Alternative Technologies

Methodologies

Successful design and development involves the use of a methodology that is based on scientific principles, but which takes into account human, business, and economic issues. Over the past twenty-five years, Alternative Technologies has developed a number of successful methodologies. These methodologies have been taught to individuals and companies around the world. Vendors of design and development products, as well as practitioners will find licensing of these methodologies helpful in a variety of ways. Current offerings include:

SOA Adoption and Implementation Strategy(tm) -- This is a methodology for moving to a Service Oriented Architecture. It addresses the key problems often faced by business and IT managers such as identifying which software assets to convert to services, with what priority, and how. The approach recognizes that SOA adoption is an on-going adaptive process, rather than a technology conversion project. The methodology focuses on maximizing measurable business value from existing technology assets.

Crystal Warehouse Methodology (tm) -- This is a methodology for data warehouse design, development, implementation, and maintenance. It includes a generic data warehouse architecture with identification of key components and their relationships, algorithms for merging data from legacy systems, data marts, and operational databases, logical database design, physical database optimization, distributed processing optimization, and a cost/benefit approach to implementing applications such as reports and analytical processing. A Crystal data warehouse or data mart grows over time in a well-organized fashion. It is heavily driven from meta data, business rules, and automated effectiveness measurements.

Alternative Technologies' Distributed Application Methodology (tm) -- Client/Server systems are still not only the de facto standard for inhouse distributed applications, they have also become infamous for a number of reasons. These include high cost, poor performance and scalability, and difficult maintenance. With more than twenty years of client/server design and development experience, Alternative Technologies has developed a method for designing client/server systems that scale and perform, keep costs to a minimum, and are easy to maintain. This methodology helps designers and developers avoid the mistakes we have found (and continue to find) in countless performance and post-mortem audits. The methodology is applicable to multi-tier, thin client, service oriented (SOA), and Internet-based systems.