Technologies

Molecular uses the right technologies to meet our clients' business needs - from leveraging a client's existing infrastructure and technology stack, to performing an architectural assessment that helps a client completely redefine its technical infrastructure to support current and future initiatives.

Our consultants are constantly working to achieve the right balance of building in-depth expertise in proven technologies, while learning and applying promising new technologies. We view ourselves as "leading edge", not "bleeding edge", with an eye for identifying and exploiting technologies that have the potential to deliver business value to our clients. We differentiate ourselves through our collaborative, strategic approach, our ability to focus on business goals and translate those requirements into technical solutions, and our innovative use of industry standard technologies to solve real business problems.

Horizontal Expertise

Throughout our 10+ year history, Molecular has gained experience developing solutions to several fundamental business challenges that are common across industries, including:

  • Security
  • Backend integration
  • Search
  • Content management
  • Analytics
  • Portals

Our experienced consultants have designed and built a wide variety of solutions to these "horizontal" business challenges, learning and developing best practices along the way. Our solutions span across technologies and range from custom-built applications designed from the ground up, to product-based implementations with minor configuration.

Our Process

Molecular has a proven track record of successful project implementation. We consistently deliver high quality projects - on time and on budget. The foundation of this success is an adaptable process that can be tailored to meet the unique needs of each project and client, whether it involves a traditional waterfall process, or a more iterative approach using technologies such as eXtreme programming and agile software development.

Higher-level technical services

Molecular provides a wide-variety of "higher-level" technical consulting services for our clients. Our technical consultants have the skills to take on challenging technical leadership roles such as "trusted advisor", "lead integrator" and "technical program manager". In these roles, we help our clients with complex tasks such as:

  • Redefining enterprise-wide technical infrastructures
  • Prioritizing and aligning complex IT project portfolios
  • Managing large, multi-vendor projects
  • Coordinating complex integration efforts
  • Making build vs. buy decisions
  • Choosing product vendors

Our consultants also take on more business-oriented roles such as "technical business analyst" and "technical strategist". As technical business analysts, we effectively bridge the gap between end users and developers by translating high-level, user-centric requirements into detailed functional logic and technical design, against which a comprehensive technical solution can be developed and tested. As technical strategists, we help clients align their IT initiatives to support short and long-term business objectives.

Recent projects

The following examples cut across industries and technologies, and provide insight into how Molecular consultants leverage technology to solve real business problems for our clients.

Rich Internet Application (RIA)
In an effort to reduce shopping cart abandonment and improve the overall online transaction process, Molecular developed a Single-Screen Checkout solution. This solution represents a Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework built with Macromedia's Flex technology, which can plug into existing web infrastructures.

Molecular has recently implemented this solution for two major retail clients on both the .NET and J2EE platforms.

.NET Site Redesign
Molecular recently completed a large redesign effort for a major manufacturing client, which included defining a .NET migration strategy and managing several inter-dependent sub-projects across multiple vendors. As part the overall effort, Molecular leveraged several of the latest Microsoft technologies to:

  • Migrate the user store from Microsoft Site Server to Active Directory and AD/AM (Active Directory Application Mode).
  • Migrate the security framework from ASP/VB COM to .NET, including the implementation of a new single sign-on authentication solution as a .NET web service that is consumable by new .NET-based pages, as well as older .ASP/COM-based pages.
  • Implement and enhance the online shopping cart as a .NET web service that can be consumed by .NET-based pages, as well as older .JSP pages.

New .NET code was written in C#, and .NET COM Interop was used to facilitate communication between the new .NET code base and existing VB COM components - maximizing the client's investment in existing infrastructure, and minimizing the level of rework needed to achieve the redesign.

J2EE Portal Implementation
Molecular recently engaged with a major financial services company to build their next-generation Internet portal. With their current technology platform reaching its end-of-life, the client looked to Molecular to implement a new IBM WebSphere Portal platform. Included in this effort is a migration to the latest version of Interwoven Teamsite, which will position the client for future initiatives such as creating private label sites and globalization.

Additionally, Molecular is developing and providing a J2EE-based web service to allow trusted third partners access to synchronize user credentials with our system, thus providing robust, highly secure single sign-on functionality.