Our professional services and application development services are mainly delivered in the form of project-based engagements in which ioko is hired to solve a particular problem or build a software application.

This list provides a view on the type of problems we help our customers solve:

• The customer needs help with their technology strategy - e.g. "what is the right technical architecture for our next generation website platform?"
• The customer has a business problem they need a technology solution to help solve - e.g. "we are going to launch a new service to make our content available on PlayStation Portables and we need ioko to build and run the platform for us"
• The customer needs help selecting the right technology solution - e.g. "what is the right product to use for search and recommendations on our website"
• The customer has a defined set of technology products in an architecture and needs help implementing them - e.g. "we are using Vignette, Extend Media, Autonomy and Macrovision and need a solution building in this framework"
• The customer is re-architecting an existing system e.g. "our Air time sales system is a legacy C++ application we need you to re-architect as a J2EE application"
• We need to improve retention rates and the user engagement on our site with a cutting-edge design and improved usability.

To solve these problems we have recruited and trained teams of people with the following experience profiles:

• Great Technical Architects with many years of experience of designing and building enterprise scale complex software applications
• Excellent Project and Programme Managers experienced at delivering big and hairy software projects
• Strong Software Developers capable of delivering quality code in complex application environments
• Diligent QA teams with experience of testing complex software applications with a rich user experience
• Inspirational Information Architects, Designers and Usability Practitioners capable of building great user experiences
• Time-served Strategists with deep industry and technology know-how

We then use these people to shape a dedicated team for our customer which is then deployed to work on the project. We can work either on-site at our customers facilities or at our own facilities around the world. Whichever model is chosen we need a lot of "face-time" between the senior people. In terms of the commercial model we use for our Professional Services, we work on either a "time-and-materials" basis or, if the requirements are well defined and documented, on a fixed fee basis.