Production Support and Maintenance

The business landscape is changing rapidly and so is the technology that drives enterprises. Your applications - whether it belongs to retail, financial, healthcare or manufacturing - must quickly evolve to keep pace with changing business needs as well as shifts in technology. In addition, as your business grows, the demands on existing applications will increase, and you must ensure that they are stable and available when your customers need them.

Industry analysts say that 70 to 80% of IT budget is being spent every year on maintaining legacy systems. In the backdrop of current economic conditions, trimming down on the maintenance cost without compromising on the quality is becoming vital to save budget for new developments. Billions line of codes in hundreds of languages, as per the analysts, become part of inventory portfolio of commercial IT systems. Of these COBOL in many variations, is leading the list followed by PL/I etc. The immediate requirement of reducing on the maintenance cost is vital for IT departments.

Maple's Production Support and Maintenance Practice

Maples ESM Technologies is focused on Enterprise Application Services. With strong expertise in Mainframe Technology area and understanding of application maintenance life cycle, Maples' is well positioned to offer maintenance services to customers. Particularly we specialize in skills such as

• CICS, DB2 and enterprise COBOL.
• IMS DB/DC and PL/I
• Assembler

Maples application maintenance and enhancement solution broadly include:

• Quick turnaround of service and change requests
• Planned and phased enhancements to improve performance of applications
• Helpdesk and production support for problem and incident management

All of these are tied to mutually agreed upon Service Level Agreements with our customers.
Our well defined methodology supports the production support and maintenance of applications through a phased approach. Setup Phase, Steady state phase clearly identify the activities that will be performed in order to meet the objectives with high transparency and predictability.

Setup Phase

This phase comprises of initiation, acquisition, offshore simulation and transition stages. This set up phase helps to understand the maintenance project requirements by way of knowledge transfer, agree on initial SLAs, set up offshore processes, establish infrastructure and environment and simulate the entire maintenance process. This is expected to take two to three months based on the complexities of the applications and the process involved.

Steady State Phase

Once the set up phase is successfully completed, the assignment enters into Steady state stage. In the steady state typically the following services are handled: On-call support for production problems, routine maintenance including bug fixes, changes required to keep the application running, enhancements to business functions, service requests, user clarifications and system optimization.

The customer's machine where the application is running can be connected by a secured link to the development center of Maples at Chennai. The consultants at Maples will develop/enhance the required application to the client specifications. As the code and data remain on the client machine a great level of control and security is maintained on the system components

Application maintenance service is particularly suitable for large application requiring maintenance on a long term, continual basis. Maples has the ability to undertake and execute such a large scale projects in the IBM mainframe technology area, using an extremely cost and time optimized on-shore / on-site - off shore development and delivery model. Productivity on such a long term project is expected to steadily gain and will be to customers advantage.

Maples can leverage it's in country expertise and project management skills and use it's off shore team to provide customers a highly attractive alternative to its in house development efforts

Maples' talented pool of technologists have implemented software solutions in multiple verticals including,

• Financial
• Pharmaceutical
• Healthcare
• Retail
• Insurance

Technology

We deliver highly transactional and scalable end-to-end global enterprise solutions, through a well-defined process, which includes requirements analysis gathering, architectural design, development, testing, implementation, and maintenance of the solution.

Our technology focus area on IBM mainframe includes :

• CICS, DB2 and Enterprise COBOL.
• IMS DB/DC and PL/I
• Assembler

Maples has invested in world class infrastructure on Mainframe to enable development and deployment of solutions to our customers. We have IBM S/390, Z/890 with Z/OS, OS/390, MVS and range of s/w and utilities supplied by IBM. We have 2 * 2 MBPS high-speed link and ISDN Dial-up link to connect to our customer facility.

Our mission is to provide cost effective and high quality services and solutions to organizations in the Enterprise space. We operate as virtual extensions to our customer teams and this helps us to better meet our customer's business goals.