Bringing a New Level of Service to IT Consulting

Disparity—Defined as “a difference, an inequality, a gap or an inconsistency”.  Certainly not words a world-class data center wants associated with its Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products and tools.  It is easy to remember how you ended up in this situation.  It was that recent merger or acquisition, the proprietary customer that has not changed over yet, the sudden expansion of the data center boundaries.  Regardless of how it happened, you’re looking for a plan to move toward a more centralized environment.

Eliminating autonomous operational tools and products will drive your operational costs down, help to eliminate errors with defined and standard practices across the organization,  and improve processes across the centralized area.  Our COTS Migration Service is designed to facilitate migration, consolidation and conversion activities with the lowest possible risk.

The Experience of ProTech

Four key elements play a defining role in Information Technology (IT) COTS product transitions.  Failure to understand the impact of these elements and lack of a documented plan to support each component are the primary obstacles to a successful migration.

Defining the Existing Environment — The scope and depth of the IT environment is extensive and far-reaching.  From administration to technology platforms, from security definitions to workload management, from resource availability to service relationships maintaining a full and complete understanding of all the elements that make up any IT control environment is a dauntless challenge.

Defining Transition Conflicts — Each IT transition is unique.  Internally developed and/or customized interfaces present unique challenges during a migration.  Many software products often conflict or do not support the transition model.  Business applications and their interfaces to customized COTS processes must be defined.

Defining the Business Requirements —It is important to define the particular business requirements of the COTS conversion.  Often infrastructure demands, or product support issues are the sole basis for the migration - addressing these issues would show  ROI.  Each business function that interfaces with the COTS solutions must be advised and trained on the new solution.  Each business dependency or driver associated with the migrating product must be understood, in detail.

Define The End State Target Model — Finally, it can be extremely difficult to ascertain the actual end result of a COTS product conversion.  What will the final architecture look like?  Will  the products function differently?  How will this impact my operations?  What changes will be required outside the control environment?  Who will need training, and to what curricula?  What customization or options does the new solution offer for improving operations?

ProTech Migration Methodology—Unraveling the Mystery

The ProTech Migration Methodology is focused on eliminating  the “unknowns” associated with conversions.  ProTech Migration Services provides the tools and comprehensive knowledge to mitigate the risk and ease the fears of conversion.

Component Level Analysis of the Existing Production Control Environment—ProTech has long been a leader in analyzing and optimizing control environments.  This experience and knowledge plays an integral part in the migration process.  The analysis tools used by ProTech provide detailed, component level integration.  All components of the control environment are analyzed, and placed into a relational database.  The information is then presented using functional queries that provide a complete picture.

Identification of Conversion Conflicts— Identifying the problems before they occur is one of the major benefits of the ProTech Migration Methodology.  Based upon the source and target product platforms, conflict queries are applied to the analysis database to identify conversion conflicts.  These queries identify the components that are affected by the conflict, and provide insight into the scope of the problem.

Simulate the End-State Architecture—Using the analysis data, model queries simulate what the end-state architecture will look like.  Everything from naming standards, to definition translation, to logical groupings are simulated. Where conversion conflicts exist, models are used to demonstrate the results of various solutions and scenarios, allowing the client to determine the best solution for their environment prior to implementation.

ProTech product specialists can install, customize, implement, convert from or to, and provide training for, most off-the-shelf program products, including:

Copyright © 2007 ProTech

Legal Notice | Privacy Policy