MCP Server and Integration Development that exposes your systems once, not once per agent.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard Anthropic released in late 2024 to give AI models a universal way to connect to external tools, data sources and services. Before MCP, every AI application needed a custom integration for every system it touched, so the same plumbing was rebuilt for each new agent or model. With MCP a system is exposed once, through an MCP server, and any MCP-capable client can read its data and use its tools. It plays roughly the role a standard port plays for hardware: build to the standard once, connect many things.

An MCP server is a service that exposes a system's data and actions to AI clients in the standard MCP format. It publishes capabilities through three primitives: tools (functions the model can call, like creating a ticket or querying an order), resources (data the model can read, like records or documents), and prompts (reusable templates for common tasks). Any MCP-capable client can connect and use them. The server sits between the agent and your real system, which is exactly where authentication, authorization and a record of what was called belong. A well-built MCP server is as much an access-control boundary as an integration.

Because one-off integrations do not scale across AI clients. A bespoke integration binds one agent to one system, and when you add a second agent, swap models or adopt a new AI tool, you rebuild the same plumbing again. An MCP server is built once and works for every MCP-capable client, so your integration spend becomes an asset instead of a recurring cost. We have spent a decade building those point-to-point integrations across PMS, ERP, payment and accounting systems.

We publish no headline figure, because on this work the protocol is not what sets the number, the systems are. Four things drive it: how many systems you want to expose, whether they already have clean APIs or need a data-access layer built first, how many write actions (rather than read-only resources) the server carries, and how strict your access and audit requirements are. Discovery produces the estimate. If what you want is an ongoing team instead of a defined deliverable, that is team extension, billed monthly per team member.

We will not quote a duration before discovery, because the protocol is almost never the long pole. What sets the schedule is the state of the systems underneath: a documented API with a sandbox is quick; an undocumented internal system, or one that needs a data-access layer built first, is not; and the access review adds time whenever the server exposes actions rather than reads. For software projects generally, in our delivery experience, an MVP takes a few weeks when development is supported by AI or 3 to 4 months with a traditional approach, while a complex enterprise system can take over 12 months.

Usually yes, and that is the work we have been doing since 2012. The pattern is the one we used for a European manufacturer, where Shopify storefronts talk to a Microsoft Dynamics ERP through middleware we built, and for a UK hotel booking platform, where a new booking engine sits between the platform and Opera Cloud, Shift4 and IBS Software. An MCP server is that same middleware with a standard interface on the agent side. Where a system has no usable API, we build the access layer first and say so up front.

By treating an MCP server as what it is: a new access path into your systems that needs the same rigor as any production API, plus agent-specific controls on top. Secure MCP design starts with four non-negotiables: OAuth 2.1 authentication on every endpoint, strict input validation on every tool call, defenses against tool poisoning and prompt injection, and hardened deployment behind an API gateway. The specification standardized on OAuth 2.1 for HTTP-based transports as of the June 2025 revision, and OWASP maintains a dedicated MCP Top 10 vulnerability list. What that means for your server is settled in the access model: which client authenticates how, what each one is scoped to, what gets recorded, and which actions are exposed at all, which is the cheapest control of the four. unicrew is ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015 certified, renewed through a multi-stage audit with Quay Audit UK.

When one agent talks to one system and no second client is coming. Build the direct integration; a server plus its access model is a cost you do not need yet. It is also the wrong first step when the system you want to expose has no API and no data access, only a user interface: that is a data-access project, and a server sitting on nothing helps nobody. And if you need something in production next week with no room for an access review, we are the wrong firm, because we do not put a server that can take actions in front of an agent before the authentication, scoping and audit design are agreed.

Three things: which systems you want your agents to reach, documentation or API access for those systems, and a technical contact who can grant sandbox access. If you already know the agent use cases you are targeting, that shortens the mapping step; if not, we work it out with you in discovery. From there we come back with a scoped proposal.