Application Assessment

The objective of this phase is to identify the critical gaps and develop a roadmap for application evolution. The gaps could be in the development process, the documentation or interfaces. Thus, several of the following analyses may be conducted:

• Code analysis (supported by tools)
• Run-time system analysis
• Interface analysis
• Business processes & rules analysis
• Financial analysis (cost of ownership)

Application Management Process Establishment

This phase is aimed at establishing the process for plugging the gaps identified. At the end of this phase a detailed Release Plan with well-defined milestones and feature-function lists are laid out for the next phases. The following activities are involved:

• Establish Development Process for new functions
• Define Service Level Agreements for support and maintenance
• Chalk out the medium term release cycle

iNEK Technologies will also set up an offshore development environment and constitute its team for addressing the identified gaps.

Application Upgrade

When necessary, iNEK Technologies undertakes upgrades of the application to fix key issues and to ensure that the application runs on top of supported platforms (HW, OS, System SW, Tools). This phase also covers maintenance activities identified earlier. The services will be administered under the defined Service Level Agreement.

Transform

Application Extension

The objective of this stage is to extend the reach, flexibility and integration capabilities of the application. Legacy Extension methodologies can range from simple (screen scraping) to complex (OO decomposition and wrapping), based on the needs of the business, cost and time-to-market considerations as well as projected life of the extended application. Legacy extension tools and techniques are used to provide system inventory, program flow understanding, code understanding and code modification capabilities for a wide variety of languages, databases and transaction environments. The techniques used could be screen scraping, database gateways, XML integration, or database replication.

Application Transformation / Replacement

Based on the application experience built up in the previous phases, iNEK Technologies will be in an excellent position to assist with the transformation of the application “under architecture”.

iNEK Technologies assists in mapping process flows, user experience and business rules for the current application and performing a gap analysis vis-à-vis the desired state. Next, we ensure that the required functionality is positioned in the context of enterprise or domain architecture. The options for Buy/ Build/ Re-Engineer are reviewed and the New Application’s ROI is determined.

iNEK Technologies then develops and integrates the new application under the guidelines of the architecture, taking into account the requirements for reliability, availability, manageability, performance and security. In the case of a rebuild strategy, iNEK Technologies utilizes tools that provide business rules identification, code slicing, code modification or transformation from one language to another.