Outsourced Product Lifecycle Services

Strategic benefits, Reduced Time to Market, Improved Efficiencies for ISVs.

We help leading Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and software-enabled businesses make better products faster and more cost effectively, applying a wide array of product lifecycle capabilities combined with the global delivery model and this is what leading ISVs, storage, telecom and web-based businesses need from their capital investments.

Our Focus

Ikas technologies is focused on bringing the benefits of global economics and optimization to software product engineering. Building and sustaining software products is dramatically different than delivering IT projects. The rigors of commercial release require specialized process and quality expertise and an intense collaborative work style that enables cocreation of values. Product lifecycle services focus is ingrained as a part of our long term organizational objectives and as a result clients gain sustainable advantages such as

Improved productivity & Quality
Reduced time to market
Ability to compete better in the market
Scalability at a lower cost base (resources and marketing)
Improved path to profitability
Improved profit margins and valuation of the company

In our Global Product engineering lifecycle offerings. We can support the entire gamut of new product development, maintenance and support activities, providing complete turnkey services, or handling individual segments of the Software product lifecycle such as testing and quality assurance or Product marketing support. Ikas in such a model works as a seamless extended engineering arm of a client’s product team. We adapt the product development lifecycle processes used by our client to the offshore environment. We work with a variety of development and test environments, utilizing numerous tools and technologies.

Our Outsourced product engineering lifecycle services help deliver predictable and quality software and more new features per release. Ikas works on a partnership model with our clients with a deeper commitment in every aspect of helping them succeed in their business objectives.

Ikas’ core team has deep experience in setting up and operating multiproduct and multitechnology captive development centers with global delivery capabilities for International Technology and Product companies.

Product Sustenance Engineering

Independent software vendors (ISV) today are under competitive pressures to reduce the cost of their software lifecycle management and product releases. The key problem for them in doing so pertains to the high sustenance and maintenance costs of the non-critical products. Products that are approaching or may even have reached the end-of-life phase could potentially consume a lot of resources and efforts from the key staff, which may be otherwise redirected for strategic development work. Ikas is aware of the need to sustain such products, and at the same time ensure that core activities don’t get affected. The major challenges faced by customers for products nearing their life term are:

Declining revenues
Sustenance (Maintenance & Support) cost overruns
Reduced focus on business innovation
Suboptimal resource and infrastructure usage.

As a part of our product lifecycle services, we provide comprehensive sustenance solutions for non-critical products and products nearing their life term. From the initial knowledge transition phase to feature enhancements, to managing global client support, we have streamlined our services to provide a comprehensive solution leading to improved business efficiencies for our clients.

Jump-start & Time to Market services for Start-ups

Our Jump-start services allows early stage companies to meet their product development and market/customer release objectives without compromising functionality, while reducing costs associated with the software development lifecycle including testing, maintenance, documentation, marketing and technical support. Our Value proposition in this area includes,

Slashing the time to market
Improves focus on gaining investor momentum while sustaining long-range goals
Enabling comprehensive resources, while protecting capital resources
Rapid prototyping using advanced product lifecycle techniques.

Our Jumpstart program is a flexible, Global delivery services model that enables efficiencies of scale through the optimization of people-process-technology aspects and keeps overall costs at a minimum. It includes every aspect of product development and support including research & development, cross platform software development, migration & porting, integration, documentation, quality assurance, performance engineering, Global support, Marketing support etc. Quick Time-To-Market is a critical element and competitive wining factor today for advanced technology start-ups. Companies today have to invest significantly to slash the Time-To-Market, which gives them a winning advantage. Ikas Global delivery framework consists of niche Time-To-market accelerators to support this requirements for ISVs especially the start ups; The global delivery framework can be adapted to customers to suit their requirements.

Platform Modernization

Legacy Software platforms, mainframes and mid-range systems such as Unisys, AS 400, are robust, reliable platforms that can serve existing customers into the future, but they are not optimal for today's pressing business needs that is on a constant change. These legacy platforms make it hard to add new features and integrate with other applications, databases and the latest technologies. Some of these systems are increasingly expensive to maintain and support – both from an infrastructure and an development point of view. Also, there is an ever-decreasing pool of developers who are familiar with legacy languages such as COBOL, RPG etc. It becomes critical for ISVs and software enabled businesses to pursue the continuum of legacy system extension into modern platforms. Migrating to current development platforms like JEE, Microsoft .NET, SOA can allow unlocking the value of these legacy products and applications and standardize them with the current possibilities. If we can enable an object oriented architecture or SOA, you get significant extensibility and usability that your customer crave for, thus improving the business and customer satisfaction.

Quality Engineering

Managing the product quality along with optimal cost and schedule is one of the key challenges facing software development organizations today. Growing complexity of underlying domains, multitudes of platforms to be supported and ever reducing release cycles are making the quality assurance challenge even more complicated. Our testing and QA services can help ISVs achieve their quality imperatives through a focus on people, processes, tools and Global delivery methodology. We have a wide range of expertise in Testing & QA including specialized capabilities in Automation, Cloud based reliability testing.

Product Support services

We can provide a wide-ranging pre-sales, marketing support, deployment and professional services support. It may not be possible for clients to engage in business across geographies. In such a case, we can help the clients deploy and support their solutions through the Global delivery model. This provides an avenue to enable a wider reach of the solution and allows the clients to serve previously uncharted geographies.

Competitive Advantage through Global Delivery

ISVs and Software enabled businesses, regardless of size, operate under business constraints that calls for optimization of complex software product lifecycle related expenditures and time to market. In order to accomplish these basic, bottom-line endeavors, they must be able to optimize their budgets and efforts. Investing and sustaining in non-critical elements of business can be less strategic. Ikas Global delivery model enables predictable costs combined with reduced time to release or market the software with greater business efficiencies. One of the most tangible value proposition, organizations that select our Global delivery services get, will be the ability to incorporate finitely predictable budgets.

Technology

We work on a number of technologies combined with process orientation and best practices application in all our engagements
Enterprise Technologies : JEE, .NET , ESB, Webservices, AJAX, Middleware
Operating Systems : Linux, Unix, Solaris, Microsoft Windows
Virtual Machines : VMWare, Parallels, Xen, Sun Virtual Box
Languages : C++, C#, JAVA, PHP, Javascript
Frameworks : Microsoft .NET, Struts, Spring, Zend
Middleware/Servers : WebLogic, WebSphere, Jboss, Microsoft Workflow, Integration, Sharepoint