Software Products Industry is going through interesting but challenging times. The end customer demands have grown and competitive pressures have increased significantly. Business models are moving away from traditional licensing to Software-As-A-Service (SaaS). Product shelf life is shrinking specially with dominance of internet based applications and lastly technology is changing at faster pace with emergence of Web 2.0.
This is forcing product companies to be innovative and create early to market advantage for their new products. We at Blue Monitor possess almost a decade of market leading expertise in Outsourced Product Development. We enable our customers in the software products and internet industry to accelerate (time-to-market) the launch of their new/improved products & solutions through our IPs for SaaS, Web 2.0 Mash Up's and SOA frameworks.
We work with engineering groups and CTO's to help organizations at all stages of product development.
Customers no longer prefer one-off products, but rather a complete solution built using the best-of-breed products. This makes software product companies invest in non core products either as extensions to older products or to interface with new technologies, standards or devices.
Blue Monitor has successfully designed and developed complete products for customers.
This service is suitable for customers who have the following requirements:
• Need for localization of software
• Drive to diversify risks of single talent pool
• Manage the non core product development efficiently and focus more clearly on core product development
• Manage the distributed development challenges through tested CMMi compliant robust processes
• Some of the highlights of our services are: Three joint patents in adding new features to a complex product
• Development of an RTOS from scratch
• Expertise across the software stack
PRODUCT MAINTENANCE
Software product companies need to balance between product development and sustenance. As products evolve and mature, the balance shifts towards sustenance. To remain competitive, software product companies need to add more products to their portfolio, get these products to interoperate and provide a complete solution to the customer. Our product sustenance solution extends the sustenance engineering capacity by shifting the sustenance of the mature and “sunset” products offshore.
• Services Offered Product sustenance
• Minor enhancements
• Point releases
• Platform migrations
• Conversions
This service is best suited for IT software products that fit the following criteria: Products that are in the decline stage of their life cycle, • where the majority of the product revenues are from maintenance and very little or almost negligible revenues from licensing, or it could be a product for which end-of-life is declared
• Product has a large installed base that needs to be supported
• Product has multi-year maintenance and support contracts for the installed base, that requires a sustenance engineering team
• Product has a large amount of software code (500K lines of code or more) that needs to be maintained during the remaining support period
The highlights of Blue Monitor’s R&D outsourcing services for product sustenance are:
Engineering ownership: Option to takeover the entire engineering responsibility of the product, including project management. This includes L1 to L4 of engineering sustenance. L1-L2 related to product support, and L3-L4 relate to sustenance engineering. Blue Monitor offers both L1-L2 and L3-L4 services.
• Engineering ownership does not imply the ownership of the intellectual property
• Transfer of engineering ownership is governed by a set of comprehensive SLA (Service Level Agreements). The SLA covers various aspects of engineering activities, as well as end-user / customer satisfaction levels
• The SLA can have provisions for both bonus and penalties to ensure that the outsourced engineering team is aligned with business objectives
• Blue Monitor will provide guaranteed productivity benefits year-on-year as part of the SLA
END-TO-END QA & TESTING SERVICES
Software product companies spend substantial portion of their development budgets in testing. With the release cycles of products shrinking along with increase in technical complexities of the products, QA and testing activities pose a capacity constraint to software product companies. Outsourcing testing to Blue Monitor, allows customers to free up development time for new features and fixing defects that are critical to get a competitive edge. Moreover, with over ten years of software testing experience and over 5000 test consultants, Blue Monitor brings in unique benefits of scale and scope to your testing needs.
Blue Monitor’s expertise in critical test processes such as automation, performance testing and integration testing help customers thoroughly test products. Using Six Sigma as the guiding principle, Blue Monitor has multiple test optimization tools that improve testing efficiency as well as effectiveness. For example, Blue Monitor has adapted the orthogonal array tool to optimize the test harness by improving coverage, while simultaneously reducing execution time.
Blue Monitor offers testing services in the following testing areas:
Regression Testing and Automation:Blue Monitor can take end-to-end responsibility for regression testing of products with agreed upon quarter on quarter improvements in efficiency, automation, process compliance, etc. These SLAs have a direct impact on the schedule, costs and quality of regression execution and benefits are built into the contract in a risk-reward model. Blue Monitor also has extensive experience in regression testing and automation, both using readily available automation tools as well as homegrown automation scripts.
Compatibility Testing:Blue Monitor’s compatibility testing services enables clients to check if their product is compatible with a wide variety of hardware, operating systems, and internet browsers as well as commonly used applications. Blue Monitor offers comprehensive installation and build verification testing of products on Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix platforms. Blue Monitor's product compatibility lab hosts a wide range of hardware and operating system platforms including upcoming Microsoft Vista. A wide variety of automation tools, including test automation, as well as one touch lab set up tools, enable us to offer these services in a highly automated fashion. Blue Monitor offers this service using Blue Monitor proprietary Testing as Managed Service™ (TMS) model. Using TMS, Blue Monitor undertakes end-to-end execution responsibility for compatibility testing with committed service levels for cost, quality and schedules.
Localization Testing: Blue Monitor has over 500 years of experience in globalization deployments. We provide end-to-end globalization and localization offering for 1 byte as well 2 byte languages, including European (French, German) and Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages. As a corporate member of the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA), Blue Monitor has access to the latest trends in globalization and localization services that we use to the benefit of clients.
Alpha and Beta Testing:Blue Monitor has experience in end-to-end management of Alpha and Beta testing of software products in coordination with the client. This service includes client site test support, remote monitoring of products, test triage and coordination for resolution of defects.
Integration Testing:Most of the software products co-exist in a larger enterprise context and often have APIs to interact with other applications in an enterprise. Blue Monitor has extensive expertise in testing these integrations of workflows and / or data models among different products.
Performance Testing:Blue Monitor has extensive experience in load and performance testing of software products using industry standard tools such as Mercury Performance Center. Apart from validating the performance baseline of products before every major release, Blue Monitor also assists in hardware sizing and resource utilization modeling for new products. Blue Monitor has a performance test CoE with a team of performance test engineers readily available to perform these tasks.
Test Process Consulting:Blue Monitor's extensive experience in testing across industries and technologies, as well as investments in test process improvement provides us with a unique insight into testing best practices. Blue Monitor extends this to clients as a Test Process Consulting Service. In this offering, we benchmark the testing function across four 'pillars': process and metrics; tools and test lab; test harness; people capabilities.
• Software product companies are constantly dealing with reduced product development cycles. However, the quality of the product’s execution needs to be high.
• Blue Monitor provides a set of services to improve the reliability and quality of the products. These services help avoid common programming pitfalls, ensure compliance to the client's selected coding standards, ensure uniform programming style, identify and fix potentially insecure code, ensure conformant coding style, and do much more.
• This service is best suited for IT software products that fit the following criteria:
• A product has been bought over and the entire code-base needs to be made uniform with respect to coding style and best practices, so that the new product can be easily integrated with the existing products
• Need to improve the QA effectiveness under a tight delivery schedule
• Need to improve the security of the product so that vulnerabilities can be avoided
• The highlights of Blue Monitor’s product hardening solutions:
• Invested in an automated compliance verification tool, through co-development with one of our partners. This tool compares well against some of the established tools in the industry.
• Development of a methodology, checklist and best practices to increase the security of the product. These tested methods and process can provide tremendous value.
INTERNATIONALIZATION SERVICES
Internationalization is the process by which a product / component / service can be customized and made available in multi language platforms or environments. In the process of internationalization, the product will be customized to locate specific error / warning messages, GUI strings, date / time processing, etc. A truly global product needs availability on multiple platforms and languages, and support for third party tools. Our porting and migration solution extend the engineering capabilities to make this possible. Blue Monitor has 500+ person years of experience in internationalization of products on Windows and Unix platforms.
Blue Monitor provides end-to-end internationalization services for any of the end-user products for the following:
• Re-engineering (design and code changes) for internationalization
• Tool assisted code changes for Unicode/ MBCS compliance
• Standard methodology for UI, help files, database and other changes in the product
• Translation and verification of the GUI strings, error / warning messages in various languages
• Localization testing in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish and others
• Development of automation tools for localization
Blue Monitor has executed projects for several fortune 2000 customers in the following platforms and operating systems:
IA 32, IA 64, SPARC, PA-RISC, PPC, MIPS
Windows, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, AIX
Blue Monitor has developed a methodology for creating a Common Code Base (CCB) to provide a comprehensive solution.
PRODUCT STRATEGY & ARCHITECTURE
In the wake of increasing globalization and fast-paced innovations, technology vendors and enterprises must find innovative ways to strategically combine business and technology, to extend their competitive advantage, economize their business operations and market their opportunities in order to be successful.
With more than a decade of experience in researching, analyzing, and documenting the business value of technology solutions, Blue Monitor’s Product Strategy and Architecture (PSA) practice is strategically placed to help technology vendors and enterprises develop innovative and effective product and IT strategies that have had proven value in business success. Blue Monitor's PSA practice combines deep technology enterprise in IT and embedded systems, broad strategic planning skills, proficiency in global strategies and understanding of hi-growth emerging countries.
Integrating market-specific knowledge and experience in emerging technologies and standards, the PSA practice provides a unique combination that can meet the complex demands of the industry. With hands-on knowledge and experience, consultants and technical architects have lent expertise and have worked with global enterprises and service providers in architecting and implementing large-scale systems.
• Core strengths of the PSA practice lie in:
• Deep engineering and technical skills
• Senior technical and business teams
• Extensive market research experience
• State-of-the art R&D and development centers
• Offshore delivery-ensuring ongoing savings
