Enterprise Application Architecture
Present situation
The IT department is faced with the difficulty that, on one hand, new technologies should be put into use in a profitable way to realize continuously rising technical requirements, and, on the other hand, it should keep track of the costs.
Often, the focus lies on the initial costs fort he development of a software system while, at the same time, the project makes use of the technologies which seem most appropriate from the project point of view. A vast number of application development processes which are carried out concurrently quickly lead to an uncoordinated and uncontrolled growth of applied technologies, frameworks and middleware products. Subsequently, only after initial development, an increase of expenditures arises. This results in a restricted agility of the company
Even if this correlation is recognized by the organization, the company is not equipped with the sufficient know how to be able to achieve the procurement of technology in an optimal way. The building-up of expertise does not, in the most of cases, follow the speed which is required by the organization. Further more, this do-it-yourself-approach holds a considerable risk.
Objective/challenge
The challenge is to build up an expertise in the key technologies within the organization and install a company-wide platform which may be used by the application development projects.
To accomplish this, a number of challenges must be met. First, the organizational prerequisites must be created to allow for the complex technical challenges to be implemented centrally, in a high quality and within a short reaction time period. Typically, this encompasses the creation of a central unit representing a powerful service quality concentrating the most competent employees of the company.
The objective in developing this platform must be to offer such a great advantage for the specialists departments, that these would use the platform even if this was not dictated by IT guidelines. This can only be achieved by a high quality which conforms to the specific situation within the company. Key qualities are, besides stability, scalability and modularity, a good comprehensibility and therefore a short training period.
Another challenge is the rollout of the platform within the company and the consistent expansion along the requirements. This is typically achieved by a team with excellent knowledge of the platform supporting the specialists departments on one hand and, on the other hand, collecting new suggestions for requirements and improvements at the same time.
It must be succeeded in expanding the ability for innovation and the productivity of the application developer, at the same time keeping control of the costs by means of a high level of consistency.
Our added value
We are equipped with the technological know how to support our customers in setting up a new, respectively, upgrading an existing application platform on the basis of enterprise Java (JEE5 and EJB3) or .NET.
Aside from the skills in technology, we possess the architectural know how to design and implement applications based on the new technologies. Also, we are familiar with the organizational structures and procedures which are critical for the success of the implementation and extension of a platform.
Due to the large number of completed projects involving comparable platforms, we are able to provide "best practises" and experience when designing the platform. An integral part of this experience is the branch-specific knowledge, enabling us to identify the focal points and evaluate requirements.
Since our consultants are involved in key positions in application development projects, we make use of fundamental technologies in a profitable way.
Our consultants possess profound knowledge in the "middleware stacks" of the market leaders (JEE: IBM, Oracle/BEA; .NET: Microsoft), respectively, open source Products (JBoss, Glassfish, ...).
Portfolio
Collecting the requirements for the application platform. Providing of branch-specific know how in order to evaluate the adequacy of the requirements.
Top-down design of the application architecture under consideration of the requirements. Definition of the responsibilities for the layers and business objects stereotypes. Mapping of the so-defined logical architecture to physical structures and technologies.
On-target-use of technology standards like JEE5 and .NET and associated middleware stacks as a base for the development of applications according to the application architecture.
Consulting on the choice of middleware products. The central component here is the application server (Enterprise Java).
Consulting on the choice of commercial and open source components, like JPA Persistence Provider as part of the platform.
For all activities, we compare the target platform with the NovaTec reference platform. By this measure, these may be considerably streamlined, while, at the same time, the risks are reduced.