Forrester study on JBoss cost savings

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Forrester Consulting released a new study outlining the advantages of migrating from a proprietary middleware platform to the enterprise open source model inherent with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

You can click on this CNBC post to see the summary!

Here’s a notable highlight from the article:

“By deploying JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Operations Network, the customer was able to achieve all of their goals while significantly reducing operating costs and cutting spending on annual maintenance fees by more than $2 million.”

Contact me if you want to learn more about leveraging JBoss!

Enterprise Open Source Brings Leverage

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Last month’s Business Week included a very readable article about consolidation in the software world with a big focus on Oracle.

At CITYTECH, we are particularly interested in the collection of software assets that Oracle has acquired from BEA and Sun, and how the product roadmap and licensing models will evolve going forward.

What we hear sometimes from customers and potential clients is that they fear losing leverage in their licensing arrangements with their biggest vendors, and few readers of this post will not have heard of some licensing horror stories if they’ve been in the technology industry for some time.

Fortunately, in the last five years or so there’s been a growing list of mature, secure, supported open source solutions available with Red Hat Software as the clear leader of this “enterprise open source” movement.

Get back some leverage with your legacy vendors by investing some time into learning more about enterprise open source, and CITYTECH has Lunch and Learn sessions and other formats to help you take advantage!

Email me to discuss or call me at 312-673-6433 x 144!

CITYTECH Attends Social Media Soiree

Friday, July 24th, 2009

This past Wednesday, July 22, I represented CITYTECH at Chicagonista’s Social Media Soiree at Sushi Samba in Chicago.  It was a fun and interesting event with some great attendees to network with, including the founders of local firms such as:

• The Local Tourist (www.thelocaltourist.com, @thelocaltourist)
• Windy City Social (www.windycitysocial.com, @windycitysocial)
• Sevans Strategy (www.sevansstrategy.com, @PRsarahevans)

In addition to these entreprenuers (who not surprisingly have huge Twitter followings), there was a nice mix of business services providers, web developers/designers, and other businesspeople interested in social media and where it’s all headed!

CITYTECH is very interested in social media and technology for both our client projects as well as for our own promotional purposes (i.e. you can find CITYTECH on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter).  In the case of our client projects, integrating content (YouTube, podcasts, etc.), collaboration techniques (forums, wikis, commenting, etc.), and services (Twitter, RSS, mapping API, etc.) from the consumer Internet can greatly add to the excitement and participation of the enterprise and web applications we build.

We will be posting more local and national events as we continually update our website and letting you know where else the people at CITYTECH are going!  We look forward to seeing familiar faces and meeting new ones!!

Five Things You May Not Know About CITYTECH!

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Every once in awhile when I’m talking to people about what we do, I realize that few of our contacts have time to read thoroughly through our website or fully get to know our capabilities.

In that spirit I thought I would post about five things you may not know about CITYTECH to provide some quick hits about our breadth of experience:

1) We’re not “just an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) shop”–recently I heard something to this effect and I realized that it’s easy for us to get perceived as a one-trick pony when we are at a client working on a specific technology, such as ECM, WCM (Web Content Management), Java, .NET, etc.  In fact we do so many things it’s kind of difficult to describe what we do; we’re working on that message for the next iteration of CITYTECHINC.com!

2) Cloud Computing–been there, done that–with a lot of recent articles, webinars, posts, and general buzz (some may say blather) about cloud computing, we realize that this is an intriguing topic.  However, we’ve been confidently leveraging Amazon EC2 for a large organization for awhile and know the pros/cons quite well, so just contact us if you want to learn more!  We are also constantly evaluating and/or using other options such as Google App Engine and the Azure Services Platform.

3) We do RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) for more than the Web–we have solid examples of using front-end UI technologies such as Microsoft Silverlight, JavaFX, and Flex3 on large enterprise applications too!

4) CITYTECH is not just in Chicago–while we are based here in Chicago, we have clients in other cities, including some outside of the Midwest as I noted in a previous post.  If there’s a good project fit and a client wants the peace of mind that our experienced software engineers provide, then we’ll hop on a plane and take care of things!

5) Mobile is just another platform for us–sometimes we consider mentioning ourselves as a “mobile shop” to some degree, but really in our experience mobile devices are just another client platform to support, and our people readily design and deploy apps for multiple platforms and it’s no big deal!

Contact me for more examples and I’ll pull one or more of our senior consultants into the conversation to convey firsthand all that we’ve done!!  You can also dial my office line at 312-673-6433 x 144.

Modernizing your Business Systems

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

In the last few months we’ve assisted a mid-sized materials supplier in updating their B2B application that manages the flow of orders to a very large client of theirs (a Fortune 500 consumer goods firm).

Mostly this means we are sifting through code, rewriting parts of it, and optimizing the way it runs.  This particular B2B app was relatively easy for us to tackle since CITYTECH has deep experience rewriting, redesigning, and deploying antiquated applications and integrating them with existing systems (such as ERP software, custom internal apps, web-based apps, etc.).

For another client, a large government entity, we took an older COBOL application and rewrote it in Java, and it now runs many times faster on cheaper hardware.

I’m proud that our consultants at CITYTECH have such strong experience in understanding business goals, examining current systems, knowing the best way to modernize/redesign/rewrite them, and how to make the resultant applications integrate with what our customers already have in place.

Of course, the real trick is in the details, so if you know of a hairball challenge for us to talk about send me a note at mwatson at citytechinc dot com!!

Good Article on Microsoft Silverlight 3

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

One of my colleagues here at CITYTECH involved with our .NET practice sent me a pretty good quick article on Silverlight 3:  http://tinyurl.com/rdk5hu

We have used Silverlight to enhance the UI for a real, working enterprise application at a major organization in Chicago, so it’s not just for web-based apps!

Email me at mwatson at citytechinc dot com to learn more or call me at 630-881-4771 and I’ll grab one of our guys from the Microsoft practice to talk with you about Silverlight, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), or other technologies we know!!

CITYTECH Projects in North America and Beyond!

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Recently, after signing up a couple of new clients, I was thinking about how CITYTECH has expanded from it’s base of clients in Chicago to a broader Midwest focus. We are continuing to serve clients outside of the immediate Chicago area and look forward to organic growth and potentially additional offices!!

Here’s where our clients are located along with some of the technologies used:

• Chicago, Illinois (multiple projects: Day Communique (CQ4), Alfresco, Filenet, Ektron, lots of Java, Java frameworks like Hibernate, iBATIS, and Spring, JBoss, WebLogic, Oracle, MySQL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft .NET and Silverlight, Groovy, Ruby, GIS/mobile web apps, CRX, Jackrabbit, etc.)

• Columbus, Ohio (JBoss, Seam, Day CQ4/CQ5 project)

• Toronto, Ontario (Day CQ5)

• San Francisco, California (Day CQ4, Amazon’s web platform, Flex, etc.)

• Milwaukee, Wisconsin (B2B app modernization, Tomcat, Java, etc.)

• Minneapolis, Minnesota (JBoss Application Server)

• Dallas, Texas (Microsoft .NET)

• Abu Dhabi, UAE (Microsoft .NET, Filenet)

• Winston-Salem, North Carolina (SOA, Oracle)

• Denver, Colorado (Microsoft .NET)

• Sao Paolo, Brazil (JBoss Application Server)

Email me at mwatson at citytechinc dot com to learn more about our projects or call my office line at 312-673-6433 ext. 144.  My cell is 630-881-4771.

Welcome to the blog of:

Mike Watson