Recruiting Fair at the Barley Mow Kanata-700 March Road Wednesday, September 21st, 2011 4:00pm-9:00pm Come and meet our managers, enjoy food, drinks and learn about the current opportunities! Bring your resume and be entered into a draw to win a Galaxy Tablet

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

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.

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.