"Go-Green" Professional Services

Unlike "Commercial, off-the-shelf" solutions that change the business process to fit the requirements, our professional services team tailor custom solutions to fit your business environment. Custom solutions means developing software that tight fits the requirements of the clients depending upon their business needs. Software Merchant offers a strong team consisting of project managers, solutions architects, business consultants, software engineers and programmers, testers, designers and technical writers. Our experience in developing applications in various languages and on various platforms allows us to make judicious decisions while selecting platform and designing software architecture. Our consulting approach would also suggest any process improvements that are needed to leverage the technology as much as possible.

Our custom software development and management services platforms include:

• Wireless Printing - Provide customer specific solutions - hardware and software to fit business requirements
• Back Office Applications - EAI BizTalk Server Integration, Exchange Integration, Blackberry Integration and MS Project Server Integration
• Client/Server applications - Smart Client Applications (.NET 3.0), Windows Presentation Foundation Applications (Vista style .NET 3.5)
• Distributed Web Applications - B2B e-Commerce Applications, B2B Web Services Applications, Share Point Portal Development, Web Parts
• Batch Applications- High volume processing, reporting and email marketing in .NET Windows Services and GRID computing
• Data Warehousing - Business Intelligence Solutions in Cognos BI, Excel, Oracle, SQL Server STAR schema based analytics and reporting
• Solutions Architecture - Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR), As-Is Analysis, To-Be Analysis, Solution Blue Print and Design Services
• Security Implementation - Microsoft LDAP and Active Directory, Microsoft Passport, and third party security like Netegrity product suite for authentication and authorization using IdentityMinder
• Operations Management - High availability strategies for applications (web farm, web garden load-balancing, fail-over, and disaster recovery, business resumption and backup/restore strategies, advanced clustering of application servers, database servers replication, network architecture, application architecture, applications hosting (test, staging and production), server administration, and configuration management.

Our Edge

Our edge is in in-depth understanding of software development life cycle (SDLC), and cutting edge expertise in project management (PMP/PMI), risk management and establishing success criteria for our customer project success before project inception.

Our transparent project management and change management ensures that our client is involved at all levels of the development cycle. We understand the urgency to realize your investment in IT, so we ensure that the deliverables are defined in phases relevant to the business needs. Our efficient management of overheads expenditures like travel and communication costs enables us to deliver effective solutions within budget and on time.

Our Approach

Software Development Life Cycle is a process by which user requirements are elicited and software satisfying these requirements is designed, built, tested and delivered to the client. The Development Process is used when a new application is being developed or a major enhancement is being done to an existing application.

Software Merchant adopts the Spiral Progressive Approach to deliver a project. The salient features of this approach are:

• It follows an iterative Development model.
• Development phases are revisited with a feedback loop from forward stages at the end of critical milestones/changes.
• At one particular time all discipline of projects are active.
• The active percentages of each discipline are different, depending upon what phase we are currently focusing. This is equivalent to saying that at one particular time we will doing a% requirements, b% design, c% construction, d% deployment.

The main benefit of this approach is that the customer can always see how the project is shaping up, not like waterfall approach where customer sees projects only after one phase is complete. This process reduces rework. UML is used as a base modeling language in each phase.

We have expertise in iterative development methodology. We have successfully implemented Rational Unified Process (RUP), Extreme Programming and Agile Methodologies in our projects. During our talks with our customer, we propose different models and we choose best approach for project execution with approval from customer.

How do we implement these processes while working with our offshore clients?

At Software Merchant, these processes are defined very clearly and we have a Process Matrix. Process Matrix lists all departments, including inter and intra department dependencies. Process Matrix also defines inter-department process by defining interfaces, process responsibilities and artifacts for each department. We interact and engage with our US clients in all these phases and collaborate at each phase with the onshore team.