Manoj Ranaweera Posts

In July 06, I responded to an article published by John Beech (MD) on Access Accounting‘s blog.  Following is John’s reply to my comments: Exceptional people are rarely available for long which is why we always take them on straight away, following a series of in-depth interviews and discussions. Extended time scales can raise false hopes which doesn’t help either party. Once onboard, our programme is to immerse them in the business, spending perhaps three months in each department at the same time as attending all of our internal courses. This is a great way for them to get to…

As I reported on 11th August, Pegasus is now part of Infor. On 15th May 06, I reported the acquisition of SSA Global by Infor. Infor is now the world’s third largest financial software company after only Oracle and SAP. Update 1: Visit Dennis Howlett’s blog for information on pending redunduncies at Pegasus and introduction of SOA through Infor. Technorati Tags: Infor, Pegasus, SAP, Oracle, SSA Global

Kiko, a Web 2.0 company is on sale at eBay, bid pricing starting at $49,999 with no sign of any bidding activity yet. Following is an extract from eBay: Kiko is a fully function AJAX calendar website. Kiko has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface, natural language appointment input, and localization support. This auction is for the domain name, our web hosting account, and all the intellectual property associated with Kiko, including copyrights to all the code. We are selling Kiko because we want to have time to work on other projects as a development team. We had a project…

Just came across OpenSSL.  According to their website: OpenSSL is based on the excellent SSLeay library developed by Eric A. Young and Tim J. Hudson. The OpenSSL toolkit is licensed under an Apache-style licence, which basically means that you are free to get and use it for commercial and non-commercial purposes subject to some simple license conditions. Does anyone has experience of using openssl-0.9.8b? Technorati Tags: SSL, Verisign, OpenSSL

Thanks Chris! You certainly have endless imagination. Mmh! which body should I wear tomorrow?

We all know that organisations go through re-branding exercises from time to time for various reasons. Some of these fails catastrophically, e.g. Post Office. What about re-branding a blog! That is exactly the dilemma Dennis Howlett is going through! If you do have suggestions, why not leave a suggestion for Dennis (on his blog please)! Technorati Tags: Dennis Howlett, Blogging

Dennis Howlett just got my attention to Gartner’s 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle Highlights Key Technology Themes. Unfortunately, I cannot read above graph (not clear) and do not have access to the full report. The little I can see, suggests web 2.0 is at the peak and VoIP has reached a plateau. I slightly disagree as both got lot more mileage to cover. Update 1: Click here for better image……. Technorati Tags: Gartner, Dennis Howlett, Web 2.0

On 2 Aug 2006, Infor, a portfolio company of Golden Gate Capital, accelerated its market share by acquiring Extensity, a leading financial performance management company and Systems Union Group, the UK based financial and performance management solutions provider. With the acquisition, Infor now has annual revenues totalling $2.1bn, offices in 100 countries and approximately 70,000 customers. Visit Infor for the full press release. What is the impact of this acquisition has on ebdex? Quite a bit! My planned meeting with a senior executive of Pegasus, which is owned by System Union Group has now been postponed. However, the acquisition also increases…

Dave Stephens, CEO of Coupa commented on Competing with the “Open Source Way" at his Procurement Central. Extracts from his comments (modified to suit): Sourceforge has over 100,000 active opensource projects. Sometimes particular projects, gain good interest over time, like with Salesforce.com. But wait a minute, Salesforce.com isn’t an open source firm. Closed source firms and service providers (Google & Microsoft included) are beginning to open up around the edges and use the movement where it makes sense for them. Then I commented on his blog: We will make our API “Open Source”. It does not make commercial sense to…

Dennis Howlett reported that Niall Kennedy is leaving Microsoft to start-up his own business, after joining Microsoft in April 2006. It is the first time I came across the existence of Niall and I like to address two points (you need to read his blog to understand why he is leaving Microsoft): Whilst companies allow certain freedom to promote innovative ideas it’s employees have, in most cases the level of freedom is controlled by organisation’s own corporate strategy and policies. Wrongly, many organisations take a short-term view specially if it has to deal with drop in share price, revenues and/or…