Accenture and Avanade Financial Planning Solution for Microsoft Surface

I recently wrote a post about Microsoft Surface in a reatil setting, which can help differentiate you from your competition.


In this post, I have embedded a video about an offering that Accenture and Avanade have created for Financial Planning.


Through this technology, a firm can really differentiate themselves from their competitors with this unique offering.  It is interactive and allows for a company to identify other opportunities for their clients.





If you would like to see how Avanade can enable your companay with unique solutions, like the Financial Planning Solution for Microsoft Surface, please contact us via email or in the Calgary office at 403-476-1473.

4 readily available processes that reduce your IT Project spend by up to 50% or greater

Are you aware that there are four readily available and often overlooked processes that IT organizations can follow that can potentially reduce an IT spend by up to 50% or greater.

These processes are available in a discussion document that I have put together for review.

Each of the processes individually will provide at least a 5% cost savings, but any of these in conjunction with each other gain synergies.


The processes are as follows:

Process One: Underutilized government program that can add up to 30% savings on IT projects.

Process Two: Rarely accessed procurement service that can reduce hardware and software spend by up to 20%.

Process Three: A community effect that reduce the cost of projects at least 10% and potentially allow for the savings to self fund the entire project.

Process Four: Access to cost cutting measures on labor that can save up to 70% on labor costs.

If you would like to understand how these processes can be accessed and how you can reduce your overall IT project spend, please contact Chris Hamilton at Avanade in Calgary at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

VB6 Migration - Moving Mission Critial Application off VB6

There are numerous companies that are still unaware that they may have VB6 applications that are running mission critical processes. A major concern is that VB6 is no longer supported and could put your company in jeopardy, especially if you are running applications that roll up into financials.

With proactive IT investments delayed due to economic challenges,organizations like yours are beginning to outgrow their legacy Microsoft Visual Basic applications and must increasingly dedicate resources to keep these systems running. By migrating Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier applications to the .NET platform, your company can achieve a highly scalable, extremely reliable foundation for mission-critical applications and realize substantial maintenance-related savings.

Gain competitive advantage by updating your applications:

In order to be successful, your Visual Basic applications must evolve with your organization’s ever-changing business needs.

- Do you have a clear picture of the benefits and costs of migrating your applications to .NET and how to remain competitive during migration?
- Do your current Visual Basic applications meet minimum performance, stability,and enterprise-scalability requirements?
- Are you concerned about security vulnerabilities in your older applications?G Can your legacy applications meet current business standards and easily adapt to new industry regulations and legislation?
- Do you have a Visual Basic application performing critical business activity that needs new functionality and are struggling with the best approach for implementing that functionality?

Migrate to Microsoft .NET and maximize your IT investments Migration to the .NET:

Framework is essential for applications that will continue to be important to your organization. Aligning your future IT strategies with .NET through languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C# will enable you to take full advantage of your existing investments in Microsoft technologies. The .NET Frame work presents an outstanding opportunity to increase developer productivity and stability for your organization’s most critical applications.

- Improve the scalability, performance, stability, and security of your Visual Basic applications.G Shorten development time and reduce risk by utilizing existing code and taking advantage of tools to automate code conversion.
- Leverage your investments in supporting infrastructure areas of the Microsoft environment, including IDE and developer tools licensing, build and test environments, and technical resources
- Gain competitive advantage by creating new, lower-cost applications and modifying your existing applications to allow for future growth and agility, while remaining competitive during migration.
- Take full advantage of open standards and new technologies such as XML, Web services, and smart clients, while moving toward Service-Oriented Architecture.
- Reduce your long-term maintenance-related expenses and build on existing support and vendor relationships.

A proven migration methodology:

When it comes to the Microsoft enterprise platform, Avanade has the deep product knowledge and real-world experience that customers demand. Avanade offers a proven migration methodology, including a full Application Migration Assessment, to ensure that organizations get the most value from their Visual Basic-based applications.

- Avanade Application Development Workshop In a two- to five-day workshop, Avanade reviews your organization’s development capabilities and challenges to identify and prioritize the applications most in need of improvement and offer recommendations to take advantage of new technologies. A gap analysis of your organization’s capabilities is incorporated into an action plan that supports your priority application migration opportunities and closes any capability gaps.
- Avanade Application Analysis In a formal one- to three-week process, Avanade examines your existing applications to determine how your organization can benefit from migration to .NET technologies, including reviews of infrastructure platform, technical architecture, application architecture, and application functionality.
- Avanade Application Proof of Concept As the final step in the assessment process, Avanade can build a prototype application to demonstrate the migration process and benefits.

Based on the results of the assessment and proof of concept, Avanade will provide a complete migration plan, including an estimated timeline,detailed project plan, and complete set of deliverables to jump start the creation of your next-generation business applications.

Reduce costs through strategic global delivery:

As a true global services company, Avanade has a worldwide presence and proven delivery record. Our global network of delivery centers in over 30 locations, including India, offers customers the benefit of multi site delivery. Offshore resources, highly trained in Avanade assets,architectures, best practices, and our comprehensive delivery methodology,provide accelerated development of solutions. Our strategic global delivery approach to application migrations allows companies to take advantage of the right combination of onshore, nearshore, and offshore options, resulting in increased productivity and cost-effective solutions development.

If you would like to find out more about our Dashboard offering or any other solutions that we provide, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or at 403-476-1473.

Dashboards for The Oil and Gas Industry

Recently Avanade in Calgary has been working on a quick dashboarding solution that is geared towards the oil and gas industry.

One of the issues that a lot of oil and gas or E&P companies face are the disparate systems that contains data that is relevant to providing meaningful information that should be correlated and used to getting your job done.

A couple of our local Architects have created a quick dsahboarding solution that is specific for E&P's to provide quick visibility into key performance indicators (KPI's) that they measure, such as production growth, capex spend to budget, output per dollar spent on a project or project type, among others.

This solution is utilizing SharePoint, XL Services and Silverlight and can typically be implemented in days as opposed to weeks or months for other dashboarding solutions. Most organizations already own this infrastructure, so deployment is usually quick and inexpensive.

One of the primary uses for this solution is in small divisions or departments of E&P's. For example, a regional division of an oil company may require a dashboard that show their daily production digits. They can benchmark if their numbers against what is required and if a problem occurs where production is lower, then they can drill down to spot the problem.

This solution can be extended to many different areas in an oil and gas company and any information that is contained in a system can be displayed on it's own or correlated with other information.

If you would like to find out more about our Dashboard offering or any other solutions that we provide, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or at 403-476-1473.

Avanade's Next Generation Data Center - Data Center Optimization

In this tight economic climate, customers look to fund projects that offer a fast return on investment and provide opportunities to lower costs. In a 2008 survey, CIO Insight ranked IT cost cutting as a major priority for CIOs.[1] According to Gartner, Inc., server consolidation and virtualization projects provide an attractive option to reduce costs and improve flexibility and they predict that virtualization will be the most important technology in IT infrastructures and operations up to 2010.

Initiatives to create “green” data centers are gaining importance as companies seek to reduce costs while cutting energy demand and carbon emissions.[2] With strong price-for-performance advantages, Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ and Microsoft® System Center technologies helped Microsoft attain a 23 percent share of the virtualization market in 2008.
[3]

Key competitive virtualization vendors include VMware, HP, and IBM. Competitive offerings lack the full range of capabilities found in the Avanade solution or depend on hardware that adds cost and complexity. Independent analysis confirms that, on the whole, Microsoft virtualization can cost as little as one-third the price of VMware.[4] Drawing upon our unique and long-standing partnership with Microsoft, Avanade provides holistic solutions that help customers take advantage of compatibility throughout their Microsoft infrastructure. Our solutions provide a breadth of virtualization and management capability at the most cost-effective price for the enterprise.

Avanade is in a uniquely advantageous competitive position as a leading global IT consultancy dedicated to the Microsoft platform. Our innovative tools, methodologies, and accelerators extend the capabilities of Microsoft data center solutions and speed time to deployment and implementation.

With the Avanade Virtualization Business Case Estimator™, Avanade consultants can accurately estimate deployment time and resource requirements for server virtualization projects, and project customer cost savings. Our Avanade Connected Architecture® Dynamic Systems Framework provides a platform for Avanade consultants to design, build, and deploy next generation data centers in a highly repeatable and predictable fashion, accelerating time to delivery and enhancing implementation quality.

In addition to privileged insights into Microsoft road maps and new technology, Avanade has a depth of internal resources with more than 9,000 professionals in 22 countries worldwide, including development centers in India and the Philippines. Using the right mix of local and remote resources, Avanade helps customers realize results with our next generation data center solution.

For information on how Avanade can enable Microsoft technologies for data centers or other services that Avanade Inc. can provide your organization in Western Canada, please contact Chris Hamilton at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

For a white paper on Virtualization entitled "Server Virtualization: A Step Toward Cost Efficiency and Business Agility", please click on http://avanadecalgary.com/Avanade_Calgary/Whitepapers.html and fill out the form.

[1] Source: CIO Insights, http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Research/CIOs-Rank-Their-Top-Priorities-for-2008/.
[2] Source: Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=530109.
[3] Source: IDC, http://www.virtualization.info/2008/10/microsoft-already-took-23-of.html.
[4] Clabby Analytics: Six Reasons Why Microsoft’s Hyper-V Will Overtake VMware to Become the Major Player in the x86 Server Virtualization Marketplace, May 2008, http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/docs/05-2008ClabbySixReasonsWhyMSwillovertakeVMW.PDF.

Canadian firms lead in adopting cloud computing

This is an interesting article that references Avanade and Cloud Computing.

Canadian firms lead in adopting cloud computing
Nestor E. Arellano
IT World Canada
February 24, 2009

http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/News/fd83008e-b4c6-4393-a4d5-7eaae30654e9.html

More than 67 per cent of Canadian organizations reported they are currently using a combination of cloud computing and internally owned IT systems, compared to only one-third of companies worldwide, according to a survey commissioned by Avanade.

Canadian IT decision makers are more informed about cloud computing than their global counterparts and local organizations lead the world in adopting the technology, according to a recent survey of large enterprise firms.

While a majority of the respondents believed that cloud computing holds the potential to improve productivity and profits during the economic recession, security issues remain a major hurdle to adoption, and almost 84 per cent of those polled indicated they had no plans of switching from their current internal IT systems.

The survey, conducted by Kelton Research for Avanade, a Seattle-based IT consultancy company specializing in Microsoft enterprise platforms, queried 502 C-level executives and IT and business decision-makers from mostly large enterprise organizations in 17 countries including the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore. The study covered a wide variety of industries such as government, aerospace, defense, telecommunications, energy, healthcare, finance, media, manufacturing and non-profit organizations.

More than 67 per cent of Canadian organizations reported they are currently using a combination of cloud computing and internally owned IT systems, compared to only one-third of companies worldwide, the survey found.

"Canada appears lead cloud computing adoption mainly because local IT leadership is more proactive in exploring the technology," notes Kaytek Przybylski, capability director for Avanade Canada.

He said the survey indicates that 71 per cent of respondents in Canada were familiar with cloud computing compared to only 61 per cent of their global counterparts.

Cloud computing refers to the use of Internet-based computer technology to access and deliver a variety of services to users. Cloud computing uses data centres and servers built on virtualization technologies to deliver applications and resources to users, typically under what is called a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Under this model, customers generally do not own the infrastructure; they merely access or pay rent for its use and thereby avoid capital expenditure.

Nearly two in three IT executives worldwide (65 per cent) and four of five in Canada (80 per cent) believe cloud computing reduces upfront costs.

Cloud computing adoption in Canada, however is still at its early stages, according to the Avanade executive. "The technology is considered to be relatively new and even here many companies are still considering cloud computing."

Other key findings of the survey were:

• Executives, by a five-to-one ratio, report they trust existing internal systems over cloud-based systems due to fear of security threats and loss of control over data and systems.

• More than 50 per cent of respondents use technologies to cut costs.

• Four out of five respondents admit their existing internal systems are too expensive.

• 71 per cent of C-level executives and IT decision-makers agree that cloud computing is a "real" technology option.

• While nearly half of the respondents consider themselves to be early adopters of technology, 61 per cent worldwide are not using cloud computing.

• More than 80 per cent of those using internally owned IT systems do not plan on integrating any form of cloud computing in the next 12 months.

• Respondents recognizes that cloud computing allows companies to focus on core business (65 per cent), react more quickly to market conditions (62 per cent), gain access to the latest technology (51 per cent) and improve flexibility (70 per cent).

Security issues are typical concerns when it comes to adopting new technology, according to Craig Balding, a security practitioner with a Fortune 500 company, blogger and co-author of Maximum Security: A Hacker's Guide to Protecting Your Internet Site and Network.

But Balding said by combining cloud computing with thin clients that hold only small amounts of data in cache there is actually less physical exposure to data leakage.

The survey findings bolster earlier views aired by technology industry experts during ITWorld Canada's recently concluded Cloud Computing Conference.

Lack of clarity about the technology among technology professionals is one of the key obstacles to adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise, according Reuven Cohen, founder of Enomoly, an IT consulting firm based in Toronto.

He said many organizations are torn between IT departments who want to maintain control of IT resources and business units who prefer more flexibility to rapidly deploy applications.
The technology sector has been heading toward cloud-based computing for a long time, but companies also must be cautious when buying into a trend, according to Jackie Fen, vice-president for research firm Garnet Inc.

"You really need to know why you're adopting these technologies. You just can't leap in every time a new thing gets hyped, " she said.

Przybylski said the survey indicates that cloud computing technology vendors must tackle the international concerns about security and control of data in order to boost adoption of the technology.

He noted that nearly one-third of the companies using cloud-based systems have increased their use of cloud computing, even during the economic downturn, after seeing its benefits.

For information on how Avanade can enable Microsoft technologies for Cloud Computing or other services that Avanade Inc. can provide your organization in Western Canada, please contact Chris Hamilton at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

Avanade Inc.’s Calgary website can be viewed at http://www.avanadecalgary.com/.

Creating a Definitive Software Library and Saving $330+/desktop

Does your company have a definitive software library? Do you know how much you are spending on software? Do you know how much you are potentially overspending on software?

Avanade Inc. has created IP or Avanade Connected Architecture (ACA) to assist companies with creating definitive software library called ACA Accelerate.

ACA Accelerate helps Avanade rapidly discover and rationalize an end-user computing landscape.

- ACA Accelerate can reduce per-seat TCO by up to 33%.
- ACA Accelerate is fast and is a prescriptive approach. Value is seen in a matter of days.
- ACA Accelerate gives you a consistent approach to collecting hardware and software inventory.
- After collection they can manually analyze the data in spreadsheets to compare Current State with Future State and drive cost savings.

Based on market information, the typical desktop costs an organization $5000/year to maintain. On average, 20% of that cost is software. By running ACA Accelerate, a company can potentially reduce their software costs by up to 33% or by $330.

On a firm that has 1000 desktops, this is a savings of $330,000 per year for redundant, unused and multiple software version of the same software. Running ACA Accelerate has a ROI that allows for a payback with in days or weeks.

WHen this service is utilized with a desktop transformation process, for example moving from Windows XP to Vista, an organization can typically cover a portion or potentially all of the costs of the migration. In addition, if a compnay were to look at Application Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization, these savings could be further enhanced.

ACA Accelerate can be demonstrated to your company.

For information on ACA Accelerate or other services that Avanade Inc. can provide your organization in Western Canada, please contact Chris Hamilton at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

Avanade Inc.’s Calgary website can be viewed at www.avanadecalgary.com.

Intoduction to Avanade Inc. in Calgary

Avanade Canada, Inc., a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, is a global IT consultancy dedicated to using the Microsoft® platform to help enterprises achieve profitable growth. Through proven solutions that extend Microsoft technologies, Avanade helps enterprises increase revenue, reduce costs and reinvest in innovation to gain competitive advantage. Our consultants deliver value according to each customer’s requirements, timeline and budget by combining insight, innovation and the talent of our global workforce. Avanade’s unique connections with Accenture and Microsoft enhance our ability to deliver effective mission-critical solutions for organizations worldwide.

Our local consultants can assist your organization on any Microsoft related products, such as SharePoint, Dynamics, Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server and many others.

To determine how Avanade can assist your organization, please call Chris Hamilton at 403-476-1473 or contact via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

Avanade Inc.’s Calgary website can be viewed at www.avanadecalgary.com.