AM Communications, Inc. is one of the pioneers in Network Management Solutions for the HFC and Broadband Telecommunications industries all over. The customer had a cable network monitoring solution called Omnistat comprised of both hardware and software. As the Industry and the technology grown up, the software application found to be incompetent for managing the business, which lead to drop in market share. This had prompted the customer to develop new application with the latest Microsoft technologies. The strategic partnering of AM communication with NeST Technologies helped AM for a fast turn around with the latest software solutions and maintain its lost market share.
NeST Solution
At the initial stage, two of NeST engineers worked at onsite and had successfully implemented a hot feature in the application, which was crucial for the sale of the solution. With the success of the feature, the client confidence in our capability had gone up and continued to issue orders for the further product developments. This relationship has been grown up to a stage where NeST is truly an extended offshore development center of AM communication with 60 strong engineers, bearing all the risk′s in AM communications business and full filling entire software product development needs. NeST had not only offered them software service but a highly successful business model.
The software application is based on client-server architecture. The total software runs on Microsoft platforms. The server application runs on a Windows 2000 server machine and the clients run on Windows 2000 workstations. The Server is connected to the Monitoring Control Unit (MCU), which is a windows 2000 machine. There is a modem card sitting on the ISA bus of this machine, which polls the transponders periodically, and get the status that is fed back to the server. Moreover, this application is capable of integrating with SNMP compliant devices and standard NMS-likes of HP open view, INMS, CISCO.
The methodology used is staged delivery method in which each stage has duration of six months. In each stage, we released three to five features as prioritized by the customer based on the market demand. Following to each release, we do the hot fixes and service pack corresponding to each version. The entire product development team is built up into three - onsite members, off shore developers and testing team- in a ratio of 1:5:2. The onsite member collects the user requirements and pass on to development team in India. The off shore team do further elaboration- design, development and testing- at India while each work product and its progress were reviewed by the customer and signed off.
The testing team is responsible for taking daily build and regression test, this avoid surprise failure during the final stages of development. And also carry out system testing using automated tools. At the end of the system testing the product will be taken for Beta testing in coordination with onsite members.
Technologies
Benefits
According to customer 70 % of the cost is incurred by software and 30 % by hardware but the hardware resulted to 70% of the revenue. Therefore, the customer apparently found that outsourcing the software development had been resulted in faster ROI.
We leveraged our knowledge and expertise for our customer to develop new products that are capable of meeting the challenges of todayprime;s network. This has indeed boosted its business prospects by targeting new potential customer