ISV Support Program at ELSA

Proper support of ISV products (ISV = Independent Software Vendor) is an integral part of ELSA's ISV activities. The primary focus of this program is for proper support of ISV software with the GLoria and WINNER product family.

Click on one of the links below to see a list of ELSA's ISV Partner Companies in the respective section. Follow the links in the respective list for more information.

  CAD / CAE / CIM

  DCC / Animation / Video

  Visualization / Visual Management

  Internet / VRML

  Operating Systems / GUI

The following ELSA departments are involved in ELSA's ISV-related activities to provide the best possible partnership and product quality:

Product Management

Product Management establishes and manages the contacts worldwide with the ISVs. In each ELSA office there are dedicated personnel for ISV support. The scope of work related to ISVs from the product management team includes relationship building, marketing cooperation, and promotion of synergetic activities as well as providing a centralized conduit for information flow between the ISV and the product development, QA and product support teams internal to ELSA.

The following product managers are available for ISV-related activities:

Europe:
Thomas Deck International ISV Marketing Manager E-mail: TDeck@elsa.com
USA:
Charles Watson Marketing Director E-mail: CWatson@elsa.com
Asia:
Henry Lin ISV Manager
Technical specialist 		E-mail: HLin@elsa.com

Relevant product management tasks toward ISV product support at ELSA include obtaining ISV product and licenses, organization of ISV product training at ELSA, scheduling and coordination of certification for ISV software, and establishing relationships between the ELSA and ISV technical staffs.

The current number of ISVs managed by the ELSA Product Management team continues to grow.

Product Development

Although it can be argued that every development engineer is involved in providing support for ISV products, the ELSA development team consists of groups of engineers dedicated to supporting ISV products by providing special driver and application software for ISV markets, optimizing ISV application performance on ELSA graphics hardware, and testing ELSA drivers with specific ISV applications.

Additional development engineers are involved in production of driver software, library development, BIOS software, support of new hardware, and additional development activities.

Through such a focus on ISV applications, the ELSA development team is able to provide software drivers for operating systems such as Windows NT® and Windows® 95 which exceed the quality and performance of rival products. Additionally, ELSA is capable of optimizing OpenGL® for specialized CAD and animation products as well as providing additional driver and application software.

Quality Assurance

Just as the ELSA development team focuses their development efforts on specific ISV applications, the ELSA Quality Assurance team performs application-bassed testing.

It is true to say that every QA engineer at ELSA is dedicated to ISV testing. In addition, several QA engineers are specifically dedicated to testing ISV applications only. Each product is tested not only with hardware certification software for Windows® and for OpenGL®, but every product is also tested with specific demo programs, applications, and benchmarks to assure a high level of quality when the driver is released, as well as a correspondingly high level of performance.

In addition to a high level of application testing, the ELSA GLoria and WINNER graphics boards are also tested with these applications in a dual-screen configuration. The extensive testing coverage reduces error reports from the field, assures conformance with the ISV product’s functionality, and optimal performance in an end-user environment.

Product Support

Providing knowledgable, ISV-specific product support for the ELSA customer base is critical. For this reason, the ELSA support personnel receive application-specific training on a continuous basis. Furthermore, the above mentioned applications as well as many others are available in the product support department.

The product support engineers function not only as technical experts for application support, but due to their expanding expertise with the application software, the product support engineers receive beta ELSA software and perform application testing in addition to the qualitiy assurance testing in the QA department.

Through the business unit organization at ELSA, there exists dedicated support personnel for the Graphics Systems' product line. These support personnel have the responsibility to be experts in several professional graphics areas and to be familiar with the full-range of application software.

Product-specific training for ELSA support personnel is organized through Product Management and provided on an on-going basis. The training is typically prioritized from the product support needs and also based on the availablility of new products from the ISV.