A Future Where Mobility and Cloud Will Become the Norm

Google’s Chromebook Pixel represents a step towards a completely cloud-based future, potentially ushering in Cloud Cities — towns and communities where the entire population have fully embraced an always on, mobile and cloud-based infrastructure – in the years to come. Pixel and Google Glass represent a future where mobility and cloud will become the norm, not a privilege. To read the full article in Wired, click here.

Avantica, already co-developing apps for everything with mobile startups, the Software 500 and industry, is helping customers bridge cloud and mobile.

Avantica’s Jump-Start™ QA Engineering Service Solves Far-Shore Agile Challenge

In an effort to help North America companies solve the challenge of integrating overseas, vendor provided QA software testing into their local Agile development effort, Avantica has introduced a new service. “Jump-Start™ QA Engineering Service for Agile” enables North American companies to quickly expand their QA testing capability, without compromising quality, within the Agile development method.

Unlike India or China outsourcers, Avantica’s software testing centers, located in Costa Rica and Peru, are in the same North America time-zone. The company’s QA engineers are Agile experienced at collaborating with customers in an integrated testing model supporting real-time collaboration, rapid iteration and quick release of quality software.

Avantica’s Jump-Start Service is a low-cost, high-quality pilot that enables organizations to try Agile-based, Nearshore QA engineering risk free. The pilot delivers:

- Discounted 2 month Pilot with an Avantica QA engineering team
- Agile tool utilization through JIRA® from Atlassian; Avantica also supports other leading Agile tools
- Same U.S. time-zone alignment enabling real-time collaboration
- Formal QA engineering process developed over 20 years and nearly 1,600 Avantica customer software projects

We’re so sure North America companies, wrestling with the the mis-aligned time-zone and quality challenges of remote, vendor provided QA testing, will find relief with Avantica’s Agile experienced, Nearshore QA engineers we’re discounting the Jump-Start pilot. To learn more, send an email to sales@avantica.net referencing “Jump-Start™ QA Engineering Service for Agile.”

Avantica Helps U.S. Software Startups Realize Engineering Expansion, and Acquisition, Goals

Avantica’s startup partners are using the Nearshore specialist to both scale software development and QA engineering AND get acquired. Some of the company’s early stage software customers have utilized their partnership with Avantica to help them get acquired by other, established software companies – including the Software 500.

Avantica customers specializing in innovative search engines, performance management, cloud procurement and other solutions have all been acquired. Henry Marchena, Avantica’s Director of Software Development Services, explained: “Our Web platform, mobile and SaaS customers in the U.S. are increasingly looking for engineering partners that align with their own business model. Real Agile development; geographic proximity; strong English language and collaborative, not hierarchical methods; are required. Compromise is not an option.”

This alignment of engineering models has contributed to a number of high profile acquisitions. Other Avantica startup customers that have been acquired include encryption solutions for smartphones and expense management software. To learn more, click here.

Will Big Data Get Too Big for the Metric System to Handle?

A principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business and a prominent thinker about business information technology trends predicts soon the volume of digital data processed could surpass this current the upper level of the metric measurement system.

Avantica is already helping established U.S. software companies analyze and productize reams of customer data.

North America software companies are increasingly turning to Nearshore software engineering services companies like Avantica to gain access to software architects and developers to help create innovative new products through the use of powerful, next-generation analytic software. This “Big Data” productization trend relies on large volumes of end-customer related data and software analytics to monetize rich supplies of information. As data assets are transformed into new SaaS or license-based products by established software companies eager to tap into new revenue streams, services vendors experienced with next-generation analytics and software development that can help them quickly get solutions to market are in demand. To read more click here.

To read the MIT Technology Review, click here.

10 Examples of Mobile Health Around the World

Health care workers in the developing world are using mobile phones to address critical health needs such as clean water and improving vaccination record keeping. In North America Avantica’s Nearshore software engineers are helping innovative companies develop Web-based, mobile accessable healthcare apps such as Oncology resource and healthy nutrition guide portals.

To learn more click here.

What platforms are mobile app developers loyal to? The 2012 numbers, according to the market research firm IDC are:

- 89% of developers are focused on iOS
- 79% on Android smart-phones
- 37% on developing apps for Windows Phone

Not surprisingly, Microsoft and Nokia are teaming up to find creative ways to raise the percentage on Windows Phones. Including investing up to $24 million (US) in a new mobile app development program at Finland’s Aalto University. Let the global competition for the minds and hearts of mobile app developers continue! To read the full article in CIO Magazine, click here.

To learn more about the many mobile apps Avantica and its start-up and Software 500 customers are co-developing using a distributed Agile engineering model, click here.

Avantica Helps Software 500 Develop Big Data Products

Establised software companies in North America are increasingly turning to Avantica’s architects and developers to help create innovative new products through the use of powerful, next-generation analytic software.

The product trend, commonly referred to as “Big Data”, relies on large volumes of end-customer related data and software analytics to monetize rich supplies of information. As data assets are transformed into new SaaS or license-based products by established software companies eager to tap into new revenue streams, Nearshore services vendors experienced with next-generation analytics and software development that can help them quickly get solutions to market are in demand.

Avantica, an expert in distributed Agile software development and QA engineering – the company recently nearly doubled its certified Scrum Masters – is combining its Nearshore engineering model delivered from Costa Rica and Peru with knowledge of popular analytics tools to help the Software 500 produce innovative Big Data products.

To read more, view this link.

Amazon and Avantica Cloud infrastructure reshaping startup growth

Amazon.com’s division Amazon Web Services is a key component giving Web platform startups rapid and economical launch and scale capability.

Avantica Technologies Release 1.0 is also a key component giving those same Web platform startups rapid and economical access to talented software engineers needed to launch and scale.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) competes with Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and Google. However, to put AWS’s focus on Cloud services in perspective, according to one knowledgeable source, just one of the 10 data centers in Amazon’s Eastern U.S. region has more servers dedicated to Cloud Computing than does all of those combined at Rackspace, which serves over 180,000 businesses with more than 80,000 servers.

Release 1.0 from Avantica (http://goo.gl/Rd6Rf), a suite of integrated software engineering services for startups designed to rapidly and economically scale software engineering capacity, is focused on solving this startup infrastructure problem:

40% of the 130,000 open positions in Silicon Valley are for software engineers… Social Media, Mobile and Cloud Computing companies are driving the growth.
- U.S. National Venture Capital Association

Software engineering talent: the key infrastructure challenge. Extrapolate that problem to other U.S. technology centers like Austin, Seattle and NY, and that is one BIG problem. In fact, AWS’ own Web-site lists over 600 job openings. Available software engineering talent capable of collaborating in an Agile model, in the same time-zone, economically, who can start developing or testing in days or weeks vs. months or quarters, is in short supply. Release 1.0 solves to that.

To read more about AWS and Cloud, view the original article in the Business Day Technology section of the NY Times – http://goo.gl/zfFdi. To learn more about Avantica’s Release 1.0, view this link: http://goo.gl/Rd6Rf.