We have the same parents. 
Or in this case, parent. Alex Bratton founded Lextech Global Services in July of 2001. Over the past 7 years, he has worked to establish Lextech Global Services as a leading provider of systems engineering and support services. Working closely with clients and listening to their business challenges brought to light a demand for increased mobility in the security and surveillance industry. Alex decided to start Lextech Labs in July of 2008 as a response to this demand.

Lextech Labs will be a product-based organization, and the first family of products will be a high-end set of surveillance applications that operate over WiFi via the intuitive touch interface of an iPod Touch or iPhone.

We rely on each other.
Lextech Global Services will design and engineer cutting-edge iPhone applications as solutions to real business needs. Lextech Labs will then bring these products to market for personal and commercial use.

Lextech Labs trusts that we will provide the highest level of systems engineering expertise and software development because we have a proven record of success. The Lextech Global Services team has extensive experience working with high-end surveillance systems, embedded software, and military security projects for industry leaders like QuickSet International and the United States Army, Navy, and Coast Guard.

We share.
We have taken the life lesson “share your toys” we learned as children to heart. Sure, our toys consist of high-end technologies, but they still elicit the same type of excitement. Both companies will play an active role in research and development and share resources to make it easy for users to interact with their complex systems using Lextech Labs’ products.

We also share the same facility at 3080 Ogden Avenue, Suite 200 in Lisle, IL. 

Learn more about Lextech Labs and their exciting new product line by visiting http://lextechlabs.com today!

First, a common example and, hopefully, some answers.  Let’s start with probably the #1 offender: Instant Messaging.  IMs have exploded on the internet in the last few years as a great, simple way for people to talk (ok, type) to each other.  Here is the problem.  Odds are very good that your message to your wife with your account information for the bank website was sent in the clear because you aren’t using any encryption.  Yes, most IM technology has no concept of secure communication at all, so everything you type is like talking on a party line; anyone that’s listening can hear it, too.  

Now, depending on what IM system you are using (AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, etc), there are different ways to deal with this one.  Some of them may have an encryption option built in, which is a lot more rare than it should be.  Because of this, there are some third-party IM client solutions.  One of the more popular IM clients is pidgin. Not only does it allow for multiple messaging protocols (because you can’t get all your friends to use the same one), but it’s available for most Operating Systems, and has more than one encryption option available as a plugin.  If you primarily use AIM, then the OTR plugin is probably what you want.  Adium (the MacOS native IM client based on the pidgin libraries), has OTR built in.  The pidgin-encryption plugin is another option that has been around almost as long as pidgin.

Unfortunately, this is just one of many potential examples/solutions.  Do a little research into whether or not your favorite IM client or protocol has any way to encrypt your messages.  The real point is just to be aware that what you are sending is probably vulnerable, so don’t send anything that you deem to be important without setting something up first.  

1. Pick Your Purpose & Sign-up

Decide what your social network’s focus is going to be.  Is this a community for your customers to interact with you and each other or possibly an industry related group to bring together new ideas.

Now it’s time to sign-up on the ning.com site.  You’ll need your community name, tagline and description and you’re good to go.

2. Pick Your Style

Ning has a number of built in style choices that include background graphics (some definitely more MySpace crowd focused that others). You have full control over the colors for all text in the site which makes it very easy to get started.  For the more adventurous you can do lots of raw html customization which probably isn’t needed in most cases.

3. Load Up the Features

Ning has most of the typical social network features such as friend lists, member management and blogs. It also includes media capabilities for music, video and pictures — allowing members to rate these items as well.

4. Pay for Upgrades?

Ning communities include advertising space (they need to make their money somehow) by default.  You can pay a bit extra to kill the ads, use your own domain name (so instead of mynewgroup.ning.com you could set up mynewgroup.com) or even remove all references to Ning itself so your users don’t know that’s the platform you’re using.

5. Invite the Crew

Finally, you can either keep the community open to the public for member sign-ups or more likely if you’re creating something more targeted, send out the invitations to your email list.  You can also send out an invite link by copying it and putting it elsewhere — such as sending it to your LinkedIn connections or through an existing email newsletter or targeted publication.

6. And You’re Live

While it may not have the complete customization capabilities of rolling your own using open source or off-the-shelf packages, using Ning also gets rid of 99% of the start-up headaches so you can get rolling in minutes. Now you can focus on interacting with that community instead of wrestling with tech issues.

Among its many grievous crimes:

Flash
You did the entire site in Flash. In addition to making everything much slower, this also completely defeats the mechanism of open standards that has made the Web such a success. Now I have absolutely no control over my browsing experience at your site. Also, I can’t view it on my iPhone. I can’t bookmark the only page on your site that I’m actually interested in. And if I happen to have special accessibility needs, I can’t use your site at all. Why do you hate freedom so much? What do you have against disabled people?

Unconscionable Use of PDFs
Look, PDFs exist for a very specific purpose. They are to be used when you need to give someone a perfect replica of a printed document, for instance a sales brochure. I should not have to download a PDF just to read your FAQs.

Non-Standard Navigation
Maybe you don’t understand the purpose of site navigation controls. They allow you to quickly and easily navigate the site. I know you think that the ones you made that pop out of a little button halfway down the page are really ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’, but I shouldn’t need navigational assistance to find your navigation controls. These controls should be in a bar across the top of the screen, or in a bar down the left side. I’m even willing to overlook some extras along the bottom of the page, as long as they are discrete. But the navigation controls should always be visible; they should never hide themselves.

Printing Problems
I don’t even know how you managed to do this, but your site doesn’t print correctly. Maybe you have some horrible and convoluted CSS that causes it. The important page on your site comes out to three printed pages. Of course, all of the stuff I care about is on the first page. The other pages are just junk that your lawyers made you tack on the bottom. So I tell my browser to just print the first page. What do I get? Your logo and top navigation bar. Nothing else. The only information on your entire site that I actually wanted has just disappeared into the void.

Browser Dependence
You may not be aware of this, but there are web browsers other than Internet Explorer. Nearly half the world doesn’t use IE, and I happen to be one of that group. Why doesn’t your site work properly in my browser? Why are you restricting your site to only people that use a Microsoft-brand browser (which, by the way, means it’s also restricted to only people that use Windows)?

Automatic Videos
So I go to your website, for whatever reason people go there, and some video starts automatically playing. Not only does it slow everything down, distract me, annoy me, and take up valuable screen real estate, it also has sound. Now your your stupid video is screaming in my quiet office and everyone is looking at me. Congratulations, you have created the commercial equivalent of a MySpace page.

Slow Ad Servers
You know, it’s annoying enough that I have to look at ads on your site at all. But when I click on a link, and the page starts to load, and then it stalls before it’s even a quarter done, and I look down at my status bar and see “Waiting for ads.doubleclick.com”, that’s really infuriating.

Because of you, somewhere, a Care Bear is weeping.

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is the term commonly used to describe a new generation of web technologies and their focus on interactivity and data collaboration.  The core technology is typically AJAX (javascript in a web browser which talks back to the web server), which provides the snazzy functionality in sites like Google maps.  This new level of interactivity in a web page also usually includes providing the user access to different types of data at the same time (merging functionality from different web sites together in a single place).

Any Web Developer Can Do It…

Using web technologies to build connected apps has proven to be more efficient than using traditional mobile technologies. Mobile applications today are typically developed in J2ME (Java for phones), Brew or .Net, depending on what the target phone(s) support.  These technologies provide a standard but often require phone specific tweaks as not all phones behave the same way.  Usually this meant that a development team built up a special library over time that handled the quirks and work arounds for various phones.

Using Web 2.0 technologies means that nearly any capable web developer with any technology skill set (Java, Open Source, Microsoft, etc.) can now create mobile applications. It also means that existing applications can have new ‘skins’ applied to them to allow already developed functionality to be rolled out in a mobile environment.

All this boils down to it being much faster to build a connected app using web technologies than with traditional mobile technologies.

For example, during a recent Lextech training session, a small team developed a web app that pulled news headlines from the Tribune, created an audio file with the converted text to speech and sent it to the iPhone. With only about 4 hours of development work, the iPhone read news headlines aloud to the user.

Power to the People

With the mobile Web 2.0 revolution, wireless carriers are no longer the gate keepers controlling what applications users can access.  The mobile user merely points their web browser to the correct place and away they go.  This also simplifies the often nightmarish aspects of rolling out and updating applications that live inside of cell phones.  Now an update to the main server updates the mobile application for everyone.

Companies Already on Board

Many leading online firms are already creating iPhone specific versions of their applications to better serve existing customers and tap into the growing market of mobile app demanding consumers. Google, Facebook and LinkedIn have already rolled out versions of their applications dedicated to iPhone users. 

The Future…

The iPhone is merely the first in what will be a wave of Web 2.0 standards capable mobile devices in the market.  This mobile revolution will rapidly accelerate new kinds of applications we’ve never seen before and allow deeper interactivity while we’re physically anywhere.

1. Nice package management and abundant repositories. 

Ubuntu uses APT, which means getting thousands of applications is as easy as a simple apt-get from the shell, or for GUI lovers, there are nice options for any desktop environment you choose. Adding support for multimedia codes and proprietary hardware is a snap as well, it will prompt you if it detects you need it and ask you if you would like to install support for it.

2. Consistency and reliability.

I’ve only really gotten burned once with a bad Ubuntu update, which was resolved immediately (xorg.config bombed, not good). In my experience, other distributions that offer the breadth of software and updates that Ubuntu does typically break and require a lot of forum searching and manual tweaks to fix. Which is about the time I say screw it and reinstall Ubuntu.

3. Excellent community.

Be it forums, IRC, or user groups - Ubuntu has a great following and a lot of good people willing to help you out with any issues.

So, I guess I could wrap things up by saying Ubuntu is easy to work with and provides me the least amount of headaches of any Linux distribution. I can get up and running quickly with out the stupid little things breaking like they do on a lot of distributions while maintaining the freedom to pop under the hood and be a nerd with it too, because after all it is Linux!

More and more applications are being written as web applications instead of the traditional compiled, system dependent binary. Web apps allow a wide range of flexibility for the developer, but having everything in your web browser can get cluttered in a hurry. This is where SSBs become helpful. They are essentially stripped-down web browsers tied to a specific site (hence the name). What makes these different is that they behave on your system like an actual application, not a web application. This can be especially useful for internal web applications, too.

The one that I am currently using is called fluid. It is a MacOS specific SSB that allows you to pick a URL, and save it as an application. When you run it, it behaves just like any other app.  It shows up in the Dock as a separate application with its own set of preferences. The fluid application itself is a small manager of your web applications that you have created, and it is not necessary to run it on a day-to-day basis, only when you want to create a new SSB application.

Users of other platforms aren’t left out in the cold, either. Mozilla Labs has an SSB called prism that is available for multiple platforms. Current versions of prism can be found at mozilla labs.

The Google App Engine allows developers to create applications using Google’s framework, test them locally and then upload the applications into the Google virtual computing cloud (the same cloud infrastructure powering Google’s own applications). It provides integration capabilities with Google’s applications, build in online storage and a variety of other features to speed up launching an application.

While this sounds like the silver bullet of web apps, there are a number of reasons some companies won’t be using it.

First off, building a SaaS (software as a service) system that you’d like to make money with may not be possible (Google user account management is included but the capability to charge users and restrict access is not yet). Second applications are limited to specific technologies (they must be written in Python). This will make repurposing existing applications much more difficult and Python may not be the language of choice for most developers.

Google’s App Engine is a great first step into making systems scalability a simple infrastructure issue that developers can ignore but it will need to evolve to be deeply useful to most organizations.

With the knowledgeable Lextech team as my guide, I have picked up more technology tidbits in the last year than I imagined possible. Hopefully, these terms will help you navigate the technology jungle with a little more confidence.

fault tolerance: A system is built so that if a part fails the system functions properly until the broken part can be replaced. The value of designing a system with fault tolerance is that it will reduce the occurrences of unexpected down time.

load balancer: This is a device used to distribute a heavy work load across multiple computers. This technique enables you to efficiently serve more users and ensures that no one computer is overwhelmed or relied upon too heavily.

Software as a Service (SaaS): This is web-based software that provides some type of ongoing value. Customers pay by use, rather than buy it outright. An example of this would be an email marketing program, like Bronto.

web 2.0: This is a way to categorize a website. The powers that be tend to refer to it as the “next generation” of websites. There are no hard and fast rules that qualify a site as Web 2.0. That said, Web 2.0 sites can be identified by their increased emphasis on collaboration, design, functionality, and usability. One sure-fire sign you are looking at a Web 2.0 site is a high level of interactivity. Facebook is a good example.

Look for more terms in Part 2, coming soon! If you have a tech term you would like to know more about, leave a comment and I will try to address it in a future post.

While I would never hire some sneaky character to follow a person, I have no such qualms about having something stalk a misbehaving application. A problem came up with a Mac program that I had written in C. It would run great for a while, and then after some random number of days or weeks it would simply stop producing output. Not only would it apparently stop doing anything, it would also use all available CPU cycles. It was furiously doing nothing.

It was difficult to debug, since I couldn’t really set breakpoints to try to catch something that might not happen for weeks. And there didn’t seem to be a way to just break into the current instruction, like I am used to doing in embedded programming.

Lucky for me, my boss Alex happened to notice an interesting function of the Activity Monitor while experimenting on his Mac. Though I had used that utility before, I had completely overlooked the intriguing button at the top labeled “Sample Process”. Using this understated gem, you can select any running process on your machine and take a peak at what it’s doing with its time. There are a few different ways to have the information displayed, but I found the most useful to be “Percent of Thread”.

What I did was take a sample of my application while it was running normally, to get a baseline. There wasn’t anything too surprising in there; CPU usage seemed to be widely distributed among a variety of function calls. Then I sat back and waited for it to lock up, as I knew it eventually would.

So a few weeks later the application became unresponsive again. I took a new sample and what do you know? There was one function call that was using 99.7% of the CPU cycles. It turns out that there was a problem with the hardware drivers I was using. They would get in a bad state in which a particular asynchronous process would never complete. The interface was such that I had to poll to check if the process had completed. It was never completing and I was polling as fast as I could, which maxed out the CPU usage. Long story short, it was a recoverable problem and I just had to put in a timeout to give up waiting after a reasonable amount of time.

If you think your application is running around behind your back, sample it and find out what’s really going on.

“Whether you love or loathe technology the reality is that it’s going to play a big role in the future of libraries and educational facilities all over the world. Mobile technology has been at the center of a lot of discussion lately in research and library facilities, with schools like ACU choosing to distribute iPhones to new students for educational purposes. …  Here are a few ideas and tips to get you started on using the iPhone for more than just calls.”

Read more at 50 Useful iPhone Tips for Librarians and Researchers

The following profile was compiled from an interview with Lisa Reisman, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Aptium Global, Inc. Read on to learn how she is using technology to generate revenue.

Get some valuable advice and the recipe to this business’ Secret Sauce!

The Business

We work with manufacturing companies on their most complex metals related purchases. We are becoming more of a metals advisory firm where we provide expert guidance, project support and global sourcing services. We will soon be adding a global metals pricing index on a subscription basis.

The Tools

We have a blog site which serves as a means for reaching out to our client base. We have obtained new clients from the site. We are also using the blog as a platform to launch web-based subscription services. It provides us with the opportunity to better highlight our expertise and opinions and to scale the business beyond the number of people we could physically talk to in a day. It also helps us track what issues/topics are relevant to our clients and other interested parties.

The Users

Our end users include metals buyers, investors, ETF, commodity  traders, sourcing professionals etc.

The Challenge

The biggest one is developing an application at an affordable cost point that allows us to experiment while still earning revenue. We were able to do this by creating the first version of our service at an affordable price point with follow-on stages funded out of earnings.

The Future

We want to be the go-to resource for all industrial metals purchasing within the US and Western Europe. It’s essential that technology form the basis for our services. To create a scalable business, we need the flexibility of our blog platform and a means of creating the foundational application from which to build various subscription based businesses including a pricing tool with forecasting capability.

The Advice

I would suggest that they (business owners that are apprehensive about technology investments) speak to as many vendors/providers as they can and identify a firm that can form the basis of a long term partnership….a firm that is willing to “invest” and work collaboratively and creatively with you.

__________

About Lisa Reisman

Lisa Reisman is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Aptium Global Inc. and has over 15 years of experience in management consulting and direct materials sourcing. In addition to past roles at Andersen and Deloitte Consulting, Lisa has also owned and operated her own metals trading company, sourcing and selling a full range of metal products from and to emerging markets including: Russia, China, India, Romania, Venezuela, Mexico, Taiwan, South Africa, Ghana, Pakistan and Israel.

Lisa earned her MPA from New York University, where she received a Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Administration Fellowship. She also holds a BA in political science and journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As an expert in global trade and supply chain issues, Lisa is INCOTERM certified and holds a Six Sigma Black Belt. Her opinions have been quoted in numerous industry trade magazines such as Business Credit Magazine, Darwin Magazine, The Industry Standard, GlobalAutoIndustry and Automotive Industry Action Guide among others. She has recently authored a column on Lean Sourcing in tight commodity markets for Modern Plastics Worldwide. She currently serves as Editor-at-Large of Surplus Record, an industrial publication with a circulation of 75,000. Lisa is a regular columnist for the blog:Spend Matters.

View Lisa’s complete bio here. Don’t forget to stop by Aptium Global’s blog, MetalMiner, today!

Install day. Pull the car in from the 20 degree November day to the garage with the big space heater going. Numb hands and warming surfaces with a heat gun to make them pliable or to get adhesives to actually stick definitely slows things a bit.

Disassembly is the first step. We (the dynamic duo of my Dad and myself — he’s the automotive and analog electrical expert while the digital side is my domain) pull out the center console & radio, pull the spare and pop panels as we route wires. Next comes building out the cozy, safe and secure home for the mac mini. To help with the vibrations in the car we’ve placed two 1/2 inch layers of sorbathane foam padding (expensive stuff but well worth it) under the mini (cut just smaller than the mini’s base so the air intakes can still pull air in). This stuff is amazing at damping vibrations. The car had a hard styrofoam case already in place previously so we drilled out access and air holes in that and then built out supports around the mini using the blue foam padding you see in the pictures. We made sure to allow air channels to flow around all sides and out into the trunk through the styrofoam.

After the mini is secure we finagle the power, audio and USB wiring under the back seat, under the driver’s side door frame and around under the dash. The power supply is then attached to the base of the trunk and the rest of the wiring tested out and cleaned up. Lots of heat shrink tubing goes in place to make sure there’s no chance of disconnects or shorts.

Now comes the time I’ve been waiting for — connecting the audio and touchscreen. First the AUX audio cabling and switch goes into the back of the Bose system. We then plug in the VGA and USB to the screen and fire everything up (yes, we’ve routed cables for both that are about 20′ long including a distance extender for the USB to make sure there aren’t any signal drops). After some rechecking of settings on the power supply it all comes to life.

Now back to the Xenarc 7″ touchscreen I mentioned before. It works really well — it’s just large. It’s about an inch think and has a good sized bezel around the outside. Rather than completely chopping up the console to fit it in we decide to attach it to the front of the console for this initial version. I think a smaller screen will be a better fit in the future.

Finally everything gets buttoned up again, tested and re-tested. It’s working and I can drive the audio from the mini through the car audio system. Version 1.0 is a success.

Next, it’s on to the development of a simple GUI that is a whole lot easier to use than selecting things in iTunes using a touchscreen.

Next step — Touchscreen GUI software in part3

There is a huge amount of market hype already and many information hungry users and enthusiasts looking for that new ‘mobile’ application. It may have existed on the web for years, but putting a dedicated version in a user’s pocket takes things to a new level.

Depending on your business model you may be able to publish the application for free but then charge users a monthly usage fee similar to your current web users. This opens up your base of potential users installing the app directly from the Apple App Store.

And since the development platform allows pretty ready access to standard URL based services, you should be able to create that native effort without the huge labor it might take to reskin your whole site for a mobile device. If  you use intelligent caching, the user will never have to care if they’re on the EDGE network, WiFi or 300 feet underground — it’ll just work.

And of course if you’re doing it right, the other advantage is that it’ll force you to identify the top 10% of the features in your web system to build into the app.  iPhone users demand simple and elegant interfaces. This simplifies your development, provides a better user experience and may even help you refocus your web development efforts on important areas too.

Also on this page, you may also find an all-in-one bundle for Eclipse that has everything you need to get started. Once the debugger is loaded in PHP and your web server has been restarted, you can open Eclipses debug dialog and create a new PHP Web Page profile.

First configure the “PHP Server” section to point to the development server your project exists on. Then set /<project name>/app/webroot/index.php for the “File” section of the PHP server debug dialog as well as http://<host name>/ , index.php respectively for the two entry boxes of the “URL” section. On the advanced tab select “Debug All Pages” and the debugger will now recognize any breakpoints in all .php files in your project!

Despite those useful sounding options, both QuickTime and RealPlayer will always insist on buffering at least 3 seconds of video. And that’s fine for your standard video clip fare. But if you are trying to use the video feed to steer a device in real-time, a 3 second delay might as well be 3 minutes.

That’s why I was so delighted to find VLC. Then I was frustrated. Then I was really frustrated. And finally I was delighted again. To understand the emotional roller coaster I experienced, you’ll need to know a bit more about VLC.

VLC is an open source media player. Like a lot of open source software, it’s incredibly powerful. And like a lot of open source software, it’s incredibly difficult to use. I guess I should qualify that: if you just want to open a GUI and play a video file, it’s fairly simple. On the other hand, if you want to harness the awesome power that sets it apart from other players, it’s obscure and almost completely undocumented.

Fortunately you don’t have to endure the emotional highs and lows that I did, since I’ll just tell you what I figured out. For real-time RTSP streams, the option we are interested in is “rtsp-caching”. It takes an argument in milliseconds, and we’ve been able to set the value as low as 100 and still get reliable feeds on a LAN. Setting this via the GUI is not too difficult; it’s found in the preferences under Input/Codecs -> Access modules -> Real RTSP. You can also set it via the command line by appending the option “–rtsp-caching value“.

But by far the most obscure way to set it (and for us, the most useful) is via JavaScript. Among its many other wonders, VLC is also available as a browser plugin. This allows you to embed in a webpage anything that VLC knows how to play. First, you must add the necessary HTML:

<embed type="application/x-vlc-plugin"
    pluginspage="http://www.videolan.org"
    version="VideoLAN.VLCPlugin.2"
    width="352"
    height="288"
    loop="no"
    id="vlc"
</embed>

Note that you could also set the URL of the video to display in that HTML, but that will not work for our purposes. There is no way to set any of VLC’s funky options via HTML. Instead, you use JavaScript to set the URL after the page has loaded:

var options = new Array(":rtsp-caching=100");
var elem = document.getElementById("vlc");
elem.playlist.add("rtsp://some.url.com/video.sdp", "live", options);
elem.playlist.play();

There you have it: “really” real-time video embedded in a webpage. And you can save your manic-depressive tendencies for things that are really important, like the new iPhone SDK.

One item caught in advance using this checklist, for example, was that our own network-accessible power strips (for remote rebooting, etc) had the wrong kind of plug to interface with the data center’s power distribution setup - we needed to get adapters. This is an example of one of those things you definitely want to know in advance so you’re not standing in the data center late at night with no way to power your gear.

The “during” portion had a complete checklist for both the tear down at the old location and the build out at the new one. It was ordered sequentially, with the idea of maximum speed in mind while preserving systems integrity. The tear down portion involved readdressing and clean shutdowns of each machine in the correct order, followed by removing equipment from the racks and shuttling them out to waiting transportation, followed by cleanup of cables, etc.

The build out portion had the order listed out to bring the systems back online as quickly as possible, and designated specific portions of it to individuals, ideally timed so that as machines were mounted and cabled they could quickly be turned back on and checked.

Once the build out was finished the final part of the checklist was run through, and we made sure each service was back online. Once finished, it was time to clean up and go home. There was some more follow up work in that part of the checklist that was planned for the next day, and was taken care of then. The first move had a team of 2; the second move expanded up to a team of 4. A good rule of thumb in this situation seemed to be correct - more than two people per rack is probably too many. The second move, with twice as much equipment took about twice as long as the first, so in our case it scaled pretty linearly.

The data center we chose has been performing spectacularly since our last move. We haven’t had any downtime, support has been excellent, and the security arrangements and access policies allow us to get in to work whenever we wish. As we’ve added new racks they quickly take care of their end and make sure they can meet our future needs. The moves may have been a little painful, but we’re happy knowing that we shouldn’t have to do it again.

Get some valuable advice and the recipe to this business’ Secret Sauce!

The Business

Cadent Resources, Inc. drives speed and profit at manufacturing and distribution companies by optimizing supply and demand. Our LeanFacility Supply Management Solution eliminates operating waste to increase the speed production and fulfillment. Our DemandCaster Demand Management Solution assures the right amount of inventory and capacity is available at the right time.

The Tools

We have added a new service called DemandCaster. It is an outsourced demand management service built as a SwaS* (Software with a Service) application with a dedicated virtual demand analyst assigned to the client to perform analysis and drive improvement. My hope is that this will become our primary revenue stream and will supplant the traditional consulting services we provide.

The Users

The users are typically operations type personnel such as materials, production, and operations managers and their reports.

The Challenge

The biggest challenge is the extraction of the data from the clients ERP system. It is this data that the system uses to do its analysis. We have not found a magic bullet but have learned that the best way to get data is to use the IT person or company the client company already works with. Typically these individuals are trusted and provide the client custom reports and other system related services and can extract the data we need quickly and reliably. They can also help us automate the extraction to assure we are able to get data when needed. They may also become a partner in identifying new prospects that can benefit from the service we provide.

The Future

The future business will be a technology driven company and the services we provide must be reliable and must achieve results simply yet robustly. The trick will be to find the balance between being technology driven and efficient and not losing the human touch and intelligence. This is critical in order to prevent our service from being commoditized which is an issue in wholly technology driven solutions.

The Advice

Talk to and work with people that know technology and can provide advice and services that will help you move forward at a cost you can afford. You can do quite a bit with not a lot of dollars so don’t be afraid to take the plunge for fear of making mistakes. The fact is mistakes will be made but the beauty of technology is that the cost to fix errors is not prohibitive and often mistakes will yield a better result. Also, don’t be afraid to start testing before the solution is perfect. It will never be perfect. Just be careful that an initial launch be performed in a controlled environment so if there are problems only the control group is affected.

__________

About Ara Surenian

Ara Surenian, the founder and President of Cadent Resources Inc., has more than 20 years of experience in management, operations, and engineering. His specialty is designing and implementing business processes that blend lean manufacturing, supply chain management, and business intelligence to significantly improve a company’s cash flow and profit.

Ara is an advisor to business owners and is a seasoned and storied presenter at professional associations, executive roundtables, and seminars. He is a member of APICS, The Association for Operations Management, the Institute of Business Forecasting, the Institute of Management Consultants, and a Trusted Advisor member of Vistage an international organization for CEO’s. Ara has an MBA with a specialization in Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management from the University of Illinois, and Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University in Boston.

* Please note: This entry originally referred to the DemandCaster as a SaaS application, but has been corrected to “SwaS” to reflect the true nature of the software.

The reason this is important is because SaaS solutions are typically hosted subscription based solutions that are available to users to use as if it was software loaded on their servers or desktop. The distinction with DemandCaster is that it benefits from all that traditional SaaS applications provide but acts as an enabler to allow the deployment of an actual service offering that is provided by a dedicated expert. This differs from another software category called Software plus Services which is a wholly software-centric solution.  SwaS does not apply to a business that uses software to simply supplement their core business such as banks, brokers, on-line retailers, and credit card companies.  A SwaS provider works in the business to business realm and uses the hosted software as an enabler to facilitate communication, analysis, and delivery to address a specific need of a client company.

This is a type of hacking called “Social Engineering” and it can undermine all your work in a hurry. In general, people are trained from birth to be helpful and trusting, and hackers are going to take advantage of that. It ranges from the guy that tailgates behind an employee, to the admin that has the administrative password on a stickie under the keyboard because the password is too hard to remember. It also includes seemingly innocuous questions about the company or that innocent “I forgot my password” problem that a “user” calling the helpdesk is having.

So the real question is; How do you protect your company against a social engineering attack? In one word, Education. You need to make sure that your employees are properly educated in how to recognize and deal with social engineering attempts. For example, with physical security problems like tailgating, make sure they understand that holding the door for someone is not an option. They may even know the person, but what if the attacker is an ex-employee and they didn’t know?

At the end of the day, just remember that proper training and education of your employees will do wonders for your company’s security posture. It is also one of the most important aspects of security that gets left behind. Remember, most employees aren’t trained to worry about “Security” and think that it is someone else’s job. It’s your job to make sure that they think otherwise.

Even the bad guys are getting into the software as a service model.