Symphony Services

Product Development Engineering



Faster time to market and more new features per release. You should expect and we deliver equal productivity to your own team. This isn't about staff aug, it's about picking the right partner.

Symphony Services is helping clients create the next generation of software offerings. We can support the entire continuum of new product development activities, providing complete turnkey services, or handling individual segments of the process. Symphony works as a seamless extension of on-shore client teams; therefore, we adapt development processes used by the client to the offshore environment. Symphony employees work with a variety of development and test environments, utilizing a large spectrum of tools and technologies.

New Product Development

Symphony's team of highly skilled software architects and engineers can take a Product Requirements Document and develop the complete product. Across development centers for our clients, we use a variety of development processes and are very conversant with Agile, Iterative and Waterfall development methodologies. Symphony prides itself on always adding value through our deep technical expertise. The following table provides a brief illustrative description of our experience and abilities in these technology areas:

Analytics R&D


Clients





Symphony has built many of the underlying analytics engines for many analytics-centric software companies, including Siebel, Hyperion, Manugistics, VerticalNet and IRI. Symphony has an unmatched combination of analytics skills, intellectual property and the proven ability to scale to meet any challenge. Symphony's analytics experts can help you add integrated advanced reporting features and develop new advanced predictive analytic algorithms to provide new capabilities to customers and increase product differentiation.

We also offer specialized data analysis and decision support capabilities to provide you with white label professional services at world-class standards of quality and responsiveness.

User Experience


At the Symphony Services User Interaction Design Lab, creativity and technical skill integrate to deliver good ideas effectively, present information with clarity and precision, achieve synergy in terms of branding, and ensure that the end product translates the requirement brief in a superlative manner.

Capabilities

User Interface Engineering

  • Information architecture
  • Task analysis
  • Paper prototyping
  • UI design/development
  • Design style guides
  • Internet/intranet solutions

Usability Engineering

  • Personal development
  • Heuristic evaluation
  • Competitive analysis
  • Findings and recommendations

Each design project starts with extensive groundwork - understanding the objectives of the communication, understanding the product or service, analyzing current audience perceptions and behavior, researching new trends, and discovering how best to maximize product potential and impact.

We focus on creating contemporary design that is simple, flexible, and usable. Our design solutions cater to different media, different audiences, and varying skill or comfort levels. We ensure that each design has the required scalability, and that provision is made for anticipated technological issues and variances.

The Symphony Design Lab also offers clients usability expertise to help them develop designs that map to rapidly evolving user needs.

Our Interaction Design process focuses on increasing the users' comfort level as they navigate through an application. Intuitive organization and navigation techniques integrate business strategies with user requirements. These fundamentals help us to generate solutions that enable users to accomplish their tasks and goals successfully, and with minimum effort, encouraging repeat visits and brand loyalty.

The end result is a totally transparent system that immerses the user in the process and renders the background technology invisible.

Technical Documentation


Symphony provides complete technical documentation services. Product documentation is often overlooked and undervalued in an R&D organization, but often has a significant impact on product adoption and customer satisfaction. Symphony offers the following documentation services:

  • Product and Technical Documentation
  • Documentation Support
    • Content Re-Engineering with Illustrations and graphic design
    • Reverse Engineering Documentation support
    • Content Publishing / Portal Management
  • Migration Labs
    • Porting and Re-branding
    • Editing and Indexing
    • TechDoc Professional Services: Formatting and pre-press desktop publishing, FAQs, and Customer Fixes
  • Training & Education Materials

Symphony follows a Documentation Life Cycle approach aligned to the Product Development Lifecycle to ensure better results.

Our work does not end there. Symphony uses a closed loop process to continuously improve the effectiveness of your documentation. We constantly collect feedback from customer support teams to understand what percentage of support calls could have been avoided by better documentation or missing information and make improvements.

Supported by Symphony's Technical Documentation Practice Group, Symphony has developed an ongoing skill-development program that ensures all team members take the time to refine their writing skills and technical skills, update their knowledge of international styles and standards and enhance their skills in using document productivity tools. Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, and accountability is high.

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Testimonials

Robert Gersten Chief Development Officer, Hyperion


“Symphony’s purpose built team works seamlessly with ours—from collaborative tools to a pay for performance model and mindset—and together we continue to achieve the productivity, quality, and innovation that meets our business objectives.”


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expertise

A representative list of Symphony's platforms and technology expertise


Databases
  • Oracle
  • MS SQL Server
  • IBM DB2
  • Sybase
  • My SQL
Server Operating Systems
  • Windows NT/XP/200X
  • Sun Solaris
  • HP-UX
  • AIX
  • Linux
  • Unix
App. Servers
  • BEA Weblogic
  • iPlanet
  • IBM Websphere
  • jBoss
  • SUN Java System Application Server
Client operating systems
  • Windows
  • Linux
Web services and technologies
  • J2EE
  • .NET
  • SOA
  • AJAX
Network Technologies
  • TCP/IP
  • IP SAN
  • NAS
  • iSCSI
  • SNMP
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