Each Ghost Company is in fact, two companies. A company incorporated in the UK, serving the US and Europe and a corresponding company in Asia. In order to help the two companies integrate seamlessly, the main people in Asia spend time in the UK, talking to clients and understanding what the market wants and where the market is going and then, vice versa. The main people in the UK spend up to a third of their time in Asia working and training the guys there. We made a conscious decision to split the support and maintenance into a separate entity even though much of the support is for home grown applications We did this so that Ghost Maintenance can eventually grow to be an independent profit centre in its own right with separate management, separate goals and objectives. Both companies work with the team ethos, but in one you have heavyweight developers and in the other heavyweight support engineers with a development background.
Ghost Software
There are two Ghost Software companies:
Ghost Software, UK
Ghost Software UK is a company set up in Brentwood, Essex, UK., which is predominantly a sales, marketing and commercial enterprise. However to ensure harmony between East and West, we also employ project managers in the UK to be both customer facing and an interface to our technical resource. These PMs usually have a capacity of 3 projects at any one time. Additionally, whilst all of the technical and operational resource is in Asia, we do have a small test laboratory in the UK to sign off final deliveries before releasing them to the client.
Ghost Software - Pakistan is a technical and development -based enterprise where all the
Computer
Telephony
Integration
CTI and Voice over IP research, development, quality assurance and technical writing is done. Organised into teams, there are one-off project-based teams, Research & development teams as well as product teams for long-term application roadmap developments
Ghost Maintenance, a stand-alone company, has been created to handle all of the on-going support and maintenance of software created by Ghost Software (and branded in the name of the client) as well as providing an overflow support and maintenance team to customers for whom we did not develop the software but who see the commercial viability of using us rather than expanding their own local resource.
Support for Our Own Source
Where we develop applications for our clients, it is only natural that this is the best place for support and maintenance is next door to where the code was written. The usual arrangement is that our client will prefer to take the first line or help desk call initially. (This is particularly important since the first port of call should be local to the end user.) Once this call has been taken, we open a case using specialized tools for the job for calls if the incident cannot be resolved at the helpdesk. It will be passed on to us and dealt with either as a configuration issue or a bug fix. Depending upon the application and its upgrade roadmap, the end user is usually charged between 10% and 20% of the end user price per annum which covers all support and upgrade charges and this is split in proportion to the workload between the Client and Ghost.
Support for third party Source
As applications become more and more successful, the requirement for additional support and maintenance people increases too. Ghost Maintenance is able to deal with any overflow you can throw at it. We have a vast and varied resource to draw from who are able to quickly understand your software design architecture and the language of the source code. We have people proficient in everything from .net to Delphi. Here we would give you a team to match the volume of calls which would include a QA software engineer to quality control the fixes at a fixed price per team per month.
