Solution Engineering

When a new IT system is developed and deployed, there are always risks. Will the system meet its initial functional and performance specifications? Will it be able to scale smoothly to meet anticipated growth? Will it provide robust and reliable service? When our clients want to launch a new system they rely on us to control and even eliminate these concerns through sound solution engineering principles. This requires a combination of skills in application software, in middleware components, hardware components and systems, in networking. Our Solution Engineering Services include:

• Infrastructure Design and Engineering: This design service produces a finished infrastructure design that will support your new IT solution. In the design, we include all hardware (servers, storage, and networking) components, security infrastructure, network access and bandwidth analysis. We optionally include storage and server virtualization technologies in our recommended designs.  
• Capacity and Scaling Analysis: This service provides an analysis of your baseline capacity needs. We develop future growth projections and translate those projections into a system growth plan that maps the trigger points and investments that you will need to make over time. Using trigger points in the context of a forecast will provide a grounding to your investment plans. The trigger points tell you when forecasted growth has been realized. Following the roadmap, you will know what steps you should take to keep pace.
• Middleware Component Design: Between the many open source and commercial middleware technology suites there are a bewildering set of options that appear to provide comparable core function. In addition, each offers its own richly varied value added enhancements. Navigating the choices to arrive at a robust middleware foundation can be time consuming and frustrating. We help our customers make smart choices about what middleware to include when building a stable middleware foundation. We also keep up with the evolving set of vendor-based and open source features and provide recommendations on which will provide value for our customers. We help our customers understand when a differentiating technology is transitioning to an emergent standard. That's our test of real value in the middleware arena. We will compose your middleware design balancing cost and maintainability with the features and functions that will both match your current needs and grow with your enterprise over time.
• Solution Quality Assurance (Functional and Performance Testing): The best way to be sure that a solution will work as designed is to test it. There is just no way to avoid that step. You either test it before you release it to your users or you ask your users to test it for you. The former method is the traditional one. The latter method is the hallmark of the open source arena. As long as expectations are properly managed, either approach can be applied with great success. We can help you devise and execute a quality assurance approach that fits your enterprise cost and time requirements and ensures that it delivers the quality that your users need.