The Enterprise Software landscape is changing dramatically, and there is a lot of inertia with promising technologies like cloud, SaaS offerings, mobile, analytics, and consumerization. In light of this change,the need of the hour is to create robust and sustainable technology solutions by leveraging emerging technologies. With this vision, Sterling, VA headquartered, iConnect provides a comprehensive set of solutions to help businesses become more technologically sustainable. "The end product could be anything from a native cloud application, mobile application to Business Intelligence. Being in the service industry and we differentiate ourselves by being a specialized service provider, having highly trained IT people onsite with the best expertise," says Amitesh Sinha, CIO iConnect.

The current industry focus is on utilization of the new technological trends largely based on social media, cloud, mobile and Hadoop. iConnect's entire set of existing offering are incorporated with these emerging trends.

The company relies on agile development process cycles that empower clients to review and change their product requirements as per the changing dynamics of the market and their competition. "For businesses in any industry, the key to success is knowing your audience. Getting familiar with their preferences, knowing what they think of your products and services, and test piloting marketing campaigns has become easier than ever because of social media. With platforms like Facebook and Twitter, an organization can know the age and gender of their target audience," adds Sinha. This understanding allows iConnect to successfully cater campaigns and product offers to the customers, providing a better return on investment.

In the current environment,the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites and analyzing that data to make business decisions is gaining momentum and iConnect is in pace with the trends. Sharing an example of iConnect's advanced efforts, Sinha stated that the company is using modern programming language and a unique set of algorithms to scan different businesses or individuals on social media. The generated unstructured data is brought into the Hadoop database and refined, creating analytics. Sharing another example of the company's efforts in this direction, Sinha explained how iConnect is currently working on mobile apps geared specifically for the retail industry.The applications use web services to integrate a retailer's point of sale software in order to fetch data

and store it into a separate data warehouse. The mobile application connects to the data warehouse giving consumers real-time access to track their shipments, trail their merchandising, arrival, and current location along with providing the ability to manage inventories and automate purchase order. iConnect helped one its clients, a leading Retail Furniture stores in Virginia, improve their efficiency with a strategy that helped the business take their bottom line to the next level. The store, with the help of iConnect, has developed an enterprise architecture that helps them simplify and lower the cost of IT and support key applications like Profits, Microsoft, Mobile apps, and BI. The aim of the enterprise architecture was to first get the technical aspects right and then move higher up in the business.

Sinha helped the business understand that it would benefit in the same way from server standardization simply by starting out on standardizing the desktop.Through the Enterprise Architecture, the store has migrated to "an asset-less datacenter" The company believes that the key to succeed as a business is to stand out as unique and distinctive. "Choosing a competitive advantage along with quality and price with flexibility is what makes iConnect different," says Sinha. In the future, the company wants to expand their footsteps as the world is moving into social media analytics, Hadoop analytics, wifi tracking, consumerization, commoditizing. "Over the next few years we intend to expand and go horizontally across the nation," concludes Sinha.