Argeo Commercial Offer

From ArgeoWiki

Summary of the Argeo offer

• Specific developments of enterprise systems, leveraging open source technologies.
• Quality-focused software engineering, using Argeo processes and online development platform.
• Flexible licensing and pricing, allowing to integrate various actors efficiently (Argeo developers, customer staff, third party service providers, offshore resources)

Customers are not only provided with IT systems addressing their requirements, but also with the technical and legal means to maintain them and make them evolve as best suits them.

Analysis of important trends in today's IT

The main challenges when developing and deploying enterprise systems are not so much the ability to perform low-level technical tasks such as networking, data access, monitoring, etc. but:

• to understand and formalize functional requirements, and to prevent their implementation to drift away from end user needs
• to integrate the system in a landscape of various systems and technologies, but also to make sure that the system itself will not prevent this landscape to evolve in the future
• to consider the overall cost on the whole lifecycle of the system, taking into account the length of its life, as well as the costs of its maintenance, of extending its features and of migrating it to next generation systems.

These challenges are specific to each customer. The added value of an IT system will be in addressing them, not in the technological bricks used to build it.

The classical proprietary model does not address these challenges at the lowest cost for the customer. In this model, the software vendor is rewarded for providing a generic and extensively tested technical layer by keeping it secret and out of reach of other actors. This makes its customers depending from it for the maintenance and evolution of their system, for which it can extract a big price.

Meanwhile, some standard Open Source systems or components have reached an impressive level of quality and of features. There is one or many credible open source technologies for each technical need in enterprise IT. Such projects offer:

• access to the source code of the software: it greatly simplifies the debugging of issues in systems built on top of them, as well as the development of extensions
• most important, the right to modify and legally use/distribute modified versions of the component: this allows to legally and safely address critical bugs or introduce new features, without depending on the version planning of the component
• a set of methods, processes and collaborative tools, which have been proven to produce good quality software

These big benefits come at a price. Beside some big well know projects (Linux , Apache web server, Eclipse IDE, Spring, Hibernate, etc.) the open source landscape is somehow messy and great stable tools can be found next to barely working prototypes. It thus requires a significant level of experience and knowledge to choose the appropriate ones and leverage them technically and financially.

The Argeo offer

Argeo provides tailor made IT systems built on top of mature Open Source components. These components are integrated into a thin toolbox layer, which allows to fasten the development cycle of the specific systems.

For a given project, the code of the specific system belongs to the customer, who is free to license it as best suits him.

The toolbox layer is itself Open Source, under a business friendly license, which makes the customer completely free to decide how it will maintain the system and later extend it. It can use:

• Argeo maintenance offer
• its own developers
• third party vendors

Or a mix of all depending on which layer is considered.

Developments are managed in Argeo infrastructure, and following a light but rigorous development process. The purpose of which is that all Argeo's developments, public and private, offer a significant and consistent level of quality.

Depending on customer needs, Argeo can either take care of the entire development life cycle of the applications, or only provide access to the infrastructure and consulting services on:

• project management
• Open Source technologies
• usage of Argeo's toolbox layer

For more information, contact: commercial [a t] argeo.org