Best-in-Class Solutions for Startup Companies

Emerging Digital Concepts has assisted many startup companies design and develop the platform technologies to quickly and effectively bring their product ideas into the marketplace. Startup companies and young companies typically lack an established, highly capable technical staff. EDC brings immediate expertise that is time-tested in the fast-paced, highly deadline driven environment typical of startups.

Senior Level Technical Leadership & Engineering Process Mentorship

Several companies have utilized EDC staff consultants as technical leads to manage and develop their critical applications and components. Other companies have acknowledged the need for engineering, development, process, and configuration management experience. EDC staff consultants have been brought in to mentor existing staff to allow them to grow their knowledge on best practices for CM and SEP.

Case Studies

The sections to follow highlight key initiatives undertaken by EDC. These case studies underscore EDC's ability to generate profitable applications for high visibility end customers, as well as lay the groundwork for infrastructures that can grow according to a company's needs.

» Case Study: District of Columbia, OCTO, DHS ITEP Grant (CapStat)

CapStat was a DHS ITEP Grant program funded to build a regional data interoperability backbone in the National Capital Region (NCR). EDC provided the driving architectural and regional support for the multi-node SonicESB SOA solution deployed in the region. The program was highly successful in demonstrating data interoperability and federation of DHS Resource Type data for First Responders, interoperability of GIS feature service connectors, and securely exposing many District of Columbia jurisdictional, back-end services deployed in their Intranet to other regional partners. The ESB architecture created a secure, dynamically routed, redundant nodal network within the region supporting query, transport, proxy, transformation, and other specialized services.

The District of Columbia OCTO DCStat Common Services Group continues to contract EDC to build out their services menu and SOA infrastructure as a follow on to work completed and delivered under the CapStat grant.

Key technologies involved: SonicMQ & SonicESB CAA Enterprise Suite, Web Services, Data & Security Integration

» Case Study: American Red Cross National Headquarters

EDC assisted the American Red Cross in realizing a deployable solution to integrate and share data between three of their largest Enterprise products used to manage their work force, disaster relief tracking, and volunteer skills - PeopleSoft, Siebel CRM, and Plateau LMS.

EDC also provided critical direction and deployment assistance on the Transaction Queuing Engine (TQE) designed to handle disaster relief donations on redcross.org.

Key technologies involved: SonicMQ & SonicESB CAA Enterprise Suite, EAI, Message Reliability, Data Transformation

» Case Study: Contact Solutions

Contact Solutions is a relatively new, innovative voice application service provider. EDC was specifically contracted and tasked with developing the web interface component for a national voter reporting application to track voter incident reporting across the nation before and during the November 2, 2005 national elections. To successfully deploy this application for major network clients, several platform enhancements and core platform services were also engineered. EDC was leveraged to handle these build outs as well.

Contact Solutions has trusted EDC with studying, improving, and ultimately enhancing many existing core platform services as they continue to build out their enterprise voice services platform to better serve their customers.

Key technologies involved: J2EE components for BEA Weblogic, J2SE for stand-alone applications, MS SQL Server RDBMS.

» Case Study: PriceInteractive

PriceInteractive, a provider of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) services, desired to integrate their telephony platform (iPort) with emerging, web technologies. In 1997, EDC brought PriceInteractive into the Internet arena by developing critical web applications that tied into the existing IVR platform. Next, EDC enhanced iPort's capabilities by extending it with web based control sets to initiate and control outbound IVR call sessions. EDC built upon this enhanced technology to create the first generation version of what is today known as Convergys Messenger. This revolutionary product, the first of it's kind, was validated in the financial services industry by players like Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse First Boston, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and others.

In the years to follow, PriceInteractive was purchased by iBasis. iBasis Speech Solutions was later acquired by Convergys. During this time, EDC continued to provide best-in-class service through continued design & development of core platform components and applications for the iPort successor platform: SpeechPort.

Key technologies involved: server farm architectures; J2EE components, including web services, for BEA Weblogic; Oracle RDBMS; UML design and specifications.

» Case Study: AudioPoint

Audiopoint Corporation was the first company to launch a voice speech recognition, personalized information portal. Founded in 1999, Audiopoint quickly grabbed the attention of investors in the voice/speech space with their first-to-market product. EDC was instrumental in proving and developing the web-based personalization interface for the initial platform solution as well as a significant portion of the content feed and capture mechanisms to keep information up to date. Subsequently, EDC lead the technical effort to architect, design, and develop the 2nd generation enterprise voice platform and migrate the portal into a complete VXML solution in 2000.

Audiopoint secured a significant venture capital investment from Reuters Investment Group on the strength of the solution created largely under the guidance and development efforts of EDC consultants.

Key technologies involved: J2EE components for BEA Weblogic, Tomcat Servlet/JSP Server, SpeechWorks (now Scansoft) VXML browser engine, Oracle RDBMS, and Suma4 switch integration.

» Case Study: National Telecommunications Cooperative Association

NTCA brought a new requirement. NTCA wanted assistance from experienced consultants in web application development and the software development process to guide and mentor their internal development staff. EDC assisted NTCA in developing and deploying many new applications that would be used by their own field staff and their association membership.

Key development efforts included an intranet-based field staff member visit reporting application, a web-based, online member conference and meeting registration application template with credit card processing, and an internal, web-based budgeting application. These efforts were great examples of proper CM and development practices that were easily adopted by their own development staff going forward.

Key technologies involved: J2EE components for Tomcat Servlet/JSP Server, Apache Struts, J2SE application components, IBM DB2 RDBMS, IBM AS/400 systems.

» Case Study: CCCI, Leadership University

CCCI's Christian Leadership Ministry (CLM) hosted a number of popular web sites (exceeding 10 million page views per month). Their web infrastructure was a classic, single SUN Netra server, which required extensive Unix know-how in order to administrate. CLM had limited staff resources from which to maintain the web infrastructure, and required a new system design. EDC architected a 4 system web farm (constructed exclusively from open source products), front-ended by a Foundry Network's ServerIron. As a result of this new, load balanced web farm, system uptimes were virtually 24/7. CLM's Administrative staff were able to leave the system unattended for as long as 2 months at a stretch.

Key technologies involved: Linux OS based servers, Oracle RDBMS, Perl scripting, Foundry Network protocol switches.