ClearPoint Business roll

NZ HiTech Awards

Fri, 07 May 2010 08:40:00 +0000

Whoa - bit of a late post - the sign of a great weekend.

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.

Technology Multi-Nationals in NZ

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:51:00 +0000

Not much to add really. Hear, hear Gareth Morgan.

Project problems? Generally not the tech.

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:28:00 +0000

ClearPoint core competencies are IT Strategy and Architecture, Software Integration and Development and IT Project Services. We are lucky. Within these competencies, we have a fantastic team of with serious experience, track record and technical depth. As client centric project people, we often get called on to assist with inflight 'problem' projects, technology implementations or the what-to-do-next questions.

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 .....

Robert Lilley joins ClearPoint

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 05:50:00 +0000

ClearPoint is delighted to announce that Robert Lilley will be joining our team as Client Relationship Director on March 22nd 2010.

Robert has managed client needs in New Zealand, Australia and the UK and worked for New Zealand based IT services companies as well as global vendors such as IBM and CSC. His experience lies in business development and customer service delivery management with a proven track record in recognised brands such as Vodafone, Air New Zealand, University of Auckland and Telecom.

Robert specialises in providing IT solutions to complex businesses, which perfectly suits ClearPoint’s core competencies in IT architecture, integration and full lifecycle software development.

His experience in developing business partnerships with global software vendors will bring a new dimension to ClearPoint.

Robert’s arrival marks the next step in the growth and maturity of ClearPoint which has grown to over 45 people in two and a half years, servicing corporate clients throughout New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

Welcome aboard Robert.

Tech Drop-Open Integration using Mule

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:15:00 +0000

Go 2010! Time for the first Tech drop of the year.
We were delighted to kick off the 2010 ClearPoint Tech Drop programme with Jonathan Ackerman presenting Open Integration using Mule. Jonathan has lead several successful pieces of our work using this technology including Rest based integration, Web Services, Web API's and integration with standard authentication services.

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.

ClearPoint on NZI Business

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:34:00 +0000

On Wed Feb 10th, ClearPoint was profiled on NZI Business Breakfast with Corin Dann interviewing Managing Director Phil Pietersen. The segment focused on Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs), particularly those that experienced good growth during the recessionary challenges of 2009 and who also are engaged in growing export opportunities. ClearPoint meets both criteria and we were delighted to get the chance to talk about the sort of organisation that we are, where we are going and what we aspire to be. Big thanks to Corin and team! See the replay courtesy of TVNZ OnDemand here http://bit.ly/9zF2hc.

Big IT Projects are Hard

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:08:00 +0000

One of the great aspects of ClearPoint is we are in the business of helping clients achieve great things with technology. With most of our work in either corporate, local government or State Owned Enterprise(SOE's) we find there is no shortage of challenges.

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.

Bring on 2010 tech

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:27:00 +0000

The year is kicking off. Already a good dollop of post holiday tech media. Googles pow-wow with China is fascinating. We are guessing that this will be one of many, many stand-offs between global 'cloud' based services and governments. Uncomfortable time for national sovereignty - particular when there is a misalignment of fundamental beliefs.

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.

Sayonara 2009

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:01:00 +0000

With the New Year nearly here, the reflection period has really kicked in. Media picks for 2009 are everywhere; everything from self-destructing sports stars to top must-have apps. The ensuing predictions for 2010 are not far behind - tho guessing the future can be tricky. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

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.

new media pow wow

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:46:00 +0000

There's an interesting public stoush going on between the online advertising behemoth that is Google and Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate. A heap of analysis and comment out there - even the Economist has seen fit to comment this week. One of the comforting aspects of true technology disruption is that no one truly knows where things end up. Old business models struggle, a seemingly endless string of promising tech startups entice and then stumble, and then every now and then a game change occurs delivering faster, better cheaper. Change is good. Reason #2345 why Technology is cool!

Living In The Cloud – the Server-less dream

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:50:11 +0000

With our planning for Christmas hols in full swing, including how we will do invoicing and payment processing whilst on holiday, it made me think about how well our “server-less” IT infrastructure is working for us. We have been using these “cloud” or SaaS apps (call them what you will) for nearly 3 years now and have learnt a lot and refined our usage over time with experience.

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.

John Quirk joins ClearPoint advisory board

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:20:00 +0000

We are delighted to welcome John Quirk of Howard and Company as Chairman to the ClearPoint advisory board. John is a recognised and respected leader in the New Zealand Information Technology sector and we look forward to working with him and the team at Howard and Company. John will advise us on developing and growing our business and help to ensure we continue to deliver great results to our expanding list of New Zealand corporate clients.

SAP Integration using Open Source

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:15:00 +0000

Today we were delighted to co-present with our client Auckland Regional Council at the New Zealand SAP User Group forum hosted here in Auckland by Deloitte. Our session entitled "Open Source Middleware Interfacing with SAP" was an opportunity for us to talk through our recent successful solution that integrated telco billing information directly into ARC's SAP system. To deliver this solution we worked closely with the ARC's internal SAP team to design and build the fully automated middleware solution over a 20 day period using Talend Open Studio. The solution offers huge operational productivity benefits to the ARC and a standardised method for dealing with further SAP integration requirements including data extraction and analytics.

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.

TechDrop: GoogleWave

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:42:00 +0000

Tonight we hosted another ClearPoint Tech Drop covering GoogleWave. Big thanks to Jan and Susan from Cloudbreak for providing us with a Wave background and overview, and to Jonathan Ackerman for presenting to us on the underlying architecture. Slides, videos and good stuff 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.

Improving the Innovation Process

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:36:00 +0000

An excellent late afternoon session organised by Wayne Hudson and the folks at Hudson Gavin Martin today on improving the innovation process in New Zealand. Kristian Slack of InnovIQ kicked things off with a presentation on Productivity of Investment in Innovation, which provided great context for a robust discussion on IP challenges in startup companies and the general state of the patent industry both in NZ and abroad. NZ is in an interesting place in terms economy, geography, and demographics to capitalise on the changes in IP protection and management that may evolve globally - particularly around trends toward open innovation frameworks. Some great stories, ideas and anecdotes shared in the spirit of collaboration.

Fruits of Design

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:23:00 +0000

Notwithstanding they are huge fans of Apple over at RoughlyDrafted.com- there are some compelling stats in this Nokia/Apple article. For a relatively new entrant into the smart phone market - Apple really are in a phenomenal position revenue and margin-wise.

Cloudbreak Tech Drop

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 02:16:00 +0000

Last night we ran our regular "ClearPoint Tech Drop : Enterprise SaaS with Google Apps". Big thanks to Jan and Susan from Cloudbreak for sharing their knowledge and experience with the ClearPoint network. As part of the programme we ran through the changes that are occurring in the Enterprise SaaS market and some real world implementation stories. There's no doubt that there is a huge amount of investment going on globally - and it is still very early days. We covered all sorts of aspects including lifecycle of an implementation, information protection, security and authentication models, full lifecycle licensing and hardware costs, operational costs, service levels, DR, change management and some very interesting project 'gotchas' that can potentially arise.

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

Information really is beautiful

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:11:00 +0000

One of our ClearPoint perspectives is that we - the collective Information Technology world "we" - are only just scratching the surface of technologies that can visualise information from data in a meaningful, relative and easily consumable way. Two cool examples twittered today;

http://bit.ly/o62S6

http://bit.ly/19Dm7D

Go AnaPlan!!

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:39:00 +0000

We are delighted to have been able to help our cool client AnaPlan LLC prepare for the launch of their revolutionary new business at Demo09. A fantastic disruptive business model and very exciting story for us to be part of. Big congratulations to Guy and Sue Haddleton, Michael Gould and all the team at AnaPlan US and UK.

We are two!!

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:23:00 +0000

Very very proud to be celebrating ClearPoint's 2nd birthday. A huge thank you to our very cool Associate team for their loyalty, support and help over the last 24 months as we have got the business off the ground. Also thanks to Em for the cake - and yes we feel like the a-typical 2 year olds. Especially after that sugar rush.