Appulse Team would be present in full force to showcase its service offerings and in-depth technological expertise of working with software and technology companies at Pan IIT 2010 Conclace. With our unique custom built dedicated teams, we are able to help the companies innovate faster, release their products at a lesser cost, and then reinvest the profits in further developing their products to gain market leadership.

To know more, please visit us at Pan IIT 2010 Conclave from 29th October 2010 – 31st October 2010 happening at Noida, India.  For more details, please go to http://www.paniit2010.org/.

We have created a state of the art, high tech exhibit at Pan IIT 2010. Please visit us at Booth 62 to see it in action. For complimentary invitation to Pan IIT, please drop an email to vikas@appulse.com.

I am very excited to attend this conference. It is going to be a great event with a huge array of impressive speakers, and a gathering of 3000+ brilliant minds from all over the world.Hope to see you there..

Do you at times wonder what are the correct price benchmarks to refer to while outsourcing your software related work? We have put together a brief ready reckoner that you might find useful. The data given below is based on Primary and Secondary research conducted by Appulse Technologies and includes inputs from McKinsey, Deloitte, Gartner, Nasscom, CSIA and other research reports.

Offshore Software Development Rates Comparison

After reading the above, if you are thinking which offshore destination is more suited for your kind of work, take a sneak preview below.  Yes, we are located at Delhi NCR which is the second ranked destination for Offshoring.

Top Offshoring Destinations 2009

If you need more details about the different offshoring destinations, and would like to talk to our experts and understand which offshore destination would work best for your company, please Contact Us. We would be more than happy to share our research data.

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Celebrations all around!!
We got selected as the “Best Retail Suppliers 2010” by Retailer magazine in a highly competitive selection process. The article can be viewed in the 2010 anniversary issue of the Retailer magazine.

“ Appulse has been focused on Retail Technology and has been serving Indian Retailers for last 7 years. It is an honor to be selected by industry’s leading publication and thought leaders” said Nitin Kumar, CEO of Appulse Technologies.

Retailer is a magazine dedicated to retailing in India and all related ideas, concepts and technologies related to the retail industry. It publishes a study once every year selecting the best IT, designing and logistic companies who form the backbone of retail operations in India.

Appulse Technologies awarded Best Retail Supplier 2010 by Retailer Magazine

Product development starts with the whiteboard, where product manager puts his ideas together. I have not come across many product development and management teams which use use cases for communication with their development teams. Here is a brief on how I think use cases at the product management table, can help collect feedback from sales, marketing, customer support and help R&D team actually understand the common perspective of all other functions.

Use Cases at Product Management level
Product Managers can look at the product from 2 different perspectives, one is the user centric i.e. use case view and second is the non functional view of the product. We have seen many product specifications which talk about features all the time and miss on the Use Case view.
Use Case is a simple description of how a “user” will use the product in context. The more understanding the product manager has about the “users”, the more usability specific issues will come up in the use cases.

Lets look at an example, in Gmail there is a feature where you can look at all related conversations in one view, so each email with the same subject and its responses are clubbed together for the “user”. This allows user to see all emails for a specific conversation context in one place. If you would imagine a use cases for this it will describe the users behavior and how the software is supposed to interact with her. The use case will describe how easy it will be do this, will the user be able to click a small button on the right to be able to shift to subject view and so on. The idea is once the product manager describes this, the engineering team can take decisions based on this behavior, without there being a need to have a low level specification.

1. Developer has to understand the user and therefore is not into coding some feature but a behavior response for the user.
2. Developer can add any logic into the use cases and send it back and forth to product management, rather than putting this into some design documents which are not going to product management anyways.
3. When the product management comes up with a change, they can specify in the use cases, what and whys of change so developers start understanding the user more and hence while coding for other features, they start applying the same context.

This will mean better communication between product management and R&D which means lower rework, lower mismatch in expectations and ultimately a usable software, where developer is focussing on user needs rather than coding logic, every line of code has to make sense from use case perspective.

Use Cases are a great way to communicate with all stakeholders of the product, and can be converted into flash animations as well for communicating with reference clients, investors and management teams.

This is a brief on how to think about architecture of a software which needs to talk to devices to implement its use cases. Devices can vary from printers, routers, proprietary communication devices, etc.

The ASIC and firmware team has come up with a command specification document which describes the low level commands which their device can understand. Now how do we move from here and make a robust, asynchronous, device driver, controller or application which uses this device to deliver functionality.

First, Start with the use cases of the device. I know that in case you are working on a device driver which is going to provide services to “other components”, then it might be tricky to think in terms of use cases. You may visualize in terms of all things you can do with the device, including things like on, off, reset, change cartridge, print photo, service, troubleshoot etc. Lets take an example of a printer. Now the use cases could look like, initiate printer, send print job, read settings, etc.

Next, Decide to have a subsystem which will provide only the commands which the device hardware is providing, “as it is” and will just take care of reliable communication with the device. Lets say the device can be connected through USB or RS-232 or Ethernet port. Now for each type of communication channel, create a separate subsystem which will communicate with the specific communication medium. So, in the end your subsystems will look like. Command subsystem, and then USB delivery, RS232 delivery and Ethernet Delivery.

Now choose the delivery subsystems to be implemented using operating system specific libraries as this will ensure more control and speed. If you want to write a driver which will run on all operating systems, you can chose Java based libraries which would have different versions for different operating systems. You need to write code using the performance optimized functions and libraries so be sure to check this out and write a cook book for all developers on which functions are “architecturally approved” to be used among the packages and external components you are using. At the delivery level, you need to focus on time out, number of times you want to retry etc.

Moving onto the next subsystem “command” here you can implement command pattern to make all hardware commands of the printer encapsulated. You do not need to implement any applications specific functionality in any of the command, this will allow you to add new commands easily and keep “changing” with the hardware specifications.

Then comes the applications or functionalities you want to build on top of these commands, these would be directly related to the actual use cases of the printer. e.g. print a document, print a photo etc. Here you can choose to break your subsystem depending on the level of processing you would need to do for each specific type of print request. It will be a good idea to provide a generic print subsystem which will provide printing of a multipage file.
Take example of print a photo, the printer may be providing you a command to print a photo, you would like to resize the image, set ink levels, etc. so all this would be done in your print photo subsystem.

And so on keep moving away from the hardware with each subsystem.

So, what are the best practices you follow while designing architecture for device interfacing software. Share in the comments.

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Working for a high-tech company and selling hardware products or primarily hardware based solutions, read on.. While working with one of our customers who happens to be a leading high-tech firm and a market leader, one fine day I realized that the amount of money they were charging for their software was miniscule as compared to the hardware cost they were selling. And often the customer would negotiate well for the software cost, and they would end up not charging for it as well or giving more discount on already low cost. This was not a simple software, it took them quite a bit of time and money to build it but the positioning was more to sell hardware and the software comes bundled with it to manage the hardware.

So, how do you justify the value of software to your customer when you are primarily in the business of selling hardware?

You can go Freemium model. Give a base version free, and then add more performance and features to the advanced version of the software which lets user derive better ROI from the same hardware devices.

Price it Per User.Often works very well while selling to large companies. Automatic revenue addition when more teams start using the software.

Try SaaS pricing. Evaluate if charging monthly and offering a web based version for your software helps you in generating more sales and winning new business

Looking for more ideas on how you can price your software. Download this very useful short eBook from an industry expert Neil Davidson. Download eBook. (right now available for free, hard copy available at Amazon for $9.95).

So what is your experience with pricing software? Do Leave a comment.

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In my previous post, I talked about the basics of Enterprise 2.0. Please view the Enterprise 2.0 in Plain English-Part 1 here.
Let’s go specific now, and discuss one example of Enterprise 2.0 Portal which would bring your customers and partners closer to your team. Here is how each department in your organization would benefit from this.

Marketing and PR

• Improves brand loyalty and awareness
• Facilitates access to direct market research & fosters buzz marketing
• Promotes product advertising and PR campaigns

Sales

• Increases sales insight in respect to customers
• Increases demand and lead generation
• Adds more touch-points during the customer lifecycle

R&D / Engineering / Product Management

• Customer contribution to product features increases
• Decreases R&D expenditures
• Increases focus on customer needs

Service and Support

• Improves service levels
• Decreases support costs

The illustration above tries to illustrate the features of building a community between a customer and a partner

Sounds Great! How would I Implement it?
Below is the step by step Implementation plan for implementing Enterprise 2.0:

1. Evaluate the need for communities that map to your current business goals
2. Design the social architecture for the community
3. Map the Social Architecture to Technology
4. Launch the community
5. Appoint a Community Manager who is responsible for growing and maintaining the community
6. Get customer feedback, and improve the social architecture and community features

Appulse Enterprise 2.0 evangelists can take up the reins from Step 1, and guide you through the complete process step by step, and assist you by offering following services

• Conceptualizing your Customer and Partner community
• Technology Implementation
• Community Launch
• Community Management using our team of community managers

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What is Enterprise 2.0?
Enterprise 2.0 refers to the concept of incorporating Web 2.0 tools and technologies into the work process of an enterprise. It helps the employees, partners, suppliers and customers of an organization to work together and build networks.

Why is it important for you?
Unlike the concept of one-way conversation, where a company communicates with the site visitors individually, Enterprise 2.0 allows you to implement a multi-party conversation to share information. It also allows you to manage knowledge inside and outside of the organization using blogs and wikis, social networking and tagging, rating systems and other such utilities. The links provided in these tools facilitate the individuals involved to participate and control the process while working together, sharing information and creating networks with people sharing similar interests.

How can Enterprise 2.0 help me with my marketing and business goals?
Enterprise 2.0 offers an array of benefits for Software and Technology companies. Enterprise 2.0 tools are capable of connecting different groups in an organization and ecosystem partners by creating infinite links among your channel partners, distributors and associated groups. These links surpass the benefits and features of other powerful links already existing between these entities. These links with enhanced features cultivate a breed of innovation, creativity, and cross pollination among different entity groups. Simple productivity gains are just one aspect of Enterprise 2.0 and it is much more capable of gaining additional returns over and above its simple productivity gains.

Below is the list of some rewarding benefits of Enterprise 2.0 for your organization

• Cultivates Long-Term Relations Between Customers and Partners
• Provides Customer Feedback and New Perspectives which facilitate the introduction of new products and services
• Facilitates Department-wise Knowledge and Expertise Sharing with Customers
• Accelerates Growth Factor by Making the Most of Existing resources
• Gathers everyone on a common page/platform.
• Self Service Searchable Portals Minimize Customer Support Costs

In the next post, I would write specifics how your sales and marketing can benefit from Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

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Many service providers offer cloud infrastructure now, but all these services are unique, and often it becomes difficult to separate one from another. There are of course lot numbers of features which different providers give but the basic questions which you should be answering to ascertain which vendor is right for your needs are below.
A. Technical Support - What happens when you need help? Can you find a human voice comforting you at the other end? This is going to happen very frequent during your initial days when you are migrating to Cloud.

B. Performance – Most common concern because cloud infrastructure is still coming up, and lot of innovation is happening there. You cannot compare this on paper, as lots of things depend on whom you are sharing your resources with. So it is always better to try it firsthand and given such low cost entry

Interested in reading more.. Please download the recently published whitepaper by Appulse Technologies on selecting a cloud computing provider here.

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Here comes another article on teaching me how to do Outsourcing… You must be thinking, come on guys no more best practices, no more advice, I have been doing it for so long, I know what works, what doesn’t works for me. I know communication with offshore team is a problem, I know productivity is not as good as what I get with my internal team, I know quality becomes an issue, and I know attrition is a major problem at Offshore where the talent is in great demand. So what is new in this article?

Well, you are absolutely right but imagine wouldn’t it be great if these problems would simply vanish, and offshoring your development actually starts generating business results for you.

Wouldn’t it be great if your offshore team productivity starts matching with your internal team? or because your product quality has gone up, your team is actually spending less time on solving urgent customer issues, and more time on building a competitive edge for you.

Is this really possible?

Yes, I believe so, and we have been working at Appulse for the last few years just to make this happen. Even The New York Times and IDG think so. Here is an article which appeared recently which talks about 13 Best Practices of Outsourcing. Here are what I think are the most relevant ones for ISVs and Technology Companies

2. Get a compatible provider. Make sure your service provider understands more than just how to code or implement. An outsourcer needs to be compatible with your company’s culture and business objectives, with the right experience, communications skills, and working style. Remember, they will become part of your organization and need to fit in as well as actual employees would.

6. Get the communications right. Make sure the service provider understands the project specifications. Be as detailed and precise as possible.

7. Expect to get what you pay for. If you put the outsourcer under too much cost pressure, it will cut corners too, such as using junior resources.

10. Get C-level sign-offs. Make sure you have senior-level stakeholders such as the CIO on the client side and CEO on the vendor side. Don’t delegate everything to middle management.

So, what are your views? What challenges you face while outsourcing? What are the best practices you have developed over the last few years which make outsourcing work for you? Do share with everyone.

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