Software Development and Engineering Capabilities: The Key to Accelerating Your Start-Up
When you run a start-up company you are deeply rooted in the business and or technology you are trying to bring to market. You also have to do many other things from answering the phone, hiring, to customer development. There are, however, many tasks you cannot take on due to lack of time or of lack of knowledge. Highly technical matters of law, accounting, management, and marketing are usually best handled by outside experts. Attorneys, accountants, and management and marketing consultants have specialized knowledge about niche areas that you couldn’t and shouldn’t hope to duplicate either personally or in the form of an in-house employee.
The same is true for many technology and engineering areas. Often times, whether we like it or not, Software Development and Engineering personnel and assets are a scarce resource — in particular for a startup. And as a long time veteran of tech companies large and small, I can tell you with certainty that this is a challenge without end. One that addressing successfully at the early stages can be the difference between near-term rapid success for a startup and a slow, difficult (and often failed) journey.
Having access to technical professional services expertise is important to help your business grow as rapidly and efficiently as possible. Given enough time, you may be able to master some of the intricacies of these technologies. Instead, hand these duties off to professional service providers. They can get them done faster and more effectively than you ever could. Besides, your skills are needed in helping your business expand.
There are many areas where professional services can help you build your product and business.
Cloud Solutions
If your product is a SaaS offering, setting up and maintaining a reliable, secure, and cost-effective cloud service is a difficult and time-consuming task especially if you are starting from ground zero. Most cloud providers now have an extensive list of services that you can use to help build and deploy your products. Some examples of these are auto-scaling servers, storage, machine learning, media services, database services, blockchain networks, and containers, and Kubernetes. Cloud computing can be hard to manage and especially hard to control costs. It is almost impossible for a small team to learn or understand a fraction of these. A premium professional service team would have years of experience building in these cloud environments and know the best way to use these services.
Mobile Applications
Mobile apps for iOS and Android have many infrastructure pieces that are common to almost every app. This includes native or cross-platform development, UI frameworks, and web and socket API connections to cloud services. A professional services team would have developed many apps and can quickly put in place the architecture, help develop the app, and back-end cloud services to get your product to market quickly.
Integrating External Services
Most applications today use a number of external services to complete their products such as eCommerce, KYC (Know Your Customer — user verification), messaging, and notification services. Again a professional services team would have integrated these services many times in many different applications and can quickly put these in your product so you do not have to learn or worry about these.
CyberSecurity
Cybercriminals attack small businesses because they usually have fewer security measures in place. They’re easy and profitable targets. Cybercriminals attack small businesses because they usually have fewer security measures in place. They’re easy and profitable targets. This is a serious problem that’s projected to reach $20 billion in 2021. A professional services team can advise and help implement the best security practices, testing practices, and how to set up ongoing security monitoring.
DevOps
DevOps describes a culture and set of processes that bring development and operations teams together to complete software development. It allows organizations to create and improve products at a faster pace than they can with traditional software development approaches. Organizations should take advantage of faster application delivery and more stable operating environments. When you want to make DevOps work for your organization, you need a partner who can help you realize the benefits. A professional services team will have DevOps experts who can help you speed up application development, and delivery while giving you greater visibility and control across your applications, servers, and services.
As a start-up, you must stay focused on your core business and go to market strategy. Partnering with a Premium Professional Services organization will allow you to do this and deliver your product quickly and cost-effectively.
As an example of this, we recently worked with a new startup that had a clear vision of what their product and market strategy was but did not have the technical knowledge or resources to deliver their product. We augmented their team by building a cloud environment including integrating a payment system, messaging system, and a number of other services so they could focus on their product and business strategy. With the help of our professional service team, they have delivered their product on-time!
Led by a seasoned team with over 85+ years of experience including CEOs, CFO, CTOs, and marketing and product experts we at RNOX help startups innovate, create, and succeed in their mission.
