iCloud - Cloud services from Apple

There is now another major player in the Cloud market now. Apple introduced its services in the cloud naming it as iCloud.Apple announced its services on 6^th June 2011 at the Apple Wordwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

Apple is giving data storage of upto 5GB to its users, and it would help a lot to users who have more than one Apple device. Users do not have to worry about synchronization. iCloud helps in accessing songs, Apps, books, Documents etc. all from just one place. As per Apple, iCloud will have automatic information sync with iPhone and iPad applications.

The cloud service’s tight integration with iPhone and iPad services will give an edge over other competitors like Microsoft’s Live Mesh.

More information about this can be found at following links.

http://www.apple.com/icloud/

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/11piubpwiqubf06/event/

Siraj

Make Your Life a Masterpiece | The Seven Ingredients of Success

This is the age of achievement. Never have more people accomplished more things in more different fields than they are accomplishing today. More people are becoming successful at a faster rate than at any other time in history. There have never been more opportunities for you to turn your dreams into realities than there are right now.


The Seven Ingredients of Success

Your ideal life is a blending these seven ingredients in exactly the combination that makes you the happiest at any particular moment. By defining your success and happiness in terms of one or more of these seven ingredients, you create a clear target to aim it. You can then measure how well you're doing. You can identify the areas where you need to make changes if you want your life to improve.



Peace of Mind

The first of these seven ingredients of success, and easily the most important, is peace of mind. It is the highest human good. Without it, nothing else has much value. In corporations, peace of mind can be measured in terms of the amount of harmony that exists among coworkers. The wonderful truth about peace of mind is that it is your normal natural condition. It is the basic precondition for enjoying everything else.



Health and Energy

The second ingredient of success is health and energy. Just as peace of mind is your normal and natural mental state, health and energy is your normal and natural physical state. If you achieve all kinds of things in the material world, but lose your health then you will get little or no pleasure from your other accomplishments. So imagine yourself enjoying perfect health, and think of how you would be if you were your ideal image of physical fitness. Then strive for your mental goal of fitness and health.


Loving Relationships

The third ingredient of success is loving relationships. These are relationships with the people you love and care about, and the people who love and care about you. They are the real measure of how well you are doing as a human being. At almost any time, you can measure how well you are doing in your relationship by one simple test: laughter. This is true for companies as well. High-performance, high profit organizations are those in which people laugh and joke together. Examine your relationships, one by one, and develop a plan to make each of them enjoyable and satisfying.



Financial Freedom

The fourth ingredient of success is financial freedom. Achieving your financial freedom is one of the most important goals and responsibilities of your life. A feeling of freedom is essential to the achievement of any other important goal, and you cannot be free until and unless you have enough money so that you are no longer preoccupied with it. When you decide exactly what you want your financial picture to look like, you will be able to use this system to achieve your goals faster than you might have imagined possible.



Worthy Goals and Ideals

The fifth ingredient of success is worthy goals and ideals. To be truly happy, you need a clear sense of direction. You need to feel that your life stands for something, that you are somehow making a valuable contribution to your world.



Self Knowledge and Self-Awareness

The sixth ingredient of success is self-knowledge and self-awareness. To perform at your best you need to know who you are and why you think and feel the way you do. It is only when you understand and accept yourself that you can begin moving forward in other areas of your life.



Personal Fulfillment

The seventh ingredient of success is personal fulfillment. This is the feeling that you are becoming everything that you are capable of becoming. It is the sure knowledge that you are moving toward the realization of your full potential as a human being.



Action Exercise

Take the brush of your imagination and begin painting a masterpiece on the canvas of your life. It is for you to decide clearly what would make you the happiest in everything you are doing.


-Haroon

Welcome To the Freshly Revamped Octaware Website

Octaware launched its newly revamped website today,  11^th of May,2011 at 11am.

It was indeed a great moment for the Management and the entire Octaware family as the hard work and labour finally bore fruit and turned out very beautifully.

A lot of pain-staking efforts went into this website which was developed completely in-house, and each and every aspect was worked on with minute detail while developing and designing the website.

Finally, the outcome seemed to be well worth the efforts as the new look and feel was well appreciated by one and all.

The event was celebrated at its Development Centers in Mumbai & Pune over sweets and pastries.

So you are welcome to visit www.octaware.com

A few glimpses of the website J

Dynamics CRM 2011

Dynamics CRM 2011 which is a latest version from CRM software from Microsoft, is really a wonderful product and loads of improvement over its previous version. I thought of listing down few of the features for those who want to have a quick handy feature list.

Tight Integration with Outlook.

The Outlook client of CRM allows users to access the CRM from within the native interface of outlook. It is based on the similar look and feel of Outlook 2010. This reduces the learning curve dramatically.

Dashboards

There are different built in dashboard which allow various users have quick and summarized view of information relevant to their functions. For e.g. the sales manager can have quick access to team performance, sales pipeline etc. User can setup and configure multiple dashboard for monitoring overall performance.

Office 2010 ribbon bar

The latest version of CRM 2011 comes with the Ribbon bar UI similar to office 2010. It is context sensitive and allows easy access to functionality in much better way.

Data Import

The existing customer data can be imported to Dynamics CRM 2011 using import wizards. It is easy to use field mapping based wizard which allows users to import data from other sources to CRM 2011. The data can be imported from Excel based CSV format by appropriately formatting the fields before importing.

User Personalization

Users can personalize the UI interface as per their needs depending upon the functions they do in the organization. Customization is decentralized and users have quick way of creating new views, modifying forms etc.

Mobile Access

Apart from the web-client and native outlook client, users can also use the mobile client to access the CRM information on their handhelds.

Cloud based development and deployment

As against the previous version the newer version allows developed to develop and deploy application based on cloud computing architecture using Azure platform services.

Posted by:

Siraj

The "Tranforming Healthcare with IT" Seminar in Hyderabad.

Last month, I had an opportunity to attend a seminar on Healthcare & IT titled - “Transforming Healthcare with IT.” wherein we also had an awards function by NASSCOm for pioneering solution providers in the Healthcare domain, which was held at the superbly constructed Hyderabad International Convention Center (HICC) at Novotel in Hyderabad.

I had participated in the seminar with my Colleague, Shahnawaz and it was quite an enriching experience. It was nice to see the way IT has revolutionized the Healthcare sector across the globe, and with quite a few initiatives being taken in India we are soon catching up.

The role of IT in the Healthcare sector has just started picking up in India and the future seems to hold a lot of promises for it.

It was an overwhelming experience to mix around with CEOs and Directors of various organizations along with many top notch bureaucrats and dignitaries. We did meet up with Harsh Manglik, CEO NASSCOM, Ms.Sangeeta Reddy, Exec. Director, Apollo group of Hospitals (the pioneering lady behind this event), Mr. Santosh Babu, (IAS officer and CEO of Electronic Corporation of Tamil Nadu, Mr.T. Ramasami, Sec. Dept of Science & Technology, Goct. Of India,  Mr. Mohammed, Director- Asia & Middle East, Microsoft. etc.

Needless to say Octaware has embarked on its journey on the Healtcare-IT sector at the right time and yes we do have a complete roadmap in place. With its focus on the Healthcare vertical, its just a matter of time when we are ready with our pioneering solution for the Healthcare sector.

cotributed by Najeeb,
Octaware Technologies.
Octaware Technologies is a Software Development, Enterprise Solutions & Consulting Firm.

Partnership signed with INET - KSA | The Ten Keys to Business Success

My todays blog is dedicated to the charming but simple personality of INET CEO - MR. Ahmed Al Aquil. Today is the glorious day when we got the partnership deed signed between Octaware & INET-KSA. We will be going far long into IT business in Saudi Arabia along with INET & Ahmed Al Aquil. I take this opportunity to talk today on the key factors of a succesfull business.


There are ten critical areas where your ability to think largely determines the success or failure of your business. The greater clarity you have in each of these areas, the better decisions you will make and better results you will achieve.


Key Purpose
What is the purpose of a business? Many people think that the purpose of a business is to earn a profit, but they are wrong. The true purpose of a business is to make both yourself as well as customers succesfull and to have a good impact and value addition to the society. Fully 50 percent of your time, efforts, and expenses should be focused on these aspects.




Key Measure
The key measure of business success is customer satisfaction & success. Your ability to satisfy your customers to such a degree that they buy from you rather than from someone else, that they buy again, and that they bring their friends is the key determinant of growth and profitability.




Key Requirement
The key requirement for wealth building and business success is for you to add value in some way. All wealth comes from adding value. All business growth and profitability come from adding value. Every day, you must be looking for ways to add more and more value to the customer experience and value addition to the society.




Key Focus
The most important person in the business is the customer. You must focus on the customer at all times. Customers are fickle, disloyal, changeable, impatient, and demanding--just like you. Nonetheless, the customer must be the central focus of everything you do in business.




Key Word
In life, work, and business, you will always be rewarded in direct proportion to the value of your contribution to others, as they see it. The focus on outward contribution, to your company, your customers, and your community, is the central requirement for you to become an ever more valuable person, in every area.



Key Question
The most important question you ask, to solve any problem, overcome any obstacle, or achieve any business goal is "How?" Top people always ask the question "How?" and then act on the answers that come to them.




Key Strategy
In a world of rapid change and continuing aggressive competition, you must practice continuous improvement in every area of your business and personal life. As Pat Riley, the basketball coach, said, "If you're not getting better, you're getting worse."




Key Activity
The heartbeat of your business is sales. Dun & Bradstreet analyzed thousands of companies that had gone broke over the years and concluded that the number-one reason for business failure was "low sales". When they researched further, they found that the number-one reason for business success was "high sales." And all else was commentary.




Key Number
The most important number in business is cash flow. Cash flow is to the business as blood and oxygen are to the brain. You can have every activity working efficiently in your business, but if your cash flow is cut off for any reason, the business can die, sometimes overnight.




Key Goal
Every business must have a growth plan. Growth must be the goal of all your business activities. You should have a goal to grow 10 percent, 20 percent, or even 30 percent each year. Some companies grow 50 percent and 100 percent per year, and not by accident. The only real growth is profit growth. Profit growth is always measurable in what is called "free cash flow." This is the actual amount of money that the business throws off each month, each quarter, and each year, above and beyond the total cost and expense of running a business.






Action Exercise
You should have a growth plan for the number of new leads you attract and for the number of new customers you acquire from those leads. You should have a growth plan for sales, revenues, and profitability. If you do not deliberately plan for continuous growth, you will automatically stagnate and begin to fall behind. Growth is not an accident; so you must plan and map out your growth plan if you want your business to see a bright future.

-Haroon

Some action at Octaware

Friends,

I am sure you all would agree that last week was quite an action packed week. Firstly India beating our arch-rival Pakistan in the World Cup Semis and then proceeding to win the World Cup on Saturday and what a match it was closely fought and intently watched :) and finally we emerged as the undisputed champions in the cricketing world.

We also had quite a few action happening off the field within Octaware. Firstly the fresh wave of some very good projects coming our way from the US and the Middle-East, (our efficient pre-sales team giving such wonderful solutions and proposals that no one could resist :) ) and then we had a couple of to & fro within the organization with software developer going on onsite assignments and then having our Octaware -US, Director - Engineering & Operations, Mr.Sultan Abdul Kader who has earlier had a very illustrious career at Micro Soft, visiting the Octaware Corporate office and our Development Centres in Mumbai & Pune.

Amidst all this action we too this this opportunity to host a luncheon at a leading 5-Star hotel in Mumbai with the entire Mumbai Team in attendance and the date was 01st of April, and no this is not an April Fools joke, we did have a great lunch session with an extensive spread of mouth-watering delicacies, enjoyed by one & all. Did someone say about 'Power Lunch'!!! :) . Before that we did have Mr.Abdul Kader interacting with the sales team, discussing some sales strategies, having a wonderful and interactive technical session with the Development Team and yes after the wholesome gastronomical experience, laying down strategies with the Management sitting through the lunch session. If someone says its lonely at the top, I would like to add, its not just lonely but you dont get to enjoy ur food in serenity as well, always trying to utilize and optimize the available time in hand.

- Najeeb
Octaware Technologies
[Octaware Technologies is a fast growing software development, enterprise solutions and consulting firm]