Ruby on Rails Development Services Available

• Posted by Greg Arnette on July 9th, 2008 filed in concept G, Announcements
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concept G is available to create or maintain your Ruby on Rails applications. Let our experience and cost-effective development services help you complete your next project.

Madala Bhanu Prasad joins concept G

• Posted by Greg Arnette on November 25th, 2007 filed in concept G, Announcements
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Bhanu joins concept G as a developer and partner in the concept G web application studio. Bhanu will direct concept G application development and also work with web producers to identify new opportunities to bring to market.

Bhanu has a degree in Mechatronics and has been developing with Ruby on Rails for the past 2 years.

Google is going to acquire Postini

• Posted by Greg Arnette on July 9th, 2007 filed in Email Management, Systems Management, Sonian
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Newsflash! - well sort of if you follow the messaging market like I do - Google will acquire Postini for USD $625 million. This news came “out of the blue,” so-to-speak. But not surprising given Google’s recent efforts to strategically enhance their software as a service offerings to appeal to small and medium sized organizations. Security and compliance is a top concern for all organizations, and the overlap of customer demographics between the two companies gives good synergy. Of course Google’s privacy rules may not be appropriate for the Postini business-class user, and Google still has a way to go to convince mid-market Information Technology decisions makers to embrace the Google compute cloud with their treasured IT assets.

This acquisition further validates the software as a service business model as a way to deliver cost-effective IT solutions for the mid-market. Increasingly, small and medium sized organizations are starting to look at hosted IT services as a better overall way to solve essential problems like security, compliance, archiving and long-term information management. Google taking a position in this product category expands the market opportunity for all hosted messaging vendors. Customers will be able to choose form several great SaaS archiving offerings in the near future.

At Sonian we believe hosted archiving services will be the best way to achieve storage and compliance goals for the mid-market enterprise. Hosted applications served by trusted partners elegantly solve essential business problems more cost-effectively than an organization can accomplish on their own in their own data center.

I just checked Postini’s latest trend for Messages Processed: 580 million messages processed. With the $625 million purchase price in mind, looks like the value is about $1.08 for each message processed. Not that any serious financial analyst would use that formula.

These are exciting times in the messaging marketplace.

Starting somethign new - Sonian Archiving

• Posted by Greg Arnette on May 31st, 2007 filed in Email Management, Web 2.0, Announcements, Sonian
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I’m starting a new business venture with my colleague George Nichols. We are creating a hosted archive platform called Sonian that will be used for email, IM, and general file archiving. The features will be delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering. We expect to formally announce the new company in July 2007 and launch the service in the early Fall.

The messaging compliance and archiving market really needs a “Archive 2.0″ style web product to solve the painful IT problem of archiving email for compliance, storage management and disaster recovery. We will be offering a web-based archive, with unlimited storage, for one low fixed price, per user per month. We will also be cost-effective providing e-discovery services with the Sonian Archive platform.

Web Apps to the Rescue

• Posted by Greg Arnette on March 3rd, 2007 filed in Web 2.0, Off Topic, Pontificate
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Using web apps “saved my bacon” - here’s my tale of woe, which was made much less horrendous because I didn’t lose any data from a recent disk failure.

I awoke Friday to find my six month old Macbook dead from it’s overnight who-knows-what REM sleep activities.

I self-diagnosed the problem to be Total Hard Drive Failure (THDF). The tell-tale rhythmic click…click…click from the drive bay and the fact the disk utilities on the OS recovery DVD couldn’t even see the drive pretty much confirmed my diagnosis.

It was now time to call Apple Care to arrange repair, and figure out how to survive without my primary computer. I figured I could get by with a spare Windows laptop and my hosted productivity apps.

Apple Care estimated two to three weeks turn-around. Ouch - That wasn’t going to work for me, since I had important Keynote presentations to give in just a few days. I had to be more self-sufficient to get back up and running. So I located a replacement drive at an out-of-the-way Mac reseller in Falmouth, MA (100 miles round-trip) (paid retail for a 160Gb drive - that hurts) and am now installing the OS from the DVD and pray that my backup from a few days ago has most/all of my data. I’m most concerned about my presentation files.

Over the past year I have been using web apps exclusively for email, calendaring, word processing, project management, and spreadsheets. My presentations are the only work product not “in the cloud.”

As I write this I am selectively recovering files from a backup and starting to piece together my system so I can do development work. The total hard drive failure could have been a really big problem - web apps allowed my virtual team and I to keep on working through my local outage. So the drive failure still robbed me of about a day of productivity, but I didn’t lose any valuable data.

Lessons learned: spread data assets over multiple physical devices and areas, and use a disk image system instead of full/incremental backups to recover from system failure.