Software Development Company Almost Destroyed By Email Spam
Hit by more than 7.5 million spam e-mails in a single day, the Melbourne-based Aged Care Software Group, watched in horror as the onslaught of spam crashed its Web server and almost put the company out of business.
This was just one disaster associated with its e-mail system, according to the company's managing director, Ken Wragg.
"We were having all sorts of trouble with our e-mail at this stage. We weren't getting any e-mail through in the end," he said.
"It was a matter of fix it or go out of business."
A software provider to the aged care sector, the company has 25 years experience developing systems for around 500 clients across Australia.
Wragg said the company has spent more than two decades building its reputation only to see it almost destroyed by spam.
"Aged care is a small industry - everyone knows everyone and if you're not delivering it gets around by word of mouth," he said.
The Aged Care Software Group has always hosted its own Web server but spam was crashing the system and Internet link daily.
Wragg said legitimate e-mail wasn't getting through so the company couldn't communicate with customers.
"A lot of our support requests and sales requests come through e-mail. If you're not getting support requests in this game, you're dead," he said.
The company moved its server offsite hoping to solve the problem but the spam nightmare continued.
Wragg said the company was still receiving 200 spam e-mails a day even though a spam filter had been installed.
"It was driving me nuts. I think every spammer on the planet had our details. It was crazy," he added.
The massive spam assault wasn't just causing frustration but costing the business money. In fact, download costs were spiralling.
Despite changing its Internet plans several times to try and overcome the problem, it was costing an extra $400 a month in excess download charges.
"We suffered two hacking attempts that, if successful, could have been catastrophic for the business," Wragg explained.
"We are a software development company with all our source code on the servers."
Wragg had reached a point where he believed his problems couldn't get any worse when his e-mail connection began to fail.
For six weeks, he said the company received virtually no e-mail. Then it was hit by more than seven e-mails in a single day.
CEBU’S EARNINGS FROM SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Cebu is expected to generate $US255 million or 20 per cent of the $US1.275 billion in revenues in software development by 2010, as it continues to be a premier outsourcing destination in the country.
Bonifacio Belen, executive director of Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cebu-it), said this opened up job opportunities to 15,000 software developers in Cebu.
Cebu earned $US60 million and employed 3,500 software developers in 2006, he said.
The figures are based on studies conducted by the Commission on Information and Communication Technology (CICT) and Business Process Association of the Philippines (BPAP).
According to BPAP's five-year forecast, the country will get at least 10 per cent or $US1.2 billion of the total global business process outsourcing (BPO) earnings of $US110 billion to $US130 billion.
The BPO areas expected to fuel economic growth in BPO and information technology enabled services (ITES) in 2010 are customer care ($US5.296 million); back office services such as human resources ($US2.392 million); medical transcription ($US1.708 million); and animation ($US759 million), among others.
In his presentation during the launch of Cebu Business Month (CBM) 2008, Belen said this target put forward an enormous growth opportunity for Cebu.
The challenge for Cebu was to serve a substantial share or 20 per cent of the national target of $US1.2 billion in 2010, he said.
CBM 2008 featured the First Cebu Open Source Summit, which was one way of addressing challenges faced by the ICT sector.
For the very first time, the major stakeholders of Open Source Technology across the world would converge in Cebu to discuss how the Open Source movement was changing the rules of the game for ICT, he said.
The summit would have speakers from Cebu and other countries, who would discuss issues such as open source applications, infrastructure and technical success factor, challenges and risks of open source, and best practices for open source governance.
Filipino entrepreneur Winston Damarillo, who is chairman and co-founder of BPO company, Exist Global and software company, Morph Labs will be one of the speakers.
Belen said the summit would help Cebu to reach its revenue target in the BPO and ITES sectors in 2010.
He said the ICT sector in Cebu had been active in coming up with programs and establishing networks with different companies to ensure growth in the sector.
In 2006, the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CICC) also organized the 2nd Cebu ICT Strategy Summit in 2006, which launched a program that seeks to make Cebu and ICT hub by emulating the Silicon Valley (SV) model.
In the 2006 summit, the ICT sector in Cebu decided to address at least two ingredients that make the SV successfulinnovation ecosystem and technology entrepreneurship.
Innovation ecosystem promotes and enables research and development to find a way in the marketplace, while technology entrepreneurship creates an atmosphere where entrepreneurs are mentored and encouraged by business experts and venture capitalists.
‘Platform-as-a-service’ System
Boasting of a one-of-a-kind solution for the application development lifecycle, Bungee Labs is launching the public beta Tuesday of Bungee Connect, an on-demand platform for Web application development and deployment.
Featured is a full gamut of tools and services to build and host applications. "Bungee Connect is a single platform for the development, testing, deployment, and hosting of rich Web applications," said Lyle Ball, Bungee Labs' vice president of marketing.
With the platform, developers can collaborate to build Web applications leveraging multiple Web services and databases. Applications are deployed on Bungee Labs' multi-tenant grid infrastructure and can be SaaS-based or offered as stand-alone Web destinations. They are accessed via popular browsers.
Rather than developers having to assemble disparate pieces such as IDE, an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) toolkit, and testing and collaboration tools, Bungee provides all these capabilities.
"Developers log onto Bungee Connect. It's in the cloud and it's a hosted environment," Ball said.
Bungee describes its product as a platform-as-a-service system, in which the entire software development lifecycle can be supported on the same computing environment to reduce costs, risks, and time to market.
Because Bungee Connect is entirely based on-demand, users can build and deploy applications without installing or configuring servers and can connect to multiple Web services from within a single environment, said Brad Hintze, Bungee director of product marketing.
"I think it's got some very interesting benefits because it's managing to integrate development and deployment but in a service environment, so it allows for a developer to [have] access to tools," said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. "It also at the same time gives them a place to deploy their applications without having to worry," about run-time choices and operational issues," he said.
Bungee also provides a way to mash up with other Web services, Gardner said. Bungee is "on to something" that is a harbinger of things to come in creating a seamless relationship between development and deployment, he said.
As part of its launch, Bungee is offering reference applications, including a calendar application, WideLens, which integrates Microsoft Exchange, Salesforce.com, Google Calendar, and other sources. These applications serve as examples of integration offered on Bungee Connect; source code for the applications can be imported into any Bungee Connect account, modified, and used in commercial endeavors.
AJAX-enabled applications can be built and embedded within other Web applications, in SaaS solutions, or offered as a stand-alone Web destination.
Interactivity is delivered via AJAX but developers themselves do not write any AJAX. They use the Bungee Logic programming language for building application logic while the UI is built using a drag-and-drop metaphor. Bungee Logic features a C-style syntax and acts like Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform, Hintze said.
"We automate AJAX interactivity," while developers focus on creating applications and value, Ball said.
Development, collaboration and test deployment are free of charge on Bungee Connect; developers only pay when applications are used. Through a utility-based pricing model, businesses can expect to pay between $2 to $5 per user per month for a heavily used business productivity application or fractions of a cent per e-commerce transaction.
Bungee's grid infrastructure provides data on application usage patterns. Applications are hosted free during the Bungee Connect Public Beta program. The public beta program is expected to continue until the end of 2008, whereupon Bungee would launch the general release of its service.
"And then the world is a different place," Ball said. Some 40 developers worked to deliver Bungee Connect, according to Bungee Labs.
Coghead Moves Web App Development Platform to Amazon EC2
Coghead announced it will move its do-it-yourself Web application development platform to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). By using Amazon Web Services to host the Coghead system, Coghead will be able to scale rapidly to meet growing user demand then adjust capacity instantly to address peak loads. Along with its move to Amazon Web Services, Coghead is introducing Coghead 2.0 with new functionality that will make it easier for any developer to build applications that leverage Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
Coghead’s use of Amazon Web Services supports the continued expansion of the Coghead Web application service. With the release of the next version of the platform, Coghead 2.0 is leveraging the same highly reliable, scaleable and cost-effective technology infrastructure that Amazon has spent 12 years and over $2 billion building for its own Web-scale operations.
“Amazon Web Services was designed to provide a highly reliable, cost-efficient infrastructure that can scale as a company’s needs change,” said Steve Rabuchin, director of developer relations for Amazon Web Services. “With Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, Coghead customers can be confident that their applications will be supported by the same technology infrastructure that Amazon.com uses.”
“Our passion is to provide a massively scalable, highly reliable and secure application platform that a broad class of developers can use to efficiently build and deliver Web applications that solve specific business problems,” said Coghead CEO Paul McNamara. “With Amazon Web Services, we can take advantage of their unmatched expertise in building high reliability, Web-scale applications, and provide the infrastructure we need to rapidly scale the Coghead service to meet the demands of our ever-expanding roster of developers.”
Currently, more than 25,000 do-it-yourselfers have registered to use Coghead’s online application platform to create business applications and entrepreneurial opportunities. An intuitive, drag-and-drop interface makes it easy and fast to build sophisticated, robust business applications -- from managing sales pipelines to tracking supplies for restaurants -- without any coding. The Web-based services are developed and delivered using Coghead’s all-in-one platform, resulting in a radical reduction in the time and expense normally required to develop and deliver business applications that scale on-demand.
Development Software Supports SOA/Web Services/Mash-ups
Compuware Corporation announced the availability of the Compuware Uniface 9.2 Application Platform Suite. This version enables IT organizations to accelerate the development and deployment of enterprise applications by extending multi- channel support to mobile devices. Uniface 9.2 also introduces extensive support for service oriented architecture and web services technologies.
With the introduction of this version, Uniface 9.2 becomes one of the development tools that can deploy applications on virtually any platform, from the mainframe to mobile devices. The Uniface Multi-channel deployment platform also provides support for Windows Vista and mobile devices. The new Uniface Mobile capability supports Microsoft Windows Mobile and provides for connection via the leading wireless technologies.
"The world of mobility and enterprise applications has been almost completely separated, but these areas are beginning to converge at the architectural, application development (AD) and user interaction levels," said William Clark, Research VP, Gartner in Gartner's Blog entry, "Making the Leap to Services and Embracing the New Enterprise Architecture," June 1, 2007. "Mobile applications pose a unique set of challenges for IT departments, and these must be considered along with Web-centric AD strategies so IT can choose the right architectures that match user requirements, device capability and network availability."
Uniface 9.2 includes new and integrated versions of the entire Uniface Application Platform Suite (APS) including Uniface, Uniface Web Application Server and Uniface Flow. The Uniface Portal capability in the Uniface Web Application Server simplifies how documents, database reports and enterprise applications are made available to employees and customers using the web-based interface. Uniface Flow is Compuware's premier tool for modeling, integration and management of business processes.
With enhanced support for web services and service oriented architecture, Uniface supports the production and consumption of web services for enterprise applications. This support includes XML Schema, Soap and WSDL. Uniface 9.2 will communicate with any standards-compliant web service is WS-I compliant and supports complex communication, modeling and validation methods. Uniface 9.2 speeds the development of portal-based applications and enables customers to develop their own composite business services using mash-up capabilities.
"Today's IT organizations want to rapidly develop enterprise applications and deploy those applications on a wide variety of platforms from mobile to the mainframe," said Aad van Schetsen, Vice President of Uniface Solutions at Compuware Corporation. "Compuware Uniface 9.2 will help our customers to leverage the benefits of service oriented architecture and mobile technologies to develop new and modernize existing applications."
The Compuware Uniface APS is a productive, reusable and proven platform for developing composite applications. Uniface provides open connectivity to help integrate and extend legacy applications, while supporting a wide range of emerging technologies and innovations. IT organizations benefit from ease of implementation, immediate ROI and reduced risk. To learn more about Compuware Uniface please visit www.compuware.com/uniface.
How do Collaboration Platforms Support Agile Software Development?
"How can an agile development process get supported by a team collaboration platform? This is a question that I get to hear quite often. To answer this question, we first have to inspect what is expected of an agile software development process and what is a team collaboration platform.
A group of software developers has created the concept of agile software development. In an agile project, the unbureaucratic collaboration between developers and users is the central issue. The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Changing requirements are welcome, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
Many different methods were introduced to put this ideal process to work. Examples are Scrum and eXtreme programming.
Team collaboration platforms, like Codebeamer, support the agile process by creating communication processes that are open and unbureaucratic.
Agile projects are entitled to go with as little formal specification as possible. Overemphasizing bureaucracy always is an expression of mistrust, misuse of control and abuse of power. It shows weak leadership by the responsible managers. Before incorporating agile methods, it is necessary to get to know the principles of strong leadership. Special models and processes for agile software development are used to support good management techniques.
A team collaboration platform is a piece of software to manage the communication needs of a team. In a software development team there are special requirements to be fulfilled. The system must be able to handle trackers, like bug trackers, administer forums, integrate source code control and handle documentation. It is implemented to support qualified leadership by incorporating agile processes. When a team uses a collaboration platform in a disciplined fashion to report bugs, share knowledge and communicate, transparency is created for the project."
Source: http://www.jroller.com/Turmalix/entry/how_does_collaboration_platforms_support
Developing A New Software
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