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Senior Consultant, Netherlands	28 November 2007
Our Client, one of the fastest growing software CRM Global Organisations are expanding their team to include a Senior Consultant. To succeed in this role you should be energetic, motivated and achievement-oriented who can work independently or as a member of cross-functional teams. You will be disciplined with an astute business sense, superior communication skills and with a strong orientation towards customer satisfaction and be able to effectively present your ideas to senior management with a strong ability to think conceptually and strategically. Responsibilities: Your core responsibilities will include but not be limited to: Managing multiple simultaneous projects and project teams. Responsible for developing functional requirements and delivering CRM solutions according to these business requirements. Facilitating workshops with key business users and defining/specifying CRM requirements and customisations according to business needs. Building and maintaining appropriate client relationships, at all levels, during delivery of project. Maintaining high levels of quality and customer satisfaction. Serving as a subject matter expert in one or more specific areas. Providing sales support to the Company’s Licence and Consulting Sales teams. Presenting project deliverables to the customer and the internal team. Required Skills/Experience: Experience of project management, ideally, managing multiple simultaneous projects and project teams. Extensive experience in implementation and streamlining within any of the following areas - Campaign Management, Sales and Marketing, Sales Force Management, Leads Management, Account / Subscription Management, Customer Interaction Management, Order Management and/or Customer Self-Serve. Previous consulting experience gained within either a CRM software vendor or the CRM practice of a major systems integrator. Proven understanding of processes and best practices within your industry and how to leverage CRM func
Microsoft ships Visual Studio 2008	19 November 2007
Microsoft has released to manufacturing its Visual Studio 2008 software development platform and the accompanying .Net Framework 3.5, meaning these technologies are available for download on MSDN to subscribers today, the company said Monday.The products will be offered on disk within the next few weeks. Trial subscriptions also are available now. Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 are accessible on MSDN here.Among other things, Visual Studio 2008 is Microsoft's development platform geared to building Windows Vista applications. During a recent conference, difficulties with building Vista applications with the existing Visual Studio 2005 platform were cited by an attendee, who was assured that the solution is to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008.Microsoft is touting Visual Studio 2008 as a platform for professional developers as well as hobbyists and teams."I am incredibly proud to be a part of the team that is truly advancing the state of developer tools," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, Microsoft corporate vice president for the company's developer division, in his blog on Monday."We hope that Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 enables you as an individual or as a team to build great applications. Whether you are a professional developer or a software enthusiast, are building applications for the client, server, Web, or devices, we hope you have fun with these products as your software is our passion," Somasegar said.Microsoft with Visual Studio 2008 is offering enhancements in every edition of the product, including Visual Studio Express for hobbyists and Visual Studio Team System for team-based development. With more than 250 new features, Visual Studio 2008 includes such improvements as visual designers to speed development with .Net Framework 3.5 and upgrades to Web development tools and language enhancements, the company said.A highlight of particular interest is LINQ (Language Integrated Query), which the company said closes the gap between programming objects and data. Developers can focus on what they need the data to do rather than on how to access it, the company said. Microsoft is positioning LINQ as a technology for rapid application development."LINQ is the star," said Greg DeMichillie, lead analyst for application platforms at Directions on Microsoft. LINQ makes it easier to tie together C# or Visual Basic with SQL, he said."Everything else in Visual Studio 2008 is useful to some set of developers or another, but LINQ hits the entire spectrum of developers," he said.Also included in Visual Studio 2008 are advanced development tools and debugging features, Microsoft said. Developers can target multiple versions of the .Net Framework, including versions 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5, and build AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) -enabled Web applications.Tools are featured to speed development of connected applications on platforms, including the Web, Vista, Office 2007, the SQL Server 2008 database, and Windows Server 2008. Web developers can leverage ASP.Net and other technologies.New ASP.Net controls allow for better page management and templates. Web development is boosted through new support for Web server communication techniques for AJAX/JSON-enabled Web sites..Net Framework 3.5 is intended to enable rapid construction of connected applications; it offers pre-fabricated software for solving common programming tasks. Web 2.0, SOA, and software-and-services applications are supported in version 3.5.Included in.Net Framework 3.5 are enhancements to the base library, Windows Workflow Foundation; Windows Communication Foundation for Web services; Windows Presentation Foundation for presentation; and Windows CardSpace, for digital identities.WCF supports native REST (Representational State Transfer) and RSS and backs multiple Web services specifications. These includeWeb Services Atomic Transactions 1.1, WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1, WS-SecureConversation, and WS-Coordination 1.1.Visual Studio Team System 2008, meanwhile, is an application lifecycle management system with tools, processes, and guidance. It supports management of application builds.Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a collaboration server for Visual Studio Team System. Featured in the 2008 edition of TFS are: Improved performance and security; support for such configurations as clusters, mirrors, and virtual machines; continuous integration; and scheduled builds. Also highlighted in TFS are version control features, query build improvements, and Web access to version control, work item tracking, and status reports.Microsoft used TFS to manage this release of Visual Studio 2008. "TFS enables process enactment, collects a lot of data, and enables reporting on it. It provides visibility to everyone and it enables enforcement of certain things," Somasegar said.But DiMichillie described improvements to TFS as minor. TFS lags behind the competition in areas like testing, he said.Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition costs $799 for new buyers and $549 to upgrade from the previous release. Team Foundation Server costs $2,799; upgrades cost $499.
IBM Rational head: We're transforming	16 November 2007
When Danny Sabbah became general manager of IBM's Rational division in 2005, he set out to make changes in the organization. Sabbah said Friday that this transformation is well under way."I think you will see a lot more reality to that vision in the second half of 2008," he said. "By 2009, you won't recognize Rational."A key Rational project is Jazz. "What we're doing now is starting to create the IDE (integrated development environment) of the year 2010," Sabbah said. One of the first Jazz products is Rational Team Concert, a real-time collaboration portal, which is now in beta.The Jazz project symbolizes the shift in focus at Rational, Sabbah said. At different points, the company focused on developing "best of breed" developer tools, and then on process and methodology, he said. Jazz doesn't negate that work but aims to "treat the application life cycle as an entity in and of itself," Sabbah said. "It's a very different perspective from, 'How am I the best coder, or the best tester, or change management expert?'""I talk about Rational being the ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor for the business process of software development," he added.Overall, Sabbah's leadership of Rational has indeed invoked change, said analyst Judith Hurwitz, a longtime IBM watcher."Historically, they've had a lot of tools that didn't really work together all that well," she said of the company, which IBM bought in 2003. "From the outside, it looks like they're building much more of a platform than a series of disconnected tools."IBM bought Watchfire, a Web application security company, earlier this year. Sabbah said IBM is going to use Watchfire's technology to embed the notion of security early in the software development process. "The way you encourage developers to understand those types of rules is to inject those design patterns into their tools," he said.As Rational undergoes change, competitor Microsoft has in turn been evolving its own development products, such as the Visual Studio IDE.Sabbah said IBM will make sure Rational continues to play well with its rival because of the mixed environments many IBM customers have. Either IBM or its partners will create Jazz plug-ins for the Visual Studio stack, he said.However, Sabbah is unimpressed by Microsoft's roadmap for application development beyond Visual Studio 2008. The project, codenamed "Oslo," is based around using model-driven design to build and manage composite applications. But the vision is still hazy, as Microsoft has set no release dates."I have a hard time dealing with announcements from Microsoft that are nothing but paper," Sabbah said. "I can write vision documents too. It's just hard to make judgments on things that aren't real.... All I can tell you is, the stuff we're doing with Jazz, it's running code."Sabbah also said he has little use for a recent trend: Tools and platforms that supposedly make it easy for business users to do some development."I don't believe any of that stuff," he said. "I've never met a business user that can use any type of professional development tool. Period." Business users are better off working within more familiar environments, such as spreadsheets and word processing programs, he said.IBM is instead working on how to better connect coders with the needs of business. "The whole idea is to improve the communication between the developers and the business analysts who are trying to convey the requirements," he said.
Microsoft goes mod with campus expansion	14 November 2007
Microsoft is in the midst of a massive expansion to its Seattle area campus and has a new strategy for the design of its buildings that reflects the software giant's changing business."It's not just Office and Windows anymore," said Martha Clarkson, a designer on Microsoft's staff who spearheaded the new direction.Microsoft has decided to put more thought into the design of its buildings to reflect new businesses, such as the consumer-focused Xbox and Zune groups. It hopes that the added cost required to create the new look, which features open lobbies, colorful carpets, and mod furniture, will pay off in productivity gains."We used to build generic buildings," said Chris Owens, general manager for real estate and facilities at Microsoft. Going forward, managers of businesses that will be in the buildings will have a say in the way the interior is laid out in order to support their business objectives, he said.The new options are the result of a project that Clarkson undertook. She and her colleagues traveled to 26 Microsoft facilities around the globe, interviewing executives and studying the way employees work.Some of their findings were surprising. For example, while employees estimated that they spent 75 percent of their work time in their offices, in reality they were in their offices only 41 percent of their time. The rest was spent in meetings or working from home, Clarkson said.Clarkson and her team also discovered that even though Microsoft has a positive reputation for a policy that allows the majority of workers to have their own offices rather than cubicles, some teams prefer an open, collaborative work environment, she said.Building 99, the first building created from the ground up to reflect the new design environment at Microsoft, has plenty of space for on-the-fly collaboration. The building, which officially opened Nov. 12, houses Microsoft Research and contains many small meeting rooms with comfortable chairs that workers can relax into and discuss ideas."We want serendipitous meetings," said Kevin Schofield, general manager for Microsoft Research. He wanted an open design that lets people see each other across the building or in another room and allows them opportunities to grab a nearby space to sit down and discuss ideas.One group in particular should like the new available spaces. The theory group within Microsoft Research includes physicists, economists, and mathematicians. They meet for afternoon tea every day, Schofield said. It's a social get together, but they gravitate into conversations that end up relevant to their work, he said. In their old building, they met in nondescript conference rooms that might not have windows or a white board.In building 99, they'll be spoiled for choice of comfortable rooms to have their tea. Some rooms can't be reserved, so that they're more likely to be available for spur-of-the-moment meetings. Many have comfortable chairs surrounding a coffee table, more like a sitting room in a home than an office conference room. Also, most of them feature glass walls that workers can treat like white boards, writing diagrams or ideas on them and then erasing the drawings.The building features a central atrium in the lobby topped with a glass roof and with conference rooms overlooking the space. Open staircases flank the atrium, which has a café in its center. The space was built to be able to accommodate a meeting of all 650 people who work in the building and all future buildings on campus will have a similar feature.Schofield used a relatively new Workplace Advantage Lab on campus to see the ideas that Clarkson's team had come up with and choose what would work best for the group. The lab shows off options such as offices with moveable walls that can be converted into larger, shared office spaces and conference rooms that are flanked by offices.Sliding doors will be one feature that will come standard in all office buildings, as opposed to hinged doors that take up more space. Also, lights in offices will have sensors so they turn on when someone walks into the room and off when the room is empty. All new buildings will also feature under-floor cooling systems, which save energy because they blow cool air from the ground up, rather than forcing cool air from the ceiling through warmer air that naturally rises.The new office design is more expensive than the old way of doing things, said Owen. But when 90 percent of the cost of running a building is paying for the people inside of it, it's easy to pay off investments that drive productivity, he said.Microsoft, which already employs over 36,000 people in the Puget Sound region, continues to grow at a fast rate. Last year, the company said it would spend $1 billion on a three-year campus expansion plan. But in mid-November this year it said it would add five more buildings to the previous plan, so now the expansion will support 19,000 new workers. The new plan includes an area of campus planned for completion in early 2009 that features a central outdoor commons, a post office, mini-spa, bookstore, and 12 food venues.
Ellison touts Fusion Applications	15 November 2007
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison didn't display much of his traditional flamboyance Wednesday at Oracle's OpenWorld conference, but he did preview the company's next-generation Fusion Applications and said its Unbreakable Linux offering has met with initial success.The first Fusion Applications are aimed at sales-force automation and will arrive in early 2008, he said during a keynote address. The company will also release prebuilt integration packs for connecting the applications to existing Oracle systems, according to Ellison.Ellison termed them "second-generation" sales-force applications. They're different from other existing sales -orce applications that are designed primarily to offer forecasts to management, he said.Fusion's goal is instead to help sales employees sell more, according to Ellison. "They're really designed not to take the place of Salesforce.com," he said. "They coexist with those products."One of the new programs, Sales Prospector, is a data-mining application that looks at a company's customer database and tells a salesperson which types of customers are buying what products. "It's very much like Amazon.com. 'Customers who bought this DVD, also bought this DVD,'" Ellison said.A company's sales force can then determine good targets for additional pitches as well as easily find customer references to help close new deals, Ellison asserted. "That's designed not to help you forecast better, but sell more," he said. "That's business intelligence for the sales force."Ellison repeatedly stressed that users of Oracle's existing product lines will not be forced to migrate to Fusion because the company plans to make it easy to integrate the new applications. "If you continue with Oracle E-Business Suite for five years, it doesn't mean you can't use Fusion Applications," he said.Ellison said Oracle intends to support its own database and IBM's DB2 for Fusion financial applications, but no decisions have been made regarding database support for other program types, such as human resources.The CEO also touched on Unbreakable Linux. He said Oracle now has 1,500 Unbreakable Linux customers, including large companies like International House of Pancakes and Abercrombie & Fitch. "We've made great progress in our first year, and we're now building on this," he said. "We're literally building up our sales team just now. We wanted to focus on getting service and engineering right before we pushed this aggressively through sales."In addition, Ellison trumpeted Oracle's entry into the crowded virtualization market, Oracle VM, which the company announced this week.Oracle VM is not only cheaper than competing offerings, it is "dramatically faster," Ellison asserted. "This is a very, very high quality, optimized VM," he said. He said the company will provide benchmarking numbers to prove its speed claims.At one point, though, Ellison showed a touch of modesty, acknowledging that no one company, not even Oracle, will ever fully dominate the applications market. "Even if we buy aggressively for the next 20 years, I think there's still going to be more competition than we can deal with effectively," he said, referring to well-established vertical offerings, such as the Hogan Systems banking software made by Computer Sciences.Oracle spent billions on a string of acquisitions in 2007, ranging from business-intelligence vendor Hyperion Solutions to Tangosol, which makes an application grid. Most recently, it extended a $6.7 billion offer to its rival in the middleware space, BEA Systems. The BEA board rejected the bid.Oracle's offer has since expired, but it has not ruled out making another bid for BEA, which said it will release a number of delinquent financial reports on Thursday.Ellison did not touch on BEA in his speech, which served as a crescendo for this year's OpenWorld conference. The show at San Francisco's Moscone Center drew more than 40,000 attendees, according to Oracle.Pop singer Billy Joel introduced Ellison. Joel was brief but playful in his remarks. "I'm excited to be here," he said. "Considering how many car accidents I've had recently, I'm excited to be anywhere."
Carrier security outsourcing making connections	12 November 2007
Massive telecommunications carriers, including AT&T, BT, and Verizon, are promoting their ability to take over a significant portion of customers' IT security operations, and some enterprises are already buying into the model.Over the last several years, the sprawling carriers have acquired and introduced a range of technologies and services that promise to help protect customers from the growing wave of IT-based threats, including denial-of-service attacks and Web-borne malware programs.And while the carriers all concede that delivering safe telecommunications and Internet access to their customers' doorsteps is a fundamental requirement of their core business, the companies also maintain that they are uniquely positioned to become broader security outsourcing partners for their clients.Florida-based First Advantage is already outsourcing a significant portion of its IT security operations to its carrier partner, Verizon Business.The publicly held risk management services company had previously seen a payoff from outsourcing elements of its call center and software development operations, and the increasing complexity of its security and compliance concerns made it a natural to enlist Verizon to take over more of the work, executives said."Compared to the cost of internal operation, price was obviously a major consideration, but it was also the idea that these are specialists in security who we would be turning to," said Isabelle Theisen, chief security officer at First Advantage."They can provide a level of monitoring and correlation that would not have been possible for us to achieve internally," she said. "And we wanted to take a more leading-edge approach to matching potential threats to specific assets, something that alone would demand a full-time team for us otherwise."Theisen estimates that First Advantage, which specializes in employee background screening and insurance fraud investigation, has already ceded approximately 70 percent of its IT security operations to Verizon.Among the services it consumes from the carrier, which include everything from AV (anti-virus) and IPS (intrusion prevention systems) to Web applications firewalls and operation of compliance-mandated server farms, many came to Verizon via its July 2007 acquisition of CyberTrust.However, the seeds that have grown into the company's portfolio of security outsourcing skills were taking root years before the deal for the MSS (managed security services) company came to pass, Verizon Business officials said."We saw tremendous growth in demand for additional security services starting in 2005 and knew we needed to scale up; adding CyberTrust has helped us expand rapidly, and we're seeing even greater demand today, especially among multinational customers," said Cindy Bellefeuille, director of solution and product marketing at Verizon Business.Some industry watchers have said that customers will increasingly expect carriers to eliminate many security threats as part of their core connectivity services just as they require the companies to guarantee network performance speeds in their SLAs (service level agreements).However, Bellefeuille said that companies such as Verizon can meet those demands while creating new opportunities for additional services aimed at thwarting targeted threats or providing automation services, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance server operation the company oversees for First Advantage."There will always be opportunities from an attack perspective for us to take action and protect customers on the backbone, and we'll do that," she said. "We've also driven a lot of internal innovation in last three years for fighting issues such as targeted attacks; we're building out the honeynets and doing more correlation of data. Now we're in the phase of launching services as both stand-alones and value-adds."Verizon marketers foresee a future wherein the company could become a provider of end-to-end security outsourcing services.While a majority of the services it has offered thus far have centered on external issues such as helping its customers ward off DoS threats and malware, the company is already getting its hooks into more internal security operations, such as identity management, filtering data pulled in by IDSes (intrusion detection systems), and providing protection for various types of databases and software applications.BT beefs up its security offerings BT is another carrier that has turned heads in the security community in recent years with its acquisitions and stated business strategies.The company's security aspirations were perhaps illustrated best by its October 2006 acquisition of Counterpane, another MSS specialist.As with Verizon, officials with BT said that the carrier is preparing to launch a far broader set of security services than merely those that it added through the Counterpane buyout.Along with anti-DoS services -- and Counterpane's array of network monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and e-mail filtering skills -- BT officials contend that the company will soon be able to provide customers with security offerings such as antimalware filtering, embedded firewalls, UTM (unified threat management), and intrusion prevention.Enterprise customers will become particularly amenable to such carrier security services as they continue to upgrade to next-generation networking infrastructure, said Mick Creane, head of managed security strategy at BT.While the company has been providing anti-DoS services for years -- using technology sourced from vendor Arbor Networks, which targets its products directly at service providers -- there is a far broader opportunity for carriers to realize in security, he said."When everything has gone IP, we will be able to offer even more services and flexibility," he said. "Organizations are recognizing that the threats are changing so quickly that it's a huge challenge to keep pace, but that within the large carrier service providers, we have the necessary economies of scale and expertise to deal with this problem."Over time, Creane contends that by pulling together more managed security and carrier services, companies such as BT will be able to provide an integrated set of network defenses that customers won't be able to rival with their own internal systems defense technologies.In addition to those defensive opportunities, the carrier also plans to offer more proactive security services, such as filtering out inappropriate or unauthorized Web sites and blocking access to those URLs for its business customers."Customers are beginning to get it, and in the short term, we can use it as a business differentiator, but in the long term, I think they will begin to expect a certain amount of security expertise," Creane said. "BT and other carriers are in a very powerful position because by embedding security into the network at a higher level, we will be able to do security cheaper than CPU-based products and services."For now, most enterprises are just beginning to familiarize themselves with the carriers' expanding security services, but proponents maintain that the transition from companies doing more in-house to outsourcing more of their security responsibilities over to their existing bandwidth providers, will evolve quickly.For some customers, the carriers' security vision has clearly already been embraced with enthusiasm."I believe that they can help us correlate high-risk incidents and threats with information about our IT assets that will allow us to focus on the most high-priority items at any given time, from a security perspective," said First Advantage's CTO Theisen. "We can then move into adoption of a more risk-based system for our information assets. Right now it's all about just getting the necessary framework in place."
Senior Developer	01 November 2007
My client who is a leading ecommerce company in the travel sector is seeking a bright, creative and solid Senior Developer to join their existing team of 8. This role will focus on leading edge application prototyping and development within the .Net 3.x arena. The ideal candidate should possess demonstrable excellence in C# and ASP.Net, building .NET server controls, workflow apps, service architecture [including web services], XSLT and XML, AJAX [.NET] In addition to a very competitive salary package are a range of corporate benefits including bonus and share options. The role is based in London with great transport links. This is an urgent requirement suitably qualified applicants will enjoy my instant response. TLP Consultancy Ltd is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.
Update: Iron Mountain to buy e-discovery company	31 October 2007
Major storage provider Iron Mountain said Wednesday it intends to purchase Stratify, a maker of document discovery software, for about $158 million in cash.Stratify is known for products aimed at law firms and other organizations that need to access large amounts of legal filings. Iron Mountain said in a statement that the purchase should help customers better manage and monitor such sensitive documents in an age of stricter oversight of regulatory compliance and government investigations.Iron Mountain also believes there is huge money to be made in combining Stratify's document discovery technology with its own storage offerings and services. "Litigation and regulation has been building for years. It then got really propelled last year with Rule 26," Iron Mountain president and COO Bob Brennan said during a conference call, referring to amendments made to federal law governing the discovery of electronic documents.He estimated the market opportunity for such services as being between $4 billion and $12 billion.Iron Mountain said Stratify will become a division of the company, and its offerings will also be marketed as value-added services to Iron Mountain's customers. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.Brennan said Stratify has had annual revenue of about $30 million, and Iron Mountain expects that number will grow by 20 to 30 percent each year.He characterized the pending acquisition as something to "bridge the gap between our physical and digital businesses.... We are acquiring the best product in the space as well as the best process in the space."John Clancy, president of Iron Mountain Digital, said in an interview that the company conducted an "exhaustive" search among e-discovery companies, and settled on Stratify due to its strong technology. "There are lot of vendors in the space. When you go through, there's usually a smart team of entrepreneurs ... but what happens is, they start with the process, but then back into the technology."Newer features in Stratify's core product, Stratify Legal Discovery, include the ability to detect duplicate and near-duplicate documents; tools for identifying and tracking documents with hidden metadata, such as comments or tracked changes; and better management of "compound" documents, such as a text file with an embedded spreadsheet.Clancy said Iron Mountain has no current plans to rebrand Stratify's offerings, and company employees will be retained.Iron Mountain also announced its third-quarter earnings on Wednesday. The company said total revenue increased by 18 percent to $702 million, a boost driven by a 12 percent internal growth spike along with a number of acquisitions, including ArchivesOne and RMS Services-USA.Operating income for the quarter rose to $129 million, a jump of 33 percent. Net income was $51 million. Iron Mountain's stock was trading at about $34 Wednesday afternoon, up roughly 4 percent from Tuesday's closing price of $32.70.CEO Richard Reese noted the company's recent run of acquisitions, which he said total some $500 million including the Stratify deal. Reese said he doesn't expect the company to continue its "burning pace" of purchases.This story was updated on Oct. 31, 2007.
United CEO: Support building for mergers	28 November 2007
The head of United Airlines said Tuesday he no longer feels like a voice in the wilderness in arguing that airlines must consider ...
Cycling: Big sponsor pulls out	27 November 2007
T-Mobile will stop sponsoring cycling after a series of doping scandals, leaving Britons Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins to ride for the new Team High Road.