Opsera > Consulting services

Opsera provides business strategy, technology strategy, business analysis, technical architecture & infrastructure design, and complete development and operational management & support services.

Business strategy

If you're a high-growth company looking to expand, develop a business plan, raise finance, or develop your technical strategy, then Opsera can help. We have built a number of companies ourselves both in the UK and internationally, and work with our clients to develop all aspects of their business.

Typically this can involve assisting with your strategic and financial planning, as well as the operational aspects of your business. We then take this understanding and develop it into an effective implementation plan driven by the overall strategy but with a focus on pragmatic, achievable phases. Often this will include developing a technology roadmap to support the chosen business strategy.

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Technology strategy

Alternatively you may be a well-established company, and interested in Open Source, but unsure of how it might fit with your business. What opportunities might it provide? What are the operational risks and issues? Opsera offers Director- and CxO-level advice on how to gain competitive advantage through the deployment of Open Source software. We can provide an executive overview of the Open Source landscape, comparisons with proprietary software, specific product evaluations and architectural blueprints for typical deployments. We can explain how Open Source would fit into your IT strategy and prepare total cost of ownership and business case reports to support your chosen strategy.

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Business analysis

Whether you need to develop a business case to justify investment in a new system, or evaluate different technology and product approaches, Opsera will help you make better technology decisions at the outset by scoping what's needed and assessing the technology solution options. Our expertise in a range of both Open Source and proprietary technologies means we can anticipate both the risks and opportunities involved in different approaches and enable you to set off on the right path to a good technical solution.

You may be looking to improve productivity, time-to-market or customer service and believe that your current business processes need to be improved. Opsera's business consultants can facilitate the design of new processes that target measurable business benefit. Moreover, we'll follow this through - by building the new processes into the supporting systems and helping you plan and implement process change to ensure business benefits are realised.

The key to building a good technology solution lies in agreeing and defining exactly what you want it to do. Our team has many years' experience of analysing requirements on a scale appropriate to the size of the project and the risks involved. We understand the pitfalls and challenges, and can help business managers and users articulate and define how they want to use the technology, whether the requirements are held in one person's head, or spread across an entire business and its customers. This might involve stakeholder workshops, requirements cataloguing and prioritisation, followed by detailed functional definition utilising use cases and screen mock-ups.

We'll organise and document your requirements clearly and thoroughly, using modelling languages to enable development to be defined and driven directly from these requirements. This is not to say that we use an exclusively top-down approach - we're pragmatic too - we'll use a level of documentation to suit your project and requirements. We can also undertake rapid prototyping so that you can see your vision emerging and tune it as you see it take form [see Our approach]

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Technical architecture & infrastructure design

If you are trying to launch a new company, or expand rapidly, you may be limited by the management time available to focus on the many different aspects of your business. Also you may not have the in-house knowledge or capability to develop your own business applications, web-site and support infrastructure quickly and effectively. Opsera can jump-start your business by providing a full outsourced technical launch capability. We'll bring to bear our experience of business case models, proven architecture blueprints, and current software components and hosting infrastructure, to help define the specific services you want to offer your customers, and how an Open Source architecture can support this.

For established companies, we can help you plan and design an updating or expansion of your technology platform to replace those underperforming, costly legacy systems. We start by understanding the business requirements, your drivers for change, budget limitations, desired timetable for implementation and your current systems. Working with you, we can then design a high-level enterprise architecture and identify and recommend the best software applications and components to meet your requirements. Once you have approved the way forward, the next stage is to develop a detailed technology roadmap, implementation timetable and budget/business case.

Our infrastructure design service covers the complete hardware, storage, back-up, monitoring and support requirements for your enterprise. We can evaluate and recommend the most cost-effective and appropriate hosting and infrastructure providers and design suitable resilience and recovery procedures based on your requirements, budget and the mission-criticality of your services.

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Development

Opsera's development services are about flexibility and speed. We offer a variety of models to suits your preference:

If you want a complete outsourced service at low-cost, then we will draw upon our offshore IT service partner Satyam to access people with the right skills and experience. Our senior consultants onshore will manage the development and communications with the offshore team, and ensure that high-quality code is produced, around the clock if needed; all of which leaves you free to get on with developing your business, rather than building an IT department.

If you have an in-house IT team and are looking to increase their Open Source design and development capabilities, Opsera will provide a design and development team to work alongside them. Alternatively we could provide a near-shore team or an offshore team, depending on your requirements and timescales. This allows you to achieve the cost and quality advantages of a blended onshore-offshore model without the financial and time costs of setting this up, and while still maintaining direct management of the project in-house.

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Operational management & support

Our experience in infrastructure design and deployment allows us to provide a full range of operations management tasks for you. From short-term hosting of technology pending transition to your internal team, to long-term hosting by Opsera, to proactive remote management of your systems, Opsera can use powerful Open Source-based tools to provide professional monitoring and support services.

Our Business Continuity services will examine the potential availability issues and security threats to your technical infrastructure and applications, and design appropriate resilience, failover and back-up strategies to minimise risk and provide peace of mind.

Opsera provides ongoing support and maintenance for all the software solutions that we develop. We typically use our monitoring tools to manage the applications remotely, ensuring that security patches are applied and upgrades are performed when necessary and that potential issues are identified early and fixed.

We are happy to tailor our support services to meet your specific service level requirements and provide a range of coverage periods, from standard business hours all the way up to 24x7 coverage.