where am I > Home > Competitive advantage for the IT Consultant and Developer

How Cimera provides a competitive advantage for the IT Consultant and IT Developer

Cimera - a platform to rapidly assemble information management solutions

IT consultants and developers are under ever increasing pressure to deliver more functionality, quicker and cheaper - and the increase in off-shore software houses is only making the situation harder. Improvements such as enhanced processes, better version control tools, more effective release management and increasing code reuse are vital, but can only help to a point. Eventually a limit is reached. However good you may be, you can only design, write & test so much code in a day. Therefore development times for small applications will always be measured in weeks and larger ones in months or years of effort.

But not anymore.

Cimera is a development platform upon which even non-technical users can quickly configure bespoke information management solutions. The benefit to an IT solution provider being that with Cimera they can give their customers a functionally rich bespoke application in a time that is just not possible with traditional approaches (even with disciplined reuse) yet without losing flexibility.

Generally speaking every information management solution will have a backend database, needs to be client server, scalable, with security, audit, querying, dashboards and, in an ideal world, with remote access across the internet, document attachments and Google style searching. Cimera does all of this “out the box” and just requires configuring (similar to how you would define tables, field and relationships in MS Access). Cimera separates the common functionality which is shared by every application and the customer specific schema that makes an application unique.

Having Cimera is like starting with 95% of a bespoke solution and just needing to configure it to meet the customer’s unique requirements. The result is the ability to deliver a fully functional and reliable enterprise quality information management system very rapidly. Rapid means, for a simple solution with few data types, just an hour or so.

Cimera is extensible so that simple .net code can add specialised user functionality or backend processing. Even if the customer solution requires a lot of bespoke code using Cimera as the foundation of the resultant solution gives a significant head start.

We think that Cimera is an excellent addition to the toolbox of any IT consultant or developer.

We describe Cimera in terms of the Build vs Buy conflict. Cimera being the best of both worlds.

Examples of solutions that have been built on a Cimera platform include:

• System for managing a property letting agency
• Patient records system for a diabetic consultant from a London hospital
• Company management & CV searching solution for an IT recruitment firm.
• Project Management
• IT Release Management
• The document Cimera in IT Development  describes the use of Cimera in managing the complex IT development department.

The benefit Cimera gives to a solution provider is the ability to rapidly design & deliver quality bespoke solutions. By simply configuring an established platform (as opposed to reinventing the wheel) development and testing times are greatly reduced (the complex 95% is already tested) and powerful functionality delivered for minimal effort. Cimera’s flexibility ensures that the delivered application can be adapted later as rapidly as it was created initially thus catering for your client's future requirement changes.