To all our clients, supporters and friends, thank you so much for your support and the opportunities this past year – we are delighted to say that 2010 has been a great year for ClearPoint and despite the tough economic environment we are very fortunate to have grown our team to around 80 people by continuing to support our existing clients and bringing onboard some fabulous new clients.

Heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you for the opportunities. It is very much appreciated by Bain, myself and the entire team here at ClearPoint.

This time of the year gives us the opportunity to share the Christmas spirit with others – this year we very pleased to be in the position to make a donation to the Westpac Helicopter Trust. They are a superb organisation as members of my own family found out this year.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and we look forward to 2012 being an even bigger year.

From
Phil, Bain and all the team at ClearPoint

The Deloitte Fast50 and Fast500 competitions are excellent.  The participants are measured purely on revenue growth, and the competition recognizes and celebrates the role that growing businesses play in providing jobs and contributing to the general economy.  The Deloitte team do an excellent job; and there’s growing media coverage every year.

A round up on the Deloitte 2011 APAC Technology Fast500 is here and the full pdf Winners report here.

So.  A big congratulations from us to all participants.  And especially well done to all the Kiwi companies on the list this year including colleagues and friends at Xero, SMX, Sonar6, Optimal Usability, and KernMobile.

Go Big!! Go 2012!! Go kiwi!

Again, the world is awash with proven frameworks and reference models that should, in theory, assist in execution of building software and developing the right IT capability. ClearPoint’s pragmatic view is that IT capability is composed of People, Process and Technology.  Reflected in our values, we believe that the most important of these components is People – IT talent and leadership.

A clear pattern of success we see is where organisations retain a component of IT Talent and leadership in-house. People and leadership build teams, develop culture, culture then influences uptake and adherence to good software development practices, and helps develop a sense of solution and software “craftsmanship”.  When software teams care about craftsmanship; design, quality and results improve dramatically. Often innovation occurs too.

The sourcing and make-up of this leadership may vary.  But in-house means having talent close who understand the core strategic platforms in detail, the value they provide, how they work, who looks after them, and ‘whats normal’.  This gives the organization an advantage in;

• Agility – Responding to business needs and change
• Domain knowledge and translation – speaking the language of the business and domain
• Architecture and Governance – Ability to design, lead, and govern solutions including working with 3rd parties

Additionally, organisations with IT software leadership are more likely to understand and select appropriate solution implementation strategies  (e.g. Agile versus Waterfall). This same leadership often also understands the importance of road-maps, non functional considerations, quality and release management and the elements of IT risk, control and mitigation.

So.  In summary – however its achieved – seek to retain software leadership and design talent.  Ceding strategic software decisions to product/vendor centric thinking is very, very common, and can often be problematic.

Another view is to consider organisations that are doing great things with software.  Think AirNZ, Trademe, Xero.  There’s a reason why they like to work with the best tech folks.

Fast 50 evaluates entrants purely on revenue growth over 3 years and celebrates the creation of jobs and the direct contribution it makes to New Zealand’s economy.  The award is a recognition of the hard work done by the wider ClearPoint team, a big thank you to everyone!

A huge thank you to our clients for the opportunity to work together to do great things with technology.  And well done again and thanks to Matt and the team at Deloitte. Excellent night, and a great celebration.

We have nothing but admiration for the people and vision behind Xero.    It is fantastic to see a Kiwi company serving and succeeding internally in the Software as A Service “platform play” space.  There’s no reason why we can’t do it – vision, smart people, the power of technology reach and the drive. Go Xero! Go Kiwi!

In terms of how we work, ClearPoint defines ‘Agnosticism’ in that we have deep technical understanding in many different enterprise technologies and platforms.  With our client centric and values based approach, we’re able to call on our combined hands-on experience to advise in a solution-focussed, independent manner.

For our engineering teams who design and build solutions, ClearPoints relationships with large software vendors such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft and our understanding of their products is very important.  This enables us to help clients best leverage software investments and guides our thinking around future roadmaps and architecture.

We have recently celebrated ClearPoint’s 4th birthday.   It has been a fantastic journey to date, with many exciting plans to come, and we feel very privileged to be working with such great clients.  We are also humbled and delighted that so many talented people have chosen to join our team.

Thanks again everyone – and Go All Blacks, Go Warriors!

Notable absence?

As integration specialists, we couldn’t help but notice the absence of coverage on BizTalk and traditional connected systems streams. Perhaps this increases the likelihood that BizTalk as a server product may be on the wane. Further reading for the curious here and here.

Unsurprising mass inclusion?

Cloud, Cloud, Cloud! Plugs left right and centre for MS’s cloud offerings. Cut away the hype and it is clear that Windows and SQL Azure are becoming more functional and the MS offering is reaching a point where it can act in a truly elastic way. The develop once, deploy anywhere approach (anywhere being ‘on’ or ‘off’ premise (public or private cloud)) does have some merit.

With app fabric and various other cloud offerings, there are increasingly options to host composite or integrated SaaS solutions off premise. The challenges of data patriation and data protection legality still pose a barrier.  But the advent of hybrid on/off premise apps somewhat addresses this and location specific services may solve this for some countries.  Sadly, little old NZ is unlikely to get its own fully redundant cloud offering any time soon…

SQL Azures database federation is quite interesting as an attempt to deal with structured data in mass scaling environment. Some parallels to the ‘no-sql’ school with respect to consistency – more details here and here.

Marketecture vs Architecture

There were a surprising number of vendor/platform agnostic architecture sessions dotted amongst the usual Microsoft pitches. Worthy and notable include thought provoking presentations from Norm Judah and Miha Kraji on the Tech Ed video site.

Another interesting talk was on ‘Disposable Architecture’. It is good to hear people talking about the pragmatic execution of architecture. When IT is an enabler or a service to the business then a focus on business value or outcomes is crucial.  The balance of speed and delivery vs. architectural soundness is a fine line and is a challenge to execute.

I thought ClearPoint was technology agnostic?

We are.  We define agnostic as knowing a tremendous amount about a wide range of Enterprise technology.  For example, today we have expert teams working on MS SQL Server, MS BizTalk, Oracle Fusion projects and various open source technologies.

This practical implementation experience in these technologies enables ClearPoint to provide independent thought leadership, and informs our strategy work with clients.

Within the Microsoft family of products, the SQL Server ecosystem in particular is of interest as it underpins our Management Information Framework; our go to market in the Funds Management sector. Understanding advances in the SQL Server space and its implementation in the cloud helps us further develop our funds management offering.

Well done Microsoft – and thanks for another great TechEd.  See you in 2012!

The world is seemingly drowning in data – and surfacing meaningful information is getting harder and harder. Some mind boggling stats from this session include;

• Twitter generates ~7 TB data for analysis daily
• FaceBook adds ~12 TB of compressed data daily
• Yahoo! 4000 node cluster, sorted 1TB random integers in 62 seconds

This TechDrop looked at open systems tools and technology that are leveraged by these organisations to sort and analyse large amounts of data including Hadoop, Hive, Pig and R. The session also explained how the various technologies implement and build on the MapReduce algorithm.

For our part, ClearPoint is engaged with many clients on Information Management and Business Intelligence related projects including our work with the New Zealand Superannuation Fund and Anaplan. Rather than a conventional BI product-led or technology-led approach, ClearPoint tends to take a software methodology approach to information ensuring a focus on business needs and drivers. We are also interested in mega trends (Pro-consumer, Big Data, Web platform businesses), how they influence and inform traditional IT thinking.  For example; Microsoft moving to offer support for SQL-Hadoop integration.

A big thanks to Jonathan Ackerman who ran the session; the slides are available up here.

We welcome any feedback, ideas – and look forward to seeing everyone all next time.

By way of background – The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Hive is a data warehouse system for Hadoop that facilitates easy data summarization, ad-hoc queries, and the analysis of large datasets stored in Hadoop compatible file systems.  Apache Pig is a platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, and R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

This TechDrop will be a fairly technical session run by Jonathan Ackerman covering;

• Example real-world scenarios
• General introduction to Hadoop, Hive, Pig and R
• Typical information problems solved by this technology
• Tech demo
• Bit of Q and A

As per previous Tech Drops; there’s no company agendas, just pure tech networking. Plan is drinks+nibbles from 4.30, ~40-50 minute session from about 5.00′ish, wrap up and all done by 6.20.  Please RSVP (if you haven’t already).  See you all soon.

In this three part blog series we want to share some of ClearPoints thoughts and experiences from working with senior teams and boards over the last few years. In particular, some of the patterns of success in terms of people, processes and technology and culture that exist in businesses that are producing great IT outcomes.

Part One: What is your IT?

More and more we come across senior management teams and boards that are not entirely sure what the IT function in their organisations is, or what IT does. What is the purpose of IT? Is it largely operational? Is it software or solution development? Is it mostly systems implementation? Is it a mixture? Often the opinion or perspective differs between the leadership members resulting in conflicting messages, strategies and inconsistent governance.

Historically its referred to as IT Strategy – with discussion and energy often centered on ‘Aligning IT with the Business’. We see things are rapidly moving on. Its not about alignment anymore, IT often is the business strategy and there are elements of vice versa. Effective businesses make the best decisions they can everyday within a clear strategic context and with effective leadership. IT is nearly exactly the same.

A clear pattern of success we see is where business leadership is aligned from board down on what sort of IT capability they have, what they need, and what they are investing in. The understanding of the role and ‘type of IT’ capability is explicit, recognised and supported.

How do organisations start to get that clarity? Technology has moved so far, so fast, and continues to accelerate. That can be a tough challenge for senior managers and directors to keep pace.

At the senior levels, it is important to answer and agree on simple IT questions. What is the role of IT in our business? To what extent does IT support “Run the Business” vs “Grow the Business”? Do we need to deliver new information based products and services? Are we relying on technology to make us more efficient, more productive? Are there strategic IT platforms on which we compete? And so on.

In answering these basic questions it starts to be come clear what elements of IT the organisation needs to be great at; and what elements may be possible to afford a more commodity view.

For example; if we are in the business of providing white-license franchises with an innovative technology software stack containing our IP – then it is likely we need to be very, very good at software product development. If we are utility meter reading business under transformation; we will likely require a competency in being very, very good at data management, analytics, and executing software projects – particularly information management projects.

Sounds simple, but the tricky subtleties are in the type of IT. Rolling out Microsoft Windows 7 is very different to rolling out Microsoft SharePoint. Building an integrated cloud solution is very different to building a traditional on-premise software stack. Leadership is key – and knowing which techniques to bring to bear depending on the type of project, is a both a competency and a success factor.

For our part, ClearPoint is into designing and building solutions for the enterprise that are fast, scalable and robust. We believe in IT talent and leadership, smart technology and strong technical discipline to deliver great results. A clear top-down understanding of what IT is and the purpose is an additional and important success factor.

In part Part Two we will follow on by sharing some thoughts on software and solution capability for the enterprise. Building tight, well engineered low-opex solutions is not easy at all. Knowing your organisations ‘type of IT’ is a good start.

We have taken space in the Vodafone on Quay building at 157 Lambton Quay which is in the heart of the CBD and near the majority of the clients we are active with.

We have always been quietly ambitious in our growth plans for ClearPoint and opening a Wellington presence is a big step for us. Having said that, we have already done a significant amount of work in Wellington over the last 2 years including our largest software development project to date, and a highly strategic IT integration consulting assignment in the energy utilities sector.

We are now working hard at building on our Wellington relationships and getting the message out to prospective clients about what we stand for and how we feel we can best help through our core services practices:

• IT Strategy and Architecture
• Software Integration and Development
• IT Project Delivery Services (PM, BA, BPM, Testing)

Our objective is to steadily grow ClearPoint’s operation in Wellington, as opportunity and time allows, aiming to earn our stripes all along the way. In 12 months time we aim to have established the core nucleus of top calibre individuals and a tight group of totally satisfied clients.

Dwayne Bace also joined us on 1^st April as Lead Consultant for Wellington. He will be our Regional Lead and feet on the ground as we develop our business in the capital. Dwayne brings a wealth of experience in IT professional services in Wellington and brings serious horsepower to our IT Managed Services & Support offering and to our IT Strategy and Architecture practice with his infrastructure expertise.

We look forward to hosting you in ClearPoint’s Wellington office sometime in the near future.

Over this time Darren and his team have solved a myriad of tech and biz problems to establish a significant virtual world gaming environment from a base here in New Zealand. In the process they notched up some remarkable achievements including a platform that now regularly supports 7000 concurrent users.  The depth, richness and complexity of SmallWorlds is impressive – here’s the newspaper.

Our TechDrop programme is designed simply to facilitate talented tech people networking, sharing ideas and telling stories. Tonight was a great example – a huge thanks to Darren for sharing some of the insights from their journey. Big-ups for the achievements so far – the future looks fabulous. Go SmallWorlds. Go Kiwi!.

ClearPoint’s was asked to participate as Industry Mentors and held regular sessions with the Team Momo, four students from Auckland and Massey Universities. They, along with the other teams, had the daunting task of coming up with an idea of how technology can be applied to solving some of the UN’s Millennium goals including reducing poverty and hunger. They needed to build both a business model and a working software solution. Probably most daunting of all was presenting Dragons Den style to a large group of fellow students, mentors and judges.

Our team came up with the idea of Farm Circle which is a market building website to allow low-volume producers of home grown crops to sell to consumers who have an interest in supporting local producers. The idea was that poor people could generate income from their efforts to grow crops whilst fostering the ideals of effective intensive land use and environmentally sustainable farming practices. The Farm Circle website has some innovative features such as a picture blog for displaying the growth of the crops from seedling to maturity and the ability to select products based on foodmiles and geographic location.

Several people from ClearPoint were involved the mentoring and support for the team, including Micheal Maclean, Jonathan Ackerman, Pratana Lamwilai-Fernandes, Keoma Pereja and Phil Pietersen. We were joined by Mark Venter from Microsoft who put a lot of time and energy into the team and did a great job. We all enjoyed  being involved in the mentoring – it is a professional development experience for our younger staff and an opportunity for our more experienced guys to put something back into the academic and IT community.

We were impressed with the innovation and quality of the presentations for all the teams and wish Team Momo all the best with their innovative Farm Circle idea into the future.

What an inspiring event – all the award winners are inspirational, humble, high achieving New Zealanders who have excelled on the world stage whilist retaining their roots and love of New Zealand.

The Supreme Winner  was awarded to ophthalmologist Dr Howard Harper, who has dedicated his life to restoring sight to tens of thousands of people in some of the most hostile countries in the world. His quietly humble speech moved the entire audience who gave him a spontaneous standing ovation.

The winners (from Auckland scoop) were:

• New Thinking: Sam Morgan, founder of Trade Me, co-founder of Pacific Fibre, active software investor and philanthropist
• Creative: Michael Stedman, a television pioneer who has built Natural History New Zealand into a world-leading documentary maker
• Information & Communications: Michael Boustridge, head of BT Global Services, a $US9 billion business in 176 countries
• Investment & Business: Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas, lawyer and powerbroker in the upper echelons of the British establishment
• Life Sciences: Professor Bob Elliott, a world leader in the treatment of type-1 diabetes
• Manufacturing, Design & Innovation: Sir George Fistonich, the founder of Villa Maria Estate winery and leading force in the country’s wine industry
• Science, Technology & Academia: Dame Professor Anne Salmond, historian and writer who has helped define and shape our historical understanding of New Zealand.

We took the opportunity to invite clients Peter Ennis (TVNZ) and Greg McHugh (NZSF) joined by ClearPoint’s Bain Hollister, Micheal Maclean, Philippe Paya and Phil Pietersen.

A great night and a great opportunity to dust off the DJ’s.

After leaving Cognos, Michael researched and developed an in-memory, multidimensional core analytics engine from the ground up. No enterprise software, no RDBMS. In 2009, Anaplan was formed and teamed with ClearPoint to help design and build a SaaS based offering to deliver fast multi-dimensional analytics over the web. Based out of San Francisco; Anaplan is now really starting to hit its stride doing cool stuff like this and this.

The Tech Drop was a brilliant opportunity to hear about the journey from Guy himself, and to learn about Anaplan’s approach to the market, the landscape nd trends in multidimensional analytics and their innovative approach. Cool stuff. Thank you Guy and team – and looking forward to a great 2011.

Celebrating growth is cool.  In all there are 50 New Zealand companies on the list which – when you consider the relative size of economies – is a remarkable achievement for NZ Inc. ClearPoint is delighted to be in at 35th, and cool to be amongst great kiwi businesses we know and admire.

Rod Drury from Xero chatted the group through the evolution of technology services businesses, through products to the creation of ‘market makers’.  The interesting thinking is that, as New Zealanders stuck out the middle of the Pacific, our culture, attitude and experience can be a strong competitive advantage internationally.  There’s no real barriers to creating technology platform-based businesses in foreign markets; the tools and access are there.  Its creating the business model, problem solving, doing the hard work and getting out there.  A great discussion that should be occurring in businesses up and down the country.

Congratulations to all – and big thanks to Deloitte. Bring on 2011!

(also a great night for New Zealand sport too)

And so we did – and it was awesome fun – something for everyone. Big thanks to all who came along and most of all to our clients for the ongoing opportunities to work together and do cool stuff. Roll on 2011!

Recognition came through our listings in the Deloitte Fast 50 with ClearPoint placed 6th overall and 1st in Auckland/Northland in category. We were also particularly delighted with the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 listing of 35th across the entire Asia Pacific region. Thanks to the many people who sent messages of congratulations.

In December we had over 60 associates working on projects. Headcount is an easy measure of size and growth for us, and we were very pleased to continue our growth trajectory in 2010. We have seen growth across all three of ClearPoint’s core practices : Strategy and Architecture, Integration and Software Development and IT Project Delivery Services.

ClearPoint exists solely to serve our clients and are very happy to have been able to increase both the breadth and depth of our client  relationships. Growth has come across all the key sectors we serve and particularly in energy utilities, telco and financial services. We have had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects over the year; the ones that have achieved the most recognition tended to be the iPhone/iPad and Android apps and the enterprise scale web development software projects.

Our growth has been achieved in a sustainable fashion which allows us to take a long term view of our opportunities and relationships. And as we grow and change, this in turn creates opportunities for our people and their personal and professional development, which is an important facet of why we exist.

The year was not without its challenges but we feel we have always tried to take every challenging situation and try and turn it into a win-win for all parties. On a personal front, some of our team had challenges from ill-health of family members and our hearts go out to them.

With the Christmas holidays upon us, we’d like to take this opportunity to wish all our clients, associates and friends a great festive season and hope you get to enjoy time with your families and friends. Travel safe and Merry Christmas.

One of the more entertaining clips features Bain and Phil explaining how a picture, that we asked Robin Southgate (our web graphic design guru) to draw up, represented ClearPoint. It was good fun and not easy particularly when our brief to Robin was “the interconnectedness of everything”.

As we explain in the video clip, our business is all about interconnected relationships – with both our clients and our people. This has created all the opportunities which have enabled our rapid growth since 2007.

Deloitte also has published the full Fast 50 index and Category winners.

And the Deloitte Flickr photostream with some classic shots!

The announcement was made on Wednesday night at an enjoyable function. The Deloitte Fast 50  evaluates entrants purely on revenue growth over 3 years and celebrates the creation of jobs and the direct contribution it makes to New Zealand’s economy.

As a start-up our 3 year revenue growth is substantial having started from a low base in 2007 and grown steadily since. The award is a recognition of the incredibly hard work done by our superb team at ClearPoint, and we entered the Fast 50 as a way of recognising our team’s achievements.

Its also a huge thank you to our clients for opportunity to work together to do great things with technology.

But for the time being there continues to be change.  An interesting change ClearPoint sees in NZ at the moment is the ‘thought’ inroads that consumer technology is making into CxO’s and IT Managers thinking.  What does that mean?  iPads, iPhones, Kindles, Android devices are making day to day business tech cool – and it is getting under the skin of these leaders and making them think – “how can my company do stuff on this technology?”.  Who do they ask ? – corporate IT.

Which is tough for corporate IT.  It’s hard to be the guys that keep the nervous system running, data centres, DR, IT vendors and procurement in line, projects under control and “the big ERP” upgrade from going of the rails. And after all that, be expected to have the energy and freshness to build ‘something hip’ for the CxO’s shiny iPad.

BUT – the opportunity is beautiful.  It is a great tIme to get on the front foot and showcase that information technology is an untapped source of creative and value building goodness.  Not to mention productivity, efficiency, customer intimacy and self service-opex-lowering magic. Great times to be IT leaders and innovators.

The main thread of the evening was to walk through from a tech perspective the differences, challenges, learnings Jan and team experienced through developing apps to run directly on the App Engine.  Putting to one side the immense scalability, huge resources and massive (currently) free quotas – it is still a fundamentally different approach. Fascinating and very insightful – thanks Jan!

Our architect has designed an innovative layout which balances team communication with optimal use of space. The entire office has been newly fitted out from the carpets to the ceiling and a includes a kitchen designed to our specification and custom colour matched office furniture. No doubt the deck will be popular during the summer BBQ season.

As a great deal of our work is collaborating with our clients and working in teams, we have designed generous sized meeting rooms and an large boardroom. All the meeting room walls have been replaced with glass to make the most of the natural light. We have installed state of the art networking and security equipment and are achieving impressive download speeds.

We will have informal house warming drinks over the coming weeks and a formal Client Launch early in the spring.

Many people are curious about our reasons for moving and the answer is multi-faceted. Firstly, last year we doubled in size – both headcount and revenue – so space was a major constraint. Secondly, and arguably more importantly, many of our larger clients are based in the CBD so our new location makes it quicker and easier to visit our clients and our people onsite, and vice versa. And finally, the ground up fit-out enabled us to design a space which reflects the values of the company and the people who work within ClearPoint.

We certainly enjoyed the previous office on Symonds Street. While we are excited to be moving, we will miss our friends from KEA, Holistics and Catalyze who we shared the space with, and have been part of the trials and tribulations of ClearPoint going from start-up to 50+ in less than 3 years. And, as many people will tell you, the view from Level 11 is magnificent and we will certainly miss that.

ClearPoint’s new office marks the start of a new era in the life of the company. The Fanshawe Street office will be the heart of ClearPoint and a place where our clients, colleagues and friends are always welcome.  We look forward to seeing you there.

We were lucky enough to attend the NZ HiTech Awards on Fri night courtesy of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Thoroughly enjoyable and great to see some cool kiwi companies getting recognised for their innovation, business success and most importantly their prowess in breaking into overseas markets. There were plenty of well known local companies – including many in our own industry that we know and respect.  Hats off to Datacom who won the Company of the Year Award.  Go Kiwi.

At an NZ macro level, there was a nice closing summary from Wayne Norrie, Chairman NZ Hi-Tech Trust.  In NZ we can buy and sell houses to each other as much as we like, only by competing and trading on the world stage will we grow a stronger economy and create benefits for all New Zealanders.  A neat evening.

The technology in its raw form (being product, dev tools, languages, platforms and infrastructure) is generally not the core problem.  The majority tend to be one or more of;

1. Incomplete or absent technology investment calculations, business case and/or ROI
2. Incomplete, absent, limited or unfocussed business process/requirements analysis
3. No Solution design (usability, integration, dependencies, non-functionals)
4. Big vendor + risk aversion. Over reliance on expensive off-the-shelf, out of the box, product functionality (that does not match business process)
5. Good money after bad. Tactical configurations, extensions, integrations of products from 4.
6. No full lifecycle planning (including TCO)

Symptoms  from above are a well trodden path – and doesn’t take long until the IT cliches emerge. “Product Y is rubbish”, “Vendor X has no idea”, “Project Z is waay over budget and will never work”.

How to avoid it?  ’IT’ in your business is not the email server or the help desk guy – it is the nerve centre+engine room+support system of the business all in one.  Technology is THE readily accessible tool, that NZ businesses have available now, to become better, faster more productive.

The catch is that IT needs constant consideration, and that applying technology requires the ‘hard technology+business thinking work’.  Sometimes it is just asking the right questions.  Instead of “Can we get CRM”, its “How can we use technology to help our business drive better relationships with our customers”.  Instead of “Can we buy [vendor x] BI suite”, “How can we better surface our data to provide the value add information to our business”

When in doubt, find some experienced IT folks – there’s always plenty of stories and pointers for questions to ask …..

During this session he led us through a sample OrderMan application that uses main stream ESB features of Mule to wrap a legacy system using Rest style integration and overlay BI reporting.  Presentation material includes a Demo Overview, Solution Walkthrough and Monitoring of Mule using Hyperic.

Thanks to Jonathan and all who attended.  We will keep you posted as the 2010 programme continues.

Why?  Because even with good ongoing technical leadership and best intentions,  systems and the governance around them become more complex over their lifetime.  That means higher operational costs,  difficult/impossible upgrades and a general emerging inertia around a system that makes it difficult for a business to move forward or do anything.  Over time management teams and boards grapple, expert views pile in, and the stakes and potential cost to change get higher and higher.  And the bigger IT projects get, the harder and riskier they become to deliver.  They are simply just hard to do.

How do we help?  Our philosophy nearly always is around 1) Reduction – breaking problems down into smaller manageable and executable parts and, 2) Strategy, Design and architecture – do the hard strategic design work on big systems, much, much more often.  Moreover, make architecturally significant decisions through time that smooth the lifecycle of systems and serve to avoid ‘big bang’ system replacements.  Difficult – doesn’t always fit with Finance dept’s view or the bombardment of IT product marketing.  But the reality is that enterprise systems, big or small, follow a lifecycle and some astute  planning for that lifecycle saves real money in the long term.

The big tech consumer themes for the year?  Ebook reader and tablet frenzy has set in here and here.  On the desktop Windows 7 is a good, fast, stable release that should provide an easier route forward for the enterprise that its predecessor.

For us? Heaps more of the same – helping clients do great things with technology.  Moreover, we seek to do more to help NZ businesses improve their performance on the global stage through our core belief that business lead technology change drives big changes in productivity.  If we can contribute to foreign earnings in our own way through our Australian and US based work then that is all goot too.  Go kiwi and bring on 2010.

Despite recessionary conditions for much of 2009, it’s been a very, very busy year for ICT and the enterprise.  For ClearPoint, the year has been fantastic, with us experiencing strong growth across all of our core practices.  Our teams have been flat out all year working on activities from early stage executive IT strategy development, through architecture and design and into software integration and development projects.

In some ways for ClearPoint, this  year is drawing to a close in a similar fashion to how we started;

-An excellent and expanding group of talented Associates

-A fantastic set of clients with challenging work that matters

-Shared values and attitudes to ‘get stuff done

In summary, for ClearPoint, 2009 has been a blast.  Its felt a bit like this.

Phil & I and the team at ClearPoint wish everyone the very best for the Christmas and New Year period.  We are excited about 2010 and look forward to continuing our work helping clients to do great things with technology.

A snapshot of what we use:

Xero – for financials ( www.xero.com ). It’s easy to use and perfectly suits a services based organisation of our size.

OpenAir – for time, project and client management ( www.openair.com ). Covers all our Professional Services Automation (PSA) needs.

ASB Bank Fastnet Business – for AP’s & all banking.

Google Apps – for email, calendar, intranet, shared google docs, IM.

Microsoft Groove – for serverless peer to peer file sharing – works very well for up to 5000 files and 2GB storage.

Dropbox – for web based file sharing and project artefact collaboration complete with full versioning ( www.dropbox.com ).

Hanging off our wireless LAN is HP colour laser, and a NAS storage device as part of our backup architecture.

And all our associates provide their own laptops, to whatever specification they wish.

So therefore we don’t require file & print servers… at all.

The design is not by accident either – when we setup ClearPoint we wanted to challenge what business infrastructure we would need for an IT services pure player. And buying loads of desktops, servers and network gear that quickly depreciates was something we wanted to avoid.

We are looking to see how we can scale this design as our headcount is now around 45+ people with many more having a ClearPoint email address. So far so good.

We often find ourselves debating design and comparing tips & tricks, and what has and has not worked for us, with our friends in the industry who have taken a similar approach. The Google / Microsoft debate rages on.

So anyway, when it comes to planning the “who”, “when” and “where” for the Christmas finance possessing, at least the “how” is taken care of – all we need is an internet connection and our ASB RSA token, and we are sorted.

Thank you to John Holley and his team at ARC for offering us the opportunity to work together.  Further details on the approach and solution can be found in the NZSUG Talend-ARC-ClearPoint pdf here.

The ever expanding Google brand is just about everywhere you look, and is having an interesting disruptive impact on the corporate IT landscape.  With plenty of capital, their ability to execute and disrupt looks set to continue.  GoogleWave comes from the original engineers who built GoogleMaps and just is another preview product in a long list of innovative products Google have brought to market.

Thanks again to Cloudbreak and to all for attending.  Please contact me for any follow ups.  See you and the next one!

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• standardised systems
• smarter processes
• great capability
• a culture of excellence

Rather than wait for the output from the Commission – don’t our ratepayers need something done now?

• Timesheeting – time entry, approval workflows
• Projects – project management, task management and control
• Expenses – entry and reimbursement tracking
• Invoicing – we run “pre-billing” in OpenAir and export the information to our accounting system for invoice production and distribution.
• Resourcing – in my experience the most thorny issue of PSA and we look forward to seeing just how useable and effective OpenAir is for this tricky area. Excellence in resourcing is central to any PS firm and no doubt will be the feature of many discussions to come.

So what are the typical criteria most organisations need to consider to select a PSA system? For us the key ones are:

• SaaS. Well, we currently have no IT infrastructure at all. We use Google Apps for email, intranet/wiki, web-based document sharing, website hosting etc etc. And it’s free for up to 100 users. So we need a hosted option.
• Per Month cost. It’s based the on number of active users each month so you can expand and contract as projects demand. And it eases our cashflow requirements.
• New features. I guess at ClearPoint we know a lot about PS management and OpenAir have been very “open” to our suggestions for new requirements, and they have promised add our new features into future roll outs. Of course being SaaS based, we don’t have to do anything to install new features – they simply appear and we can use them.
• Integration. Primarily with our SaaS based accounting system called Xero. We are starting with a simple export/import integration mechanism and plan to fully automate the integration over time.

We’ll share our experience of the implementation over time and we are interested in the view and experiences of both PS firms and corporates in this space.