Implementing Service Oriented Architecture
SOA, pretty much the buzz word of this first millennium’s decade – what value does this bring to our organization, and how can this improve the cost/value proposition of our IT operations.
Risotech brings into the SOA arena dozens of accumulated man-years in software infrastructure projects, consolidating experience in design, architecture build-up, development and deployment of newly available technologies.
Investing immense resources in new technologies, together with the experience gathered in projects, provides us to day the capabilities to offer IT management a sharp and focused review of what SOA is, and how best to implement with your organization.
The Risotech offering consists of unique combination of technology and expertise, proven working methodologies, procedures and project capabilities. This allows us to ensure your IT not only runs on latest technology available, but is seamlessly aligned with your business goals and well managed in terms of cost / value proposition.
Much has been said and continues to be said on SOA – we would like to focus a fundamental route relevant to all IT organizations organizations – effectively manage your ability to deliver tomorrow’s business needs. In our IT terms, it is all about software integration – formats and standards, decoupling and regrouping, developing and reusing, governing and auditing, maximizing throughput of your Resources – people and components.
SOA handles people, processes and relevant software components – as such it requires attention not only from IT management, but from the other business units within your organization. Properly defining business applications is a must for effective SOA implementations, and as these are dynamic in nature, we at Risotech place much emphasis on allowing your several entry levels and entry points to the SOA arena.
Whether you are implementing a new Web based Portal requiring integration of new workflows, or a new CRM applications connecting information from various customer databases, or on the other hand already rolling out a new system requiring a hybrid business process to be implemented, we have the right solution to get you on a sound, solid and effective path.
Risotech consultants will help you select the right technology, products and software components (link to the Technology Partners Page)that do indeed matter. Combined with a custom fit methodology of working procedures to ensure the right components are fitting your business requirements. Our consultants will then provide you with a very practical path to implement SOA.
Performance Management and Monitoring 
During the whole life span of a project, from initial design, through architecture review, planning, development and deployment – we have at Risotech the solution to help you achieve apt performance out of your IT assets.
A combination of products (link to the Technology Partners Page) and a set of services we provide enable your IT resources to build up the exact performance required by your business. Apt performance is our target, and we adhere to business requirements by analyzing, planning, productizing with new projects are developed, or pinpoint, trouble shoot, provide remedy and deploy when required.
These solutions are aimed at 3 different levels of projects, as follows:
During planning stage: we provide solutions for capacity planning, design and review of performance related issues. Risotech can assist your architects, project managers to make sure they are selecting the apt components for the project, and envision easy and affordable scaling up and scaling out routes together with high availability. As common practice we would build for your developers a performance “cook book” or “reference guide” to use on a permanent basis throughout projects – our experience shows excellent results when indeed put into practice
During development stages: Risotech provides a set of solutions for the developer – making sure he has the proper set of tools and methodologies to deliver performance aware code.
We provide tools, consulting, reviews and guidance in memory, virtual machine and thread analysis for the Java and JEE development as well as database performance analysis and optimization.
Additional solutions for SOA component development, allowing tracing and management of messaging and brokerage transactions – all aimed at allowing the developer to excel and deliver apt code.
During runtime stage: Be it any business transaction, ranging from the client itself through open systems and components up to the Legacy systems or EIS and back - Risotech will provide the means to highlight it, measure and analyse it, amend and provide remedy when needed. Any SOA component, business processes, data integrations, enterprise service bus, portals and combination of web services – Risotech has solutions ranging from Passive monitoring of your production environment, to profound overall management of your systems with the pro-active ability to solve problem as encoutered, and when possible, long before they are encountered.
Risotech has set the standards in performance management and analysis in its excellent service and remarkable ability to success in this important area of the customers' project. We have successfully unlocked performance bottlenecks, planned and implemented highly available architecture and DRP for SOA platforms, application servers and databases, and managed successful performance management for projects.
Our performance solutions also include security performance management. We provide software and services to allow management of authorization and authentication. You can find out more about our solution here: Security brochure.
Data Management
Focusing on industry leading vendors databases, our data management team at Risotech provides a set of solutions, making sure your data management resources are indeed kept well guarded, optimized and fully persistent.
Risotech provides analysis of your data structure needs, and will assist in planning the architecture and structure of your databases. All this is done with relevance and in accordance to business and functional requirements set for the project. Risotech has gained extensive experience in designing complex databases for mission critical applications – be it in the defence, telecom and governmental agencies. As such we will make sure your organization databases are indeed designed to adhere to the architecture and structure defined and the business requirements set.
In the emerging database and information integration world, our team holds important knowledge and experience in application to database bridging to unlock the challenges of transaction coordination, security, object to relational mapping, all combined with performance management through the technology layers. This important asset allows us to lead your project to successful and innovative solution that fit your business requirements.
Risotech will assist in the role-out of these databases, and follow during the life time of the project with ongoing maintenance, ensuring continuous operations.
Our data management solutions also include total storage management solution. We provide software and services to allow management of storage. You can find out more about our solution here: Storage brochure.
Scalability and High availability solutions
Core middleware, databases, applications servers, integration platforms – Risotech provides the skills, experience, methodology and relevant products that enable your operation to scale and provide high availability operations.
Risotech offers:
- Design and implementation of 5 nines and up configurations
- Design and planning ensuring your databases, application servers, and integration platforms can indeed scale out (horizontal scaling) and scale up (vertical scaling) – We allow this be carefully selecting the technologies that suit well your business needs and operational requirements
- Migration into high availability platforms for your entire IT middleware.
Agile & SCRUM
Often in traditional development projects, everything seems to be going so well, right up to 80% completion or perhaps even later. Then things start getting harder. Things start looking less and less likely to meet the planned end date. Until eventually you concede that you can't hit the date because it's just too late to do anything much about it...
In agile development, there are a few key principles that highlight such issues early. Distressing though this is, the issues are highlighted whilst there's still time to do something about it.
One reason why this is a common problem in traditional software development projects is because the testing is one big lump all at the end. Consequently it's very hard to gauge quality until late in the day and it's very hard to judge how complete the product really is, because you don't know how many more bugs there are to find.
In agile development, testing is integrated throughout the lifecycle, features are completed one by one, and for each feature "done" really means "DONE!". In addition the product owner or user representative is actively involved in order to see the product frequently and steer its development every step of the way.
All of these principles go a very long way to ensuring clear visibility of progress, and providing a clear and unambiguous measure of the product's completeness on a very regular basis.
Risotech has a long background of adopting and implementing agile development procedures and tools as part of its projects and customer consulting. Not only we have gained important practice in rolling out agile projects, we have the tools and knowledge of how to bring these precious tools to your project as well.
Among our solutions, you can find our Rational SDLC solution for implementing development methodologies backed by IBM Rational set of products.
Professional reviews
IT management process is always driven by dynamic business requirements and various operational constraints. As such, decisions are taken in real-time throughout the process and might have large impact on the success of your project or product role out.
Risotech, with its team of experienced technology experts brings a deep understanding of technologies available as well as the business and project / product requirements and combines them both to provide professional reviews. By tackling our customer’s challenges in this dynamic and ever changing IT environment, we have developed expertise and know-how in various emerging technologies, and more important developed the methodologies and practice to bring them forth to your production environments.
Our professional reviews include the following:
o Architecture review
o Design review
o Code review
o Performance review
o Development methodology review
All our review processes follow a common Risotech review methodology that allows us to concentrate on the key points relevant to the customer. All our reviews are carefully documented and built in stages, allowing your IT personnel to closely monitor the process with our experts, ensuring delivery of professional reviews – making project role-outs on in your IT environment – a success.
Project development
Risotech brings a wide technology spectrum to your projects, ranging from data services (databases, information management, and etceteras) to middleware (application servers, messaging, integration platforms …) and front-end services (portals, rich client technology …). These accumulate years of experience in vertical and horizontal projects in relevant industries and allow Risotech to offer efficient best practice in project development skills.
The Risotech R&D team and project consultants develop projects utilizing our vast technology expertise in Java/J2EE, Databases and SOA. We bring into our projects the accumulated experience we gained and our expertise in application management throughout its lifecycle. Our projects vary from module development to full application or platform development, based on the customer need and abilities.
Risotech places much importance on basing its projects on common and approved industry standards. The technologies selected for any project, should be tested, documented, proven and robust - collectively with our experience and expertise provide a solid and sound investment to make.
Our project managers will lead each project along side the customer toward a successful implementation, with emphasis on accurate budgeting, time lines and fulfillment of the project requirements. We provide close management attention that allows us to successfully manage project risks and changes during the project lifecycle.
Technology consulting
Risotech holds valuable expertise in cutting edge technologies for infrastructure and integration platforms. Our consulting team is built of well experienced technology experts that participated and lead some of the more important and challenging projects in the local industry – for some of the largest IT departments and ISVs. They bring wide perspectives of the different technologies with proven implementation capacity on different platforms and industry environments.
Our technology consulting helps organizations adopt and minimize the risks while implementing new technologies – placing focus not only on the path to take in terms of technology selection and adoption, but the pace and rhythm too.. They integrate role-out best practices, deep understanding of the technologies and its limitations, customer business proposition and functional constraints. In addition, we provide to our customers the value and outcome of our intense and fruitful cooperation and sharing of knowledge with our technology partners to broaden our ability to support the technology platforms.
Our group of consultants share knowledge and customer cases on a day to day basis and on dedicated technology sharing meetings held frequently. This has proven to be a very useful factor which allows our customers to gain the best value out of our consulting services.
Risotech insists on sharing knowledge with its customers – this is done through mentorship sessions, tailored demonstrations and hands-on show cases. Placing emphasis on this, has proven in all cases the value your IT teams get by working with Risotech – We make sure the value and fruits of our studies – remains within the customer’s premises.
Development Environment
Risotech works and integrates with the leading development environments and continuous integration tools as part of its support for agile project development methodologies.
Risotech manages its projects based on agile SCRUM methodologies and have on board an experienced SCRUM master to manage and share the knowledge and methodologies. We bring these insights into customer projects and help them build up agile methodologies and supported development environments accordingly.
Risotech utilizes open source and commercial software to enable continuous integration platforms with support to the leading SCM, IDE and technology platforms. We successfully integrate our performance analysis and methodologies into our agile methodologies and development environment, providing aligned performance results during development cycles.
Professional personnel
Along side our professional services we offer our customers the ability to enjoy professional outsource services with a state of the art screening process and excellent management team.
Our outsourced professional personal enjoys our strong technology backing which allows them to bring into the table the most professional and agile knowledge, utilizing our consulting group and knowledge sharing mechanisms.
More details (rio.risotech.com).
Training and Education
Risotech puts important emphasis on training and education. We deliver and develop training for the most advanced technologies and platforms available to date. Our training personnel are all involved and practicing development and project role outs – this ensures the class attendees receive not only the best knowledge levels in terms of technologies and products but apt and relevant best practice from projects similar to the ones they are challenged with.
Our group of consultants delivers training together with our training partners (JohnBryce Ltd. and Blue Education Center) as well as customized and tailored mentoring and training sessions.
Risotech also publishes unique training courses in its fields of expertise.