The Microsoft Application Platform Optimization (APO) Model is a simple framework to help you identify opportunities to optimize your application portfolio. The APO Model is designed to help you align your applications and core business processes, assess the workload performance of your existing business-critical applications, and prioritize the application and infrastructure investments that will drive the greatest return for your business.
By providing an objective assessment of select business processes, the APO Model helps you deconstruct large problems and pinpoint root causes to better align applications and infrastructure investments. Whether your goal is to buy a new application, extend an existing application, or build one in-house, the APO Model makes it easier to quickly translate business objectives into IT projects that will add value to your business.
The first part of this process is the Business Gap Assessment, which focuses on alignment of your business processes and the applications that support them. This assessment is designed to capture and define the critical business issues and industry-specific attributes that are causing you the most significant challenges.
The second part of our assessment process focuses on the applications that support these critical business issues. This assessment is designed to help deconstruct complex business applications into smaller, more consumable parts to help you prioritize investments and resources to deliver the maximum business value.
Listed below are key capabilities that encompass your applications, along with examples of ways to streamline them.
Most enterprise organizations use organizational or departmental applications unique to their business processes, such as Human Resource Information Systems. To manage and develop these applications in a way that is consistent and repeatable, you need solutions for life-cycle management, application development, and user experience.
The Microsoft Development Platform includes an integrated server with a single data store, featuring built-in collaboration and quality tools to assist your entire development team, as well as a common development framework for web services, rich client applications, smart devices, and more. This solution provides the integration and consistency necessary for successful custom development.
Your line-of-business applications should work together for one single purpose: to further your business goals. So why does it seem like they are antagonistic sometimes? With a single line-of-business platform, your packaged solutions are integrated and may include:
- Transaction processing to ensure your transactions are completed or cancelled successfully
- A centrally managed application server that stores and exposes APIs for use by custom or third-party applications
- Data-management processes that address issues related to corporate assets, including data governance, architecture, security, quality, and metadata and master-data management
- Embedded communications technologies that unite existing communication systems and tools using integrated services and client applications
- Workflow automation that includes the tasks, procedures, organizations or people, information, and tools needed for each step in a business process
Most likely you’re doing business on the web – perhaps generating revenue, or simply communicating and collaborating with customers and building your brand. Most organizations face the same set of challenges with the web: What’s the best way to attract an audience? What’s the most compelling experience to keep that audience engaged? How do you take this a step further and actually make money from web investments? And, then, after all is said and done, how do you know what’s working and what’s not, so you can build new experiences to meet customer demand?
With one integrated platform, your web experience should answer all of these questions with capabilities such as:
- Commerce
- Advertising
- Web content creation and management
- Search, social computing, and communities
- Digital assets
- Analytics
Microsoft offers end-to-end solutions, encompassing digital marketing to attract and retain customers and Internet business solutions to generate revenue from new and existing customers. And the web platform from Microsoft integrates well with your other applications and gives you highly advanced capabilities.
Enterprise application integration ensures that front- and back-office systems are connected to support any business process or application. For example, you may integrate employee self-serve applications and online forms or your customer relationship management system and supply-chain management systems. With application integration, you can reduce complexity and ensure a lower total cost of ownership of applications.
Information is at the heart of your organization’s ability to make strategic decisions. When you’re confident that your insight into data is sound, informed, and complete, you can trust that your decisions will help create competitive advantage and achieve your business goals. Microsoft provides tools for better decision making across structured and unstructured information. Our dashboards and scorecards can be self-service, freeing up IT for more productive tasks. And by using familiar technologies in SharePoint, Office, and SQL Server, our reporting and analysis solution delivers business intelligence (BI) by integrating the strengths of these products on a single platform to empower informed business decisions.
Complementary to the important tasks of reporting and analytics is data warehousing. Microsoft data-warehousing solutions are designed to store and connect your information securely, making the analysis, extraction, transformation, and loading processes easier. Because data is aggregated, compressed, and stored in a dynamic, scalable, integrated system, your organization can reduce long-term storage requirements and generate reports faster. Proper data warehousing helps employees spend less time searching for the right data and more time on higher-value work and better decision making.
Some organizations want departmental data warehouses that keep information cleanly within a silo. Others want enterprise-level data warehousing, holding data across the organization and providing an aggregated view across all systems. Even others want extreme query performance, massive scalability, and a federated architecture for high-end data warehouses. Microsoft provides solutions for all of these needs.