| Application
Maintenance |
|
| Maintaining enterprise-wide
business applications has become
increasingly complex and costly activity
for many companies. Aging mainframe
systems, the continued shift to client/server
and Web-enabled systems, mergers
and acquisitions and global expansion
have forced companies to devote more
time, effort and money to keep their
applications running at an optimum
efficiency level. As a result, corporate
IT activities are investing an increased
percentage of their budgets and staff
to day-to-day management tasks, instead
of focusing on more mission-critical
projects to promote business growth.
To relieve the drain on their IT
resources, many leading companies
have made the decision to outsource
the maintenance and support of their
applications to IT services firms. |
|
| Organizations typically
outsource application maintenance
to achieve the following objectives: |
|
 |
Re-deploy
existing staff to new development
efforts. |
|
Achieve higher
user satisfaction. |
|
Lower existing
maintenance costs. |
|
Provide better
troubleshooting. |
|
Reduce response
time. |
|
Improve stability,
flexibility and security. |
|
|
| Our application
maintenance and support methodology
takes a two-staged approach to application
maintenance, based on recognized
best practices and supported by a
stable, state-of-the-art infrastructure,
which are described below. |
|
| Stage 1 |
|
|
Preparation. |
|
Planning. |
|
Transition. |
|
|
| Stage 2 |
|
|
Ongoing
Maintenance / Steady State. |
|
Continues
Improvement. |
|
|
| Our Application
Maintenance and Support Services
comprises of: |
|
|
Application
Updates. |
|
Application
Enhancements. |
|
Content Updates. |
|
Documentation. |
|
Error tracking
and Debugging. |
|
Performance
Testing. |
|
Performance
Monitoring. |
|
User Support. |
|
Application
Support. |
|
|
| Although all the
focus and intellectual effort of
many organizations is to build a
new system to overcome some business
problem or need, they sometime forget
the equally large on-going support
costs. |
|
| If you are not
ready to move your development projects
offshore, you can certainly move
to the application support service. |
|
| For many organizations,
once an application has been completed,
the original development team is
released on to new projects. In many
projects, as the application enters
the testing phase, the development
team is gradually reduced. Application
support is often not seen as "rewarding" and
staff retention rate for those handling
this role is low. This is not business
model for offshore developers. The
offshore approach is to leverage
the knowledge and experience obtained
in particular projects in similar
engagements with an industry segments.
For offshore support, the telephone
number that the customer calls is
typically a local number. |
|
| Starsoft maintains
a team of offshore support analysts
and developers to handle second and
third line support. Depending on
client requirements, we can dedicate
a permanent team to provide ongoing
support... |
|
| Typically, if Starsoft's
Application Maintenance service is
also used there is an overall cost
reduction. The start-up cost and
training time required for the support
analysts is reduced. |
|
| |
