Enterprise Architecture

Your business strategy, applied to technology.

Your technical infrastructure should support your strategic direction. Ensure that your investments support the business outcomes your team is pursuing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Your Ticket to Tomorrow

Before we implement, we need to design and plan. Your enterprise architecture defines how you approach your business through technology. We don’t believe in solely preparing you for today. We help align you for the future by conducting thorough assessments, creating comprehensive designs, and devising innovative strategies.

Architecture Assessment and Strategy

You may have just acquired a company whose architecture is a black box to you, or maybe your existing architecture needs a facelift with modern refactoring and a third party replacement. Levvel can help you identify your current state architecture’s weaknesses and dependencies while also helping identify where you could improve with first-class and modern recommendations. We will help you understand what you have and where you’re going.

Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping

We will come in and work with you through discovery workshops, systems cataloging, code reviews, SME interviews, and in-depth analysis to uncover your applications’ dependencies and help you map out your current state architecture.

Architecture Recommendations

We will review your current state architecture and any plans for your target and align you with recommendations that will meet your future objectives while also leaving you nimble and extensible for what may come later. Levvel will work with your technology SMEs to ensure our recommendations meet your constraints from procurement to company standards.

Performance Tuning

Whether you anticipate a performance impediment or are currently experiencing one, Levvel can help identify how to improve your systems’ performance to ensure you are future proof and ready to handle the volume your business demands.

Vendor Selection

Choosing the right vendor after you’ve decided to buy and not build is an overwhelming process. Through requirements review, vendor overviews, research, existing architecture review, and our experience, we can help identify the most viable solution for your business needs and constraints.

Architecture Planning and Design

Architecture design has many layers and takes time to complete. However, just like development, it can be done through an iterative agile process. Levvel’s architects can get you started with the initial roadmap and blueprint for your solution and software architectures that define your greenfield approach, modernize your legacy ecosystem, or identify the best method for integration and migration with third-parties.

Once started, this journey can continue when it joins the implementation stage and flex to meet new requirements uncovered by product managers or any technology constraints encountered by engineers. You’re ready to transform, let us guide you.

Legacy Modernization and Refactoring

Infrastructure and systems incur tons of costs for organizations. Also, inconsistent data feeds, fractured architectures, and duplicated services cause support headaches and wasted resource management. Levvel can help identify how to modernize your legacy ecosystem, which will, in return, reduce costs, increase business intelligence, and potentially speed up processing time.

We do this through discovery workshops, systems cataloging, code reviews, SME interviews, and in-depth analysis. We will work with you and your teams to identify a feasible roadmap to get you to the transformation you desire. When we leave, you will be flexible as ever to respond to any changes your business needs to meet.

Solution Architecture

A roadmap is one part of an architecture plan. Still, it needs a thoughtful and thorough solution architecture that depicts how the current and new systems, processes, flows, and roles will fit within the Enterprise Architecture to meet your business objectives.

Levvel can create a series of diagrams with supplemental documentation that outlines the hosting, persistence layer, security protocols, data transfer methods, and services needed to meet your transformation needs. Levvel works with your organization to ensure all standards, requirements, and constraints are understood.

Software Architecture

Although a solution architecture helps us understand the big picture, your organization will still benefit from a lower level design around how the software will consistently interact within the ecosystem, process, transfer data, and handle things such as extensibility, scalability, performance, and reliability. We specialize in microservices, event-driven, component based, and serverless architectures.

API Design

API-first approach solutions require a thorough design process complemented by detailed documentation that describes the behavior and contracts of the APIs. During the design phase, we work with your software architecture, requirements, and tech stack to identify the best API approach for your needs. We consider API Management tools such as Apigee and custom solutions using tools such as OpenAPI and Swagger to document.

Our APIs address key components such as security protocols, key encryptions, access control, rate limiting, analytics, monitoring, logging, caching, tracing, and single sign-on. We come to your problem with an agnostic and best-practice approach and help identify if REST, SOAP, Protobuf, or even GraphQL is the right style for your enterprise architecture.

Enterprise Systems Integration and Migration

Levvel recognizes that your enterprise systems must be integrated in the most flexible manner possible to minimize coupling between systems or possibly avoid vendor lock-in. Sometimes it involves integrating a best of breed third-party solution into an existing enterprise, replacing an aging system with a newer one, or maybe integrating with a cloud solution.

We can help you identify how to approach this challenge and formulate a plan for implementing the change as efficiently as possible. We will help you identify the most strategic approach that still leaves you in control of your destiny while reducing risk and operating costs.

Technical Approach and Delivery Plan

Once the agnostic architecture and product strategy are defined, the specifics around which tools and tech stacks work best need to be selected. Levvel will work with you to align the best technical approach based on current talent, budget, existing procurement approvals, and strategic analysis for your solution. In addition, Levvel can help you map out your first 90-day delivery plan that outlines:

  • Risks
  • Assumptions
  • Best SDLC Methodology
  • Resource Plan
  • Makeup of Your Teams
  • Significant Milestones of Delivery

At the conclusion, you will have a predefined execution plan which you can bring to your executive team for approval, and to your delivery team for implementation.

Big Data and IoT Data Analysis Architecture

The world is becoming more connected. For organizations to increase business value, they are starting to invest more in IoT solutions. Companies that can collect, analyze, and understand their data will make faster moves in the market.

Levvel can assist organizations by assessing their current state and determining readiness for smart devices. Organizations are already making use of smart devices by enhancing their data acquisition strategies. Levvel Architects can provide the right assessments and solutions that will connect enterprises to their environment, assets, products, and customers.

Connected Devices

The amount of connected devices is growing exponentially. The right components can allow you to be perpetually connected to any environment, your products, and even your customers. Levvel can asses the types of devices and platforms that can connect the digital enterprise to the real world. Based on the specifics of your Industry, Levvel can assess and recommend the right devices, gateways, and network design.

Data Acquisition

Connected devices can generate massive amounts of data about their surroundings. Being able to ingest this data quickly and accurately is critical. Levvel will analyze the following approaches to identify a solution.

  • Data Ingestion—Design, Development, and Automation of Data Pipelines.
  • Data Engineering—Design, Development, and Automation of Streaming Data Solutions.

Aggregation and Analysis

Being able to separate the signal from the noise is key in finding the insights buried under terabytes of data. To provide full value, data must be structured in a usable way. Through techniques like predictive analysis, Enterprises can detect equipment failure in advance, changes to customer behaviors, or even track products throughout their lifecycles.

  • Data Modeling—Structuring of vast amounts of information into rich data models that can service multiple aspects of an enterprise.
  • Predictive Analysis—Design, Development, and Automation of Machine Learning models based on values collected and training data to make predictions.

Insights/Visualization

Visualizing data provides opportunities to find patterns that may otherwise remain hidden from decision-makers. The ability to pull actionable insights from raw data will allow an Enterprise to achieve maximum ROI from their IoT investments.

  • Systems integration design for existing Business Intelligence Platforms
  • User and content analysis with context to help determine the right graphing approaches for specific data elements

Cloud Architecture Planning

Whether your application requirements are greenfield or brownfield, our cloud architecture planning engagement addresses both. Greenfield applications are those that are expected to be cloud-native and are not hindered by existing infrastructure. Brownfield applications are those that exist on-premise or in the cloud and have existing dependencies.

Lay the right foundation for your transformation.

Enterprise Architecture is the foundational part of defining your digital transformation. Levvel can be part of the entire process from identifying and mapping your current state architecture to creating the low-level diagrams that depict your legacy modernization and target state architecture design. Transformation is continuous and takes patience and investment; we are ready to partner with you on your journey.

Vendors and Platforms

LightBend, Acure Events Hub, Google Pub/Sub, AWS Kinesis Streaming, Apache Kafka

Selected Experts

eric-laforce

Eric LaForce

Senior Vice President, Capabilities

jim-boone

Jim Boone

Architecture Senior Manager

ashley-grant

Ashley Grant

Vice President, Engineering

Let's chat.

You're doing big things, and big things come with big challenges. We're here to help.

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