Overview

Maintaining stability in the software world requires significant budgets in terms of maintenance, support and migration from release to release. The cost of fixing defects is an order of magnitude compared to the cost of designing and developing software. Often times cutting corners while developing a project leads to long term costs that are hard to predict.

A good architecture not only considers the needs and constraints of the current environment, but also keeps in mind the robustness of the solution for the long term. In addition to metrics such as scalability, performance etc. it also provides extensibility hooks that will lead to future enhancements and potentially follow the concepts of a plugin architecture that allows for replacement of the various piece parts of the software.

The success of any architecture should be measured by the returns of the overall cost over the long haul. We at ALBION GLOBAL recognize the value of upfront analysis and design of the architectural needs of our clients.

What We Do

There is a constant challenge to find the right balance between cost and efficiency as part of software investment. By following our modular software strategy, we provide for lower costs while maintaining the sanctity of concurrency, scalability, system efficiency, performance, and extensibility among others. This model uses standard use case studies to modularize existing or new software design into reusable assets. These assets now get mapped to system design for development in geographically dispersed locations and also create the foundation for code reuse for various solutions thereby lowering the overall cost. In addition, some of these modules can be potentially replaced with open source software and can also be integrated with technologies such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Our proven architectural experience guarantees to lower the cost in the long run while maintaining the same quality of service that customers are accustomed to and expect.

How We Do It : Custom Application Development Methodologies

We use the following multi-staged approach for solving any problem:

• Existing Applications
1. Study current architecture and design
2. Use existing tools and knowledge to understand the pain points
3. Recommend design changes, potentially replacing some modules with open source software where appropriate
• New Applications
1. Identifying use cases and hence requirements for addressing business scenarios
2. System/IT Architecture
1. Recommend the appropriate hardware and software including database, security etc.
3. Design architectures for solutions
1. End to end flow
2. Adaptable Reusable assets that can be potentially leveraged by other products or solutions by leveraging common design patterns
3. Robust and low cost of solution by mixing and matching these assets with open source strategy.
4. Performance Metrics Analysis
5. Scalability, robustness and distributed caching strategy for high availability.
6. Usage of standard J2EE (servlet, portlet, JSPs, EJBs), JDBC, web services, security etc.
7. Usage of .NET Architecture
8. Recommend appropriate security audit services
9. Recommend remote infrastructure management infrastructure for seamless development across geographically diverse locations for the reusable assets.
• Combination of the existing and new applications
1. Create and use reusable assets as above to create new solutions
2. Integrating reusable assets with new ones using architecture such as SOA (service oriented architecture).

Advantages

• Robust Design
• Modular approach
• Standards based protecting ROI
• Budget adherence