Middleware Infrastructure and Application Management

Anyone who has been around business and IT systems and applications over a few years knows how quickly the “state-of-the-art” systems and applications get termed as “legacy” applications, while ever latest and the greatest “state-of-the-art” applications show up, promising ever brighter future. The challenge for all CIO’s and Applications leaders is how to keep their legacy environment not only functional and operational, but accurate, timely and ubiquitous – being able to interact with and exchange information in a meaningful format with the all kinds of applications and databases, new and old alike. Even a larger challenge is to maintain a team of software professionals who can be motivated to maintain, support and enhance the legacy environment effectively while knowing that their colleagues are getting exposed to more state-of-the-art environment.

The challenge is even more severe in the middleware/SOA environments, where the traditional middleware/EAI infrastructure provides the critical plumbing and connectivity, which forms the foundation for the traditional applications, SOA components and BPM tools to interact effectively. The initial middleware implementation involves “interesting” tasks such as business process engineering, architecture, design, development and implementation, where there is a lot of “glory”. However, once the basic critical systems are connected through middleware and the environment becomes functional, the tasks of building custom adapters, creating interfaces, data integration, data cleaning, etc. get assigned to “mundane” category, which no “career employee” wants to do. However, seamless integration of underlying systems and databases is a prerequisite to obtain the true power of SOA and accurate information for real-time decision making.

This is where Xoriant comes in. Xoriant has a combination of technology skills, expertise in multiple technologies and application packages and proven tools/methodologies for middleware environment management. Xoriant deploys best-of-the-breed in people/systems/processes to mitigate risks in client’s mission critical middleware production environment.

Typical deliverables during middleware infrastructure and application management phase include:

• Producing and executing a comprehensive maintenance plan, time lines, roles and responsibilities
• Ensuring technical completeness:
  
  • Accuracy of technology impact and risk analysis
  • Plans for test, install, back-out, and recovery
  • Identification and review of all technical dependencies including effect on concurrent changes
• Ensuring that the timing of change executions do not conflict with business cycles or enterprise priorities
• Ensuring appropriate management involvement and approval
• Provisioning successful testing and results to comply with client requirements before going to production environment
• Creating a comprehensive knowledge repository of the management support environment
• Creating monitoring tools that would ease technology deployment and enable faster detection and turnaround of any issues in the client’s business operations
• Providing 24x7 proactive/reactive production support
• Qualifying other software (database, web, applications, etc.) vendor patches and new releases to the client’s existing middleware environment
• Providing upgrade assistance:
  
  • Helping the client in moving to supported versions of the software products i.e. eliminate roadblocks to client upgrades.
  • Helping the client in establishing workaround solutions when product upgrade was impractical.
  • Ensuring that the software product upgrades meet client specific environmental needs
  • Minimizing any downtime in client business operations during upgrades