streamability analysis, and research into algorithms for optimized matching of template rules. He also implemented the XPath parser for SaxonJS, and was responsible for a number of key developments for SaxonJS 2.0, including integrating the XSLT compiler written in XSLT itself, and developing the W3C test suite test driver for SaxonJS which runs in the browser and on Node.js.

Contact

The office phone number is no longer available. Please contact us online instead.

Commercial enquiries email:

saxon-orders@saxonica.com

Technical support:

For technical support, please register at saxonica.plan.io; or if you prefer to keep things private, email support@saxonica.com.

Postal address:

c/o Assets Accounting, Chartered Accountants
Chiltern Chambers
37 St Peters Avenue
Reading RG4 7DH
Berkshire, UK