Managing IT for you
Systems design & development
Despite the availability of many IT systems today, many businesses are still resorting to customized systems to cater to their exact needs. This is because most systems – especially those from other regions, may not be able to cater to the needs of your organization’s localized processes or peculiarities. Making enhancements to the system to cater to these needs may not necessarily be the right thing to do.
The answer would then be to have a system developed to your organization’s requirements. But if you do not have a strong IT team, this is where HTC is able to lend our expertise.
Since its incorporation in 1989, HTC has been developing systems for our local and foreign customers from both the public and private sectors. These include various Government agencies, Local Authorities, Travel & Tour companies, Healthcare providers, Finance and Banking, Logistics, Power Generation and Port Management, just to name a few.
Throughout the years, HTC has become experienced in the use of various tools, methodologies and standards to complete these projects successfully. These vary from Visual Basic, C++, C# and Java development languages to SSADM and Yourdon development methodologies; Middlewares like Tuxedo TP monitor, Websphere Message Broker and Weblogic Application Server, amongst others. HTC has also built HL7 compliant interfaces for healthcare modalities, LU 6.2 protocols for communications with mainframes and EMV compliant applications for finance and banking customers.
Today, our team has expanded its experience to include a myriad of other new and proven technologies in our development work such as MVC, LINQ, Entity Framework, Angular JS, Node JS, Mainframe communication programming, Cloud computing, Chip Card programming, just to name a few.
Systems integration
There has always been an increasing need to share data across the various systems within an organization or between systems of multiple organizations locally, regionally or globally. Users must be able to access their data and information wherever they may be, to make accurate and timely decisions.
At HTC, we see Systems Integration as not just sending, distributing and accepting data to and from another system, but as an art form in itself where the following considerations must be taken care of:
Like humans, computers come in various shapes, sizes and operating systems. Data which we want to work with may reside in large mainframes to small personal laptops and specialized devices. All these data repositories and their functionalities, together with the environment in which they operate in, must be thoroughly understood before proper integration can be achieved.
Some of the approaches and protocols HTC has used to achieve proper data transfer include LU 6.2, TCP/IP/SNA network with sockets and MQ series when integrating with mainframes over an SNA network. Here, consideration between EBCDIC and ASCII need to be taken into consideration. Between non-mainframe systems, TCP/IP with sockets, HTTP and HTTPS have been used
Precision in timing and orchestration with the various system processes and functions are a key consideration to HTC’s integration engineers.
No matter how near or far two systems can be from one another, data transmission may be interrupted. This results in the data not reaching its destination, or only a portion of it does. Even if the entire data file is received, is it exactly as what was transmitted? At HTC, our engineers ensure that these concerns are handled automatically by the systems in all integration jobs.
Data that need to be transferred can sometimes be very large. When this happens the bandwidth of the network will be affected. To overcome this, data files may be compressed or split into multiple manageable files before transmission. Care also is taken to ensure that frequency of data transfer could be very large with the same effect.
Most important of all is security of the data during transmission over a public network. HTC understands that all organizations are obsessed over security of their data and we ensure that all transmissions comply with the TLS protocol.