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IT Consulting

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Overview

Top line growth, reducing operational cost, increasing customer satisfaction and effective use of information for competitive differentiation are the top business priorities for the CEOs today. It is thus no surprise that the CIO's focus is surely shifting from techno-centric IT to Business-centric IT. To facilitate this journey, APLOMB brings together key IT consulting services that address aspects of reducing cost, increasing agility and enabling transformation. Our consulting offerings are based on an analytical approach to understand the business problems, resulting in practical recommendation and actionable plans. Our value proposition is based on a confluence of business knowledge, deep hands-on technology skills and a focused approach through the use of in-house methodologies, frameworks and tools.

Our key IT Consulting service offerings include:

Application Portfolio Rationalization

Aligning IT with business objectives and ensuring that it generates maximum business value, is a primary goal of a CIO. In today's fast track IT environment, it is not unusual to observe that about 75-80% of an organization's IT budget is spent on Application management / maintenance. In addition, over the years, legacy applications have become the operational and knowledge backbone of organizations. They are non-negotiable and crucial to business survival. Market research estimates that more than 70% of corporate data still resides on legacy systems. In such a scenario, managing key assets like the Application Portfolio of an organization at an optimal level of efficiency is an important aspect of aligning IT to business. At APLOMB we believe that Application Portfolio Management is not just about running multiple enhancement projects or maintaining applications. In a strategic initiative, that IT and business groups should jointly plan and execute, each asset in the Portfolio needs to be assessed in terms of its business value and "Total cost of ownership". Similar to a financial portfolio, the application portfolio must be monitored and re-valued continuously and altered to suit the enterprise's business goals.

Our Offerings

Using a workshop driven approach APLOMB subject matter experts will collaborate with you and help:

Application Portfolio Rationalization Framework
iReturns ROI Assessment Framework
Claro Agnitio Assessment Framework.

Our Value Proposition

APLOMB understands the dependency of business processes on the Application Portfolio and has an in-built mechanism in its Application Portfolio Rationalization Framework to offer the best rationalization roadmap which aligns and improves your business processes.

APLOMB ROI analysis will ensure that you get a fair idea on your ROI. We will also provide you a fore view of the related demands on infrastructure, people and monetary resources.

Service Oriented Architecture

In the current business climate, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as a potentially attractive solution for helping enterprises to become more flexible in achieving the vision of a collaborative and process centric organization. Designed from a services perspective and implemented as a set of loosely coupled systems, an SOA can help enterprises integrate disparate applications.

As you get ready to re-look at your enterprise IT infrastructure as part of your modernization exercise, with a view to enable business process flexibility at an incremental cost, APLOMB can help you with our spectrum of SOA consulting services.

APLOMB takes a structured approach to delivery, and draws on its years of expertise in architecture and design, skill-sets on various standards, technologies and platforms related to J2EE, .NET, Web Services, MOM, CORBA, Integration, BPM and Security, as well as industry domain knowledge to deliver high value to customers. APLOMB has developed migration methodologies, templates and an Enterprise Architecture Framework based on the Zachman framework, to move existing applications to a service-oriented model.

Our Service Oriented Architecture Offerings

Our SOA consulting offerings encompass assessment, planning, architecture design, development, implementation and governance.

SOA Strategy and Roadmap

SOA assessment and strategy formulation
SOA enabled Enterprise-wide Architecture Roadmap definition
SOA Reference Architecture development
Architecture review and evaluation
Evaluation and suggestion of technologies/platforms
for implementation
SOA Implementation Planning
SOA Program management and Governance setup

Architecture Design

Service Enabled Enterprise Architecture: Design the Process, Applications, Data and Technology Architecture
Products and Solution Architecture
Reverse architecting
Prototype Development

Prototype Development

We develop prototypes for early validation of approach, architecture for non-functional requirements, identification and evaluation technology choices and implementation strategy.

Implementation

Based on J2EE, .Net, Web services technology ESB, MOM, EAI, Application server products and SOA tools.

Testing

The inherent complexity in Service Oriented Architecture implementations demands a detailed testing process which would include process, code and design reviews apart from unit and regression testing for processes and services with the help of integrated testing framework. APLOMB's SOA consulting strategy is as follows:

Test through development
Testing from service provider and consumer views
Testing from different functional units - components, services, metadata, web services, business process & composite applications
Automated, iterative and continuous testing of each functional unit at periodic intervals
Automated scenario based testing for business processes.

Our Value Proposition

Dedicated Architecture and SOA center of excellence, which keeps track of developments in SOA, skills on relevant standards and platforms, development of best practices, methodologies, frameworks and reference models.
Domain expertise in Finance, Insurance, Manufacturing, Telecom, Retail, Energy & Utilities, Hospitality industries as well as e-Commerce
Defined roles and track for technical and solution architects
Information Security & Business Intelligence expertise through dedicated practice groups
Participation in standard organizations such as OASIS

Business Process Management

As increased competition and continuous pressure to enhance shareholder value drive organizations to continuously augment and ameliorate their products and services. There is also a heightened need for enterprises to comply with changing regulations and adopt good governance practices. Enterprises which hope to survive in this fiercely competitive environment need to be highly efficient, effective, agile and flexible. This is possible only if processes which underpin an enterprise function exhibit these traits.

These and other challenges are driving the adoption of 'process approach' in enterprises. The advantage of taking a process centric approach has been well-documented and most organizations having a process framework in place have reported an increase in operational efficiencies, customer satisfaction and corporate profits. The 'Process framework' or business process approach tends to look at the value chain business process and seeks to optimize this by driving out inefficiencies due to sub optimal processes to design an end to end optimized process.

APLOMB's Business Process Management (BPM) solution enable enterprises to incorporate KPI driven, process centric agile solutions that help organizations address need for end-to-end visibility, process discipline, process flexibility and process management.

Our Business Process Management solutions and service offerings include:

Process Consulting Services

BPM strategy and roadmap
Product evaluation and selection
Business process modeling
Process re-engineering & optimization

Process Implementation Services

BPM suite implementation
Production support

Specialized Services

Composite application frameworks
Reference template-based rapid ROI deployment.

SOX Compliance

To comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, most organizations have completed the documentation of internal controls environment, financial reporting process documentation, controls design and testing during the last two years. However, maintaining compliance maturity while improving compliance processes makes it imperative for organizations to have an institutionalized and robust compliance sustenance framework.

APLOMB has extensive experience in making global corporations SOX compliant. Based on the COSO and COBIT risk management frameworks, APLOMB's SOX sustenance methodology enables organizations to sustain and improve their year on year SOX compliance. APLOMB's Six-Sigma based SOX sustenance methodology has a well-defined process that ensures continuous improvement of compliance processes. APLOMB leverages its global delivery model and its compliance process manager tool (APLOMBM) for SOX sustenance to give significant cost effectiveness.

APLOMB is a compliance process repository and manager, developed by APLOMB to automate and streamline management of SOX compliance. APLOMB gives an "online, multisite" compliance automation framework to create an assessment methodology, plan the execution, execute the assessment, collate and analyze the collected data, and create analytical reports to ensure a professional, hassle free and clean assessment experience for the customer. APLOMB stores the assessment methodologies, which can be modified, reused, recreated to be used for another business situation. APLOMB has built-in process templates as a knowledge base.

Our SOX Compliance Offerings

Sustenance Framework Definition

Identification of control areas and activities to be tested periodically, and KPI definition
Exceptions and Alerts - e.g. violation of access controls
Reporting

Continuous Process Improvement

Inclusion of controls due to changes in COSO/COBIT
Exclusion of controls from testing based on pre-determined assurance levels

This is
done by:

Periodic Control Testing
Event Based Control
Annual Control Testing

Test & Measure

KPIs defined in the earlier phase are measured through testing and the compliance process is improved through an analysis of the test results.

Our Value Proposition

APLOMB is uniquely positioned to deliver SOX compliance and sustenance solutions. Our key differentiators include:

Extensive SOX compliance experience with Fortune 500 corporations
End-to-End sustenance services from process controls sustenance to system control sustenance
Proactive management of changes to COSO/COBIT frameworks
Compliance process improvement methodology Pre-built ACL based test automation framework
Well-defined onsite-offshore engagement model with measurable milestones

Enterprise Architecture

In the world of empowered consumers and stiff market competition, businesses need to be flexible, right-timed and offer their products and services at the lowest cost to get a sustained business advantage in the market. Needless to say, the business and IT need to be strategically aligned.

In this context, enterprises are increasingly realizing the need for having enterprise-wide architecture (EA) and governance structure in place that can help the organization to gain agility, interoperability within enterprise-wide resources, reduced information latency, reuse and above all reduced 'total cost of ownership'.

APLOMB's Enterprise Architecture Services help you address the challenges you face in defining and moving from your "as-is" Enterprise Architecture to a "to-be" state that meets the organization's strategic goals.

Our Enterprise Architecture Service Offerings

Enterprise Architecture Assessment and Planning

Using a workshop-based approach, and frameworks such as TOGAF and Zachman, our Consultants help you define an EA roadmap that's tailor-made for your organization. We help you to create the EA reference model and the governance model that enables you to translate your strategic goals to an implementable EA. This includes designing frameworks and methodologies, guidance on technology roadmap and infrastructure planning, and EA program design.

Enterprise Architecture Program Deployment

Given that any EA exercise starts with a top level view and if not translated to an implementation ready state, has the risk of remaining at an academic level. APLOMB Consultants therefore work with you to collaboratively set up project-specific guidelines and processes for adoption and compliance.

Our Enterprise Architecture services include:

EA program management and governance
Tool / Framework based EA repository creation
Reference architecture creation
EA projects implementation and management

Offshore Advisory Services

Organizations have, over the years, adopted a diverse mix of offshore options. These options have mainly been either a selective offshoring and/or an Offshore Development Centre (ODC) with focus on a single- or a multi-vendor approach. To date, the predominant drivers for offshorization has been cost, quality, easier access to required technical talent, faster ramp-up and accelerated delivery.

However, any offshore strategy formulated around achieving these benefits, has been adding little or nothing when it comes to ensuring the alignment of IT with business. Various industry research estimates that 80% of IT budgets go into maintaining existing applications, leaving only 20% for new projects. In addition, economic and regulatory frameworks over the last few years have resulted in several emerging challenges for organizations. Such dynamic considerations have made it imperative for them to assess the financial viability of their IT portfolio. With most organizations' applications being supported from offshore, it is very important to have business-IT alignment as a part of their offshore strategy. In addition, the selection of an appropriate offshore engagement model also becomes a key issue as organizations go forward on the Transformational Offshore Outsourcing Path. Though traditionally, organizations have been concentrating on ODC as the only possible solution, there has to be a focus on other engagement models (like BOT, JV, Captive, etc.) as a part of their evaluation process. APLOMB has been instrumental in developing long-term offshore strategies for their large customers. Based on our experience of setting-up and managing large ODCs for clients, our involvement has been right from the conceptualization stage. APLOMB plays a major role in developing the transition roadmap to enable effective implementation of a long-term offshore outsourcing strategy.


Our Offshore Consultancy Offerings

APLOMB's Offshore Consultancy and Advisory Services can help you develop an effective offshore strategy with key focus on the following issues:

Selection of an appropriate Offshore Engagement Model
Identification of Offshore Candidates
Identification of transformational application candidates in the early stage of the offshore planning process
Identification of SLAs and metrics (including ROI and Application Value) that need to be monitored throughout the relationship
Defining an appropriate transition and transformation roadmap
Addressing the change management

Technology Advisory and Adoption Services

Today, adoption of emerging and innovative technology is increasingly happening for realizing business benefits and technology is no longer seen as a "differentiator" in a globally competitive landscape. End customers want breakthrough solutions at lower cost, with the result that technology investment and adoption is increasingly becoming a line function. At the same time, business groups face the challenge of lack of subject matter experts and processes by which to induct newer technologies and solutions into the existing IT landscape and measure the success.

APLOMB has a proven track record and deep skills in the process and practice of technology adoption and change management, starting from evaluation, solution engineering to adoption, be it a technology, software tool, an emerging technology standard, a mobile product or simply an emerging architectural pattern for IT enablement.

Our Technology Advisory Service Offerings

We offer the following Technology Advisory and Adoption services which address niche requirements from conceptualization and development to rollout

Technology and Vendor Evaluation Services

Technology scorecard
Technology adoption roadmap
Initial business case/feasibility report
RFP creation
COTS/Build strategy assessment and analysis
Vendor analysis and selection

Technology and Vendor Evaluation Services

Creating Solution Specification
Validation thru Prototyping and Proof of Concepts
Solution Architecture and Design
Solution Development
COTS product integration
Pilots and Beta Testing
Internationalization and Localization
Testing Strategy & Process Consulting
Functionality and Regression Testing
Usability Testing
Performance Testing

Emerging Technology Rollout Services

Vendor Coordination and SMEs, to create continuity of strategic focus between evaluators and users
Rollout Infrastructure Assessment & Optimization
Business Continuity Assessment/ Implementation
Technical help desk
Program management
24 X 7 support
Solution change management