Many organizations introduce technologies oriented towards specific business application needs. A result of this can often be a proliferation of technologies, many with overlapping capabilities. In turn, objectives such as reuse and economies of scale become lessened.

In today's market place, the capabilities of products aimed at similar niches in the market can differ widely. Selecting the correct product and ensuring its applicability into the future requires a continual focus that many companies cannot afford to dedicate resources to.

Application Objects, Incorporated (AOI) has been involved in evaluating groups of products that can form the core of a company's technical infrastructure. Comparing and contrasting these product sets, in combination with business objectives resulting from an application portfolio analysis, form the first stage in defining a consolidated technical infrastructure for application development.

This becomes more important as the issue of build versus buy enters into the argument. With costs of projects easily moving into seven, eight, or even nine figure ranges, the benefit of a customized application development over a packaged implementation becomes a serious question.

AOI has been involved in helping to define some of the parameters surrounding these issues as they relate to the architectures, frameworks, third-party products, and developmental approaches. Our experience in these technical arenas combines with our delivery capabilities mean we are able to effectively support our customers throughout the project lifecycle.

Services of AOI include:

• Product set evaluation and deployment
• Application portfolio Analysis
• Architecture definition and deployment