Having a new idea for a new service, a new game, not to mention use of emerging IoT concepts, can be very exciting and everyone should be striving to make the dream come true. However, understanding what it requires in time, effort, investment, budget, and technology to realise that new idea might not be so easy, and then - after launch - what does it mean to operate and maintain it?
Many ideas today combine different “worlds”: social media, mobile apps, Internet of Things etc. It’s easy to focus on what the end user can see and do, but it may not be that easy to understand the entire chain of events and the infrastructure that is required.
With a limited budget the key challenge is to find ways to launch a product with a sufficient set of functionality to attract customers within the budgetary limits and then iteratively improve the product until it is fully adapted to the market needs.
Working with start-ups ensures that you keep your mind open and encourages you to find unorthodox ways to implement and deliver and to find an optimal balance in your choice of technologies to minimise the cost while still delivering a competent and scalable solution. Often, the interesting technology and architecture challenges come from completely new companies.
United Vanning Consulting has the right competences and insights to cater for these needs!
United Vanning has been asked on numerous occasions to specify the business and functional requirements and to perform a full technology and IT-architecture assessment for start-ups.
Let’s look at an example: we were asked to collect all requirements, challenge the business ideas and create a complete system architecture for a new gaming and betting venture.
As part of the process United Vanning contributed substantially to the gaming and betting concepts and functionality as well as to the overall user experience. This was highly appreciated and subsequently requested by the customer to be incorporated into the solution.
The technology span of the platform was demanding; from a customer interaction point of view it included smartphone and tablet technology, real-time gaming engines, and social media integration.
But the back-end functionality was equally important for the solution to secure revenue and comply with regulations: fraud detection and compliance, payment solutions, accounting and journaling, campaign management and customer communication, content management, reporting and analytics etc.
During the process all the requirements were gathered and analysed and use cases were captured and validated, resulting in a list of deliverables containing:
Use case scenarios
Architecture and system components high-level design
Technology choices
Costing of all items and components
Project plan and resourcing plan for execution
The analysis also included how to operate, maintain and host the platform. To keep the license costs down, open source software was selected for much of the platform implementation.
The output material was used to validate the overall business case and to approach and secure venture capital, and serve as the foundation for the entire implementation project.
For more information about United Vanning or to explore how our expertise can help you please contact us here.
