When effecting the development of your custom business applications. You have 3 basic long term strategies to choose from. You can develop those applications in house, hiring a new department of employees - software programmers, system architects and technical managers. If you take this approach you then have to contend with all the issues surrounding that decision: Salaries and benefits, workload (and this will fluctuate drastically), sick time, employee turnover, the time it will take you to manage these issues taking you away from your core line of business. If developing software is not your core competency, do you really want to enter this business? Is it a strategic fit for you? Is it an expensive misadventure that can jeopardize you, your department or your company?

The next option is to call a "head shop" and bring in a bunch of project based consultants, programmers and other "hired guns" to design, program and deploy your solution. While there are some very good (and very expensive) independent programmers in the marketplace today, a lot of the time they will spend simply learning and understanding your business - or rather you will have to hire more consultants to design the scope of work and functionality of the software; then once the applications are programmed, tested and deployed, the consultants and coders are off to the next project - that is, unless you want to pay them to sit around and wait until you find a bug or need modifications. While you don't have to deal with the long term issues of increasing your organization's head count, fixed costs and overhead, you also lose the built up institutional memory and knowledge with project based consultants that you would enjoy with employees.

There is a third way, a better way. Using International Computing as your strategic partner and taking advantage of our RISE® methodology, you can experience not only both long and short term cost savings compared to either previous strategy but also a retention of your institutional knowledge, business processes, best practices - and you don't take your company down a perilous misadventure of designing and building a new cost center in an area that is not even your organization's core business. If your core competency is not in designing and hosting software applications, if it is not something that is a profit center for you, then do you really want to focus your energy, efforts, reputation and scarce resources on such an endeavor?

International Computing specializes in partnering with organizations to automate their business processes and providing them with critical ongoing long term support - thus freeing those organizations to focus on doing whatever it is that they do best. Our business model utilizes full time technical professionals: programmers, analysts, consultants, system architects, project and technical managers as full time long term employees. The team assigned to your business will substantially be the same team working to support you and your applications two years from now. You won't have to re-teach or re-orient new programmers or consultants every few months on your business priorities, systems, practices, or lessons learned. As your priorities shift, we have the flexibility to shift with you. As you grow, our team can grow to meet the demand. As your needs change, rather than be faced with layoffs, reassignment or HR issues, we can simply reassign our team members to different customers or projects. Rather than facing the permanent distraction of becoming a technical manager of an entire new team and the issues that brings, we handle that for you.

Another benefit of using International Computing, is that wherever appropriate, we design our software to open standards specifications. Using the LAMP computing environment as a base, our technology is escrowable and able to be understood by competent experts in the case that would ever be necessary.

*LAMP is the computing environment indicated as Linux operating system, Apache web server MySQL database and PHP programming language.