Amadeus Consulting, a custom software development company, announced another high growth year, attributed to closing key technology deals, creating new e-commerce and Web development platforms and expanding its service offerings including desktop, mobile and Web applications and search visibility.

Amadeus Consulting’s total revenues increased by about 30 percent in 2010 compared to 2009. The company saw notable sales growth from key technology deals that included:

Providing the integrated technology powering Denver and Chicago B-cycle’s bike-sharing programs, including the kiosk interface, customer Web services, Web-based administrative tool and iPhone™ application.

Beginning the first phase of a three-phase project to develop a database-driven Web portal to benchmark airport performance for the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academies.

Developing a Microsoft® Silverlight® Web-based application for city employees to update and manage traffic signals remotely through the Web for All Traffic Solutions (ATS).

The development of dozens of mobile applications across all platforms by the company’s award winning mobile team.

“Organizations of all sizes know that when a comprehensive technology solution is required, they can count on Amadeus Consulting to deliver results,” said Jay Millard, chief marketing officer for Amadeus Consulting. I attribute our success this year directly to this total solution approach.” “We make sure that we cultivate a deep skill base across diverse technologies in our organization to meet the complex challenges facing businesses today.”

Amadeus Consulting furthered its customer support efforts by rolling out 24 x 7 software maintenance, a feature not often offered by comparable software providers.

Amadeus Consulting expanded its software development portfolio by developing two platforms that give customers affordable, user-controlled tools that optimize their Web environment. The e-commerce platform includes search engine optimization, supports large inventories and all payment types, and can be deployed in less than four weeks. The Virtuoso Website builder platform comes with website hosting and customer support 24 hours a day, seven days a week for less than half the annual cost of a full-time employee. Both platforms allow medium-sized companies to launch full-featured Websites without setting aside a large budget or using their own internal resources.

Amadeus Consulting anticipated demand and expanded its workforce accordingly in the areas of search visibility, including SEO, Web analytics and conversion rate optimization, user experience development to simplify the roll-out of new applications, and mobile application development for Android™, iPhone ™, Windows® Phone 7 and iPad™. To round out the team’s experience, the company hired a PMI-certified project manager to drive process performance into each technology project it undertakes to continue to come in on-time and on-budget.

“Everyone can agree that 2010 was a tough year for businesses overall, and our momentum attests to our commitment to provide our customers smart, cost-effective technology that makes their business more profitable and competitive,” said Lisa Calkins, chief executive officer for Amadeus Consulting. “We will continue to deliver the most up-to-date solutions and provide unmatched customer service into 2011 and beyond.”

Source:http://www.advertisertalk.com/custom-software-development-company-amadeus-consulting-reports-another-record-year-in-2010-19089.zhtml

From a personally-controlled social network to a mobile application that lets aid workers collect, sort and share information about children in emergency situations, open source software is meeting the needs of today’s application developers, according to Black Duck Software, which today announced its 2010 open source ‘Rookies of the Year’ list.

Working from a list of thousands of new projects launched in 2010, Black Duck evaluated a project’s popularity using a weighted scoring system that awards points for commit activity within a project, the number of developers involved, and the number of web sites linked to the project. After auditing its findings and normalizing scores, Black Duck determined the top 10 Rookie projects.

Some key observations from this year’s report include:

30% of the top 10 new projects in 2010 used the AGPL license, indicative of an increasing number of new cloud/SaaS related projects
40% of the top 10, and 32% of the top 50 projects, are now on github, indicating a significant shift to this repository

The Black Duck Rookies of the Year for 2010 include:

Diaspora, the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.

OpenStack is an open source, open standards cloud computing platform, backed by RackSpace and NASA, for building reliable cloud infrastructure.
Cloud9IDE, the Integrated Development Environment built on top of Node.JS, aims to bring the best features from other existing IDE’s and source code editors such as Eclipse, Netbeans, Textmate, and many others together, bundled as plugins.

OpenStack Nova is a cloud computing fabric controller (the main part of an IaaS system). It is written in Python, using the Twisted and Eventlet frameworks, and relies on the standard AMQP messaging protocol.

NuGet is a free, open source developer-focused package management system for the .NET platform designed to simplify the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.

Activiti BPM Platform is a Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow system targeted at business people, developers and system admins. Its core is a super-fast BPMN 2 process engine for Java. Activiti runs in any Java application, on a server, on a cluster or in the cloud.

SparkleShare is a file sharing and collaboration tool. It is designed to make sharing documents and collaboration easier, and to make peers aware of what you are doing. It allows you to instantly sync with any Git repository to which you have access.

VoltDB is a fast, scalable, open-source OLTP SQL database with ACID. It is an alternative to NoSQL key-value stores and database sharing.

RapidFTR is a mobile application that lets aid workers collect, sort and share information about children in emergency situations. RapidFTR allows for quick input of essential data about a child on a mobile phone, including a photograph, the child’s age, family, health status and location information. Data is saved automatically and uploaded to a central database whenever network access becomes available. Registered aid workers will be able to create and modify entries for children in their care as well as search all existing records in order to help distressed parents find information about their missing children
ownCloud is an open personal cloud which runs on your personal server. It enables access of your data from all of your devices. Sharing with other people is also possible. It supports automatic backups, versioning and encryption.

“The 2010 Rookies analysis demonstrates the continued embrace of the cloud as well as an increasing number of business process applications,” said Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President, Black Duck Software. “Each project in the top 10 represents the expanding use of open source by developers and the larger community, especially in the mobile and cloud communities.”

This year’s Rookies were drawn from an expanded universe of projects from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase and from Ohloh.net, the web’s largest free public directory of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), acquired by Black Duck in September, 2010.

Source:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/black-duck-software-names-open-source-rookies-of-2010-113073829.html

Kao Brands, a global manufacturer of premium beauty brands including Jergens, Ban, Biore, Curel, Guhl and John Freida, prides itself on innovation and quality. Therefore, when the company added new equipment or implemented different procedures, they realized that they needed a system that was both agile and secure to allow optimizing the manufacturing of many different recipes on the same equipment.

Over the last seven years, Kao has expanded its operations globally, particularly in Europe and Australia. In March 2009, new equipment was added to accommodate the additional needed capacity. This increase in sales had necessitated using outside contractors to fulfill product commitment. The company saw value in cost savings and quality improvement while protecting the confidentiality of recipes by bringing that manufacturing capacity back to the plant. Kao produces many different products and SKUs on the same equipment and packages those products on the same lines.

“This was a logistical problem,” said Andy Pickens, Engineering Manager for Kao Brands’ Cincinnati plant. “With three major production areas – making, storage and packaging – producing many products with the same equipment and having to validate cleanings between products, results in a complicated system. We needed to continue to provide high quality products but with more agility to address the increased capacity requirements.”

Kao’s control system is complex and its PLC platform was driving the operation. Many operations are interconnected and if a change in one system was made through the PLC, due to sequencing, it could have an adverse effect on another operation down the line. The team thought that, due to the rate that things change, they needed a solution that would allow them to develop PLC code once and not have to change it with each tweak to the process. Kao implemented Proficy Batch, a powerful and feature-rich solution used to increase product quality, consistency and efficiency, and Proficy Historian to capture high-resolution process data enabling true process visibility.

The Proficy solution was implemented on the new equipment and now the team is implementing on all equipment. “We now change recipes more quickly and more reliably,” said Pickens. “Changes that used to take days to implement are now taking hours instead.”

Kao isn’t stopping there, according to Pickens. The company would like to use the data collected by the Proficy Software solution for process improvement. “We are working to optimize what is a good time for each step of every product we make,” he said. “We would like to see what the impact any manufacturing bottlenecks have on the schedule made by the production team, and adjust our schedule dynamically to compensate.”

“Kao Brands is a great example of how companies achieve efficiencies by laying a solid foundation of reliability and predictability,” said Erik Udstuen, Vice President of Software & Services for GE Intelligent Platforms. “Operational excellence starts with visibility into operations, moves to efficiency, reliability and then, by standardizing work processes, improving planning and execution across the company results in a sustainable competitive advantage for the company in the marketplace.”

Source:http://www.automationworld.com/webonly-8111

We’ve created a list about 5 top software topics that people were discussing during the year 2010. You’ll be surprised to know that millions of Mozilla Firefox users wanted to find out where they could get the best add-ons for the web browser, to help them improve their browsing experience.

Many antivirus software products that are offered as “free” on the Internet, also have features that are just as good as antivirus software that you often pay for. You can download the following software and use them to help protect your system from viruses and malware: AVG 9.0 Antivirus Free, Avira Home Edition, Avast! Free Antivirus, and Microsoft Security Essentials.

The latest buzz about the iPad, and iPhone has been news worthy, because consumers wanted to learn more about Apple’s iPhone operating system. Many opinions were expressed about the iPhone, because consumers were concerned about the lack of support for Adobe Flash, and not being able to see interactive videos on Apple’s iPhone.

The web browser Google Chrome, often made headline news, because you can use plug-ins and extensions that are similar to Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. Google Chrome users, here’s a few extensions that you might like to try out: Adblock, Send From Gmail, Google Mail Checker, IE Tab, DocsPDF/PowerPoint Viewer, Fastest Chrome, and Stop Autoplay for YouTube.

Microsoft Office 2010 was released this past year, and the software has several new features that can help you to stay organized and get your work done faster. However, if you can’t afford to buy Microsoft Office 2010, you could use an open-source application, such as Open Office, as an alternative. The software application, Open Office is free to use, and has features that are similar to Microsoft Office. You can use the Word Write Processor, Calc Spreadsheet, and Impress Presentation Creator to organize all of your information.

Source:http://www.rantrave.com/Rave/2010-Top-5-Software-Topics.aspx