As the M.D.’s first employer was S3 (Silicon & Software Systems), we were delighted yesterday to read that they have received €10m in funding. Since their founding around 1986 by Maurice Whelan with backing from Philips they have grown from strength to strength. Like us all they suffered badly post-crash but have recovered incredibly well. [...]

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The Inquirer has a nice round-up of most of the players in the Open Source Datbase Market. Over the past few years, we have dealt with a lot of different customer DBs and here are a few thoughts based on that experience.
Overall what we have seen is an inexorable move from Oracle to SQL Server [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development 2 Comments »

We recently had to do a very fast turn-around proof-of-concept for a Web-based Dashboard/Portal/UI on a reasonably straightforward relational schema in SQL Server.
As this was to be a throw-away development, we decided to leverage it for some internal training and feasibility study. We try to avoid buzzword bingo and don’t jump on every new technology/toolkit [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development 2 Comments »

In our first Python post we mentioned that there can be push-back on the usage of Python in solutions for customers, particularly if the entire system is to be built in Python.
An interesting alternative which can gain more customer acceptance is Jython. This is Python reimplemented in Java and it provides features which are [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development 2 Comments »

As mentioned in a previous post, we have been having great success recently using Python as a develoment language for both customer engagements and our own internal long-term projects. There are however, some areas where we have to make decisions in its usage.
The first is quite simple - development environment. The options are currently [...]

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We have always been big fans of development languages which have traditionally been referred to as scripting languages.
Going back over 10 years, we created some very useful tools and automation systems using TCL. This may seem like an odd niche choice, but for us, at the time, it had some major advantages. It was [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development 2 Comments »

For the non-Irish readers of this site, Tom Raftery has one of the most popular and best Irish technology blogs. He has just done a great interview with Robert Scoble which is now available as a podcast. Scoble is coming over to talk at the IT@Cork Annual Conference. This should be a fantastic day but [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business 1 Comment »

Business Objects have announced that they are joining the Eclipse Foundation and are going to Open Source some of their tools. This is a very timely move for them as there appears to be a lot of energy building behind their Open Source competitors which must surely be hurting sales of Crystal at the low-end. [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Enterprise 2 Comments »

Jon William Toigo over at Byte & Switch has a great article on Aperi and the history of SRM in general. His analysis of industry reaction to the Aperi announcement by IBM is particularly incisive.
Whether IBM will succeed (with the help of the OpenSource community) or not is obviously the great unknown. In any other [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Enterprise, Software Development 3 Comments »

Oracle has just launched 10G Express Edition, a stripped down version of their mainstream DB. The limits appear to be very similar to MSDE or SQL Server 2005 Express (1 CPU, 4GB DB, 1GB RAM). This should be big news. Oracle have absolutely no penetration at the low end where MySQL and (funnily enough) MSDE [...]

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The Register has a pointed article on the BMC SORM (Service Oriented Resource Management) announcements. Further into the article they quote Gartner as saying, in its “Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2005″ that CMDBs are at the “peak of inflated expectations” with the “plateau of productivity” some 10 years out.
Whilst it does appear [...]

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Chip Hazard on Jeff Bussgang’s Blog has a great riposte to the assertion that the Enterprise software business is dying. In particular, his first point about driving IT efficiency is very relevant to our business area.
We spend most of our time developing custom solutions for clients who have made large up-front investments in [...]

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Byte & Switch report that Adaptec Says Sayonara to Systems
This is a sad end to the Eurologic story. We have watched them grow from a tiny operation in the early 1990’s to their coup in getting an OEM deal with Dell. Then the mooted IPO, then the loss of the Dell deal followed by a [...]

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IT@Cork is a very active network of IT Professionals in the Cork area of Ireland. They hold regular talks, conferences and meetings and are a fantastic resource for the industry in this region. We have recently become members and look forward to meeting our peers at various events over the next few months. We will [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business 3 Comments »

Due to the continued growth of the company, we are currently looking for experienced Oracle PL-SQL or SQL Server T-SQL Developers. Knowledge of Reporting and BI tools would be considered a major advantage as would a background in Enterprise Java development. Ideal candidates will have between 4 and 7 years experience. We are interested in [...]

Posted in Administration, Argolon Comments Off

There is an interview over on Steve Shu’s Blog with Mike McLaughlin, a Management Consultant from Deloitte. Whilst the bulk of the interview is targetted at MBA students, there is one very telling comment about executable strategies rather than credenza-ware. Surprisingly, there are still many large Consultancies out there with no delivery capability. They [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Enterprise 1 Comment »

This article on CRM News highlights many of the important issues to be addressed when an organization is considering offshoring. But it is actually far more useful than that and should be read by anyone who might even be considering local outsourcing. In summary, make sure your internals are solid before going external!

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Once again we link over to the EDS “Next Big thing Blog”. This recent posting summarizes perfectly many of the customer issues involved in outsourcing.
Over 13 years, in various companies, we have been involved in Outsourcing, Design Services, Consultancy and Professional Services and I don’t think we have encountered many customers who would have [...]

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B&S have updated their list of what they consider to be the Top 10 Privately owned Storage companies. The one that is most interesting for us is obviously Glasshouse. They are the 50-ton gorilla in the independent storage consultancy field. Whilst we are not quite in their league (yet!), we do talk to the same [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Uncategorized Comments Off

We run across many interesting articles on technology and business over the course of an average week. Many are worth reading but not necessarily blogging about. In order to give an insight into the areas that are taking up our thought time, we have created a del.icio.us page for our bookmarks. For those of you [...]

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