With a proven track record in over 40 years of custom software delivery and with over 70,000 man days of development each year from our UK and India team alone, we have the skills and experience to help you identify, assess and fulfil the custom solution delivery opportunities within your business.

This section includes:

• The benefits of custom solution delivery
• Capgemini’s Approach
• Capgemini’s Capabilities
• Success Stories

Benefits of Custom Solution Delivery

The recent economic downturn has seen organisations striving to deliver even more value for less expenditure and where applicable, compete more aggressively for market share. With little or no appetite for wholesale change of major IT solutions, organisations are employing custom solution delivery to:

• Create solutions that differentiate them from the competition.
• Harness the existing IT estate through greater integration and process efficiency.
• Consolidate and improve the quality of application solutions to reduce operational costs.
• Go beyond package configuration, implementing specific extensions and customisations.
• Help drive greater business innovation through new technology.

Capgemini’s Approach

Compared to the industry, our approach to custom solution delivery has proven to deliver solutions:

• 20% to 40% more productively.
• 25% faster.
• With 15% to 20% better quality.

Combining our skills and experience with a unique set of accelerators and approaches we now support our clients in four distinct ways:

Whether organisations are looking to augment their own teams with specific skills, or enhance their own capability by taking what we’ve learnt, our Skills and Transform offers are ideal.

We also recognise that organisations may want a flexible Application Development Factory or a subscription Assurance or Legacy Modernisation service as a natural extension to their own organisation that will scale as their demands fluctuate. Our Services offer does just that, bringing you access to leading tools, techniques and capability without the long term commitment or initial investment.

And finally, with Solutions, we will take the responsibility for the end-to-end delivery of a custom software solution. Bringing extensive experience in all the leading technologies that the industry has to offer, and some of the old legacy favourites, our team of over 550 technologists are equipped and ready to support you in your challenge.

Capgemini’s Capabilities

Our ability to support custom solution delivery comprises of two key elements:

• Our people A passionate team of IT professionals aligned to technology communities.
• Our accelerators A set of approaches, techniques and facilities that makes our custom software development proposition unique in the market.

Our People

With over 550 individuals across India and UK, aligned to one of seven specific technology communities, we can provide the breadth and depth of capability and experience that custom software technology demands. The communities include:

• Information Management - Specialising in development of specific business solutions utilising product sets such as IBM/Filenet, EMC Documentum, Microsoft MOSS and Opentext Livelink.
• Engineering - Our combined UK and India teams include industry accredited Software architects, System and Software designers, Service Oriented Modelling & Architecture specialists and Software Developers. This team specialise in Java EE / ME / SE, IBM Websphere, Oracle Weblogic, utilising the IBM Rational toolset, Open Source, Iterative and Agile methods and techniques.
• Engagement Management & PMO - An experienced team of project delivery professionals to govern and ensure delivery certainty for some of the most challenging custom software delivery projects.
• Mainframe - A team to ensure we can help harness the investment made in legacy systems, whether its to exploit the services using SOA / Web enabling services, re-platform the system or simply to extend the solution further.
• Lifecycle - Covering the technology-neutral aspects of software development, such as Business and Systems Analysis, Testing, Technical Management and Software Delivery Process Engineering. Our Analysts provide expertise in the elicitation, documentation and control of business and system requirements. Our Testing team delivers test strategies, test management and test execution services across a wide range of project types. Technical Managers realise the solution, taking responsibility for the technical aspects of delivery. Finally, the Process Engineers ensure that the software delivery processes and tools are tuned and relevant to the organisation/project.
• Microsoft - Our team of over 100 Microsoft technologists provide coverage across the Microsoft product range, including the Collaborative tools (Exchange, Unified Messaging etc); the Microsoft Office products (SharePoint Server (MOSS), Office); Mobility solutions (Windows Mobile, Smart Client); the Integration products (BizTalk, ERP+); and the .Net framework (inc. C# and VB) and SQLServer.
• Enterprise Solution Architects - A senior team of architects who have in-depth architecture experience developed across multiple industry sectors and business solutions that span a range of technologies. Our architects bring their delivery experience to forge teams together and tackle the challenges of designing and delivering complex, end-to-end business strategies and solutions.

Our Accelerators

What makes Capgemini truly unique is our ability to bring our accelerators to bear on what we do, just a few of which are described below:

• Acceleration Solutions Environment (ASE) – A uniquely designed collaboration centre to support accelerated and agile delivery. We’ve helped one organisation reduce it’s product design cycle from 9 months to just 9 weeks.
• Accelerated Delivery Centre (ADC) - Ourglobal, ready-to-roll network of 24 centres, equipped with on-demand facilities and leading edge methods and tools to kick-start a project in less than 24 hours.
• Rapid Design Visualisation (RDV) - An exploratory, up-front approach allowing you to see, feel and shape the solution before you invest in development.
• Rightshore® – Our global delivery model, which leverages the savings of off-shore delivery whilst retaining the speed, predictability and collaboration required of custom software delivery.
• Methods & Processes – Our own Governance and Quality Management systems underpinned by tools, techniques and processes to support iterative and agile delivery using methods such as RUP and Scrum.

Success Stories

Department for Education (DfE)

The Communications Unit at the DfE wanted to improve the quality and efficiency surrounding the creation, production and distribution of their publications. Capgemini was enlisted to create a new Catalogue Product Management System (CPMS) as the primary repository for all such publications, whilst also providing interfaces to websites selling the publications and fulfilment agencies to sell, store, distribute and dispose of the publications.

Capgemini used the existing Microsoft technology stack in line with the success of Online Publications for Schools. This project utilised the new Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) for the first time within Capgemini UK, which included ASP.NET 2.0, C# 2.0 and IDE Visual Studio 2005. VSTS allowed the integration of collaboration tools and improved communication during the software development process. The DfE now has a single repository for all the publications they produce, ensuring that the latest version of a publication is always viewed and errors attributed to synchronization issues in the old system have been minimised.

NHS Wales

To allow citizens to access health related information via a secure website, NHS Wales launched a program to create “My Health Online”, a portal designed for patients in Wales. Capgemini was invited to collaborate with IHC, PA Consulting Group and Millar Hutchison working on behalf of NHS Wales. Capgemini defined software architectures, developed functional components and worked with IHC to migrate the Microsoft .NET solution to NHS Wales’ hosting service, Health Solutions Wales, for the production environment. The integrated team delivered the first phase of the project to very tight timescales. The solution was constructed using rapid application methods with agile development techniques yielding an application that meets IHC requirements while being delivered within an accelerated timeframe and too budget.

Large Financial Services Organisation

The client wanted to modernise their entire approach to regulatory reporting including the clarification and optimisation of information provision and accessibility for many of its stakeholder groups.

To meet these challenges, Capgemini developed a SOA based mandatory electronic reporting solution. This solution provides a strategic data system for the automated collection, validation and storage of regulatory reporting data, via a range of different technology options (web form, PDF file, web service, etc). This robust, secure and highly scalable electronic data submission solution enables the client to implement future reporting changes without extensive system redesign and associated cost. The bespoke J2EE based system was built using state-of-art technology from Adobe (in particular the Adobe Livecycle ES suite) and BEA (AquaLogic and WebLogic).

The solution was rolled out to all 29,000 financial services firms in the UK during the latter half of 2008.

Rightshore® is a trademark belonging to Capgemini