In-house products made available

: Tuesday, 15 September 2009 00:30

A few in-house products, used by PWN Consulting internally over the past couple of years, have been made available to the public as either standalone products or as services.

We have also decided it is time to move our infrastructure over from Tomcat/Apache to JBoss/Apache, since having a full-blown J2EE stack will allow us to provide advanced features since WebMVC can only fully be utilised when running inside a J2EE environment.

The project ongoing for Massmart - Oasis - is finally drawing to a close. We have been running live in parallel for three months now, and the results are looking very favourable. The project is scheduled for go-live in January 2005, when the old legacy system will be deprecated. A full review on the project will be posted once the system is live.

Security Security

Consider the scenario where you outsourced a project to a development house. Once they have finished and you approved the functionality, they deploy the product in a production environment and maybe have the system hosted if it is an online system. Have they educated you on the security risks in exposing a server to the Internet? Have they locked down the server and hardened the services running on it? Have they used defensive coding methods to make their code more robust? Do they understand wat an SQL injection attack is? Do they actively maintain the system to ensure ongoing security and reliability?

We can confidently respond in the affirmative to all those questions.

Small Company Benefits Small Company Benefits

If you ask CIO/CTO's whether it is better to contract a large software engineering company than a smaller one (staff wise), most would reply that it is less of a business risk to contract the larger company. Their reasons would typically be that larger organisations have more resources, more stability due to its size, better experience and have a better chance of delivering the project on time and within budget

We disagree. Experience has shown us that larger organisations are actually more of a risk than smaller companies. A large company would assign a limited amount of resources to your project. In many cases said resources would be shared between their various clients. Resources of larger companies are usually not as loyal as resources of a smaller company - less ownership implies less attachment. Therefore they leave more easily for better pastures. This creates fluctuations in the ability for the team to implement your project. Unless you are the contracted company's largest client, you will not be treated as you deserve to be. A small company values your business more. Resources are more attached to the company and work harder to make the company a success, implying they will take better care of you. They have less incentive to leave for other opportunities because they are employed not for the money, but for helping realise the vision of that company.

There is something magical about small companies when it comes to their ability to serve your needs.