Your Search Results Are Guaranteed

The Bottom Line -
SEO what is the point?
Your Search Results Are Guaranteed.
Dramatically raise targeted traffic to your website 80% - 1500%
Raise revenues by increasing number of leads and sales with boost in visitor traffic.
Drives only qualified visitors to your website because visitors qualify themselves. They take the initiative to turn on a computer, open a browser window, navigate to a search engine, type in a keyword and click on your website amongst all others.
What A Professional SEO company can fo for you?
We position your company on search engines so you can monetize on those visitors.
Target qualified customers in all Canadian and American cities. Expand by geographic areas or reinforce existing market share in Canada and US. Learn more about Local SEO.
Become key industry online player by capturing competitive, and profitable search spots on Google, Yahoo, MSN (Microsoft), Ask.com, AOL and other search engines.
Nirvana is a leading global search marketing firm that proves the word “leading” with real results.. We have full capacity to achieve all of your search marketing goals and go beyond.
We know there is a budget to work with and that budget has to turn into revenues within a time period. Nirvana works closely with your team in order to satisfy proper stakeholders and most importantly achieve and surpass your objectives by driving targeted and motivated customer prospects to your online properties
Reduce cost per acquisition of new customers by targeting prospects on search engines with keywords that receive highest search volume and deliver highest conversion rate.
Optimize your: press releases, code, flash, video, PDFs and other properties for high search engine visibility..
Increase brand awareness by increasing traffic from third party industry websites via link enhancement services.
Know what your competitors are doing, take advantage of their weaknesses and position your organization to compete with their strengths through website & competition analysis.

Nirvana understands that to succeed in search marketing and bring measurable results that speak numbers you require a strong partner that gets search, understands your objectives and works in tandem with your revenue goals.
We offer advanced search engine optimization services untouched by any of our competitors such as customized targeting of your customers by geographic areas, full French focused SEO campaigns, in-depth 360 degree research into language your customers use, all round awareness of competition, online industry trends and more.

Affiliate marketing current landscape

Affiliate marketing current landscape According to E-consultancy “companies across all industries spend, on average, 18% of their online marketing budget on affiliate marketing”.
 62% of retailers say that they are spending more on the channel than they were two years ago.
 significant rise in the usage of affiliate marketing is evidence not only to the exceptional return on investment offered by the channel, but also to the efforts of networks and affiliates to recognize and adapt to the needs of advertisers and agencies.
 The market is not only growing, but becoming more sophisticated, both in terms of the rise of "super affiliates", and with the development of new technologies. Affiliates are now a trusted and innovative sales force - an essential part of the marketing mix.
 E-Consultancy's report showing that affiliate marketing is now seen as the most cost-effective channel for customer acquisition, beating both paid search and email marketing. With affiliate marketing showing 60% yearly growth, its superiority is only set to increase further.
 Web 2.0 have impacted the affiliate marketing. The new media allowed merchants to get closer to their affiliates and improved communication between each other. New developments have made it harder for unscrupulous affiliates to make money.

So where is the future

Developing technologies such as mobile and behavioral targeting will are likely to see a thickening of the long tail with niche products representing a larger share of the sales, more evenly distributed weight among best performing publishers, for example 50 to 100 sites instead of ten generating 90% of the volume. There is likely to be consolidation across the affiliate networks, and networks will be repositioning to cater for the ever changing landscape. There will be a rise in different players providing affiliate services such as specialist agencies. Contextual technology will enable greater segmentation and targeting of the internet audience as it serves advertising and products based on relevancy and improving click and conversion rates.

global it solution

Business Process Development (BPD)

Organizations recognize the need to better understand and improve their business processes, market agility versus their competition, speed in their decision-making process, and implementation of measurable best practices.
Mid Sized Companies often do not have the in-house expertise to lead and manage the process analysis, design, and implementation activities associated with a successful BPD initiative and need assistance in one or more of these areas.
Businesses run on processes. Successful organizations constantly look for opportunities to streamline and improve their business processes.
There are many compelling reasons for doing so including: reduce cycle times, lower costs, increased growth, productivity gains, quality improvements, and increased value to the end customer.
Nirvana’s BPD process delivers the ability to identify, define, analyze and design flexible mission-critical/enterprise-wide processes that align with the corporate strategic plan (goals and objectives), create market differentiation (proprietary processes unique to a company) and create a competitive marketplace advantage.
Our method is designed to identify and optimize business processes so organizations can respond with precision and agility when making business decisions in today’s changing business environment, enabling them to:
> Identify Quality Improvements
> Automate and Integrate Manual Processes to Increase Efficiency and Accuracy
> Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while achieving higher service levels and increasing Return-on-Investment (ROI)
> Reduce Redundant Processes
> Decrease Business / Product Cycles
> Regulatory Compliance (SOX, FDA, HIPPA)
> Create & Leverage Best Practice Standards
> Increase Personal Productivity and Satisfaction
Nirvana customizes a precise work plan to address your company’s unique needs:
> Assess the “As-Is” model to include a performance-based analysis of the business and customer-facing processes, supporting applications and infrastructure.
> Design the “To-Be” reference model that aligns with your business strategies through customer requirements identification, target performance monitoring, process and organizational re-design, business case development, and “As-Is”/“To-Be” gap analysis.
> Develop an implementation plan that is focused on business measurements, implementation strategy, project implementation sequence and charters, communication plans, and training programs.

Like many of Nirvana’s service offerings, our Business Process Development methodology was established independent of market and corporate breadth, therefore it is an adaptable solution that will seamlessly integrate into the present enterprise

Consolidation of vendors makes high risk for middle and small enterprises

Consolidation of vendors makes high risk for middle and small enterprises
1. Consolidated products many times get lost in the mix with the larger vendors multi-product menu of product offerings.
2. Focus diminishes as the Consolidator spreads its resources across many products creating uncertain support and product direction.
3. End of life cycle accelerates for many of the consolidated software products leaving the business consumer in an unclear and potentially costly position.
4. Support of an acquired product can become less effective, as consolidation generally includes staff reductions in product support and related help desk areas.

The Niche Vendors
Companies requiring specific industry functional capabilities and/or who desire a closer vendor relationship including influence on product direction may be candidates for what a Niche vendor delivers best. These vendors although generally smaller in staffing, focus 360° of their efforts on providing strong market and product expertise. The results produce a high level of customer interaction, industry specific functionality, responsiveness, product influence and access to senior management.

In a consolidating ERP market, Niche vendors can end up winners because of the following reasons:
1. Consolidation means fewer competitors – An example of reduced competitive ERP solutions due to consolidation is MAPICS. Five years ago they offered three ERP solutions; XA, Point.Man and Frontstep. Today, they are no longer around, having been acquired by INFOR in 2005. Today, two of the three former MAPICS ERP products have virtually
disappeared from the ERP software market. This is common when consolidation takes place, many products get retired.
2. Walk the Talk – Because Niche ERP software companies focus on a single market they are specialists. All staff members are immersed in a single business type and understand in detail business issues and solutions associated with that specific market.
3. Business health specialist – Similar to personal healthcare, when looking to correct health issue you go to a specialist. They understand your specific area of need and offer the expertise. Why would you not do the same with your business? That’s where Niche vendors offer great advantage.
4. Less software overhead means optimized methods – ERP products are very complicated business solutions which integrate all aspects of a business. ERP software that is focused does not require features intended for another type of business. It is therefore optimized by design for its target market and is developed
efficiently with deeper yet specific market functions. Software set-up during
implementation is already streamlined due to
its inherent clean market specific business
logic.
5. Market specific focus – As an ERP business consumer, companies want to see the product remain in tune with their direction and trends in their industry. Customers of a Niche vendor are generally part of a smaller user community and one that collectively has common interests. Those common interests provide much of the R&D input insuring appropriate
product direction. For some customers it is also important to have access to the vendor’s senior management which in a Niche market organization is usually very accessible at the most senior levels

Top Five Reasons to Switch from Clarify Thick Client to Clarify Thin Client

INTRODUCTION
CRM today has gone beyond the realm of its original objective of customer relationship management, which involved sales, marketing and customer service to become the driving force behind strategy formulation of various companies.
The latest developments in the CRM space have enabled integrated customer management and created value by introducing agility and efficiency to businesses - Thus helping businesses not only achieve operational efficiencies i.e. reduce costs, sell more but also add value to their customers.
Modern CRM technologies focus on pain areas such as delayed response to customer queries, agent skill misuse, productivity, lack of integration in communication channels, creation of complete view of the customer, leverage customer insight etc. thus enabling businesses to foster stronger customer relationships.
TRANSITION
Thin clients are devices that can connect to the network but have very limited computing and storage capacity. Thus removing the need for Laptops / Desktop Computers or up gradation of hardware/software of the existing desktop computing environment. Even the old/obsolete machines running on earlier configurations that can hook up to the current network can be used without major issues.
Thin clients also make it possible for enterprises to shift from location centric applications to network-enabled applications and also provide complete customer satisfaction. It not only aids in security issues but also reduces the TCO. Numerous examples can be quoted from Fortune 500 organizations where benefits from transition have far exceeded initial cost of deployment of solution thus lowering TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
Transition to Clarify thin client from Clarify thick client offers companies an excellent opportunity to manage virtual workforces, disseminate correct and meaningful information to customers at the right time/place that empower each and every customer interaction with the highest level of service satisfaction.
In today's volume driven industry, a transition from Clarify Thick Client to Clarify Thin client helps deliver a focused and differentiated client experience. A Clarify Thin Client environment enables efficient customer interactions while making it easier for a system to adapt to the rapidly changing business scenario.
FIVE MAJOR REASONS
Five major reasons for making the much talked about transition from Clarify Thick Client to Clarify Thin Client maybe understood as under:
1. DELIVER AN UNMATCHED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
A changeover to a Clarify Thin client environment makes it possible to integrate all capabilities essential for customer query resolution into a single application that allows dynamic support for each problem resolution stage.
The new support environment allows for incident management, configuration management as well as problem management aiding in smoothening of operations and increase in productivity of support professionals. Superior operational functionalities and the finesse to handle version upgrades put Clarify Thin Client in a unique position to deliver a distinguished customer experience.
In an era of globalization and Business Process Outsourcing, with clients and workforce distributed across the world, thin clients aid in 365 X 24 X 7 support environment from anywhere in the world without compromising on the security of the data. Thus providing clients with uninterrupted services round the clock.
2. CREATE AND CAPTURE MAXIMUM VALUE
Reduced IT support costs associated with maintenance, support, upgrade, distribution makes the system highly scalable and leads to lower TCO. It also places responsibility of upgrading application with newer patches as well as handling security issues in safer and qualified hands unlike the end user who could be a layman. At the same time end user is unaware of changes that are taking place in the system, as his/her work remains unaffected in case of a crash. Cost of productivity when a desktop/laptop crashes or when the user infects the system by opening or sending a virus can be avoided by deploying thin client. Automation of knowledge management system in thin clients also leads to improved customer interfaces that in turn lead to rapid return on investment.
3. INTEGRATED CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT
Upgrading to Clarify Thin client adds new features/functionalities to existing CRM environment while retaining all the old features, thus integrating legacy applications with new and forthcoming applications. The improved and sophisticated customer interface makes it possible to make efficient problem resolutions and reduce escalations, leading to better customer management and client satisfaction. Customers can also access their data (provided its public), without having the client installed on their machines or even while traveling, over Internet thus keeping themselves better informed about the status of their requests/problems lodged at customer helpdesk.
4. BRING AGILITY AND EFFICIENCY TO BUSINESS
Globalization and structural changes have shaken the Industry to the core. This has resulted is an ever growing need for organizations to become lean and agile. Clarify thin client aids in an organization in this goal.
Clarify Thin Client applications can be accessed from anywhere over the web using an Internet browser thus giving company representatives power of knowledge at their hands With digital convergence, any device would be capable of accessing these applications over Internet. With all the client information at their fingertips, sales force gets better equipped while in the field. Also Integration of applications and processes in an integrated environment enables high value customer servicing, thus bringing in more agility and efficiency to businesses.
5. GET A 360 deg. CUSTOMER VIEW
As the name suggests, system provides 360-degree customer view i.e. complete view of the customer, which would include Master Data, Transactional Data and Analytical data. Thus providing better/holistic information about the customer to all the stakeholders. Easy availability of this data in the hands of field personnel equips them with a powerful tool to manage operations in a better manner.
Clarify thin client customer manager is well equipped to manage customer interactions at different levels (phone, email etc.). The system allows easy customer data access, easy updation of customer data and better case information management.
Thus, for many organizations transitioning from Clarify thick client to thin client is a cost effective initiative that increases customer satisfaction and operational agility.

Making of a Customer Centric Enterprise

Enterprise-wide Customer Challenges
The importance of customers remains same across boundaries. Becoming a 'customer-centric' enterprise is not about implementing a Customer Relationship Management solution. It is the ability of an enterprise to capture rich customer information and analyze it intelligently to know their customer well.
For enterprises, the challenge of meeting customer demands is increasing. Each department requires intelligent and updated information of customers to strategize effective business processes. No customer process and data stays in one department within the enterprise. In most enterprises, fragmented, redundant, and unsynchronized customer data resides across discrete data stores.
Following are some of the reasons for this:
Rapid growth
Mergers & acquisitions
Multiple product lines
Each business unit with their own representation and usage of customer data
Different transactional systems not sharing the customer data efficiently and in real-time, and others.
Because of inaccessibility to customer data across business units in real-time, these business units end up using inaccurate, insufficient and inconsistent customer data. Every department of the enterprise are faced with a different set of challenges due to this inconsistent and fragmented data structure, some of which are:
Marketing
Multiple business units usually capture Customer preferences, but no common view exists to address customer preferences consistently across the enterprise to avoid legal issues like unsolicited emails.
Other challenges faced by the marketing department includes:
Creating effective marketing campaigns and accurately measure its effectiveness
Inability to conduct closed loop marketing
Productivity issues and higher operating costs
Product pricing issues for global customers

Sales
Sales force spends large amount of time on non-value added customer information validation. They also face difficulties in cross/up selling due to non-integrated customer purchase history.
The primary challenges faced by the Sales force include:
Unavailability of updated order status information
High administrative costs for sales credit assignments
Difficulty in collecting consistent customer information from distributed reseller network
Inability to effectively tailor messages relevant to current customer experience
Partner integration

Order Management
The order management process is no different.
The challenges posed to the order management process due to unavailability of single customer data repository includes:
Field Representatives and partners are forced to utilize multiple tools for order entry process
Inadequate cycle time for customer delivery - bookings and Shipping delays because ofinadequate customer information entry (invalid and redundant customers)
Fulfillment linked to initial 'shipped to' or 'staging' sites, but not necessarily inclusive of an end install site, limiting insight/planning for true install base.
Information not effectively shared between functions creates double work and confusion for customers and field reps when ordering solutions
Longer order management cycle time
Support
Inability to accurately validate entitlement of callers; giving away free service
Inability to view complete relationship and sales history for potential cross sell opportunities during support occurrences
Lengthy call times due to non-value added customer information validation .Lack of consistent information being collected upon opening of service cases
Higher total cost to service
Finance & Executive Management
The Finance department and the Executive management on the other hand faces a different set of challenges, as they -
Are not clear on o Root cause of the problem
Benefits that can be drawn from consistent customer master across business units
Changes to internal & external Business processes and policies
Changes to Data management practices
Changes to Information Technology
Efforts and time required

Business Value
Can not offer a unified experience for customers across business units
Do not have single source of truth
Face difficulty in updating and accessing billing, receivables, claims, payables and other information
Face challenges in Forecasting and Planning
Get reduced Marketing effectiveness
Get reduced Sales effectiveness
Get reduced Support effectiveness
Get unclear customer account

IT Department
The challenges faced by the IT department are:
High data management costs due to approach of following after the fact maintenance
Inaccurate data
Insufficient data
Inconsistent data
Discarded data Inability to access up-to-date customer profile in real-time
Duplicate customer data across systems
Duplicates within systems (Same name spelled differently)
Customer creation at multiple systems
Problems Cross Referencing Customers
Sharing customer intelligence
Data and Work redundancy

Shift to Customer-centric Enterprise
The old enterprise model mainly focused on Operational Efficiency. Tools and systems were developed to increase productivity and decrease costs. Profitability was directly related to enhanced operational efficiency while the main investments were made in the merchandising and supply chain function areas. The main reason for the failure of this model was the inability to retain customers and revenues that consistently reduced. With the new model emerging, the focus shifted to customers. Enterprises realized that the most crucial asset on which they could base long-term revenue generation stratergies was: their customers. Leveraging customer information for improved customer satisfaction, lifetime value, retention and customer insight became the profit drivers for the company. Investment focus shifted to reatining and acquiring new customers. Establishment of multiple customer service touch points and effective market strategies came into focus.
Customer Data integration, customer information management and customer insight emerged as the key function areas to transform to a consistently growing 'customer centric' enterprise.
Customer-centric Framework
The customer-centric framework is the end-to-end customer solution. It is combination of Customer Information Management, Customer Insight and Customer Insight to Action. In a Customer-centric framework, customer data integration is strengthened by Business Intelligence applications. Each solution enclosed within the Customer-centric Framework serves specific set of functions to make an enterprise truly customer driven.
Customer Information Management
· Single 360-degree customer view
· Data Quality & Refinement
· Customer ID & Classification
· Rich Customer Information Customer Insight
· Customer Intelligence
· Customer Value
· Customer Profitability
· Product Profitability Insight to Action
· Product Development
· Marketing, segmentation
· Sales and Support
· Relationship Strategies
Business Strategy, BPM
At each phase, the customer-centricity improves the business value through each business function. It helps refine offerings after an intelligent analysis of the market and customers. Some critical Business Questions that makes the Customer-centric Framework successful are:
· In what way and how often do we interact with our different customers?
· What campaigns / offerings are the most successful with our customers?
· Are we effective in selling and serving our customers?
· What additional customer information will improve our efficiency and effectiveness?
· Who are our most profitable customers? What are our most/least profitable markets?
· What segments are underserved?
About Nirvana
Nirvana, The Customer Knowledge Company, develops and delivers Customer Asset Strategies to increase tactical and strategic decision-making capabilities across the enterprise. As a leading provider of CRM, ERP, integration, and business intelligence services to the Global 2000, Nirvana turns customer data into strategic knowledge that positively affects the entire enterprise. Established in 1990 with international offices, Nirvana has a long-standing commitment to global delivery and is uniquely qualified to deliver end-to-end solutions through valuable strategy consulting services and highly skilled engineering execution. Strategic and technology .For additional information on Nirvana's full range of services, please visit our website at ://www.nirvanainfocom.com

Nirvana's SOA Point of View

The Need for a New Enterprise Architecture
The information technology solutions that many organizations have implement over the past decades are no longer adequate to meet contemporary business needs. In today's economy, the global marketplace requires businesses to operate with greater agility, competitiveness, and productivity, at lower cost than ever before—because now their competitors come from every corner of the globe. Technological advances that one company overlooks will be adopted by another and used to their advantage.

As a result, companies must quickly recognize and respond to new opportunities and challenges and growing global competition. We need to respond to customer requirements more quickly and precisely—and to offer tailored responses to the distinctive needs of various customers. Enhancing efficiency and productivity requires faster access to deeper, more accurate, and more timely information for better decision-making. As companies respond to their challenges by setting up virtual supply chains that bring more global partners and vendors into their core business, they need ways to seamlessly integrate with those partners and vendors.

Many IT environments aren't up to the challenge. Their systems are inflexible, incapable of quickly adapting to new business or regulatory requirements. Too many systems are complex, proprietary, and siloed, making customization and integration difficult. The inability to share existing application components increases the time and cost to develop, test, deploy, and maintain new solutions. As a result, too many resources are tied down with fixing, maintaining, and attempting to integrate existing solutions, rather than investing in innovative solutions to new business needs. The IT department, which needs to be a strategic asset to the company, is too often a cost center instead of an innovation center.

Fortunately, trends have been moving in a more productive direction. Technologies like extensible markup language (XML) and simple object access protocol (SOAP) enable new ways to integrate systems. Legacy investments may now integrate with new solutions across platforms, departments, geographic boundaries—even across enterprises
Together, these developments provide the foundation to solve the problems facing business and IT: service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

Organic trafic growth is important to your business

SEO strategy is something that has been difficult to define as the search landscape tends to change quite frequently with new innovations and technologies emerging up all over the place. There are so many dimension and aspect for it .To me, a successful organic SEO strategy should focus on three areas:
Getting Traffic to Your Web Platform via Carefully Selected Keywords
This is really the lifeblood of your SEO campaign. Without proper keyword selection, we run the risk of blending into search results oblivion. A strong SEO strategy begins and ends with keyword selection. In fact it never ends. Keyword research should be ongoing. To remain competitive we always need to develop creative ways to reinvent our messaging and content. Business is a dynamic process, markets change, competition change, supply and demand change and your business should change as well.
Keyword selection is a critical aspect of any SEO strategy. Keyword selection depends on a wide variety of factors such as: Type of Industry, Popularity of our brand, Competitiveness of keywords, Semantic mapping of the user, Stage of Awareness, Head vs. Torso vs. Long-Tail and Time of Season.
The list could go on and on. The fact is that keyword selection is not a one-time thing. You really need to make an effort to understand what terms searchers will be using when looking for your service or product offering.
Relevant, Compelling and Useful Content on our Web site
The greatest SEO strategy that we can incorporate is content development. from a user point of view, content development can be used to improve site stickiness and time spent on your site. We need to provide our audience with the content on our site and targeted landing page that they are looking for. If that means book review, we had better provide the reviews.
Even in 2008, the search engines still like good old fashioned HTML text copy the best. Not content buried in Flash or images, good old copy. However if you need a little content "pizzazz" try incorporating videos with transcripts, blog posts, news articles or the like. If keywords are your lifeblood of your SEO strategy, them content is the rest of your "physical" makeup. Search engines need content to crawl and index and of course rank. To increase your visibility in the organic space of the search engines (ie the natural search results) you need to have a content rich site. Do not expect to rank if you do not have any content on your site. Writing content for the Web is a key factor of any SEO strategy. Yet why is it overlooked by so many? Every SEO strategy needs to focus on content development. You are defeating the purpose if you are not pumping out new content on your site on a regular basis. You want to be an authority on "car insurance" you better have content about "car insurance". You want to rank well for "cosmetic dentistry" you might want to create some additional content for your site. Content development is critical for a successful SEO strategy.
Establishing Authority via Link Development
A strong SEO strategy needs to have this component for without relevant links to your site, you simply will not rank. The sites that are the true authorities are the ones with quality links from other sites and web properties. It’s not always about quantity, but more often than not it is about quality. If you want to rank well in the search engines, you need to build up your external link inventory. Many argue that the best way to do this is to buy links. I strongly disagree. Buying links artificially builds your link inventory. It improves quantity but does not necessarily improve your link quality. For my money, the best way to build your external link inventory is to do it by providing interesting and useful content. Some call this link bait, I call it smart online marketing. If you provide content that is somewhat unique, extremely useful and informative, chances are others are simply going to link to your content. Furthermore you can bet that the links will be of higher quality and more relevant.

Do you think that a site without a strong external link inventory can rank well? Well it does happen, but the "staying power" of these sites to remain in the top organic result is week. A site with a strong external link inventory will almost always outrank a site that lacks quality links. It’s built into the search engine algorithms, linking is still a fundamental factor as to how sites are ranked in the search engine results pages.
Conclusion
A successful SEO strategy must consist of three items
Relevant Key Phrases
Relevant Content
Relevant Links
If you can address these three issues with your SEO strategy you will do well.

Offshore developemnt support

Nirvana Offshore Development Center
Offshore Trends
· Global 1000 companies will continue to replace local contractors with offshore or near shore support
· Companies will continue to demand and opt for offshore or near shore components in almost every major outsourcing deal
· US-based outsourcing and consulting organizations continue to increase their offshore resource pools
· There will be merger and acquisition (M&A) activities involving North America and Indian IT services vendors (e.g. Wipro acquisition of utility practice of AMS and Headstrong merger with TechSpan)
· Attrition will skyrocket in the Indian IT services arena
· Fortune-class companies will continue to require offshore vendors to have mature processes in place before they engage them
· Companies will increase their first time investments with offshore service providers
· Companies will continue to experiment with reverse auction to secure the lowest possible price for offshore engagements
· Some Indian vendors will improve their relationship management and account management capabilities in order to establish higher-level and more secure relationships with clients. It enables longer business associations between user companies and Indian firms. In the future, relationship management will be a distinguishing factor for vendors. Low-cost, high-quality labor will no longer be the measure for the right vendor. Strong Relationship Management practices and the client-partner type of experience will distinguish vendors
companies will and must put in place centralized program management offices (PMOs) or governance structure
The Offshore Development Center (ODC)
Offshore Outsourcing has become a dominant theme among the IT Outsourcing trends worldwide and India has become the leading destination for Offshoring
Thus, the concept of an Offshore Development Center (ODC) evolved to provide its pool of specially trained resources, well designed infrastructure and proven and time-tested processes. It can be defined as, a dedicated, customized, and secure software development center established for a customer that needs to outsource substantial and/or continuous software development and maintenance work. The ODC service model evolved from the traditional project service model in order to accommodate the specific needs of individual customers, more efficiently. The major advantage of an ODC is that it takes project services few steps further ? technical resources are dedicated to the customer exclusively, fulltime, and for an extended time period. This approach gives the customer better control over the process of product development, and it leads to higher resource efficiency at lower rates (up to 30% lower than regular project services and up to 60% lower than with internal resources).
The offshore development concept evolved from these compelling factors. Under this concept it provides the entire infrastructure and a full-time IT team of pre-decided size to the client as an "Offshore Development Center" (ODC). A part of the development team may be located on site, at the customer's facility. The processes, methodologies, and standards of the ODC are designed keeping in view the client's concerns on offshore development and development requirements. It requires longer-term commitments and the center can be expanded to meet the client's growing needs.
Typical savings of setting up an ODC can be to the tune of 50 to 60% of traditional development & support cost and are derived from solutions developed and supported with combined on-site/offshore resources. Offshore development Centers are equipped to support applications management, development, or testing effort. It also benefits the service consumers (customers of the clients) with minimum of disruption within the client's facilities and greater utilization of client's internal resources.
Steps in ODC Setup
The following are typically the steps for setting up an ODC for a seamless extension of your software development facilities:
Step 1: Team Identification
The setup activity begins with the hand picking of technical/domain experts and programmers with the required skills.
Step 2: Acclimatization of Client's processes
After this core team is in place, application and systems knowledge are transferred with the coordination of client experts. This activity typically takes place at the client site.
Step 3: Process Definition
A process methodology is defined and customized to meet client requirements. This is a key step in the whole process as teams separated by time and space need to follow agreed procedures and processes to ensure high quality of deliverables. This methodology also includes checkpoints, protocols and review mechanisms, to remove ambiguities in communications. Use of standards and tools is identified and incorporated
Step 4: Offshore Environment
a: Simulation
The defined methodologies and processes are tested and fine-tuned, often with the core team working from the client facilities for a brief period in a simulated offshore environment. The initial results and early deliveries are checked against the agreed norms for compliance. If there are any deviations, the services level agreements are further refined. This cycle is continued until the requirements are met, confirmed and signed off.
b: Infrastructure
As a sub-step to this activity, a seamless IT environment is created offshore with communications links to client facilities. Depending on the requirement the ODC team is inducted at the offshore site. Some of the core team members return and train the offshore team on specific systems and applications, thus completing the offshore setup of resources.
Step 5: Project Execution
The ODC is now ready to execute projects for the said client. This will ensure on time, on budget deliveries using the Quality process and methodologies.
Key Benefits of the ODC
· Significantly reduced cost
· Offshore model, higher volume commitment and agreed rates
· Higher utilization and productivity
· Retained knowledge, quantum of work, efficient resource allocation
· Enhanced protection of intellectual property
· Client-specific R&D activities as value adds
· Significant emphasis on offshore activities
· Quick ramp up and ramp down
About Nirvanainfocom
Nirvana, The Customer Knowledge Company, develops and delivers Customer Asset Strategies to increase tactical and strategic decision-making capabilities across the enterprise. As a leading provider of CRM, ERP, integration, and business intelligence services to the Global 2000, Nirvana turns customer data into strategic knowledge that positively affects the entire enterprise. Established in 1990 with international offices, Nirvana has a long-standing commitment to global delivery and is uniquely qualified to deliver end-to-end solutions through valuable strategy consulting services and highly skilled engineering execution. Strategic and technology partners For additional information on Nirvana's full range of services, please visit our website at www.Nirvanainfocom.com or mail us info@Nirvanainfocom.com