With the wide variety of off-the-shelf applications already on the market, by definition, a custom solution means that your business needs are either complex, or unique; maybe both. The process of turning those complexities into a reliable, valuable business tool may seem elusive. The Omnitech credo, “Taking you to your vision” is more than a catchy tagline. In addition to our talented pool of developers, we have also created a cutting-edge process for helping you to understand and define your business needs.

The complexity of traditional software development has crippled even large, well-funded companies. This occurs when the project is constrained by an early, often inaccurate, design and the resulting software is developed in isolation from the end users. To address these weaknesses, we use an Agile software development process with Scrum.

First, we break down complex processes into meaningful chunks of related functionality. Next, each of these chunks is prioritized by business need and developed to the point where it can be completely tested. Finally, after a chunk is fully tested and reviewed by the project team, important feedback (in the form of modifications, improvements and course corrections) is incorporated into the next chunk of functionality. The project team uses this iterative process as it works through the backlog of prioritized features.

Each time the project team participates in a review of newly-developed functionality, we (and you) learn more about your business objectives. With this knowledge, we make technology recommendations that are finely tuned to your needs. Our focus on your business objectives helps the project team to streamline a wish-list that exceeds your budget, or to refine a set of features that require significant testing and feedback.

Key to the success of this process is that you directly drive the design, and remain tightly connected to the software product as it evolves through the development process. We help you divide your project into manageable portions and you help us build it your way. In the end, we provide you with a robust implementation of your vision firmly grounded in what makes your business tick.

Just about every company, big or small, is presented at some point with the dilemma of whether or not to hire a new employee to fill what is most probably a short-term need. Does one go through the employee selection process only to let them go when the work is done, or is there another solution?

At Omnitech, we understand that adding an employee for a short-term software development or business analysis task is often not worth the hassle. That is why we have developed our staff augmentation program. We provide our pre-qualified, knowledgeable personnel to assist you with internal analysis or developmental needs for as long as you need them. These personnel spend their time at your location(s), working directly with and for you.

Staff augmentation works well in situations where a more structured project approach might not. Do you have some ideas that you’d like to explore (perhaps a series of reports that need to be written) but you do not want the overhead of an entire project team? A single Omnitech person who is dedicated to the tasks you assign and reports directly to you might be just the ticket. In addition, if you decide you would like another person to get the job done more quickly, or you identify additional work, it is simple for us to add another person to the contract.

Our clients who have used this approach find that it meets specific, short-term needs quite well. Using staff augmentation can create a closer relationship between Omnitech and our clients and allows our personnel to become directly involved with essential business processes because they are 100% dedicated to client needs for the duration of the augmentation assignment.

Might staff augmentation be just what you need? Give us a call and we can talk about it.

PHP is one of the programming languages we use here at Omnitech. PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and is a scripting language suited for web development. This language is maintained and driven by the Open Source community. Since its inception in the 1990s, PHP usage had reached more than 20 million web domains as of April 2007(see usage stats) and continues to grow. We are always striving to meet our clients’ needs and PHP is one of the many pieces of technology that helps us to do exactly that.

PHP can be run on virtually any web server (Apache, IIS, etc.) and offers a powerful level of interaction with the MYSQL open source database. The main advantage of PHP is that anyone can download it, install it on a server and host websites which use it without incurring any licensing costs for the PHP. Our sister company Dataware hosts PHP websites and web applications on both Apache and IIS servers, depending on clients’ needs.

Most of us have heard of the Linux operating system and even more of us have probably used the Firefox web browser by Mozilla. Omnitech ensures that the websites and web applications it develops are compatible with Firefox, unless a particular client does not need it. Both Linux and Firefox are examples of open source alternatives to Microsoft or Apple products.

In the same way that Firefox may be used instead of Internet Explorer or Safari, PHP provides us with one alternative to using the VB or C# programming languages. Multiple frameworks, similar in many regards to the Microsoft .NET framework, are available to assist in PHP development. Zend is one example of a company that supports the open source community with a PHP framework and applications for use by PHP developers. In general, however, support for PHP frameworks depends on the community working on it, rather than a specific corporation.

In the open source environment, programmers around the world contribute, review code, fix bugs and improve security. We use customized open source solutions when they are advantageous to our clients. Over the years we have worked with PHP to build a number of websites for marketing, ecommerce, and course registrations among others. In addition, we have used it to develop private web applications which are critical to our clients' business. Although C# and VB are our primary programming languages, we are able and willing to work with PHP when it is the best fit.