Application Maintenance Outsourcing

Organizations have built huge stacks of applications to enable and support different business functions and needs. These applications were built over the years and usually involved multiple software and hardware technology platforms. As a result, a large amount of precious organizational time, money and energy resources (>60%) is locked up in support and maintaining these applications. In many cases, there is no compelling business value for performing such activities within and at such great costs. Outsourcing the maintenance and support tasks may be the way to realize advantages. It is very important that this process is done in a manner that enables organizations to realize value and cost savings that could be utilized to fulfill other strategic initiatives.

Hastraa’s methodology helps IS organizations to cut flab and cost by way of taking over of non-core activities like application maintenance & support, rationalizing support delivery framework, deploying structured support models and processes resulting in higher levels of support, better quality, and at lower cost.

Initially, the focus of maintenance efforts will be directed towards knowledge acquisition, transition management, correcting and fixing existing bugs and pending issues. As time progress and situation stabilize, we will leverage the knowledge gained to perform the same chores with lot lesser effort and

utilize the balance time to establish pro-active measures to move up the maintenance chain.

Our transition model is independent of any tool and technology and provides a smooth and seamless transition of the application and the associated responsibilities from the client.

Our services include:

•	Portfolio Assessment
•	Offshorability Analysis
•	Application Maintenance
	•	Helpdesk support including 24 x 7
	•	Advanced technical support
	•	Enhancements and Process changes

Portfolio Assessment
We survey the current IT scenario in the context of organizational priorities and strategies and then identify applications that can be maintained, enhanced, re-engineered, consolidated, or retired from a business value perspective. As part of the rationalization exercise, we will also explore support tasks that can be offshored without comprising on current service levels. We will collaboratively work with the key stakeholders and the business users in identifying opportunities to improve efficiencies.

Offshorability Analysis
Outsourcing helps organizations helps realize substantial cost savings from areas which are non-strategic and whose business value to retain in-house is not compelling enough. But it also impacts the organizations as well, transforming the way they do business, changing the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders and the manner in which they receive and respond to service delivery.

Offshoring is the next level in the outsourcing evolution and results in greater benefits but requiring higher level of organizational readiness. In many ways, going offshore is a strategic decision requiring consent from top management. Our Offshorability analysis service will help organizations make this all-important decision fact-driven. We will assess your current readiness to offshore, impact on business over short-term and long-term, identify ‘right’ pilot applications, test out models and systems, evaluate risks and mitigation plans, define service metrics and service delivery framework, and more importantly, additional cost savings from the move.

Application Maintenance
We will assume full responsibility of maintaining IT applications and ownership of knowledge whereby the client is relieved of responsibilities of maintaining and enhancing applications. We can provide corrective maintenance and bug fixing arising out of the production systems with 24X7 availability. This service can be provided onsite as well as offshore.

We can provide application enhancement services including process changes, re-engineering/add/enhancing features and functionality to existing application and report development. Our robust transition management methodology will ensure seamless transfer of knowledge from client to our team and further to new additions.

As part of this offering, we perform the following activities;

•	Conduct pro-active health checks to identify potential issues and advise /take action
•	Identify areas of application/process improvement and work collaboratively with key stakeholders and business users to implement them
•	Resolve reported issues depending on the priority of the problem and agreed SLAs
•	Provide off-hours support to resolve high-priority problems Deployment of software on completion of testing
•	Maintain an up to date operational knowledge base with all known issues and their resolutions

Benefits to Customers
Hastraa has well-defined methodologies, processes and dashboards to collect, analyze, and report service metrics. The Dashboards contains the relevant metrics that enable Hastraa and its customers to do a metrics-driven analysis of the engagement.

The benefits that Hastraa can bring to customers include:

•	Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
•	Y-o-y savings as a result of implementation of best practices, process improvements and establishing relative stability of application portfolio
•	Ability to manage sudden surge and falls in support requirements
•	Robust transition model, that is platform-independent
•	Higher quality and efficiency of service
•	Complete ownership of knowledge management
•	Process and Metric-driven support instead of person-driven