FNSTAR provides following technology services to customers to ensure that IT systems are built on scalable, performing architecture in a consistent way enabling organizations with flexibility, competitive edge, and lower cost of maintenance:
Application Architecture Consulting
Performance Consulting
Technical Leadership Sourcing
Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture is like a city plan. Application architecture, in contrast, is a plan to build a housing complex or a mall. The two significantly differ in their scope with latter conforming to the standards laid down by the former. A good city plan outlines how different amenities within a city need to be located and designed for image as well as convenience. How a city will handle its growth, etc. This city plan insures that city construction is not ad-hoc and chaotic. Construction happens in a planned and coordinated fashion. Enterprise architecture is analogous to a city plan. Enterprise architecture outlines how an organization will build its information technology systems efficiently and cost effectively to run its business. It outlines how enterprise IT systems will support the growth of business. How these systems will interact with other systems within the organization or with other organizations. Inherently in the plan is also embedded flexibility to support new and evolving business models. Flexibility also empowers organizations to better withstand industry trends and cycles. It also empowers organization to create new products faster and cheaper without having to overhaul existing systems completely. It also enables organization to take advantage of evolving technologies to make organization more competitive and efficient. It is a plan to judiciously utilize technologies to give an organization continuous competitive edge.
Our experience suggests that many organizations recognize need for enterprise architecture but do not do full justice with it. Daily operational and business needs tend to push organizations to take shortcuts. These operational and business needs are important and they must be attended to, but someone in the organization needs to keep this overall plan like a guiding post. When this guide post is consistently ignored or not kept up to date with changing technologies, overtime, organizations land up with applications where some look round, some triangular, while others circular- in a nutshell, you get a spaghetti of systems, applications, technologies, and standards. These systems are hard to maintain, hard to change, and hard to interact with. In longer run this, short sighted approach of ignoring good architecture planning process, costs far more to an organization than savings achieved by bypassing it, not to mention it makes organization slower to respond to change.
Application Architecture
Application architecture focuses on how a given application will meet functional, performance, and operational requirements while conforming to the standards, codes, and policies defined by enterprise architecture. It is important that application architecture adheres to enterprise standards, to maximum extent possible, to ensure that a homogeneous IT environment evolves. Overtime this practice allows an organization to reduce cost of development new systems and time to market by better leveraging reuse in form of technologies, training, tools, patterns, processes, standards, and software. This also allows organizations to realize higher return on investment in a technology as enterprise architecture process makes induction of new technologies and standards more thoughtful, reducing their churn, and ad-hoc technology decisions. While conforming to enterprise architecture standards, the application architecture focuses on some of the following key aspects of application:
- User requirements
- Technology
- Database Model
- Object Model
- Processing
- Communication
- Integration
- Security
- Manageability
- Performance
We, at FNSTAR, take this to our heart. Enterprise architecture and application architecture have been our foundation and basis of our existence. We can help your enterprise architect your information technology systems for competitive advantage, change, and optimal resource utilization. Send us an email at info@fnstar.com to talk to us- we can help you.
Performance Consulting
In today's complex technology environment and legacy integration, it is not enough to just develop good code and hope that it will successfully transition into a data center and start serving business users and clients. Organizations must not underestimate the effort it takes to operate an application once it is developed. A good number of applications when they are put into operation do not perform to users' expectations. They do not meet response time expectations, they do not meet load handling requirements, and they do not handle well transition and data (conversion) issues, not to mention that they create a nightmare for operators to manage these applications, because, manageability and operability was put on the sidelines in the rush or never thought through. It takes inordinate amount of time and effort to bring these applications to a state when they do not require developers who coded them. Some never reach to true operational and performance standards. The software assets thus created become liabilities for companies and investment never pays off its true potential. Any amount of band aiding, only gives partial relief. This sounds all too familiar.
But it does not have to be this way. It can be stopped by proper performance and operational planning. The applications and systems can be built for both performance and manageability/operability. These considerations needs to be factored early in the design and tested to make sure that these important issues are not ignored. Often performance planning requires application architects to thoroughly analyze system characteristics, to name a few:
- Uptime requirements
- Manageability Requirements
- Availability requirements
- Response time requirements
- User load requirements: speeds and feeds
- User load analysis (transaction vs. analytic)
- Characteristics of surroundings of the system in terms of communication
- Characteristics of dependencies
- ...
We at FNSTAR, take performance and operational planning as an integral part of system and application architecture. In our efforts it never takes the backseat. We consider operability and performance as two of the three legs of a stool with business functionality being the first leg. Our many years of experience building high performance systems have given us tremendous edge. If your systems are suffering from these drawbacks, send us an email at info@fnstar.com to talk to us- we can help you.
Technical Leadership Sourcing
Though it may sound controversial but truly speaking, there is a lack of experienced and qualified engineers in the market who can truly serve as technical leaders. It is a very tough job requiring both hands-on technical experience as well as good leadership and communication skills. Without strong technical leaders, many projects stumble and produce sub par quality not to mention overrun in budgets and slippages. In today's market where cost and scale have become the primary drivers, this technical consultative skills with leaders hat is hard to identify among the thousands of 'me too' consultants. It has become a pain point for many companies who want high quality professionals.
We, at FNSTAR, have recognized this gap and we are offering a service to our customer to provide them with truly high performing technical leaders who can steer complex technology development and integration projects in the right direction with conviction. It is not an option to leave these challenging technical situations in the hands of novices just because they cost little less, only in the beginning, but they cost far greater in the longer run. If you like your projects to have such high-powered consultants; send us an email at info@fnstar.com to talk to us- we can help you.
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