Global Software Product Development Outsource Provider Opens New Development Centers in the US and Latin America

A global software product development services and consultancy provider headquartered in San Diego, California, propelled by strong customer growth has expanded its operations through the addition of three new software development centers. These development centers are located in Quito, Ecuador, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. These sites are in addition to neubloc's existing three development centers in Poland and its headquarters site in San Diego. The new locations are part of the strategy for worldwide development of the company that aims to provide an expanded global presence, ability to handle development in time zones close to the US and the ability to implement "Follow the Sun" development/QA models by combining services in Poland and Latin America. Finally with the opening of the Oklahoma City facility neubloc now has an embedded software development facility that compares favorably to any such center worldwide.

This is just one of the most recent steps the company has undertaken to leverage its exponential growth trend, as neubloc has managed to yearly more than double its growth rate, since the date of its establishment. Monthly revenues are up 157% year over year. The company's representatives quote as reasons for this accelerated growth is its focus on software product development (vs IT development), its complete software product development offering from human interface design, development and test and finally the high quality of engineering combined with low attrition that can be sourced in Poland and Latin America. This combination of quality of development services, low employee turnover (critical in software product development), US based design and management and focus on product development make neubloc unique among hybrid onshore/offshore software services suppliers.

Although on its earliest growth phase, the Latin American centers will triple its current volume of operations by the end of this year. The new development teams comprise years of experience in bringing high-class software products to the market. The center will absorb various software development projects: development and integration of software products, usability design and implementation and finally ongoing test and maintenance.

"By opening our new centers in Latin America and the US, we are reinforcing our commitment to offering a full range of product development skills and services," said Armando Viteri, CEO and President of neubloc "The centers are a key component of our global strategy to drive the local development expertise and delivery of leading edge software products and to provide unmatched support to our customers."

Based on its experience of over 6 years in the international software product development market, neubloc addresses clients from various domains, worldwide, especially in markets like the U.S., Canada, Western Europe and in industries such as: media & entertainment, distribution, financial services, education, storage systems, social networking, etc.

source:- neubloc.com/

Three Ways That Open Source Could Benefit

This post from Matt Asay on whether open source needs consolidation asks an interesting question, and some of the comments that came in on it were interesting. This comment caught my eye: "No. Open source does not need consolidation. Open source needs product managers." Product managers, of course, drive improvements in commercial and proprietary software products, and listen carefully to what businesses need. At the end of our recent interview with Sun Microsystems' Ken Drachnik, regarding Sun's GlassFish app server, he also called for business synergy to advance open source projects. Here are three ways that open source projects can benefit from a bit of Business 101.

Business Advisors. Open source software reseller and consultancy firm Sirius just announced that it is seeking to convert new customers with a free online advisory service focused on driving open source adoption. Its eyes are squarely on the sagging economy with this move.

Of course, there are VARs and consultants who do advise businesses on open source adoption, but centralized, well-known and respected organizations could win more respect for open source from businesses. Consider CDW, for example. It is sort of an uber-VAR, teeming with technology experts in many proprietary categories, and they go out and advise businesses of all sizes on technology to adopt. Open source could use its own CDW.

Does Open Source Need Product Managers? Much of my life has been spent meeting with product managers who drive improvements in proprietary software products. A single, good product manager can have an enormous impact on business users. In this post, I discussed Chris Peters, who was the product manager for Microsoft Excel before Microsoft Office existed, and before Windows succeeded.

Chris was largely a one-man band who wasn't going to stand Lotus' domination of the spreadsheet market. He listened carefully to what businesses wanted, and drove rapid-fire improvements in Excel. His success as product manager of that spreadsheet had a great deal to do with how Microsoft put Office in more than 90 percent of desktops. Open source could use some product managers like that.

A Community Fund. This idea comes from Joe Brockmeier's great post on what Linux needs. There, he said: "Lots of major players contribute a great deal of money to open source, usually in ways that are strategic to the companies themselves. This works out great for the Linux and FOSS community in general, but what's lacking is a general fund for development and nurturing of projects that don't fit under the wing of any vendors in the open source industry." It would be great to see some patrons emerge to back open source projects that don't have commercial companies to support them, and there are many other models for encouraging community funding.

Source:- ostatic.com/

Does open source need consolidation?

I was reading this OStatic interview with Ken Drachnik, marketing manager for open source software infrastructure products at Sun and a co-founder of GlassFish (Sun's open-source application server), and it made me wonder if it's time for some consolidation in the open-source stack. Yes, I'm the one who argues against consolidation in enterprise software, but another part of me wonders why we spend time reinventing wheels....

Yes, we have de facto winners in most software categories: SugarCRM in CRM, JBoss in application servers in enterprise adoption (with Tomcat winning out for unpaid deployments), MySQL in the database market, etc. Think of how much better these projects would be if we concentrated development on these, rather than creating a range of lightly developed and even more lightly used open-source alternatives.

I guess my underlying question is, "Do we need a myriad of open-source alternatives to the proprietary software stacks, or would we be better served with one or two rock-solid open-source alternatives?" I'm inclined toward the latter, as I think Linux, for example, is much better off for having three robust competitors (Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu), rather than dozens of also rans with no strong options.

Source:- news.cnet.com/