ZZICT is a group of specialists in the field of information and communication technology. ZZICT has its roots in and is still active in the academic world (universities and institutes). We present a number of aspects that we feel are essential.

• Dynamic, small teams

  Small core teams are essential for the successful completion of most projects in any case, but they are essential in the context of the fast paced world of e-business. In this new and evolving domain, nothing remains the same for more than a few months. New products and standards constantly appear and are being replaced again.

• Highly trained people, large pool of expertise

  At ZZICT, we only employ highly qualified staff. Our teams form a pool of know-how in a wide range of domains, especially distributed systems, security, wireless applications and networks, J2EE, databases, application development (object-orientation, components), etc. This well-balanced mix of ingredients is a necessary precondition for a successful e-business project.

• State-of-the-art development methodology

  With the challenging, fast rhythm of the e-business world, traditional development methodologies consistently fail to deliver products that really satisfy all the requirements. The main reason is that those requirements naturally change during the development of the system, to keep pace with changing needs and to take advantage of new business opportunities. Therefore, we base our development approach on two ingredients: high user involvement and fast development cycles.

  High user involvement means that we involve the client to a large degree during the development of the system.

  Fast development cycles allow us to gain rapid feedback about changes in the requirements, and about the product under development in general.

• Reuse

  Our philosophy is to employ a mix of well-known, proven components and standards (such as Symbian, J2ME, J2EE, Apache, Zope, Plone, MySQL, XML etc.), together with custom development. By not reinventing the wheel, we can offer shorter time-to-market. In addition, these components have passed rigorous scrutiny and testing by a very large number of people, and they therefore attain a high level of reliability and quality. A significant additional advantage is that the resulting system or application, being based as much as possible on known products and standards, is easier to understand and maintain.

  While we try to use standard components as much as possible, there are always parts of the system where off-the-shelf solutions are not adequate. The publicly available technology may be immature, or there is simply no standard solution that completely satisfies the client's requirements. It is clear that our mix of expertise introduced above is especially needed to build these missing parts of the system or aplication.