it engagement models

From initially being just a cost-cutting concept, IT outsourcing has gradually and steadily moved ahead to establish itself as a must-have successful business model by rendering not only cost-effective but also sophisticated and highly efficient quality services and solutions.

The major concern in outsourcing is that of risk identification, and risk mitigation thereof. Softweb's versatile and flexible engagement models not only provide its clients liberty to choose the appropriate engagement model, as per requirement, but also help in assessing risks and mitigating them.

Softweb offers forward-looking IT outsourcing engagement models to our clients that go over and beyond tactical outsourcing. These models offer the opportunity to accelerate outsourcing higher along the collaborative value chain.

In the initial discussions with the prospective client, Softweb makes it a point to understand and evaluate the project requirements, project complexities, as well as the volatility of the client's business needs. Based on the project complexities and business volatility, we recommend an appropriate engagement model for the relationship to start. The rationale behind this is to assess technology risks, business risks and manpower risks and mitigate the same by an appropriate deployment of Softweb's resources.

Softweb has evolved engagement models to suit an intermediated business model, with a clear value proposition for an onsite business partner and an offshore team. The objective of any engagement model would be to provide a virtual team to the system integrator while adjusting the level of commitment, level of control, investment required (both time and money) and the cost savings generated through offshore economics to optimum levels for the situation at hand.

Broadly there are three engagement models that move from a low involvement, low control mode to a very high involvement, very high control mode. These are:

Get a predictable budget for your project.

Get Low perceived risk

Fixed Price Model suits best for clients who wants fixed price for fixed scoped project.The typical Features of this model are:

Fixed Price

Fixed Scope

Familiar requirement (we've done projects like this before) or clear requirement (typically detailed analysis & application design already completed)

Will involve Project Management, User Interface Design, Devolvement, Quality Testing, Will NOT involve Project Analysis

Softweb keeps the IP (Intellectual property) of the product, but share full rights to use the software. However, if the application is fully designed when it reaches us, then we give the IP rights to the client.

Typically asked for by clients with less project requirement clarity and offered by us only when we have high clarity on the requirement

Advantages to the Client: Low perceived risk (but actually high risk, since he will have to live with our design)

Budget predictability

Disadvantages to the Client: Low flexibility

Highest price

No ownership of IP

You can hire a team of: Programmers, Developers and Coders

ASP.NET programmers

PHP programmers

VB.NET programmers

C#, C++, Java, MySQL programmers and developers

Software testers

Website designers and Flash developers - HTML, DHTML, CSS, Flash, Fireworks, Photoshop

Technical Support and Software/Application Maintenance professionals.

Would you like to get your work done with more than 40% cost savings?

Would you like to extend your team without worrying about any overheads?

Would you like to get competitive advantage by having specialized professionals working on your project?

If your answer is than you should take outsourcing advantage of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) employee services.

We can provide you with a team of full time equivalent employees for your specific requirements on setting up an offshore development center. You can choose to hire a single professional and then scale up to a full-fledged development center.

Advantages to client:

Least cost option

Dedicated team

Budget predictability

IP ownership

High flexibility

High control

Can start with any level of expertise on the application

Disadvantages to client:

Need for client involvement is highest

Budget depends on how well the team is managed

You can hire a team of:

Programmers, Developers and Coders

ASP.NET programmers

PHP programmers

VB.NET programmers


Software testers



Get complete control over development cycle.

Get the best price for evolving requirements.

The typical Features of this model are:

Single Standard rate X$/hr irrespective of resource used

Follows typical SDLC timelines (10 -15% -- Analysis, 10 - 15% -- PM, 10 - 15% -- UI, 40% -- Coding, 10% - 15% -- Testing)

Ideal for Small jobs/Tasks based approach

Client involvement is more

Client keeps IP

Less expensive than fixed

Advantages to the Client: More control over implementation

Good when evolving requirements

High flexibility

Analysis is involved

Less expensive than fixed

IP ownership

Disadvantages to the Client: Time involvement on Clients behalf

Lack of pro-active involvement Vs. FTE

Only Std. SDLC projects

Budget control in client's hands

You can hire a team of: Programmers, Developers and Coders

ASP.NET programmers

PHP programmers

VB.NET programmers


Software testers



Independent software vendors e-Zest itself being a ISV during initial days of its corporate life understands challenges for ISVs Some of challenges ISVs face including:

Demanding customers (Constant changes in requirements)

Shrinking product life cycle

Reduced time to market

Higher flexibility

Sharp focus on customer support

Intense competition

Need for independent testing

Access to Product-savvy and domain-savvy product design and development talent

Multiple versions for different Customer segments to be maintained at any point in time

Managing product licensing and securing software to avoid unauthorized usage

These challenges severely affect ISVs ability to compete, sustain and win market share. To address these challenges e-Zest leverages its vast experience in software product life cycle management & offers following services to ISVs:

Product Consulting Outsourced Product Development (OPD) Services

Offshore Product Enhancement, Maintenance and Support Services

Product Migration and Porting Services

Independent Software Product Testing services

Product Performance Engineering Services

Dedicated Offshore Development Centers (ODCs) for product development with Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) option

Solution Architecture consulting

Enabling Software as a Service (SaaS) - ASP Model

e-Zest also offers Value Added Software Product Services to its ISVs clients including:

Design and development of Software Product Website (Demo Download, Online Product Purchase, Product Support)

Content Writing for Product Manuals

Content Writing for product Help

Product Licensing Consulting and Programming

Anti-Piracy Consulting and Programming

Software Demo, Shareware, ShrinkWrap Management

Professional Software Product Setup design and programming

e-Zest value proposition for ISVs Product-savvy and domain-savvy development talent

A sizeable pool of high end architectural, design and testing skills and flexible and dynamic development environments

Investments in product development centric tools

Creative commercial contracts which mitigate the risks for the ISV looking to explore the offshore opportunity. Such contracts includes terms of intellectual property protection, and flexible pricing mechanisms

Rapid team mobilization

Cost Savings due to offshore operations

Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) service Information is Knowledge. Today's economy is Knowledge economy. Knowledge processing is a continuous process of creation and dissemination of information by bringing together the information industry leaders to create knowledge and see meaning in information and its context. This Information driven Knowledge outsourcing in known as Knowledge Processing Outsourcing or KPO. It includes a range of sophisticated research and analytics services designed to support businesses,financial services firms, market research and consulting firms, and other information-intensive industries.

With our strong background in IT consulting,software development using two-tier delivery model, we can add significant value to your KPO needs, by deriving synergies between all of our practices. This can lead to The total being greater than the sum of the parts. We can leverage our extensive experience and expertise in business and technology consulting,IT services with business process management (BPM).Our Knowledge Services include information services, research services, and complex, high end analytics. e-Zest KPO service offerings include following major services:

Business Research

Marketing Research

Business and Technical Analysis

Data Analytics

Pharma and Healthcare Research

Financial Services Research

Human Resources Research

Legal Research

Intellectual Property (IP) Research

e-Zest takes a comprehensive approach to information security, including BS7799 certification, and quality, including ISO 9001:2000 certification.

We employ MBAs from top business schools, Charted Financial Analysts (CFA), Chartered Accountants, Engineering graduates and Lawyers with expertise in respective fields from best educational institutions in india for KPO needs of our clients.

At e-Zest, we are strongly committed to developing unsurpassed analytical solutions to difficult business problems. By helping you crystallize understanding of the complex options available to you, e-Zest solutions translate complicated data into clear management decisions.

Offshore software development Software development is a highly technical job. To develop software in-house requires time, skilled manpower, and expensive programs and equipment. Offshore development is a cost effective alternative to developing software in-house. Offshore software development and Offshore Programming at e-Zest safeguards the client's intellectual property, proprietary software and new development specifications with very high levels of security. Clients retain full ownership of all intellectual property rights and software source code at the completion of the project.

Offshore software development at e-Zest also provides you with immediate short-term access to a broad range of specialized technical skills and equipment. Offshore development allows your "A" team to focus on your core competencies. This means you get to market faster while maintaining your technological advantage.

Offshore software development is synonymous with flexibility. When facing a large project but of short duration, you can use Offshore software programming to limit the number of new employees and administrative support personnel you must take on. e-Zest allows you to double the number of programmers you have access to and better yet, we are just a phone call away.

For start-up companies, the benefits of Offshore software development can be monumental for the simple fact that it allows you to go farther on your venture capital dollars. The costs of Offshore software programming are much lower than hiring western programmers to fulfill your design.

Offshore software development offers another major advantage: independence. Most software vendors or investors cannot conduct independent analyses of their own or their competitors' products. e-Zest not only performs development work but also can obtain the competition's software for evaluation purposes for clients. This ability allows us to ask the questions you want answered and not disclose client identity.

Offshore software development has an extra benefit for other software developing companies, who by sub contracting out some of their most routine tasks to our company would be able to concentrate their workforce on the different tasks, which need their specific expertise. We would insure that perhaps unpleasant and perhaps more routine tasks still get done, saving their time for something of higher priority and importance.

To sum it up: Offshore software development at e-Zest allows you to cut production costs without the need to compromise on either speed or quality. Your operation becomes adaptable to increasingly complex and rapidly changing business environment. Ask yourself, can you afford not to go offshore when the competition is.

Software product testing A Product to be successful in a market place, functionalities that it provides is of prime importance. Apart from these product functionalities, performance, security, scalability and reliability are the other key parameters that determine the product's ability to deliver a true solution to market needs and ensure the enriched user experience. As software products are getting complex so are their testing techniques and ethnologies. This increases quality demands that too within tight release cycle constraints.

There are many approaches to software testing, but effective testing of complex products is essentially a process of investigation, not merely a matter of creating and following routine procedure.

Some of the key software product testing services we provide are:

Validation Testing

Black box Testing

Configuration Review

Usability, Accessibility Testing & Analysis

Alpha and Beta Testing

System testing

Recovery Testing

Security Testing (Robustness, Reliability Testing)

Stress / Load Testing

Performance Testing

Compatibility Testing

Interoperability Testing

Globalization, Localization testing

Functional Testing

Unit Testing

Smoke Testing(Sanity Testing)

Integration Testing (Top-down Integration Testing, Bottom-up Integration Testing)

Regression Testing

Content Testing & Verification

Customer relationship management (CRM) Customers are the core of any business, and so is managing the relationship with customers. e-Zests domain expertise in Customer Relationship Management ranges from business leads management or customer interfacing planning to end-to-end relationship management from marketing to delivery of service or product.

e-Zests CRM consulting brings our experience in aligning your CRM process with stated business objectives, leveraging the power of technology to make it more effective. This involves defining or optimizing CRM workflow and applying right trends and technologies into overall solution.

Our consulting helps you answer following some of the issues and key questions

1. What are or should be your CRM objectives?

SWOT Analysis

ROI Objectives

2. How do we align CRM objectives with overall business objectives?

CRM interfaces with other areas

Key Process Areas in CRM

Extent of Business Analytics and Business Intelligence Capabilities

3. Are there any gaps in our CRM process?

Workflow Modeling

Gap Analysis

Constraint Analysis

Remodeling CRM Strategy

4. Do we need end-to-end CRM or should we focus on specific objectives first?

Verification and Validation

Trade-off evaluation

5. What are the CRM industry trends we need align ourselves with?

Licensed Software vs Subscription-based Software-as-a-Service

Reporting vs Analytics vs Intelligence

6. What are the key technical attributes of our CRM?

Flexibility for customization

Web 2.0

Service Oriented Architecture

Best suited tenancy model

7. Should we buy an off-the-shelf CRM product or develop our own application?

Vendor Analysis

ROI revisited

Holistic approach of e-Zest consultants helps you in defining and architecting the right solution that your business needs for managing and sustaining the growth.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) e-Zest defines ERP as an enterprise re-engineering solution that uses new business computing paradigms to integrate IT processes across company divisions and departments. Some of the key ERP solution modules can be listed as follows.

1. Sales Management

2. Staff Management

3. Stock and Inventory Management

4. Supply-chain management

5. Production planning

6. Project Management

7. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

8. Financial Accounting and Bookkeeping

9. Data analysis and workflow management

10. Business Intelligence and Reporting (MIS)

11. Document and Workflow Management

Currently ERP market is experiencing a transformation from vertical product-centric architectures into horizontal customer-centric architectures. Generally, traditional product centric approach is tightly inter-coupled and ends up being inflexible and insular. On the other-hand the horizontal approach is more loosely coupled and adaptive. It is built for an era of specialization. We recommend this enterprise SOA approach to ERP application development.

Following trends are reshaping ERP development and delivery approaches to great extent:

Adaptability to the Internet: Need for internet enabling ERP solutions which provide anytime, anywhere access is a growing trend

Improvement on integration and flexibility: Integrating two applications from the same vendor is generally a challenge, but integrating applications from a variety of vendors is further difficult, which is major requirement for current ERP solutions. e-Zest uses its expertise in XML, Web Services and other integration standards for development and integration of current ERP solutions with other applications in organizations.

Embracing e-business: Increasing demand for integration of e-business services such as CRM, Business Intelligence. e-Procurement and supply chain management solutions within ERP platform

Reaching out to new users: Need for using ERP data by multi-enterprise users, mobile users

e-Zest excels at enterprise IT solutions. From your software platform, optimized for the ERP environment, to your support and services infrastructure, we support you every step of the way in your re-engineering journey. e-Zest focuses on the vision for the application and not simply the current technology.

This vision determines the appropriate architecture, customization features, installation procedures, and level of complexity. e-Zest works with software vendors to ensure that you have the correct suite of integration applications integral to a successful ERP solution. These applications are used to identify and plan the enterprise-wide resources you need to best serve your customers. e-Zest has partnered with these experts to skillfully ally applications with our strong team, technology, service, and support to provide the best, next generation IT solutions.

Business intelligence (BI) Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions.

In every industry, businesses are striving to track, understand, and manage their information more effectively so that they can evaluate performance, plan their future and achieve competitive advantage.

The key drivers for accurate and timely information include the need to:

1. Place data in the hands of larger numbers and types of users

2. Make decisions more frequently and more accurately in shorter time scales

3. customize data on a mass scale requiring data warehouses to provide different information to different people from different data sources

4. Manage the impact of new legislation and compliance regulations

Our Business Intelligence (BI) software development services offerings can be divided into following areas:

Front-end Development

Data Warehousing and Mining

Business Intelligence Reporting Services

Front End Development e-Zest Business Intelligence competency team members are having expertise in custom off the shelf solutions such as ProClarity Analytics,Arcplan dynaSight which can be used in front-end development. There are cases where these ready-made solution fails to meet clients specific requirements. In such scenarios, e-Zest leverages its capabilities in customized (bespoke) web front end reporting solutions. We can provide solutions based on multiple technology platforms such as:

.NET platform including VB, C# and ASP

Java (J2EE)

Open source with PHP and MySQL

These web-focused technologies enable the development of customized reporting and analysis front ends and are particularly useful for organizations with very large volumes of data they wish to work with or very complex reporting and analysis requirements.

Data Warehousing and Mining Data Mining refers to exploring data, discovering patterns, and applying these patterns to business operations with an easy-to-use, extensible, accessible, and flexible platform.

Data Warehousing leverages enhancements in partitioning, manageability and query optimizations in recent database solutions such as SQL Server 2005 and Oracle Database 10g to streamline operations and increase performance.

e-Zest provides data mining and warehousing services from business intelligence perspective on SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10g and PostgreSQL database platforms.

Business Intelligence Reporting Services We provide software development services with enterprise reporting capabilities using following technologies:

Business Intelligence Services using Business Objects Solutions

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

Cognos and MicroStrategy Reporting Services

At e-Zest, we have helped our clients in delivering business intelligence solutions with measurable value which are inline with long-term business goals for our customers.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) Most of the businesses have adopted the software solutions in their early-days for competitive advantages. These legacy software solutions, either the packaged product or specifically developed to meet specific organization needs in past, works well even today individually, but they create information islands.

In most cases, each system produces redundant information, which successively creates inconsistent data across enterprise. This results in multiple data entry points, data duplication, and data isolation problems. Such organizations are in need of the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) services to integrate these systems.

We in some cases, use point to point or middleware based integration for providing EAI services to our clients. Point to point integration is used when number of system to be integrated are two to three. For integrating more systems using point to point integration becomes cumbersome and nonviable. Middleware based integration is better choice for large number of systems. Middleware provides generic interfaces with which all integrated applications pass messages to each other. Each interface defines a business process provided by an application.

e-Zests EAI service offerings include following major integration services:

Platform Integration e-Zest provides platform integration using constituents of web services, services oriented architectures (SOA's) Messaging, Object Request Broker (ORB), Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and Publish and Subscribe based communication integration.

Data Integration Our expertise in enterprise technology platforms such as .NET and Java EE provides us with the platforms and tools to extract transform and manipulate data for our clients. In the context of XML, this also involves the greater task of metadata management.

Component Integration Our integration includes integration at the level of the business logic, transaction management and application services using component architecture of SOAP/XML framework or EJB/Struts framework.

Application IntegrationOur application integration services include building web services adapters or writing bespoke adapters on appropriate Middleware. Adapter-based integration forms the backbone for this level. Rules and content routing & event-based transactions and transformations are primary enablers in such integration

Process Integration Involves the process and workflow modeling approach to integration using business process management (BPM) based approach.

Client engagement modelse-Zest follows a high-touch strategy in managing the service delivery. A strong, proven client-vendor engagement model is the foundation for a successful offshore experience. Since each client has different requirements and expectations, it is important to plan in detail from very early on and clearly define roles and responsibilities.

e-Zest offers multiple engagement models to meet diverse needs of global clients. You can choose from any one of the generally accepted models below or a combination of them for different phases of your project. We can work with you to customize a model to address your specific need. An appropriate engagement strategy is based on a clear understanding of customers business drivers. Our models core focus is on the customers innate needs like:

High Quality

Fast Delivery

Low Cost

Increased project profitability

Flexible resource Allocation and management with no up front investment

Predictable support

Handling future needs of the customer

Any of these pricing models can be applied to our suite of services in custom ways for convenience and best value for money.

Effort based pricing or Time & Material

Milestone based billing

Dedicated Development Facility or Retainer

Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) Model

Project based pricing or Fixed bid.

Strategic Partner Model

Offshore Development Center(ODC)

Time and material This engagement model is particularly useful in contexts where the projects are prone to specification and design changes midstream. This model gives customer greater flexibility in terms of developing the project specification on an ongoing basis and modifying the specifications based on the changing market needs.

In this effort based pricing model, the project cost is a function of the project execution time and the corresponding resources deployed.

Fixed bid or Fixed cost

This option works for clients who are concerned about progress in remote projects, milestones-based payment schedules reinforce progress monitoring. It helps justify payment based on achievable milestone and visible progress reduces risks.

Dedicated development facility or Retainership A Dedicated facility is an extension of the customer's own engineering/development center. Through such dedicated facilities, we offer the best skill sets, resources, and flexibility and time-to-market advantages to the customers, taking all necessary efforts to protect the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of the customers. All rights to the IPR developed in the Development Facility vests with the customer. The Dedicated Facility also provides a cost effective solution to customers requiring continuous offshore support. For such dedicated relationships, we also implement customer specific quality/process frameworks and teams are trained for the specific needs of a Client. The resources are paid on a retainer basis.

Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model e-Zest's Build-Operate-Transfer model enables customers to rapidly start offshore operations and later transfer the offshore development center as their own subsidiary/captive center.

e-Zest provides the following value proposition during each phase of the process:

Build: Setup the facility and infrastructure, staff the development center, and establish knowledge transfer.

Operate: Manage the offshore organization: Program Management, Development, QA, maintenance, enhancements, and product support.

Transfer: Register a new offshore subsidiary for the customer, transfer assets, and handover operations.

The dedicated facility leverages e-Zest technical infrastructure, processes and execution capabilities. The dedicated facility is staffed either by existing e-Zest resources or by client's resources or by resources hired specifically for engagement or a mix of them all. e-Zest has a well-defined mechanism for the smooth transition of the facility ie its own captive center to the client.

Clients see the following benefits by working with this model:

Faster Time to Market

Lower Establishment Costs

Risk Reduction

Flexibility

Process Expertise

Option of owning the facility

it engagement models

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