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Posts Tagged ‘Contegix’

Leveraging Strategic Partnerships: CustomWare

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
Since I got rambling on Atlassian tools in my last post and decided not to include Customware, we’re going to focus this post on how Contegix put us in touch with another organization that continues to make a positive impact on HotWax Media.
In the early days of working with our Atlassian tools, we began to understand the power and potential of the applications at our fingertips, but didn’t have enough expertise or time to invest in getting the most out of it.  Yeah, we wrote a couple of JIRA plugins (to add timesheet capability and enhance reporting of work efforts for billing, but we were tiptoeing around modeling all of our processes in the application because it was not clear how to make it happen – that’s when we decided to enlist help from the experts!
I immediately went to the Atlassian site to find out how they handle their support services and I have to admit that I was shocked to see that Atlassian does not offer any professional services support their products at all.   Instead of falling into the common pitfall of trying to run both a product company and a services company, and often not doing it well, they opted to focus on their product and build a network of professional service providers that would handle their growing community of users.  I went to their network and just picked the company that looked like the closest match to our organization.
To make a long story short and not to name names, we had a really strange experience with that provider and went back to Contegix to discuss who might be a better fit for HotWax Media.  Contegix informed us that they havepartnered with Customware, on Australian based company, to provide their Atlassian professional services and  put me in contact with Robert Castaneda, the Founder and CEO of Customware, to see if there was indeed a fit.
Robert and I decided to meet at ApacheCon US 2009, in Oakland, just as he was formalizing his new office in the Bay area.  We got down to business quickly – I explained our current conundrum (problems with our home grown JIRA plugins after a big upgrade), the new Greenhopper plugin I was excited about using, our development processes, some and the challenge of modeling our workflow in the Atlassian tools.  With Robert’s experience and understanding of both these tools and running a successful service organization – he was able to understand the problems we were facing and provided us with a solution from which to start our modeling effort.  We started right in making modifications to our plugins and discussing folding in JIRA’s Agile views (see Greenhopper) into our world in the appropriate ways.
In the subsequent months, Customware has continued to refine our custom JIRA plugins while HotWax has concentrated on iterating on our process workflow to refine it into something that will exceed the expectations of our customers.  One word to describe working with this group: effortless – they simply provide high quality advice based on years of experience and back it up by delivering.  We couldn’t be more pleased with the support and look forward to every possible opportunity to work with Customware.
Contegix brought our two companies together, helping us to benefit from partnering with like minded organizations dedicated to improving the quality of service that customers expect.  This ends my series on partnerships, but provides us a great bridge to my next set of discussions around our development workflow and utilizing our Atlassian tools to make transparency with your customer a way of life.

HotWax Media Partners

Since I got rambling on Atlassian tools in my last post and decided not to include Customware, we’re going to focus this post on how Contegix put us in touch with another organization that continues to make a positive impact on HotWax Media.

In the early days of working with our Atlassian tools, we began to understand the power and potential of the applications at our fingertips, but didn’t have enough expertise or time to invest in getting the most out of it.  Yeah, we wrote a couple of JIRA plugins (to add timesheet capability and enhance reporting of work efforts for billing, but we were tiptoeing around modeling all of our processes in the application because it was not clear how to make it happen – that’s when we decided to enlist help from the experts!

I immediately went to the Atlassian site to find out how they handle their support services and I have to admit that I was shocked to see that Atlassian does not offer any professional services support their products at all.   Instead of falling into the common pitfall of trying to run both a product company and a services company, and often not doing it well, they opted to focus on their product and build a network of professional service providers that would handle their growing community of users.  I went to their network and just picked the company that looked like the closest match to our organization.

To make a long story short and not to name names, we had a really strange experience with that provider and went back to Contegix to discuss who might be a better fit for HotWax Media.  Contegix informed us that they have partnered with Customware, on Australian based company, to provide their Atlassian professional services and  put me in contact with Robert Castaneda, the Founder and CEO of Customware, to see if there was indeed a fit.

Robert and I decided to meet at ApacheCon US 2009, in Oakland, just as he was formalizing his new office in the Bay area.  We got down to business quickly – I explained our current conundrum (problems with our home grown JIRA plugins after a big upgrade), the new Greenhopper plugin I was excited about using, our development processes, some and the challenge of modeling our workflow in the Atlassian tools.  With Robert’s experience and understanding of both these tools and running a successful service organization – he was able to understand the problems we were facing and provided us with a solution from which to start our modeling effort.  We started right in making modifications to our plugins and discussing folding in JIRA’s Agile views (see Greenhopper) into our world in the appropriate ways.

In the subsequent months, Customware has continued to refine our custom JIRA plugins while HotWax has concentrated on iterating on our process workflow to refine it into something that will exceed the expectations of our customers.  One word to describe working with this group: effortless – they simply provide high quality advice based on years of experience and back it up by delivering.  We couldn’t be more pleased with the support and look forward to every possible opportunity to work with Customware.

Contegix brought our two companies together, helping us to benefit from partnering with like minded organizations dedicated to improving the quality of service that customers expect.  This ends my series on partnerships, but provides us a great bridge to my next set of discussions around our development workflow and utilizing our Atlassian tools to make transparency with your customer a way of life.

-Tim

Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media, an OFBiz service provider, as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.

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Posted in HotWax Media | No Comments »

Contegix – OFBiz Management

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

Contegix and Hotwax

Last post, we spent time going through the history of getting started with Contegix (Managed Hosting ) and the many areas that they have helped us to scale and handle complicated infrastructure requests.  Now, let’s spend a little time talking about how Contegix and HotWax manage OFBiz installations.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we found Contegix because of their reputation in the Java community for providing the highest quality Java application support and deployment around.  This translated directly into their management and support of the OFBiz community and specifically the deployment and management of production applications built upon the Apache Open for Business platform.  In short, they have killed it and made our ability to deliver the highest quality development and production support possible.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how we manage installation together and how it might benefit your business:

1. It all starts with infrastructure support

Contegix knows infrastructure, so just about anything that you’ll bring to the table, they have implemented in a system for someone.  We have brought to them some truly strange setups and they haven’t blinked – in fact – to the contrary – they’ve improved upon the architecture that’s being brought to the table and owned it as if this was a development project that they were taking on.  That’s one of the best things about them – many of the first people in the company were actually developers – which makes the way they look at your solutions that much more on point to what you are delivering.

2. Deployment matters

Through the years of contributing to OFBiz we have gone through many cycles from using a vendor branch per customer, to using only the trunk with patches to custom pieces of the code, to working directly off of releases, to using a single vendor branch for all customers, etc – I am sure this will continue to change as we develop software.  Another big bullet to focus on is that Contegix manages ALL of our staging and production deployments – with very little input from us.

For those of you who have been doing this for a while, and more importantly those of you who have managed processes around deployments and everything that’s involved there – this must just sound too good to be true.

Well it is … except that it is true :)  We simply provide them with URLs to the branch, trunk, version, etc of OFBiz – and our components – and they not only maintain the files necessary to run the framework (entity-engine configuration, ofbiz-containers, etc), but they do this across the variety of deployment styles and individual instances that were put in place along the way.  They work directly with our engineers to understand when our custom patches might impact their patches as well as being proactive about getting together with our team about changes that they’d like to see in the way we’re providing them information.

All I can say is that it doesn’t get any better than letting the people who understand the servers take care of that – and allowing our people to focus on the customer specific aspects of our software.

3. Expert, knowledgeable 24 x 7 support

Not that this is a given these days in the age of automation, but if you look, you should have no problem finding a host out there who might be able to answer the phone or reboot your broken server, but what happens when something really goes wrong?  What happens when your database crashes and the guy sleeping on the phone has to wait until 8 AM and the Linux technician comes in?  Contegix employs experienced developers who know the tools they use (and the tools you use) better than just about anyone you possibly could employ.  Add in the fact that they are monitoring your application all the time and can preempt your customers from noticing any glitches in the system, and you know that you’ve found your partner.
Next up is finding out about our partnerships that we forged thru our partnership with Contegix: Atlassian tools and Customware support.

Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Enterprise eCommerce, HotWax Media, OFBiz | 1 Comment »

The HotWax Media Way: An Apache “OFBiz Service Provider” Partnering with Contegix for Beyond Managed Hosting and Infrastructure Support

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Today we’ll be digging in a bit more deeply on the topic of Contegix’s role in simplifying our business and making hosting and infrastructure first class. As I mentioned in my previous post, the relationship between HotWax and Contegix (www.contegix.com) was forged while we researched migrating our clients’ custom Java applications from a dedicated host (your own server – but you manage the system administration) to a managed hosting provider (this is what Contegix provides for us).

ofbiz service providersmanaged hosting contegix

As Apache OFBiz developers, the opportunity to offload some of the administration and monitoring of these applications seemed like a great option for a small company trying to service more and more customers – while maintaining an emphasis on quality of service. After all, at our core we are OFBiz Service Providers as opposed to infrastructure providers. So finding the best infrastructure experts and partnering with them gives us the best of both worlds — we focus on OFBiz applications, Contegix focuses on infrastructure, and our shared clients win!

The topics that differentiate Contegix from other providers are exactly what made this such an easy decision for us: passionate customer service, expert engineers, instantaneous response time, 24×7 support, 100% Network uptime SLA, attention to detail, etc. After the successful migration of our customers, we carefully looked at each of our applications to see where we could increase our ROI by utilizing more of Contegix’s resources instead of growing these system administration capabilities in house.

Over the past few years, HotWax Media has grown considerably and we have leaned heavily on our relationship with Contegix to help define how all of these disparate applications will work together. We have modeled our application choices based upon how they run their business – knowing that leveraging our partners proven workflows can only provide a greater synergy between our two companies and make us an even more efficient team. These days they manage everything from mail, chat and calendars (with the Zimbra groupware platform) to our global phone system, from single sign on (for all of our applications) to our business to business VPNs, from project management and collaboration software, to staging servers and a large number of production OFBiz installations. They scale with us and we look forward to finding new and creative ways to work together to provide the highest quality service possible.

The next post in this series will focus on the specifics of OFBiz deployment management with a continued emphasis on our partnership with Contegix.

- Tim

Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Apache OFBiz, Apache OFBiz Development, HotWax Media, OFBiz, OFBiz Development, OFBiz eCommerce | No Comments »