By Anjoo Navalkar

We conducted a survey* of smart-phone users on Linkedin to find out how frequently they used their Smartphones to browse or surf the net. 50 % of the polled group of people said that they used their mobile handsets for surfing the net and accessing social media websites. And going by the survey results, we are certain this % is going to only increase….
Reason – 1 » Technology
With 3G making firm and strong strides into our lives, we will slowly get used to getting video on our mobile – The way we got used to viewing films on large theatre screens to viewing films on Television, then a smaller screen and finally on the screen of a Smartphone. Though initially, videos were a threat for films, but slowly they have developed their own niche. Similarly, Websites and mobile web-sites will co-exist in the future.
Reason –2 » Social Media
Social Media sites are becoming popular day-by-day. One in every five computer-users access social media every day. With the Smartphone providing the ability to access popular social media sites on a palm, the user is getting habitually tuned into accessing the net using the Smartphone. Mobile websites generally give access to important information on the parent website, so a Smartphone user will surely use the mobile website to get quick and relevant information access.
Reason –3 » Market share
With the prices of Smartphones falling and the market for the same expanding every day – almost everyone now who has a computer (laptop or desk-top at home), also has a Smartphone. Mobile workforce is increasingly adopting Smartphones to access enterprise applications. Along with this, mobile devices are also used for browsing and surfing the internet. With the growing market share of Smartphones, it makes a lot of business sense for businesses to have WAP websites for mobile users.
*Based on LinkedIn Survey Results: See Poll

Global IT Outsourcing started off with the Software Product companies outsourcing their non-core activities like product maintenance and bug-fixing projects. For the ISVs, the Product was their cash-cow till it was re-engineered or discarded. For the end-customers, there was a greater upfront and hidden cost involved during implementation. Unforeseen hardware requirements, maintenance, upgrades and support fees would add up quickly. As a result a major portion of the total IT budget was spent on the enterprise software infrastructure. At the turn of the decade, end customers of the ISVs started demanding pay by use solutions which could be accessed by them anywhere, anytime. This pushed Software Product companies to think of on-demand options like SaaS.

Besides the traditional ISVs, software-enabled businesses delivering services like Recruitment, Training, On-line Testing, Financial advisory etc. to the end-user (Corporate) also needed their on-line software based on SaaS architecture. These businesses also became OPD customers. Developing a highly scalable, secure and cost effective on-demand technology platform is a challenge – it needs a synchronized effort comprising of an experienced technical team of architects, specialist domain experts, and senior experienced programmers, supported by intelligent testers. The ISVs and software-enabled businesses could barely achieve a good ROI or profitability if this team is to be maintained in-house. Therefore, they gradually started outsourcing these activities (development or re-engineering) to OPD companies. Instead these companies have started to focus on ideation, developing new product concepts and innovative marketing avenues to drive increased sales and stable profitability.

The importance of cost saving in outsourcing is decreasing – companies are increasingly considering outsourcing to find the best fitting specialists, who deliver what they really need. Therefore, cost is not anymore the ‘key driver’ – instead the availability of high skilled people, good work practices, user friendly graphical design, adequate project management, good client communication, mutual understanding and customer intimacy have become important factors.

On the other hand, OPD (outsourced Product Development) companies are trying various mechanisms to grow their operations through innovative practices, but acquiring new customers is not easy for the majority of the outsourcing players because now corporations are moving beyond technical capabilities and cost advantages, and have started looking at domain knowledge in a significant manner. Over the years the OPD players have gained substantial experience in outsourcing contracts and there has been an overall increase in skills and maturity which is making ISVs more comfortable to outsource complex development projects. Therefore, the OPD companies with sound technical skills, deep domain expertise and strong soft skills will survive this new paradigm shift in outsourcing; the rest will become part of history…..

As a pioneer in the OPD arena Rave has dealt with over 70 ISVs globally and has developed/re-engineered SaaS-based products and e-platforms in the recent past. We realize that software product engineering is complex and challenging when the engineering team operates in a distributed environment, as is the case in an outsourcing arrangement. Over the years we have identified best practices that build trust, bridge cultural and geographic divides, and enabling technologies which help us deploy the software effectively.

Globalization has shrunk boundaries, made connecting to people in different continents just a click or a call away and brought in its wake – Outsourcing! Organizations (reluctantly or willingly) saw huge savings and efficiencies in offloading ‘non critical’ work to locations with a larger skilled resource pool available at lower costs than their home countries.

“Outsourcing” is now a decade-old phenomenon. It has grown, evolved and become an integral of part of every organization’s strategy in one way or the other! Having worked in the industry myself for over a decade I thought it was a good time for all of us to look at the evolution of outsourcing – what it was, how it is today and how it might be in the near future! I am not talking about long monologues on outsourcing or debates on whether it has been good but a dialogue to find out how we all feel about outsourcing and view it for the future.

I have shared some of my thoughts in the table given below.

Outsourcing Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow..

I look forward to reading what you think!

Outsourcing Yesterday??
Outsourcing Today??
Outsourcing Tomorrow??

Requirements Elicitation, Analysis and Specification – How much is too much?
As a business Analyst we are often posed with this question from time to time. Not only are we expected to answer this at the estimation, proposal making and/or project planning stage, but also, several times during the lifecycle of the project.

So then the obvious thing that comes to mind is how does one define the scope of the Business Analysis process and perhaps more important – is it possible to define the scope of the Business Analysis process?

Some would suggest that it depends on your experience, technique, client, specification model and SDLC model and must be handled on a case-to-case basis. Sophisticated projects requires more time to be spent working on requirements, whereas typical maintenance projects require small or even no amount of BA efforts.

Given the usual project vs. estimates vs. delivery scenario, it becomes imperative to define a boundary around your requirements and consider ‘what’ all falls within that. It is ‘how’ we arrive at the ‘what’, that entreats us to discuss – how does one reach a conclusive, if not quantifiable answer to this question. Too much of analysis (like excess of all other things) does not come highly recommended, yet too little will not be enough; therefore one does need to draw a line somewhere. But the question remains, how and when does one do that?

1. Firstly, prioritize the deliverables to ensure a quick turnaround. One must keep in mind that the longer it takes to get something in the customer’s hands, the less valuable it is and the more risk there is of the BA spending time eliciting requirements that are low in importance or worse, no longer relevant by the time the product is delivered. Therefore, before deciding on the ‘how much effort to expend’, at a minimum one must define true project scope – what is it the customer really trying to accomplish, prioritize deliveries and deliver in phases if the end product will take a lot of time to develop. The customer’s most important business needs must be satisfied at the earliest, because if one cannot communicate that via the final product delivered to the customer, nothing else will matter; the project will either fall short of or go well beyond what is required.
2. Secondly, be practical in your approach.  In reality, there is never too much – it can always be better. And that is one of the problems with IT: we are always looking for the “Best” solution. Testers want the solution to be completely defect-free. Developers want elegant and clean code. Designers want beautiful, all-encompassing designs. Business analysts want requirements that cover each and every possibility. We hold ourselves accountable not to the business but to some abstract level of quality that defines excellence in computer systems, perhaps foisted upon us by the professors and academics in Computer Science curricula. This theoretical approach often creates more problems than it resolves. Cem Kaner, among others, advances the concept of “good enough” software for testers. Therefore one must be practical and look for a solution that works for the customer, can be delivered in the defined time frames, is cost effective and doesn’t compromise on quality. In the quest to find the ‘best solution’ one may end up going around the same problem, recursively, forever.
3. Thirdly, concentrate on resolving the current business problem. Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries and many others talk about writing only as much code and producing only enough design to cover the needs for today. If we extrapolate this concept to business analysis, then the answer to the question “how much is too much?” would be that we should develop (or at the least lay more stress on) requirements that solve the business problem(s) as of today, nothing less, and nothing more. If we focus on what’s needed and important today, the needs of the future become just that – future enhancements that only get delivered if the customer thinks they need them after seeing what you have originally delivered.

So there, we have it now – the list of the three most important things to consider during requirements analysis.

I’m sure that some veterans would argue that this perhaps, is a stingy approach to scoping of requirements – not looking at the big picture. My answer to that is -there is never a set ‘big picture’. The moment one thinks that we have got the big picture, it gets bigger. Here is the question: if we implement every one of the customer’s requirements for today, is the current business problem solved? If not, we need to do more. If so, stop for now. That perhaps is the most conclusive end to this discussion that I can think of – but contradictory opinions are certainly welcome!

We just conducted a poll on CMMi to find out if professionals within the technology industry perceived it as a marketing gimmick or if it really adds value for the company. The verdict: 45 % thought it was a marketing ploy where as 50% thought that it really helped in streamlining processes and 5% weren’t sure of either. The participants also had additional comments about the delivery process and marketing benefits.

Having gone through the poll results and the interesting discussions by the respondents, I thought of the three most important things that matter the most in a CMMi initiative:

1. Undertaking a CMMi initiative for a company is a strategic decision taken by the Top Management. This decision has to be a part of the over-all business strategy which touches all aspects of business like Customer, Delivery, Support, and Sales & Marketing. The CMMi initiative then becomes totally aligned with the entire organizational eco-system and not a separate project to be quickly delivered and forgotten.
2. This strategic decision should be clearly communicated to every level of the organization and each organizational unit should clearly understand what CMMi is? Why are we doing it & what is the value it is bringing to my unit and to me as an individual. The words “capability” & “maturity” are commonly used, but they are interpreted by each one of us based on our exposure and experience. It is extremely important for each unit in the organization to have a synchronous understanding of these terms or words. To gain a better perspective of this, there is a need to clearly document processes (what we are doing, how we are doing & who is doing!) and capture organizational experience along with it. After all, maturity is nothing but applying our past experiences to present situations.
3. CMMi is also a psychological change-it pulls a person out of his comfort zone and makes him ask questions / introspect about his performance via metrics. Processes and performance measured and validated by numerical evidence is like a mirror-‘it cannot lie’. Each unit in the organization should get attuned to evaluating its performance using metrics /numbers, improving and cross checking results to validate improvements. There is always a huge psychological bottleneck towards applying these processes but if there is a strong top management commitment and communication, the entire process becomes smooth and more meaningful.

The CMMi model was put together by the best brains in the world. If the experience of these processes is leveraged with a clear understanding, then I do not see why it should not give a business edge to the company. I am using the word “business” here & not “marketing”, because “marketing” is a subset of “business”. Business encompasses the Customer, Company Delivery & Operations as well as Sales & Marketing. The CMMi initiative sanitizes business processes and gives assurance to all stakeholders – external (Customers, Business Partners) that they will get a quality product or service as well as internal (Executive Management, Employees) that they have done the job well using optimum resources.

In my conversations with software engineers there is always a lot of curiosity about ‘Cloud Computing’?  There are number of questions lingering in their minds- Why is everyone talking about cloud computing? What is the buzz all about? Should we care about Cloud Computing? How does it benefit businesses?

I will try and answer these questions in this blog as I had similar questions and dilemma a year and half back.

To start with let’s think of scenarios where an organization would need to consider ‘Cloud Computing’. The following scenarios come to my mind!

Scenario -1 – There is a need to load-test an application with 10,000+ users on the portal and would like to gradually increase the load to know the breaking points of the system.

How would one test it? What kind of infrastructure would one really need to carry out the test? How much it is going to cost me? How long will it take to setup? If it takes too long for vendor selection, approvals set up and test then how can I deliver on schedule?

Scenario -2 – Storage Needs for On-Demand Training Platform of a company are increasing significantly day by day.  The storage requirements are already in Several Terabytes (TB) (1 TB = 1024 GB) and growing at the rate of 100 GB/month. There is a need to have scalable storage solution.

Scenario -3 – High end computing power is required e.g. 8 CORE processors with 32 GB RAM to run the CPU intensive calculations and it is estimated to have 20+ such servers to accommodate the desired throughput ? The project deadlines are tight and there is a need to act on this quickly.

In order to provide a solution for the above scenarios one has to look at the characteristics of the requirements. The characteristics can be summed up as:

• Significantly large number of servers required to generate load.
• Servers are required for limited period (for the duration of load testing) only.
• Ability for on-demand scale up is required.
• Scalable Storage is required to support growth of the business.
• A high end server configuration is required and the number of such servers required is also high.
• Project Deadlines are tight and need to speed up the entire process so as to get servers ASAP.
• The solution must be cost effective.

After deliberating on the above scenarios and requirements if I look into what ‘Cloud Computing’ has to offer, then it definitely looks promising! Let us look at some of these ’promises’

No Capital Expenditure
No need to buy servers upfront as one can rent it thus saving Capex.

Pay-Per-Use
No need to pay for ‘idle’ resources. Cloud Computing makes billing transparent and is based on the pay-per-use model. So if server instances are running then only one has to pay. Once the usage is over one can simply ‘switch –off’ the server like electricity. This again adds to cost-effectiveness.

Ready to Go Server Instances
No need to format the servers. No need to install operating system and respective Service Packs. No need to install SQL Servers. One can choose the server instance based on configuration required at the click of a button. Cloud Service Providers such as ‘Amazon’ provides quite a few ready made instances known as ‘Amazon Machine Image’(AMI). This provides significant gain for provisioning servers. The provisioning time is not in days but in minutes. You could try it yourself!

On –Demand Scalable Model
Cloud Computing provides an ability to kick-start given number of server instances at a click of a button. This is as simple as ordering a ‘pizza’ and specifying ‘quantity’ in the quantity box.

Focus on Service Level Agreement
With cloud computing one need not worry about providing and managing infrastructure services but can focus on Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Cloud Service Providers. E.g. 99.99% Availability is now provided by Cloud Service Provider.

No Trained Staff Required
No more professionally trained IT staff to manage the servers and installing and configuring it. Thus one can certainly save on the costs associated with IT staff.

Go Green – Saving on Electricity
As the servers are in the cloud one need not worry about providing electricity usage as it is completely managed by cloud service provider. In addition to this it provides savings in electricity cost to you.

Reduced Real Estate
One need not worry about managing the real estate for keeping servers and associated infrastructure; as again these are managed by Cloud Service Providers.

It is hard to ignore the ‘cloud computing’ offering as it meets the various requirements and more importantly it is more cost effective as compared to traditional process of getting quotes from vendors, selection of vendors, approval, set up and testing of the infrastructure.

If I were to summarize the reasons or mantra for Cloud Computing then it would be ’ Simplicity, Agility and Reduced Total Cost of Ownership’.

When we go to a Supermarket to purchase things we want, we do get impressed with the décor and ambience. We see the goods displayed in a neat orderly manner.  Every section is logically arranged for a customer to get easy access to whatever he / she wants.. What if the goods are just displayed on shelves and you had to struggle to search the items? You will prefer not to go to that place again or just walk out of it as soon as possible in spite of the décor and the ambience. That is exactly the case of a website visitor, he visits the website with the intention of getting information he is looking for…

Information Architecture (IA) simplifies this task on an online platform. IA is one of the key elements of Usability, which defines how information can be organized in a logical way. In order for your website or application to be successful, user should be able to locate the information he or she wants without the help of a sitemap. Site map in case of a website works like a customer-assistant in a super market, who helps you navigate.

Information architect for a website is like what an architect is for a building. How does the architectural plan help in constructing a building? If the architecture is accurate, the construction team does not have to worry about the design. Similarly, in case of a website or application or for that matter any communication product, the ‘organization of information’ plays an important role. It is only when you figure out what all information needs to be put in, how it can be categorized, how users will be able to find it, you can think about the other design aspects.

But how is IA prepared? There are two different approaches i.e. ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In ‘Top-down’ approach, we understand broad level strategies and design the high level architecture. In ‘Bottom-up’ approach, we understand the contents in details and their relationship with each other in order to satisfy specific user requirements. To elaborate it further, we will continue with our example of a super market. In a super market, one can categorize products as ‘apparels’, ‘electronics’, ‘cosmetics’, etc. That is same as a ‘top-down’ approach. But when a customer would buy an expensive dress, she might be interested in finding jewelry or makeup elements to match the new dress she just bought. Online shopping websites like Amazon, eBay take such user requirements into consideration. When a user sees a particular item details, he/she gets a list of the suggested items depending on the current item the user is viewing. That is a ‘bottom-up’ approach. So by following both these approaches one can achieve user as well as business goals.

Also, there are different tools like ‘Affinity Diagrams’ and ‘Card sorting’ to develop the IA. But one needs to spare sufficient time understanding the logical relationships within the different terms or sections.

In most of the projects, clients try to skip the IA usability activity due to time and money constraints. In order to save efforts, team is expected to produce the layout options immediately after understanding the functional requirements. It is important to understand that it is the information architecture which decides the layout and not vice versa. This evolving field of IA is not given much importance in many of the projects in India. But one needs to understand its importance and need for the success of a website.

Thinking back into the dark ages of software development, I can remember when I first read about “non-functional requirements.” The term threw me off balance – “If it’s non-functional, why do I care about it?” A couple of reference books clarified this for me, but the term has always seemed an odd one to me. I prefer to think of non-functional requirements as “constraints” we put on the system. When a product owner says “this system must perform adequately with 100,000 concurrent users” the product owner is putting a constraint on the development team. The product owner is effectively saying, “Develop this software any way you’d like as long as you achieve 100,000 concurrent users.” Each constraint we put on a system narrows the design choices a bit; calling these “constraints” rather than “non-functional requirements” helps us remember this.

In systems engineering and requirements engineering, a non-functional requirement is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviors. These are in contrast with functional requirements that define specific behavior or functions. In general, functional requirements define what a system is supposed to do whereas non-functional requirements define how a system is supposed to be. Non-functional requirements are often called qualities of a system.

Qualities, that is, non-functional requirements, can be divided into two main categories:

• Execution qualities, such as security and usability, which are observable at run time.
• Development-time Qualities, such as testability, maintainability, extensibility and scalability, which are embodied in the static structure of the software system.

These could be elaborated further as

• Availability: A system’s availability, or “uptime,” is the amount of time that it is operational and available for use. This is specified because some systems are designed with expected downtime for activities like database upgrades and backups.
• Efficiency: Specifies how well the software utilizes scarce resources: CPU cycles, disk space, memory, bandwidth, etc.
• Flexibility: If the organization intends to increase or extend the functionality of the software after it is deployed, that should be planned from the beginning; it influences choices made during the design, development, testing, and deployment of the system.
• Portability: Portability specifies the ease with which the software can be installed on all necessary platforms, and the platforms on which it is expected to run.
• Integrity: Integrity requirements define the security attributes of the system, restricting access to features or data to certain users and protecting the privacy of data entered into the software.
• Performance: The performance constraints specify the timing characteristics of the software. Certain tasks or features are more time-sensitive than others; the nonfunctional requirements should identify those software functions that have constraints on their performance.
• Reliability: Reliability specifies the capability of the software to maintain its performance over time. Unreliable software fails frequently, and certain tasks are more sensitive to failure (for example, because they cannot be restarted, or because they must be run at a certain time).
• Reusability: Many systems are developed with the ability to leverage common components across multiple products. Reusability indicates the extent to which software components should be designed in such a way that they can be used in applications other than the ones for which they were initially developed.
• Robustness: A robust system is able to handle error conditions gracefully, without failure. This includes a tolerance of invalid data, software defects, and unexpected operating conditions.
• Scalability: Software that is scalable has the ability to handle a wide variety of system configuration sizes. The nonfunctional requirements should specify the ways in which the system may be expected to scale up (by increasing hardware capacity, adding machines, etc.).
• Usability: Ease-of-use requirements address the factors that constitute the capacity of the software to be understood, learned, and used by its intended users.

Here is a list of questions which could further help in understanding them well:

• User Interface and Human Factors
  • What type of user will be using the system?
  • Will more than one type of user be using the system?
  • What sort of training will be required for each type of user?
  • Is it particularly important that the system be easy to learn?
  • Is it particularly important that users be protected from making errors?
  • What sort of input/output devices for the human interface are available and what are their characteristics?
• Documentation
  • What kind of documentation is required?
  • What audience is to be addressed by each document?

• Hardware Considerations
  • What hardware is the proposed system to be used on?
  • What are the characteristics of the target hardware, including memory size and auxiliary storage space?
• Performance Characteristics
  • Are there any speed, throughput, or response time constraints on the system?
  • Are there size or capacity constraints on the data to be processed by the system?

• Error Handling and Extreme Conditions
  • How should the system respond to input errors?
  • How should the system respond to extreme conditions?
• System Interfacing
  • Is input coming from systems outside the proposed system?
  • Is output going to systems outside the proposed system?
  • Are there restrictions on the format or medium that must be used for input or output?

• Quality Issues
  • What are the requirements for reliability?
  • Must the system trap faults?
  • Is there a maximum acceptable time for restarting the system after a failure?
  • What is the acceptable system downtime per 24-hour period?
  • Is it important that the system be portable (able to move to different hardware or operating system environments)?
• System Modifications
  • What parts of the system are likely candidates for later modification?
  • What sorts of modifications are expected?

• Physical Environment
  • Where will the target equipment operate?
  • Will the target equipment be in one or several locations?
  • Will the environmental conditions in any way be out of the ordinary (for example, unusual temperatures, vibration, and magnetic fields)?
• Security Issues
  • Must access to any data or the system itself be controlled?
  • Is physical security an issue?
• Resources and Management Issues
  • How often will the system be backed up?
  • Who will be responsible for the back up?
  • Who is responsible for system installation?
  • Who will be responsible for system maintenance?

The RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) e-platform is a result of months of collaborative work and is a perfect example of ‘Multisite Agile’.  The RSC and Rave Technologies association started in April 2009 when RSC Publishing decided to partner with Rave in the development of a powerful new content delivery platform that would house RCS Publishing’s 165 years of scientific knowledge. It was a huge assignment but also a fantastic opportunity for Rave to be part of an industry success story.

In the face of growing competition RSC Publishing wanted to expand their market reach by addressing the needs of a wider section of users and keep up pace with product enhancements. There was a need to revamp the existing content delivery system, re-looking at the search capability and usability of the system. Being an on-demand software, performance improvement, availability, scalability and accessibility, had to be given due consideration and new requirements like access to social networking websites and customer-branding for libraries or institutions needed implementation. Above all, these changes had to be implemented in the ‘shortest possible time-frame’.

The RSC Development team comprised of Business Analysts, Usability and Accessibility Experts; Graphic Designers and Technical Architects along with .Net Developers, Mark Logic Developers and Testers. Considering the time-constraints and evolving requirements needed from the entire team with continuous customer collaboration, the e-platform was developed using the ‘Agile’ development approach. This was in itself an achievement since the teams were based both in India and UK but the team’s experience and expertise in Agile ensured smooth sailing. There were regular interactions between the Rave team and RSC resulting in quick resolving of queries and issues as well as complying with the project deadlines.

The project kicked off with user-studies and interviews conducted by Rave’s usability expert with the scientific community and universities in a number of countries to address and understand the customer needs, and expectations. Based on these inputs, various mechanisms were implemented to improve the usability of the software. It was decided that the platform would be developed using SOA, to enable it to meet any future challenges of flexibility and scalability.

We used the Mark Logic server at the centre of the application as the content repository. The server’s capability of aggregating various types of content existing in different systems to create a single and integrated content repository provided the user with a dynamic and searchable platform. Rave leveraged Mark Logic’s powerful search engine to develop a quick and accurate search capability. For improved user experience and ease of use ‘Tag Clouds’ have been made available on key pages like “Home Page” to display the latest content and search results page for ‘Most Searched Keywords’.

This on-demand software has addressed the non-functional demands of high throughput, performance, scalability, multi-browser and multi-OS support availability, and accessibility features. It offers a seamless interface to the third party systems such as eRights, Shibboleth, Chemspider etc.

Rave has used third-party mail management software and Mark Logic’s RSS support for developing automated notifications capability in the form of e-alerts and RSS feeds. These notifications are sent to the customers whenever changes are made to the content. The e-alerts are delivered through various channels like emails, mobile etc. Users can now use social bookmarking links to post articles on social- networking sites such as Connotea, Delicious, Facebook, etc.

Though the current platform is in beta, it has provided a functionally rich platform to RSC with an ability to accommodate innovative commercial models around content delivery. It has also increased traffic to the new platform due to a clean and easy to use User Interface. The platform now has the ability to be extremely responsive to User comments and feedback!

The RSC Publishing e-Platform will be on demo at the Rave event booth and you can also hear David Leeming from RSC talk about how this e-platform is changing the game for RSC – all at the Mark Logic Conference tomorrow!

So stay tuned in, and have a great week!



Early in March RSC Publishing (Royal Society of Chemistry) announced the release of its new content delivery platform, ‘RSC Publishing beta’ developed in partnership with Rave. Released as beta, this product is undoubtedly one of the finest platforms in the ‘STM publishing’ industry. It was a combined victory for users, technology, agile methodology, collaborative team work and of course, sustained commitment and support from RSC – it also showcased Rave’s domain expertise and technology prowess in the STM Publishing industry!

In May Rave would be showcasing the RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) Content Delivery Platform at the Mark Logic User Conference 2010 being held from May 4-6, 2010 at the InterContinental Hotel in beautiful San Francisco. The powerful e-platform supports multiple content types and acts as a web window for publishing the wealth of RSC knowledgebase to the whole world (165 years of research!). The platform is powered by the MarkLogic server 4.1 which provides seamless content integration and alert capabilities helping RSC to be extremely responsive to its customers. We are one of the Silver Sponsors and are Exhibiting at the event. Our team at the event is Hemant Gandhi (VP – Sales (US)) and Prashant Lele (Director – Sales (UK)).

The Mark Logic User Conference is an annual gathering of Mark Logic customers and partners, and has earned an industry wide reputation for showcasing award – wining information applications. Mark Logic is a leading provider of information infrastructure software serving publishing, media, government, financial services and other industries. The MarkLogic Server is an XML Server that provides the agility to build and deploy next-generation information applications. The conference is designed for companies that want to maximize their investment in MarkLogic products and learn about the rising trend toward information applications.

Rave has been servicing clientele from the STM publishing vertical for over a decade and there is a strategic focus at Rave to develop software and applications for addressing the needs of the STM publishing community. Rave’s expertise is geared towards partnering with clients to address the new market trends and technology challenges. This focus has culminated into an organizational initiative to build a vertical practice for STM publishing.

We are excited and looking forward to the event. In the coming days we will share with you the ‘secret’ behind what makes the RSC e-platform ‘one of its kinds’, and shall keep you posted about the developments from San Francisco!

If you want to meet us at the event look out for RAVE TECHNOLOGIES at the exhibiting centre or send us a request on http://bit.ly/cIiNqa.