speakTECH offers the following types of assessments to help customers prioritize their technology needs:
- Technology Health Check
- Application Architecture and Code Review
- Technology Roadmap
- Infrastructure Readiness
- Scalability Assessment
Technology Health Check
Provides a guideline to determine how efficiently your business is utilizing the technology it has already purchased, as well as identifying opportunities where products and solutions can help your business operate more efficiently.
Application Architecture and Code Review
speakTECH offers a review where our experienced software developers come in and provide an assessment of a proposed or existing custom-developed application. The review identifies areas for concern or risk to your project and also proposes solutions. During a code review we analyze existing source code, and monitor the execution of the application (using tracing and debugging techniques) to provide a list of recommendations for optimization, security enhancements or future enhancements.
Technology Roadmap
Businesses are constantly finding that the rate of change in technology exceeds the lifecycle of their investments. Especially with e-Business and Internet portals we find the need to constantly adopt new tools and platforms. A technology roadmap provides a timeline that maps project milestones and dependencies to your business priorities and the realistic release and implementation cycle for the technologies you should implement. The following questions will be posed during the assessment:
- What is the priority of planned features?
- Which version of solution technologies should be deployed first and when should they be deployed?
- Which version of the software should the project be developed on?
- Can developing on beta products increase the longevity of the solution?
- When is the best time to test new features?
- When is it critical that there is no down time?
- How long will this solution be used?
Scenario: An internet retailer wants to prioritize merchandising and marketing improvements to help sales immediately, but also needs to consider their revenue flow, and not introduce new features during peak seasonal times such as Christmas or back-to-school weeks.
In addition to the architectural strategy, this engagement provides a roadmap of how organizations can migrate from where they are today to the recommended architecture.
Infrastructure Readiness
The new Microsoft server products take advantage of the latest Windows 2003 Server features. It is common in corporate environments that adoption of a newer Windows platform (Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory) has typically been slow. This assessment service includes recommendations to help your company do the following:
- Identify consolidation, storage, security and directory services requirements intrinsic to Windows
- Servers migration (e.g., from NT4 to Windows 2003)
- Plan, budget, and conduct migration initiatives smoothly
- Reduce operating expenses and improving resource utilization
- Take advantage of consolidation and virtualization techniques
- Explore managed services in the areas of desktop and server management
Scalability Assessment
Organizations are constantly faced with concerns about their ability to service their customers during peak times. Fortunately, methodologies exist to help understand the capacity of an existing application implementation, and they allow you to predict how to support supplied targets. These assessments usually introduce a code review and specific recommendations of what components to focus on and the anticipated performance and scalability gains from making these changes. The founder of speakTECH, Aaron Sloman, was one of the primary architects of Microsoft's Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA), a methodology prescribed by Microsoft to aid businesses to create applications that are predictable in the number of users they can support on a given hardware configuration. Aaron has spent a considerable amount of time delivering TCA engagements to many of Microsoft's largest internet business customers and delivering training to help consultants and customers perform these assessments.
TCA helps you:
- Understand performance characteristics and best practices for your application or web site
- Understand key performance counters used for performance and scalability testing
- Perform capacity planning for your application using TCA methodology
- Understand the sequence of components or page interactions