Today’s information technology world is fast moving and becoming ever more complex. Companies of all sizes and sectors are experiencing difficulties sourcing development resources that are skilled in leading edge technologies.

There is a chronic worldwide shortage of experienced, reliable, self-motivated people. Outsourcing specific projects allows companies to leverage the knowledge of others and leave in-house staff to concentrate on the company’s unique requirements and needs.

Our team in Australia represents a risk free solution. We have worked with large companies around the world on many projects both on and off site. We offer high quality development skills coupled with fewer overheads than could be achieved through almost any in-house development effort.

We offer

• Highly self motivated developers with a strong base of leading edge, technical knowledge.
• Development skills derived from technically leading within large international projects.
• Strong leadership and project management skills gained from mission critical, high profile IT systems.
• Experience with large technology companies, financial organizations, and top-five consulting firms.

How we would work together

Past experiences show that the best and most productive way to approach offsite development projects is to gain a detailed knowledge of the project scope and final deliverables. Usually this involves on-site visits and meetings to discuss design approaches and environment concerns. Subsequently email, fax and telephone conversations are sufficient for further communications. The time difference in Australia also offers clients in the USA an extended working day, so that a problem can continue to be worked on after normal US business hours.

After platforms and tools are appraised and selected, a proof of concept, prototype or skeleton application is developed. This application is the candidate for a trial integration phase that irons out environment issues.

Once this stage is reached full development can proceed. Test harnesses and fake interfaces are developed that not only help the overall development process but also contribute significantly to final testing and additional development phases.

Upon completion of development a short on-site visit is required for final integration, knowledge transfer and project post-mortem analysis.
 

Selected Projects

Hewlett-Packard ecardfile.com, based in Cupertino, California.

The eServices division of Hewlett-Packard undertook an initiative to create a global business eService. This service, ecardfile.com, provides a business contact service for a global audience. After the system went live, development started on an intranet corporate version that could be configured to customer needs with the ability to link existing corporate directories with the external ecardfile.com site. deFacto Software Australia continues to provide development resources and strategic technical direction for this product.

deFacto proposed the infrastructure required, designed the core application data model and application logic. The development team consisted of developers, testers and technical writers from multiple countries. deFacto put in place project management systems and controls to manage the developers and testers who were located in Australia, India, New Zealand and the US.

The ecardfile.com web site features a high availability and high performance configuration with a web server farm and CISCO load director accessing a large database server with warm-failover capabilities. An alpha quality WAP/WML version of this site was also developed. The corporate Intranet version utilizes XSLT, JSPs and Java beans to access multiple data sources such as LDAP directories and legacy databases. Its system database can be Oracle, SQLServer or Informix and the platform can be HP-UX, Linux or Microsoft NT. An administration module is provided to completely customize a solution for a variety of scenarios. Recently, support for a standalone version for the HP iPAQ Pocket PC has been developed enabling 200,000 contact details to be accessed via this small footprint device.

IZEX Technologies netrehab.com, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

IZEX Technologies was a US based startup that created a distance rehabilitation solution called NetRehab. This innovative service delivered physical therapy through remote monitoring of rehabilitation progress.

IZEX had developed a ‘smart’ brace and connected handheld monitoring device. What they lacked was a system that could enable the device to communicate its collected measurements to a central system so that medical professionals could examine a patients progress and adjust the patients rehabilitation routine without the requirement of a physical visit.

deFacto put together a development team and, together with IZEX engineering staff, created a system that collected the handheld’s data, then collated and presented the data in graphical format to suitably authorised users. An application was also developed that enabled the therapist to create and adjust exercise regimens for a patient to download to their handheld.

AT&T Wireless Services, based in Redmond, Washington.

AT&T Wireless has an existing Intranet system (SPIDRWeb) that enables telemarketing personnel to be automatically put through to an incoming call, prompted to run through sales scripts, make real-time credit checks and place orders for long distance and cellular phone offers.

This contract involved analysis of the current application and suggestions for improving the performance and capacity of the system. Replacement of a proprietary layer with a standard based data access system (JDBC) was suggested, designed and implemented in 1998.

The following work was completed for AT&T offshore. The deFacto team designed and implemented a screen engine that took XML panel definition files and rendered Java Swing panels for a heavy Java client version of the original SPIDRWeb browser based client.
 

Petroconsultants SA, Geneva, Switzerland (owned by the American IHS Group).

Petroconsultants provides information to the worldwide energy sector. Reports and data are distributed on a weekly basis. The company wished to distribute this information in a timelier manner over the web. As some subscriptions cost in excess of one million Swiss francs, tight security and swift responses were essential.

We were contracted to design and implement a security access and control system to the company's web site. The final system, which went live in March 1998, provided access, subscription rights, license time-outs and simultaneous access privileges.

The system architecture consisted of a multi-threaded Java servlet (invoked from a Lotus Domino web server) accessing an Oracle RDBMS over JDBC. To handle the problems of restricted concurrent access, the servlet communicated with a Java daemon utilizing RMI.

Core development was done in Australia on an Apache/Linux server and then integrated on site in Geneva to the target Domino/Solaris platform.
  References for all these projects available on request.

Contact Us

deFacto Software Australia Pty Ltd
3a Jacques St, Balmain
NSW 2041
Phone: +61 2 9810 7444
Email: info@defacto.com.au