subject: Finding The Right Enterprise Application Management Provider [print this page] In today's world, many businesses are outsourcing their enterprise application management to a single company who can provide solutions for all of the business's IT challenges. These solutions include not only their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and related software, but all applications that are deployed enterprise-wide, including e-mail.
Deploying business applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and other industry applications is complex and time-consuming. Managing them is even more challenging. Recent studies have shown that most IT organizations are very good at deploying and maintaining infrastructure, yet they are still struggling to effectively deploy and manage the business services and applications supported by that infrastructure.
Outsourcing enterprise application management can enable IT organizations to standardize processes, gain real-time insight, accelerate time-to-market, increase returns and reduce their application lifecycle costs.
Let's look at some of the features that are driving more and more small and mid-size businesses to outsource their enterprise application management:
Application Administration
An application administration team is dedicated to implementing and maintaining applications in a configuration optimized to meet each customer's specific needs. These applications include user accounts, output devices, database interaction, batch jobs, patches and customizations. To ensure optimal system performance and availability, the application administrators work closely with the database and operating system administrators to proactively monitor and tune each system.
Database Administration
Database administration services are designed to ensure data availability and security. At the same time, they should focus on maintaining data integrity and optimal system performance. Successful data backups, along with regular restore and recovery testing, are one of the highest priorities. Proactive and perpetual system monitoring and tuning ensures customers' systems are highly available.
Operating System Administration
An operating systems administration group provides support for server infrastructure and operating systems. Services include systems design, hardware installation, upgrades and patch management, systems configuration, performance monitoring and tuning, security design and monitoring, and daily administration.
Application Functional Support
To maximize the productivity of users, application functional support provides full-time support and training services to customers. These services include diagnosing and resolving functional problems, acting as the customer liaison with software vendors for problem resolution, conducting functional training for customers' new employees, developing and managing training materials, and performing short-term projects at customer sites.
Application Development
Application modification or customization is often necessary. Although it is always advisable to keep as close to packaged code as possible, the enterprise application management provider should be highly skilled in application development. If changes must be made, they should be able to design the solution to be as portable as possible to aid future migrations. The solutions can be personalizations, such as screen changes or new/modified reports; customizations, such as new sessions and functionality; or integration of 3rd party packages. Necessary skills range from needs assessment, design, code development and testing, to troubleshooting and issue resolution of other provider's code.
Finding an enterprise application management provider that offers all of these services helps to ensure a smooth flow of integration, implementation and processes. As organizations become more multi-functional and multi-structured, their enterprise application management provider will play a critical role. Make sure you choose a company that offers superior services with the flexibility to meet your needs. Your IT environment is critical to your company, and should be ensured to a reliable provider.
