DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for November, 2008

A recent study by CIO connect has confirmed the steady evolution of the CIO roles as we suspected.

Over 80% of respondants hold board positions or places on senior change management panels. 62% said they they were being turned to by board level collagues for “insight and leadership in business change”

CIO’ are finding themselves spending more time on business issues such as strategy, transformational change and project briefings.

”We are seeing CIOs emerging to take a leadership role in driving business change within their organisations,” said Nick Kirkland, chief executive at CIO Connect.

This affirms our launch of the MAMBA platform as an enterprise transformation engine allowing business and IT departments to work effectively together to keep pace of the change in a challenging operation environment.

Are you a business transformer? Do you need the tools to allow your business technology to keep pace with the relentlessly changing needs of the business? Get in touch to see how we can help you get ahead of the transformation curve…

Original article

Much rivalled and often debated programming languages PHP and .NET have seemingly been brought a step closer together by the development of a new compilation tool from Jadu.

The tool, called Phallanger has been developed by Jadu and will allow the compilation of well known and well used open source technologies to be compiled into an executable which paves the way for further development using the Microsoft framework.

The uptake for this product is thought to be high as customers welcome the breakdown in barriers associated with the long running battle between the Microsoft .NET framework and the open source community.

Customers can now benefit from a lean delivery and the best of both worlds.

More information

The compiler

Have you used the tool? What are your impressions? Comment back with your thoughts…

So enough of the hype over the last few months. Would you actually like to see what we do? Well now is you chance.

We are presenting MAMBA for the first time in an exclusive online webinar. MAMBA is a next generation software development framework. Its injects a shot of adrenaline into your business by enabling the business to move as fast as the fastest person.
If you are interested getting more done on less resources, then you should invest 30 minutes to find out what MAMBA can do for you.

Why should you invest 30mins to attend?

Because you will learn how to:

- make better use of reduced budgets
- rapidly evolve your business
- empower staff to more efficiently perform their duties
- manage business compliance
- proactively react to changing market conditions
- do more with less overheads

Most importantly you will see how you can beat the recession that you DON’T have to have.

Places are limited so …

Register now

The concept of email marketing has come a long way since its humble beginnings and having worked in the space I know there is wide variety in quality when it comes to the selection of a a good Email Service Provider. Many times I have seen people compromise the deliverability of their email in favour of keeping costs down. Obviously if you invest your time, energy and dollars into building a list and putting a newsletter together, it makes sense that you are getting good levels of deliverabilty. My favourite analogy to explain this is stolen from the direct mail days. Imagine you went to the expense of acquiring a list, doing the creative, printing and fulfilling then the postman only delivered 30% of your campaign. Would that be acceptable to you? Probably not so it shouldn’t be acceptable online either.

Early systems were focussed mainly on simply getting the message out (or email blasting), where as the next generation of ESP’s recognised that with so much competition in the inbox, its important to send more personalised messaging in order for your message to get read. So a good ESP will provide the facility to segment and target a message and be more conversational.

My current ESP of choice is Aweber largely due to the cost but also because it delivers all the features of a next generation system. In addition to list segmentation, great delivery and reporting, Aweber comes with some neat additional features…
Blog broadcast – Subscribers to my blog will know that I offer a weekly digest of my blogposts. This is all taken care of by Aweber automatically which I love.

Email to Twitter – Bloggers or companies who love the twitter phenominan will be interested to know that posts cam be published to a feed in Aweber and inturn syndicated to your twitter account. So basically, your newsletters can be read by your twitter followers too.

Readers of DaveBirchall.com are able to try Aweber for themselves by visiting the following link.

Best of all you can set up and get started in less than five minutes.

A lot has changed in the last few months at Solentive, the place that keeps me busy in the day time. In addition to the software development side of things we knew we had so much to offer and our website didn’t reflect that.

So today we launched a brand new website that tells you all about what we do. We opted for a plain English approach so you don’t have to be a tech head to understand it. In fact good IT is a reflection of a good business process so if your in business (any business) you need to see what we have to offer and what we can offer.

We have also launched our revolutionary Business Process Management Suite, MAMBA. This ‘product’ is a next generation enterprise transformation which allows managers to model, deploy and test business processes without heavy reliance on the IT department. I will be doing a webinar in the next few weeks to give you an exclusive preview on the platform. If you are new to BPM, you will get an idea of what its all about here too.

So take a look at www.solentive.com over your lunch to see what the future looks like.

Dave Birchall

www.sydneynetworkers.net
www.davebirchall.com

Microsoft unveiled its new software plus service offering to room full of developers in LA last week. MS Chief Architect Ray Ozzie introduced Azure as the platform that will support Microsoft Software plus service strategy. The plan will enable Microsoft to compete with the likes of Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com who each have their own SaaS / Cloud offering. The cloud computing concept allows clients to hire storage space and processing cycles on the server side. MS aims to offer service such as exchange, sharepoint and other well established technologies through the cloud. It seems that the future of software technology and therefore our businesses

This news made the front page of the well known technology journal (yes I am being sarcastic) Mx in the same week as news broke about the proposed internet filter being pushed by the Australian Government. Under the plan, content will be restricted by ISP’s to filter ‘harmful content’ such as extremist messages, pornography and other such ‘morally damaging’ content. Critics of the scheme claim that our internet access will be restricted in the same way as the great firewall place by the Chinese government. There are fears that a filter is a step in the wrong direction away from freedom of the internet and towards politically motivated filtering of content.

Of most concern to me is the claim that a filtered internet could only run at 20% capacity of unfiltered speeds. This has obvious implications for your business if you want to take advantage of next generation technologies such as cloud computing. To add to the fray experts predict that the filter will be next to useless at filtering out such content.

Get educated or take action