AB Consulting was originally formed in August 2000 by Andrew Bray. As a parent with young children, he agreed to help out the local school by setting up and maintaining their network and ICT rooms. Part of his remit was to research, purchase and install a remote control package to enable the teachers to control their students' machines and to demonstrate software directly on their screens.

A quick trawl of the Internet disappointed him: the remote control software programs he found were expensive, well outside the budget available to the school. Many of them had steep learning curves and required technical and networking skills.

Determined that the school should nonetheless have the software it needed for teaching, Andrew decided to call on his 15 years' experience in Windows programming and write a simple and cheap alternative himself: in December 2000 the first version of AB Tutor Control was released.

Andrew had two main aims in writing the program:

Realistic pricing structure: First, he wanted schools like the one his children were attending to be able to afford the software. He therefore adopted a pricing structure which charged a small amount for the tutor software, but did not charge for every client (or student) installation - which is what made many of the other remote control programs so costly.

Simplicity and transparency: Most teachers are simply too busy to read manuals or spend precious time figuring out how to use complex software. Andrew's second aim was, therefore, to design software that was quick to learn and easy to use. The very simple interface he developed has been a huge success.

Word started to spread and very quickly AB Tutor control was being used in schools, colleges and universities around the world as well as in commercial organisations who soon saw the power of the software.

Today the software continues to evolve, driven mainly by client requests as well as external imperatives such as the launch of Vista. To cope with the growth in business, Andrew has set up a small limited company, AB Software Consulting Ltd. He has maintained his commitment to developing and delivering simple but powerful software at a price affordable by schools.