The SSD offers services in the following areas of the software development and deployment cycle:

• Development: This involves the complete software development lifecycle starting with requirements capture and ending with User Acceptance Testing and handover of source and documentation.

• Deployment: This involves installing the software on a system identified and provided by the customer, and configuring it for production use.

• Infrastructure setup: This includes installing of the complete software stack on bare metal, starting with the operating system and ending with the application layers for the back-end (server-side components) and front-end (browser configuration and testing, if needed).

• Migration assistance: This includes data migration from legacy systems to the new application, cross-validation of output generated by legacy systems and new application, training for end-users, system administration training, and EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) services to integrate heterogenous systems with the new application. If data entry is required for migration, SSD does not offer the services.

• Post-commissioning support: This includes software support to maintain, modify, and enhance the application software which has been delivered to the customer, as well as maintain the entire software stack for the production systems. Our services include addressing performance, security, scalability and robustness issues.

The SSD does not undertake software services for applications not developed by them.

The Software Services Division (SSD) has skills and experience in the following areas:

• Platforms: Unix (AIX, HP-UX, Digital Unix on Dec Alpha, Solaris on SPARC), Linux, *BSD. In Linux, we have depth in RedHat (since v7.x) and SuSE/Novell Linux (since v6.x) families, and have done two major projects using Debian.

  Very little application development work on Microsoft platforms; we have executed major infrastructure setup and maintenance projects using MS Windows Server NT4, 2000 and 2003.

• Programming languages: Depth in Perl, Java, C, shellscripting, PHP. Some Python. Very little C++.

  No work in Microsoft-specific programming languages, e.g.Visual Basic.

• Front-end technologies: In-depth expertise in browser-based UI, including advanced Javascript, AJAX, and CSS. Expertise in testing and upgrading browser-based front-end code to make them browser type independent; we test on MSIE v5 to v7, Firefox v1.5 and v2.0 on MS Windows and Linux, and Safari on Mac OS X.

  Some expertise in Java application development with windowing UI. Very little expertise in developing applications with windowing toolkits for either Unix or MS Windows platforms. No expertise with client-server software development environments (e.g. Oracle D2K, PowerBuilder).

• Application platforms: Tomcat v4 and later, upto current versions. JBoss, recent versions. Some projects in Java on Oracle Application Server concurrent with Oracle 8i.

• Database engines: In-depth expertise in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle (8i onwards), IBM UDB (on Linux and AIX). Some expertise with MS SQL Server.

• Voice applications: We have a team dedicated to developing voice applications and integrating them with back-end business applications. We are software and application partners of one of the world's largest manufacturers of telecom equipment.

• Infrastructure skills: The SSD usually executes projects which involve requirements capture, solution design, development, testing, deployment, and post-commissioning support. The SSD has strengths in deploying the entire software stack for a new application, starting from OS installation and configuration, database server installation configuration, right down to troubleshooting and enhancing the production system for performance bottlenecks and security issues. This is a rare combination of strengths which most Indian software development companies lack.

Since the SSD earns most of its revenues from fixed-price projects, our management processes have to be tight and our quality processes have to be excellent to allow us to avoid overruns and retain profitability. In this respect, we are in a small elite minority in an industry which primarily operates on a T&M billing model.

We have tried to document some of the lessons we have learned from our projects and how our management process has evolved, in a separate page.

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