Most ISVs are quickly making cloud a technology of choice due to the benefits it offers around access to new markets, ability to create new revenue streams, lower costs, greatly enhanced flexibility and clear application differentiation. This is completely changing the technology landscape and according to IDC the total spending on IT cloud services is projected to go over $55 billion in 2014.

However the path to cloud has its own challenges like rightsizing the investment, addressing security issues, managing the change from software to services, identifying the target architecture, migration approach and managing operations efficiently. All this has to be done twice over, for the on-premise version as well as for the cloud version.

Symphony’s Cloud Engineering Services span the entire cloud lifecycle- beginning with advising on the optimal cloud strategy and roadmap, leveraging the product engineering rigor in re-architecting the products, adopting robust migration/development methodologies, supporting the ISV in deployments and operations and last but not the least offering post migration product engineering services optimized for the cloud.

Symphony Cloud Engineering Services Solution has three components under its umbrella each aimed at a different phase of the cloud journey – choose (the right option), hop (your solution and customers on cloud) and stay (manage the cloud operations). These are,

• Defining a cloud business case : These services help the ISV in choosing the right cloud strategy and roadmap through a series of well-orchestrated steps, by leveraging the industry’s first Cloud Maturity Model. These begin with a high-level cloud readiness analysis on multiple dimensions of business, technology and risk followed by a high level ROI calculation. This is followed by a detailed assessment spanning business objectives, product architecture and road map and operational considerations.
• Executing cloud adoption/ integration : These services help the ISVs to move their solution and their customers to the cloud via three sub components,
  • Cloud enablement services : This service helps ISVs leverage cloud for their SaaS or on-premise products. Symphony has a robust cloud-migration methodology supported by the various tools it has developed, and is working closely with leading cloud service providers e.g. Amazon, Azure, force.com for cloud enabling its ISV customers.
  • SaaS enablement services : This service is built upon the deep product engineering expertise for ground up development or re-engineering for SaaS products. This consists of architecture & design services, development/migration services and product quality certification services for building scalable, high performance and highly availability multi-tenant SaaS products. Symphony leverages best in class frameworks to cut down on time to market and also helps ISVs in building their own frameworks.
  • Deployment services Deployment services : This service facilitates quick on boarding of tenants by offering the best in class commercially available integration/data migration services in an on-demand mode. This saves upfront investments by the ISV while evaluating the SaaS model with beta customers. ISV can then either continue with these services or Symphony can help them build their own migration tools and integration hubs.
• Optimizing cloud operations
  • Cloud product engineering services : Symphony has built the engineering processes optimized for cloud from ground up, like agile for cloud, continuous integration in cloud, product quality management etc. in order to meet the stringent demands like short release cycles, high availability SLAs, prevent cascading effects of leaked defects etc. These processes have been pre-built into Symphony’s Integrated Solution Platform (SymISP) for ready use. Symphony’s preventive and predictive maintenance & support service with its analytic dashboards is embedded in cloud product engineering to optimize maintenance costs and meet SLAs.
  • Cloud operations services : For managing cloud operations like provisioning, monitoring, billing etc. Symphony initially leverages its partnerships to shorten the time to market and protect ISV investments until the cloud model is proven. Symphony’s Software Management Service can assist in managing the on-premise version and if so desired sun-setting it in an assured return business model.

All these services are based on the core model of Outcome CertaintyTM, which is about getting the results you require to meet your business objectives. It is about achieving goals, driving innovation and bringing predictability to costs, schedules and quality of the outsourced software product engineering process. Symphony Services ensures that leading technology companies maximize the ROI from their engineering investments and deliver market-leading products to drive their success.

• Accelerated strategy planning and roadmap creation : Using Symphony’s consulting framework ISVs can be presented with a strategy and roadmap for selecting a cloud provider and moving to the cloud within 2-4 weeks; Assured ROI : Symphony helps ISV’s by delivering a time phased investment planning that is in line with revenue for an assured ROI. This is backed up with robust methodologies, tools and solution accelerators for a flawless execution with predictable output.;
• Assured ROI : Symphony helps ISV’s by delivering a time phased investment planning that is in line with revenue for an assured ROI. This is backed up with robust methodologies, tools and solution accelerators for a flawless execution with predictable output.;
• Shortened time to market : Symphony has partnered with vendors like TechCello, Corent and others to build multiple frameworks for .NET development, java-based migrations etc. that cut down migration/development cycle time by 30-40%, further reducing the time to market;
• Shortened release cycles on Cloud : Symphony best practices and optimized processes embedded in Integrated Solution Platform shorten the post migration release cycle by 20%;
• Optimized post-migration engineering budget : An ISV has to manage both on-premise and SaaS version at least during the transition period. Symphony can help with life cycle management of on-premise version thus saving about 25% of the engineering budget.

Symphony has partnered with the leaders in the cloud computing space to deliver cloud services solutions to its customers. Symphony is part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution providers program helping deliver solutions and consulting services on the AWS infrastructure platform. Symphony is also a gold certified Microsoft partner and it is helping deliver assessment and migration services for ISVs looking to move to the MS Azure platform.