The Genesis
The world of software development is highly fragmented and rapidly becoming a place of commoditized service offerings. Our approach to development and technology differs from most. To us, Good enough is not good enough. We are not comfortable staying in our comfort zone. We are willing to put our skin in the game and take on challenging assignments. As a result, not only do we forage for exciting projects, but are also held to higher expectations by our clients. Since we work with very cutting edge companies, we are expected to be ahead of the technology curve at all times and to further shorten the time to market for new products. Our CoreLabs was set up to continue our commitment to staying at the forefront of product development.
How we are doing it
We realize that we cannot really accomplish our ambitious goals by working in a vacuum. We are working closely with educational institutions, research labs, open source communities and leading technologists who advise us in creating common IP that will add tremendous value to our clients. The combination of research, along with validation and sanity checking, is what makes CoreLabs more than lip service.
Types of Services
1. Research and Prototyping Services
Software companies need to continue to remain innovative and look for opportunities that either add incremental value to its customers or mine new markets. The product marketing team typically has zillions of ideas they want to try out, however, since resources are limited, priority is always given to supporting the existing revenue-producing product lines.
The classic chicken and egg problem of having to show something to the management in order to justify the ROI was one of the drivers for setting up the CoreLabs. A full-staffed Research department is not something that every company can afford.
One of the divisions within the CoreLabs is dedicated to address this dilemma by providing research services on emerging technologies as well as building prototypes and proofs-of-concepts. This allows product marketing the opportunity to try out these new concepts in the market before recommending an investment in building a full-fledged product.
To learn more about this Service, check out our Research and Prototyping Services .
2. On-demand Development Services
Software Development is notorious for re-inventing the wheel every time. Each new product goes through trying to define the process, deciding on tools and infrastructure, setting up labs, etc. All of these lead to more than just a resource cost – they lead to a delayed market release.
This drove the second Corelabs service to create best practices and to build a core infrastructure and knowledge base that can be leveraged for either a new endeavor or an existing project. One of the beauties of this service is that is just part of the on-going CoreObjects commitment to adding more value to the clients.
As we built our various applications, we started developing reusable reference modules that were required for most of our engagements. These were combined to form our Core Common Components.
We also built a toolbox of Frameworks and Open Source components that we can bring to the table or make recommendations on at the start of any engagement.
The QA Lab and Build and Deployment Environments were also created from this initiative.