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by Brenda Pastorek | Chief Operating Officer, MapleWorks Technology, January 5, 2011
Happy New Year!
In 2010, MapleWorks Technology saw signs of a return to a stronger economy—we added new clients to our customer base, as well as continued to develop products for existing clients.
With the addition of new clients came the addition of bench strength (doubled in 2010) to the MapleWorks team. We are proud to attract the best and brightest engineering talent, and have welcomed many exceptional people to the team in 2010. Not only are our people technically astute, they understand the importance of their contributions as individuals and as members of a greater team to delivering superior software development consulting services to product companies throughout North America.
We pride ourselves on having a clear mission and vision. The MapleWorks’ mission is to provide superior software development consulting services to voice, data, and video converged product companies in the network communications industry, and our vision is to be viewed as the “Gold” standard in performance, as measured by innovation, quality, and reliability, within the network communications industry. In combination, our mission and vision ensure that we deliver innovative solutions that fulfill our clients’ product visions.
On behalf of the team here at MapleWorks, we thank our many clients for their continued patronage, and we wish all of you strong business growth in 2011.
Cheers,
Brenda
by Peter Graham | MapleWorks Technology, December 15, 2010
I have at times required a rather dramatic, yet short term, increase in computing resources. The readily available solution was to turn to the cloud and utilize the diverse services offered through Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s a cost-effective approach when you need bandwidth, computers, easily scalable storage or an array of operating systems. I have found that the pace of change with AWS is significant, so remember that the services offered today will with little doubt be more plentiful tomorrow.
Listed below is a brief, non-inclusive list of activities software developers can perform in the cloud with AWS:
- Simulate large-scale applications
- Conduct extensive processing
- Test the performance of software applications
- Access a multitude of operating systems
- Administer multiple databases
- Utilize easily scalable storage
A key point to keep in mind is that you have the power of combination. You can pick and choose what you require, configure an image that suits your specific needs and save it and re-use it as required. You may then fire up and shut down a multitude of these images as required. It’s my experience that AWS had really driven home the point that this highly configurable on demand service can address a great many situations. Naturally, with any service, final determinations will be made after a close examination of the requirements, options, and costs. My previous forays into the cloud have left me with following summary of pros and cons.
Pros
- Capital investment is zero
- On-demand access to virtual machines, storage capacity
- Straight forward scalability after initial configurations
- Time savings
- The ability to choose from numerous operating systems
- Significant flexibility in configuration, scalability and “start/stop” demands
- Reasonable costs for short to middle term activities or projects
- Uptime is impressive
Cons
- Longer term needs can adversely affect your budget. (You pay for storage, you pay for running instances and you pay for bandwidth. This can and does add up, so you have to do your cost – benefit analysis.)
- There is time required for your initial set up and configuration. This will cost a bit, but can be lessened with a planning.
- Occasionally, you might run into a snag and have to spend some time researching a solution that is not to be readily found in the documentation. (However, this is undergoing continual improvements.)
AWS is a great service when you have experience and understand your own requirements. In the final analysis, it will come down to what you need, when you need it, and what you are willing to spend.
Next Time: A case study of a real world project in the AWS cloud.
by Paul Gasparro | Co-founder, MapleWorks Technology, December 6, 2010
In my last post I gave a high level definition of unified communications. In essence, unified communications is a systems-based approach to unifying real-time and non-real-time communications services across devices (e.g. mobile phones, landline phones, tablets, laptops, etc.). Unified communications makes it easier and simpler for knowledge workers to communicate and to be more responsive to communications.
If you’re developing a unified communications system, you are delivering high value to your enterprise customers in the form of:
- Choice in communication media
- Accelerated response times
- Improved personal productivity
- Enhanced workgroup collaboration
- Tailored unified communications to specific role(s)
- Reduced business costs; e.g. travel, telecom
- Improved company-wide communications
- Improved customer satisfaction
What other benefits would you add to this list? I invite you to add a comment.
by Paul Gasparro | Co-founder, MapleWorks Technology, November 29, 2010
Years ago we used to be handcuffed to our landlines—remember that? Today, we communicate using mobile phones, softphones, tablets, laptops, and more. And we communicate via voice, sms, chat, and more. While advances in technology have given knowledge workers tons of choice, advances in technology have also created fragmentation. What number do you call to reach your colleague? What number does your colleague call to reach you?
Unified communications has been all the rage for the last of couple of years. That’s because there is business value in bringing fragmented communications back together—and it continues to be a huge opportunity for software development companies. Even though it’s been around for a few years, there is some confusion as to what unified communications is and what it can and cannot do. MapleWorks Technology has experience developing unified communications systems for our clients and we typically start the engagement with an agreement on what unified communications is.
So, what is it? At its simplest level, unified communications is a systems-based approach to unifying both real-time and non-real-time communication services. Examples of services are telephony and IP telephony, email instant messaging (IM), SMS, fax, audio/video/web conferencing. And presence—knowing where the recipient is and if they’re available—is key to unified communications.
In today’s virtual and highly mobile world, colleagues may be at the office, at their home office, in the car, or even out for a lunch-time run. Presence enables colleagues to know where a colleague is and their colleague’s preferred medium of communications. Here’s a scenario. Jason needs to contact Rachal. Rachal’s working from her home office today and she prefers chatting at the moment—so Jason IM’s her. If unified communications has tied it all together for this company, Rachal can escalate the chat session to a voice call—quickly, seamlessly.
Stay tuned for my next blog post when I talk about the benefits of unified communications.
by Paul Gasparro | Co-founder, MapleWorks Technology, November 15, 2010
When I look at the many companies we’ve provided software consulting services to over the years, I see two groups: those who know what they want and know how they want us to do it, and those who know what they want and want us to figure out how to do it. We’re all too happy to help both groups achieve their end goals; however, our engineers really shine when we hand them the latter—they love a good challenge.
We’ve got an office full of talented people. No matter the constraint—whether technological or budget—put the project in front of them, and they’ll leverage their experience to develop an innovative solution.
Here’s a true story. A company built a carrier-grade automatic call distribution (ACD) system on Microsoft Windows, but hadn’t taken failover or high availability into consideration. They arrived at MapleWorks’ doorstep in need of a unique perspective on how to deliver this functionality. We came up with an innovative solution and delivered the functionality required.
Another true story. A company that developed network management software didn’t have the resources to build labs to test the software. They were in need of fresh ideas to accomplish the task. We helped the company “simulate” the environments, which not only saved them millions of dollars in capital expenditures, the innovative solution reduced the time it took to do the required testing.
When you outsource a software development project to MapleWorks, you are getting much more than the end product—you are getting the added value that comes with a team that can leverage combined years of experience to deliver innovative solutions that achieve goals.
by Richard Langevin | Senior Software Development Manager, MapleWorks Technology
At MapleWorks, we have experience developing remote video imaging applications. Because telemedicine applications have stringent performance targets, I’ve based these top 8 technical considerations on this complex technology. Here comes the tech talk…
1. Bandwidth and QoS. Will everyone have the same bandwidth? Consider how to adjust for different bandwidth requirements. Streaming servers such as Wowza Media Server and Adobe Flash Media Server have proven capability to determine available bandwidth. If not available, consider having a mechanism to do so. Also, consider if it’s a managed network—if video can get priority, then your stream will be more reliable.
2. Security. Is the video service public or private? If private, how is authorization going to be done? How will the video stream be secured? Will the authorization be standalone or integrated with an existing system using LDAP, Radius, or another protocol? Is integrated Windows authentication required? If so, can you consider open source like JCIFS NTLM HTTP authentication? Do you need an alternate method? Are there different classes of users?
3. Video Encoder. Check the encoding latency. What encoding format is needed? What resolutions do you need to stream? What are the cost points? Is streaming server support required? Do you need on-board storage?
4. Video Source. What is the video source for the encoder? Live or pre-recorded? Do you need to multicast or is it per user? When do you start/stop/pause video streams? You need to make sure that your video source—encoder/streaming server chain all work together.
5. Video Player. What video player will you select; for example, Off-The-Shelf (OTS) players such as Flash or QuickTime? Or a custom solution to meet particular requirements? Desktop and/or mobile? Each brings different requirements. Do you need to check on system resources to adjust resolution? What equipment are your target users using? Do you need to support interactivity?
6. Platform. Which platform will you use for your remote video services services? Weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches. For example, with a Windows server platform, you could choose end-to-end Windows products. With Linux and Unix, there are other options.
7. Management. Think about the management requirements. How are you going to provision the video sessions? How are you going to monitor the health of the system?
8. Statistics. What do you want in a real-time view versus reports? If you need to export statistics, what formats do you need to provide the data in? What reports should be available on the system versus an off-board system? Do you need to schedule automatic report generation?
To read more on this topic, I recommend that you download our white paper, 8 Technical Considerations Ensuring the Development of Flawless Remove Video Imaging Applications from our Video Applications web page.
by Paul Gasparro | Co-founder, MapleWorks Technology
Business users are becoming more and more comfortable using their Smartphones to access information. Case in point: A study by comScore finds that use of social networking apps on Smartphones grew 240% between the 12-month period April 2009 to April 2010 (source: http://www.emarketer.com/article.aspx?r=1007757).
While the stat on social networking apps is sexy, let’s not forget the many other mobile applications that business professionals are now accessing from their Smartphones: customer relationship management (CRM) apps like Salesforce.com and financial management apps like Quicken. So what does this mean to software product companies?
As a software development consulting firm, here are the top 3 challenges that our customers are asking us to help them solve.
- How do we ensure our software product delivers a consistent user experience across the multitude of operating systems?
- How do we create a consistent user experience across the plethora of devices—personal computers, Smartphones, tablets—all of which have different screen sizes and viewing requirements (landscape, portrait)?
- How do we remove the complexity that IT departments face in managing all of this for their employees?
The software product companies that are asking these questions are on the right path to differentiating themselves in a crowded marketplace.
Interested in reading more on this topic? I recommend that you check out this article entitled, 5 Mobile Megatrends (and How to Prepare).
by Peter Maly | Senior Software Development Manager
Cloud computing and Software-as-a-service (Saas) applications have been growing in popularity since the economic downturn, hence, many product development companies turned to us (MapleWorks is a software development outsourcing service provider) to accelerate commercializing their products. Even with the uptick in the economy, I don’t expect to see demand slow because, depending on your end customers’ goals, cloud computing/SaaS can allow them to reduce costs, reduce their IT footprints, and reduce the headaches that come with managing infrastructure.
To achieve the end goals of your customers, here’s the top 10 technical considerations for planning your SaaS development project.
1. Latency. In typical circumstances, SaaS applications work fine. However; as a hypothetical scenario, if two to four seconds of delay are introduced into the connection, and 100 requests are normally handled, will this affect quality or usability? What will be the customer’s threshold for latency?
2. Reliability. The Internet is still not as reliable as circuit-based networks. But it’s still essential to make sure that reliability is high. This is especially important for mission-critical applications. What will be your customers’ requirements for reliability?
3. Redundancy. One of the value propositions for SaaS is proactive maintenance versus reactive maintenance. In the same vein, customers look to SaaS as their disaster recovery plan. Redundancy and recovery is the responsibility of the SaaS vendor. How sophisticated will your redundancy and backup services be?
4. Scalability. Scalability is a key point of moving to the cloud. As an enterprise grows—or shrinks—a cloud hosted SaaS gives them the ability to scale appropriately. Has scalability been designed into your SaaS application?
5. Compatibility/standards. Standards are a challenge. While it’s impossible to future proof the SaaS application that you develop, at least try. Look at trends and think five years in advance.
6. Partitioning. When there are many users sharing the same resource, logical partitioning helps to guarantee security. Can your SaaS application be partitioned?
7. Security. Confidentiality is a consideration in SaaS applications—and typically entails a high degree of complexity. It’s essential to ensure that you offer the appropriate level of security. And, this is especially important for mission-critical applications or sensitive data. What level of security will your customers require of your service?
8. Data migration. Customers don’t want to be handcuffed should they wish to move their data elsewhere. There have been plenty of sad stories on this topic. How will you deal with data portability?
9. Usability. If everyone in the enterprise is to adopt your SaaS application, it must be intuitive and easy to use. Will a usability expert test your SaaS application?
10. Total cost of ownership (TCO). Your customers turn to SaaS to deliver against their expectations for reduced IT infrastructure costs, decreased maintenance costs, on-demand scalability, and utility pricing. Will your SaaS application enable your target customers to lower their TCO?
That’s my top 10. What would you add to this list?
April 28, 2010
MapleWorks Releases Note Taking App.
 Read more
MapleWorks Showcases Mobile Application
Savvy with Release of Note Taking App
to Android Apps Market
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