Posted on Mon, Feb 08, 2010 @ 03:30 AM
Today Magic Software UK released a PR story about our work with Adecco, one of the UK's largest Recruitment Agencies.
Adecco have been a customer of ours for many years, so when they moved to uniPaaS and began investigating the possibility of developing and deploying applications in the Cloud using Magic's uniPaaS technology, I was personally very excited.
Click here to read the full story and let me know your thoughts.
Posted on Fri, Feb 05, 2010 @ 08:11 AM
2009 was definitely the year of cloud-education, although many companies are still prudent to act on the cloud. This prudence is born from a number of issues, such as where to start, security risks, organization readiness and lack of standards and industry consensus. We also learned that some enterprises see the utilization of cloud environments verses their own internal environments as an "either or" concept. However, this does not necessarily need to be the case. For many companies the number one reason for moving to the cloud is for economic benefit. Other reasons such as, simplicity, connectivity with remote users, elasticity and flexibility definitely dominate the discussion.
We see companies trying to benefit from some of the above in the form of their own "private clouds". What most have not considered is that a hybrid-cloud approach can also contribute and help them to achieve these benefits, regardless of whether we look at private or public clouds. We see more and more companies talking about private clouds, which in essence is nonsense; why is this? Because the whole point of a cloud is to consume services rather than own and maintain infrastructure, in much the same way we do when consuming utilities. This has taught us about companies' attitudes and concerns with regard to cloud technologies. On the one hand they want to take advantage of as many cloud benefits as they can, but without putting their businesses at risk and therefore; owning part of the solution.
So what do we mean by a hybrid model? This is the ability to create enterprise business applications that span across both on-premise infrastructure and cloud infrastructures (regardless of whether this is private or public) and without the need to worry about how to create such solutions. This enables companies that are not yet entirely comfortable keeping their "crown jewels" on a public cloud, to start immediately benefiting from all other areas of the cloud that they are willing to embrace. As time passes and confidence builds these companies will be able to transfer more and more of their business logic, with relative ease, to the cloud.
In 2009 we spoke with many CTOs, IT Managers and ISVs, and were invited to demonstrate and pilot this concept to them. Most of whom were keen on the idea of developing applications on platforms that can be deployed both on-premise and off-premise, or in combinations of both. One such example of this that we are currently investigating for one of our prospects is, taking their invoicing model for their Accounting package (create invoice, print invoice, amend invoice and so on) into the cloud. This allows their salesforce and administration teams to work remotely from home or on mobile devises, but also keeps their General Ledger model, forecasting and reconciliation within the safety of the enterprise.
We also found another interesting aspect of the hybrid model that many customers, such as banks, local governments, the NHS and so on, need because of their regulatory, compliance and governance requirements. Some organizations are required by law to own, manage and maintain the data repository of their solutions due to regulatory standards, such as data protection, Basel II and so on. By providing a solution that allows them to put their entire application logic on the cloud while keeping all the database on-premise, within the concept of a data vault, accessed by secure VPN links from the application platform proves to be the only solution that meets their needs and requirements.
Magic Software's uniPaaS Application Platform allows organizations to develop enterprise business solutions that can span between on-premise, off-premise, desk-top and mobile devises without the need to worry about which bits go where and provides the flexibility and functions to each of the environments at any given time. For example, when designing and deploying the solution there is no need to pre-determine what runs where. uniPaaS enables organizations that have current software development needs, to start building applications without the need to worry about how to deploy and can therefore make the decision to move to the cloud when they are ready.
Posted on Wed, Jan 27, 2010 @ 10:08 AM
Manufacturers looking to efficiently upgrade their IT capabilities and gain access to new business application functionality have two basic options available, according to Magic Software Enterprises.
They can either sign up with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor or they can develop their system in house using custom software.
The SaaS option is on the rise as the market continues to swing towards the integration of 'services' and 'information'.
This 'service industrialisation' is personified by the SaaS business model, which meets business functionality needs with a measurable, buyable commodity that is available on the open market.
According to the company, SaaS is the ultimate playing field 'leveller', enabling small manufacturers to achieve the same operational efficiency of big players with big IT budgets, developing custom-made ERP and CRM systems.
With all that said, however, there remains a significant advantage to building manufacturing applications in house.
While SaaS provides a fast and easy way to obtain the IT capabilities needed, it remains, by its very nature, a one-size-fits-all solution, with little or no room for customisation to fit the specific business processes in some manufacturing enterprises.
If manufacturers are looking for very specific functionality - which does not leave them dependent upon the continued existence of their SaaS vendor - there is a good argument for opting for custom software development.
That argument can be made even stronger if the cost of custom development can be reduced and the end result made more adaptable to changing business demands and the needs of a mobile workforce.
The development of rich internet applications (RIAs) solves some of these issues.
Manufacturers that have implemented custom RIA systems report a number of benefits.
First, RIAs are inherently mobile; the user has access to his or her main ERP or CRM system from anywhere, as long as there is internet connectivity.
This is particularly beneficial for manufacturing organisations since this industry typically has work operations and staff that cannot be tied to a static desk or workstation.
RIAs enable shop-floor operations and inventory staff and managers to work on the move and still have instant access to the core CRM or ERP system of the organisation.
Second, one of the main advantages of RIAs is that they are, by nature, 'rich' - this means better user interfaces and improved functionality, typically including dashboards with moving graphs that can display histories and up-to-date inventory levels, sales figures and orders.
This can help improve decision making, reduce product costs, better identify bottlenecks and anticipate shortages and improve lean-manufacturing procedures.
Third, manufacturing industries require fast and up-to-date inventory data and a real-time view of work in progress; RIAs can provide real-time tracking and batch item monitoring, including radio-frequency identification, barcodes and other tracking systems, helping manufacturers to more efficiently and effectively manage their manufacturing processes.
In addition, RIAs can pull data from multiple data warehouses and systems and present that information on a single screen or a reduced number of screens, with screens that can be opened and viewed simultaneously with visualisation capabilities as well as drill-down and scroll-down capabilities, enabling staff and management to view more detailed information as required.
Another advantage is that custom-designed RIAs accessing local data warehouses can be optimised for master item synchronisation, potentially saving organisations millions.
All in all, the benefits of custom-writing RIAs present some significant advantages for manufacturers.
That is, of course, until the user starts writing; then, he or she realises that developing an RIA that features internet accessibility with the power and functionality of a desktop application involves system complexity.
Custom RIA development can be prohibitive to many manufacturers because the sophistication of the software requires two kinds of programmers: RIA programmers for the client-side user interface and traditional business logic programmers for the back-end server application.
Maintaining two development teams is not cheap, fast or easy, hence the attraction of the SaaS option.
However, this issue can now be resolved with a new approach to RIA development that pre-compiles and pre-configures the heavy code-writing processes into ready-made business application engines - or metadata engines.
Application platforms that make use of metadata engines, such as Magic Software's Unipaas, allow a single programmer to create and deploy the entire business application from end to end, without the need for multiple programming languages or multiple development teams.
With a simpler coding process and fewer specialised skills required to design and implement changes, manufacturers can also more easily custom change their applications as their business needs evolve.
Metadata-driven application platforms can reduce typical RIA development costs by up to 75 per cent, making RIA competitively viable for smaller manufacturers and those with lower IT budgets.
Metadata application platforms allow RIAs to become a viable, economic alternative to SaaS for a large number of manufacturing companies.
Manufacturers can retain their customised, mission-critical applications in house, while avoiding the IT expenses associated with conventional RIA development and deployment.
Read more from Manufacturing Talk
Posted on Thu, Jan 21, 2010 @ 03:21 AM
For those of you who regularly follow my blog posts, I thought you might find my recent interview for Microscope an interesting read. The article talks about my interests, likes, dislikes, what my first car was...So here's a little info about me that you might not be aware of!
What is the best/worst advice you have received and from whom?
Best advice: "If you treat your subordinates as privates (rank) they will perform as privates; if you treat your subordinates as generals they will perform as generals." It was given to me by my manager at the time, Regev Yativ, vice-president EMEA.
What is the best book you have
ever read?
I read a lot, from classical to business, so it is a difficult choice. If I had to choose one book that influenced me and gave me the passion for what I do today it would be Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar.
Tell us something most people do not know about you
I love philosophy, especially classical and post-modern. I enjoy researching the influence and implementation of philosophy theories in art and architecture.
What temptation can you not resist?
My mum's cooking.
Where is the one place you would like to visit before you die?
Somewhere in space. I just must see planet Earth from space before I die.
Which bit of technology would you want with you if you were stranded on a desert island?
My iPhone. I just love it. It makes me feel that the world is in my palm.
What was your first car and how does it compare with what you
drive now?
My first car was a Volkswagen Beetle. It was two years older than me and was in a bad shape when I bought it, full of dents and corrosion. I invested my first two salaries in modernising the car, gave it brand new bodywork with a fantastic metallic colour, changed the interior and enhanced its performance. It was the most talked about car in my age group at the time.
Today I drive a BMW 6 series, which is a good combination of a fast-performing sports car with the comfort of a top-of-the-range saloon car.
What do you most believe in?
Employee empowerment is the most critical aspect of successful business today. For an organisation to be responsive, agile and decisive, empowerment at every level is the key. Empowerment makes the difference when a sales person decides to do that little bit extra for customers; empowerment makes the difference when a quick decision by a worker saves the production line from a possible breakdown; empowerment makes the difference when people try to locate opportunity for improving their work and life in general.
If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be and why?
President JF Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those two weeks during October 1962 could have changed humankind's future forever and taken us back to the Stone Age. Kennedy was considered by many to be intelligent but too young and too weak for decision-making in crisis situations. He managed not only to defend his country and achieve the best possible outcome from the situation, but also won many hearts and paved the way to end the cold war.
Who would you least like to be stuck in a lift with?
Someone with bad body odour.
Describe yourself in one sentence
Someone who is loyal, committed and delivers.
If you were shipwrecked, who would you like to have with you and why?
Family and loved ones. After all, they are what keep me going.
Do you prefer cities or countryside?
I struggled with that question myself for years, when deciding where to live. In the end I decided on somewhere in between. I like the activity, the buzz and the nightlife cities can offer, but I would miss the peace of mind one gets in the countryside. I now live in Windsor.
What would be your perfect holiday?
My perfect holiday would be a place full of history, character and art. Almost everywhere in Europe could fit that definition. I went to Florence last year, which I raved about for months afterwards. Barcelona is another favourite spot that I keep going back to. And Bath (Avon) still mesmerises me despite the number of times I have visited.
Sum up the IT channel
Working with the channel allows us to do what we do best - develop innovative technologies - while our channel partners focus on their strengths, which are selling, marketing and customising our products to meet users' needs.
Posted on Tue, Jan 19, 2010 @ 05:11 AM
Some of the leading cloud vendors at last month's Business Cloud Summit voiced there opinions on the real reasons organisations are looking at cloud computing. Arguements ranged from cost and ROI, improved service and flexibility of business applications, to better provision of applications to suit individual user requirements.
Take a look at the video to find out more.
Posted on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 @ 06:16 AM
At the end of 2009, Magic Software attended the Business Cloud 9 Summit and as a result, I was recently asked by them to provide an industry view for an article debating the relevance of pure-cloud platforms in the 'real business world'. The article looks at the issues currently facing ISV's looking to deploy on multiple platforms and how best to achieve this.
Ultimately, the article debates the cost effectiveness for ISV's of continuing to develop for on-premise (client/server) applications against the new breed of Cloud applications, and also highlights the benefits of using hybrid-SEAP platforms, such as Magic Software's uniPaaS.
Click here to read the full article and let me know your thoughts.
Posted on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 @ 03:34 AM
I recently went to see a customer who had both SAP ERP and Microsoft's SharePoint in use within the organisation. They had an interesting dilemma - Microsoft's SharePoint integration templates were useful, but weren't designed for their specific integration requirements. That left them at a loss, requiring several manual administration processes in order to integrate the two systems. Not only was this time consuming, costly and prone to human error, it also meant they weren't making full use of either system. The question was how were they going to integrate the two systems in order to bring their use of software into the 21st century?
It appears my customer is not alone, David Rubinstein - SD Times, is a proponent of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) and hosts some of the best conferences worldwide on this technology. However, he also acknowledges it has it's metadata pitfalls, which means if you're thinking of integrating SharePoint with anything else, you had better make use of a systematic approach, otherwise you will get bogged down in massive development efforts involving thousands of lines of code. This only serves to exacerbate the exact problem SharePoint is designed to solve.That's where Magic Software's iBOLT comes in.
iBOLT is code-free and contains a comprehensive library of adapters, wizards, services and methods, based upon Magic Software's 25 years of development experience. Within iBOLT you can create both simple and complex business processes by dragging, dropping and configuring your desired components rather than working through pages of hard code. In addition, once configured, your visual flow can be easily activated and deployed to achieve results between 5 and 10 times faster than other integration technologies.
Why not have a read of our free Whitepaper all about this subject and tell me your thoughts.
Posted on Thu, Jan 07, 2010 @ 03:53 AM
For many the real concern about SaaS - Software-as-a-Service is how to take traditional on-premise applications, like SAP's ERP, for example, and make it available over the cloud? SaaS integration has a number of benefits, some of which include:
• Increasing the flexibility of information over different systems
• Bridging disparate pieces of a process together
• Enabling a traditional on-premise application to go mobile through a common set of data interfaces
• Reducing the complexity and expense of integration
Over the next year, we are set to see cloud vendors differentiate themselves by offering complete cloud solutions as opposed to the basic infrastructure offerings. Solutions that help integrate private and public clouds, provide single sign-on and security, offer real multi-tenancy billing and chargeback, and enable business process and workflow automation in the cloud will become the new breed rather than the traditional hosted virtual machines.
As I mentioned in Monday's blog post, using a combination of Magic Software's uniPaaS application platform for the RIA front-end and the iBOLT business integration suite at the back-end, enterprises and ISVs can now build a mobile application that provides powerful Rich Internet (RIA) functionality for business users that also integrates and presents all of the various enterprise systems' data on one screen.
Through the combination of uniPaaS and iBOLT businesses can combine SAP with Salesforce.com CRM data, ERP data and back-office systems and processes to produce entire business workflows that can be customized, extended, deployed in any language and centrally managed over the cloud - be that private or public cloud scenarios.
The management of SaaS integration is enabled through the orchestration of data and information flows within the system environment. iBOLT is designed to easily assist with this orchestration, while uniPaaS enables rich application functionality over any mobile devise. Hence, your business data is easily accessible through workflow orchestration built in iBOLT and made available to end user s in a user friendly, mobile GUI through uniPaaS.
Click here to read more on this topic. I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on this subject.
Posted on Mon, Jan 04, 2010 @ 04:10 AM
We've already had 4 days to start enjoying 2010 and looking at what the year has in store, I think we could be in for a good one - Fingers crossed!
2009 saw widespread recognition of the operational and economic benefits of cloud computing, so much so that we all now understand how it is set to transform IT for the future. After a year of uncertainty and reduced IT budgets I believe we are set to see a growth in the use of cloud services in 2010. With that in mind, here are my predictions for the year to come and how I see Magic Software contributing to this.
So far Magic Software UK has already signed up to attend the Cloud Computing Congress at the London Olympia on March 16th, so it looks like the Cloud will still be hot on the agenda.
2010 will see an explosion in the demand for mobile devices and mobile applications. The challenge will be to provide a viable Rich Internet Application platform for the development and deployment of business application and in particular enterprise mobile applications that will be powerful yet practical enough to enable workers to complete essential tasks via their mobile devices - without transferring one-for-one the entire client user interfaces of heavy ERP or CRM enterprise applications to mobile screens.
Using a combination of Magic Software's uniPaaS application platform for the RIA front-end and the iBOLT business integration suite at the back-end, enterprises and ISVs can now build a mobile application that provides powerful Rich Internet (RIA) functionality for business users that also integrates and presents all of the various enterprise systems' data on one screen.
The combination of uniPaaS and iBOLT will mean businesses can combine SAP with Salesforce.com CRM data, ERP data and back-office systems and processes to produce entire business workflows that can be customized, extended, deployed in any language and centrally managed.
2010 will also see significant changes in the cloud-based service offerings. It won't be just the applications we make use of as services, it will also be consultancy and training, which is set to move into the cloud and stand as a major differentiator between the cloud vendors.
As more and more people gain experience with cloud services, knowledge will disseminate in the industry and best practices around security, networking, ‘hybrid clouds', application architecture and IT policies will become widespread.
Hybrid cloud scenarios will become the dominant use scenarios for cloud computing for the years to come. However, the drive toward hybrid cloud scenarios requires the integration of cloud-based and on-premises technologies in the enterprise.
Magic Software's iBOLT business integration platform is designed to fully and automatically integrate on-premise and on-demand cloud and mobile applications, and to extend the functionality of those applications while preserving the core business logic of the underlying technology.
With this in mind, 2010 looks set to be an exciting year on the cloud technology front. What's your verdict? Tell me your predictions for the cloud in 2010.
Posted on Thu, Dec 24, 2009 @ 03:39 AM
On Monday, as hundreds of people struggled to make it home in the snow, myself included, I thought of the many children across the country, most of whom will probably never have seen a white Christmas.
It was with that thought in mind, I had a smile on my face, despite my 2 hour journey 6 miles down the road from the Magic Software UK offices.
So for all you kids out there, young and old - I hope you have a very merry white Christmas and look forward to seeing you all in the New Year, from all of us at Magic Software UK.