As an IT manager you may have been confronted with the requirement to organize the development of a web-based information system.

Given the multitude of today’s web technologies and the variety of possibilities to “glue” them together into a coherent overall system, the task of managing web application development is a challenge even in the case that you have an in-house development team that possesses the necessary skills and extensive know-how on the particular technologies.

As long as your chief of development/system architect does not have some kind of “model” or “architecture” that combines all these technicalities with business logic in an reasonable way, you will have to deal with increasing costs and longer time-to-market because of redundant source code, rigid implementations, non-intuitive scattering of logic over various source code segments, poor modularization, etc.

On the other hand, you may face the case of having an in-house development team that does not possess sufficient expertise on web technologies in order to successfully execute the project, but that has excellent understanding of the business logic and the needs of the application domain.

Your decision would probably be in the first case either to trust your architect and execute the project with your in-house team or to strengthen your team with some external consultancy in order to ensure correct architectural decisions.

In the second case you would probably either directly outsource the project or get extensive external consultancy in order to perform the project in-house with a mixed team of externals and internals.

ULTRA4 proposes a better decision in either cases:

You purchase a development platform that provides you with a standardized source code architecture - that has been proven to be optimal for web applications in a multitude of real-world projects - and a core software infrastructure that offers out-of-the-box all the basic software components you need in order to build a modern web application regardless of whether your developers are familiar with web-related technologies or not.

Together with the development platform you get limited external consultancy at your premises (1-2 consultants) that aims to educate and supervise your development team in using the development platform within the particular project. In order to maximize the efficiency of the supervision, the consultancy implements also parts of the application.

The consultancy ends up with the transfer of the complete know-how on the source code of the development platform to the team. Also the methodology on how to extend the source code of the development platform is transferred to the team.

After the end of the particular project you can optionally purchase an inexpensive maintenance contract with the provider of the development platform that offers advice of your team on any question might arise and all the new releases of the development platform for free.

In this way, you ensure the success of your projects in both cases. In the second case you additionally take full advantage of the strengths of your in-house development team (i.e. their experience in the business domain) and end up with an infrastructure that will be reused also in future projects (which would not be the case if you had outsourced the project).

And all this without any lock-in effect, since you possess the source code of the development platform and the know-how to extend it!

That’s the way we go: With UltraCore™ we provide you with a unique development platform that can fulfill the scenario described above in the best possible way and optimize your development of Business Web Applications (c.f. UltraCore™ success stories).