Metacube has the necessary expertise, talent, and resources to deliver customized solutions that are tailored to your specific needs. We ensure that we deliver solutions that match your business processes, rather than forcing you to change your business processes to match our solutions.

Our Application Engineering Services lets organizations continually adapt their IT systems to meet the fast paced changes in the business environment such as introduction of new products or services, changes in the regulatory environment, modifications to the business processes to improve productivity etc. Adapting to new requirements could involve modifications or enhancements to existing applications, or developing new applications. Considering that businesses have made significant investments in IT systems in terms of hardware, software packages, custom software systems and most of all in training end users, our teams ensure that past investments in the existing IT systems are fully leveraged.

Iterative Life Cycle

Traditional application development projects have been managed using waterfall life cycles, which required freezing of requirements specifications before design, and freezing of design before development. However several organizations in the past few years have started to prefer iterative processes like the Rational Unified Process for application development. The driving force behind the shift has been the realization that change is inevitable during the development life cycle, and it is better to plan for it rather than ignore it.

Metacube on account of its close association with product companies has gained very valuable experience in iterative processes. Product companies prefer to use an iterative approach to translate an idea into a mature product. Each successive release of the product is built on the existing system and delivers new features to the customers. The features are prioritized on the basis of the value that they deliver to the customer, and the technology risk associated with them. Metacube has used this experience to refine its processes, enabling it to successfully complete and deliver the projects within budgets, on time.

We believe that iterative processes can also be applied to application engineering and can offer several advantages.

• Quicker deliveries ensure early feedback from the customer, thus reducing risks related to communication gap between the customer and the engineering team.
• High value features can be delivered in the early releases providing quick return on investment to customer, thus ensuring continued support from the management.
• High risk features can be addressed in the early releases, reducing risk of failure in the late stages of the project.
• Iterative processes provide adequate support for handling changes during the development cycle.

Fixed Price Projects

Several customers prefer fixed price proposals for specific onetime projects. Fixed price projects require careful drafting of requirements specifications. If the customer does not already have formal requirements specifications, Metacube generally offers a two step proposal. The first proposal is for doing the requirements analysis and developing the formal requirements specifications along with top level architecture. The requirements specification serves as the basis for second proposal that provides for design, construction, and deployment of the application.

The fixed price projects provide for limited changes in the requirements specification during development as they often impact the efforts and time line. The iterative approach used for fixed price projects leans more towards the waterfall cycle.

Extended IT Team

IT Systems in an organization are akin to living entities, and they need an elaborate IT Department to create, sustain, and deprecate them.

Developing new applications creates spikes in human resource requirements and hence can be outsourced as projects. However once the application has been created it needs constant efforts to maintain, enhance, and support it.

Our Extended IT Team model is based on creating a dedicated pool of human resources that extends the in house IT team of the client. The fact that the extended IT team is dedicated to the client offers several advantages including team stability, knowledge retention, effective communication, team loyalty, and better interpersonal relationships. The extended IT team can share all responsibilities including development, maintenance, enhancement, and management of applications with the in house team.

Metacube offers flexibility in the degree of control the client exercises over the extended IT team. Based on client's own preference, the client's management control may lie anywhere between loosely coupled On-site and Off-shore teams to tightly coupled teams.

Global Delivery

Global Delivery has become the mantra of optimal resource utilization for both manufacturing and services. Significance of global delivery for IT services including application engineering, application management, business process outsourcing, and IT enabled services can not be underestimated.

Use of extended engineering team necessitates effective implementation of distributed development processes. Metacube is also adept at the art of distributed development through effective use of VPN, shared source code repository, defect tracking system, and collaboration and knowledge sharing frameworks.

Metacube can also offer application management and support services based on a global delivery model.

Services Offered

We have been delivering custom solutions to small, medium, and large organizations, and have handled a wide variety of IT projects involving all or some phases of the system life cycle starting right from the feasibility study to system implementation and maintenance.

Our services can be called upon for turnkey system development, system reengineering and migration, system quality assurance, system maintenance and application support.