Application Maintenance Outsourcing

Many organizations today implement packaged solutions or custom-developed applications without consideration for how they will maintain and enhance the application after launch. Unlike many consulting firms, we consider the process for post-launch support and maintenance of an application as important as the development process. SBF provides Application Maintenance Outsourcing (AMO) solutions that reduce the time you spend maintaining systems and allow you to focus on other aspects of running your business.

Through our AMO offering, SBF provides outsourced turnkey support of an organization's critical applications. The type of support provided includes the following:

	Application enhancement and development
	Release management
	Change management and issue tracking
	Quality assurance and integration testing
	Deployment management
	24 x 7 on-call problem support
	Vendor management of hosting provider
	Continuous process improvement

Approach

SBF built its business on the use of best practice processes and methodologies. At the core of the SBF methodology for AMO is the SBF Engineering Process. Engineering Process was created to handle the management of enterprise-scale applications with multiple, geographically dispersed development teams. Engineering Process is a combination of best practice change management coupled with release and deployment management processes. This grouping of inter-related functions is used to manage the origination of a change request or problem ticket through remediation, testing and deployment into the production environment. What this means for you is that changes to your application are prioritized and released on a predictable schedule and that the resulting application is stable.

Benefits

The SBF AMO service offers the following benefits:

Reduce Total Application Maintenance Costs

	Frees up internal IT resources for core business system development
	Automated processes drive continuous improvement and minimize re-work
	Delivery team can consist of partial resources so  client  only  pays for  what is   used
	Multi-year contracts make maintenance costs predictable

Reduce Application Downtime and Errors

	Performance commitments ensured through Service Level Agreements
	Simplified support model provided by a single point of contact
	Code / Content / Configuration versioning provides traceability and rollback
	Proactive performance tuning and architecture improvement

Improve Application Quality

	Faster turnaround maximizes amount of change implemented in a release
	Automated issue tracking and change request processing ensures focus on highest-priority changes
	Focused team eliminates distractions by other business priorities
	Collaboration ensures alignment with client expectations

Performance Tuning

As many organizations rushed to build web applications to support critical business functions, not enough consideration was given to scalability of those applications. In many cases, the expected visitor traffic volume was underestimated or the application and support infrastructures were not mature enough to handle the load. In other situations, poor application performance was caused by adding increasingly complex functionality on top of a limited infrastructure.

SBF has a team of seasoned application and systems engineers with years of experience in the development and support of large, complex custom and packaged applications. SBF applies this experience to each performance tuning effort to help ensure the results are achieved in a reasonable time frame.

Through our Performance Tuning offering, SBF provides the following services:

	Simulated Load and Stress Testing
	Root Cause Analysis
	Capacity Planning and Scalability Analysis
	Performance Monitoring Strategy

Approach

SBF uses a systematic and iterative approach to get to the root cause of the problem. Performance issues are generally caused by application code, hardware configuration, software configuration, query design or database design.

The process begins with the establishment of a baseline level of performance through simulated load against the application. Performance metrics are captured and compared to generally accepted standards. Our senior technical staff evaluates the behaviour of the environment during simulated load and makes recommendations for improvement. Changes are made to the environment and simulated load is applied again. The cycles iterate from this point until we identify core problems. Often in performance tuning efforts, there is no silver bullet solution; however, through careful study with senior technical resources, the problems can be solved.

Benefits

The SBF Performance Tuning service offers the following benefits:

	Detailed report of application performance statistics
	Improved application performance
	Capacity analysis of current application
	Road map for increasing application capacity
	Ongoing performance monitoring plan