From statistics to suits, from insurance to apples, the team at Intergen has been busy working with an exciting and diverse range of clients. Statistics New Zealand, Rembrandt Suits, AMP, Environment Waikato and Turners and Growers, have all been presenting us with unique challenges. An increased focus on business efficiency and system integration within and between organisations has been the catalyst for embarking on a joint venture with Fusion5. The joint venture company called Interfusion has acquired Ernst & Young’s Microsoft Navision practice. Navision is part of the Microsoft Business Solutions stable and provides a flexible, customisable system for financial management systems. Interfusion currently supports 30 implementations and has 12 staff. As a result of the joint venture we will be able to expand our offering to clients to include integrated business solutions. These solutions include core financials, end user reporting and analysis, employee intranet, business workflow, business to business commerce and line of business applications. You will see more of Interfusion over the coming months. This year’s TechEd conference was a huge event for us with over 20 staff involved. ISSUE TEN >> HOT NEWS: >> THE INTELLIGENT BUSINESS MAGAZINE Running hot < Copyright 2005 Intergen Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission of Intergen Limited > tony.stewart @ intergen.co.nz INTERGEN SYDNEY >> SLEEPYHEAD >> 2 2 3 4/5 6 7 8 INTERGEN CONSULTING >> TECHNOLOGY >> TECHNICAL PREVIEW >> CASE STUDY - AMP >> UI DESIGN & CRM >> Breaking news: Intergen acquires Ecentric. Ecentric brings an area of expertise and client base to complement Intergen’s current work. Ecentric is known for its work in the entrepreneurial sector, involvement with start up companies and new initiatives. It was responsible for the development of a number of well known ventures such as Trade Me, Carter Holt’s e-cargo, and the Anchorville site. The acquisition complements Intergen’s focus on established business solutions. ASP.NET 2.0 in action. Known as early adopters of new technology, Intergen recently appeared on Microsoft’s Customer Evidence site showcasing a recent ASP.NET 2.0 project we developed for the Bexhill Funding Group (search for Bexhill on the Microsoft site). Intergen sponsored and ran the Hands-on-Labs, which gave conference goers the opportunity to use some new or advanced Microsoft technologies by working through real examples. We used the labs that had been prepared for TechEd USA, which involved testing them, fixing any problems, learning the content, setting up the 100 computers in the lab and providing staff to assist with questions. This was a great experience for us. Our staff really enjoyed working together to set up the labs (including some very late nights) and helping people work through labs and use technologies they might not otherwise have the opportunity to see. In addition to running the Hands On Labs we also provided four speakers for TechEd sessions. Jeremy Boyd was one of the hardest working speakers at the event, delivering seven sessions in New Zealand and Australia including an extra session on SQL Server 2005 after his first session was ‘sold out’. Andrew Tokeley received the third highest speaker rating, beaten only by two of Microsoft’s international stars. We are very proud of our contribution to TechEd and we congratulate Microsoft on running a great event. The New Zealand event had over 2000 attendees, making it by far the largest TechEd per capita in the world. To bring an international perspective to some of the coming trends and technologies we brought Mike Iem to New Zealand to speak at our think! conference and to visit with clients. The presentations covered new Microsoft products that improve our ability to deliver the kinds of systems that our customers are starting to demand. We are excited about these technologies and will be using them with our clients. Intergen’s team at TechEd
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From statistics to suits, from insurance to apples,the team at Intergen has been busy working with anexciting and diverse range of clients. StatisticsNew Zealand, Rembrandt Suits, AMP, EnvironmentWaikato and Turners and Growers, have all beenpresenting us with unique challenges.
An increased focus on business efficiency and system integration
within and between organisations has been the catalyst
for embarking on a joint venture with Fusion5. The joint
venture company called Interfusion has acquired Ernst &
Young’s Microsoft Navision practice. Navision is part of
the Microsoft Business Solutions stable and provides a
flexible, customisable system for financial management
systems. Interfusion currently supports 30 implementations and
has 12 staff. As a result of the joint venture we will be able to expand
our offering to clients to include integrated business solutions. These solutions
include core financials, end user reporting and analysis, employee intranet, business
workflow, business to business commerce and line of business applications. You
will see more of Interfusion over the coming months.
This year’s TechEd conference was a huge event for us with over 20 staff involved.
I S S U E T E N
>> HOT NEWS:
>> T H E I N T E L L I G E N T B U S I N E S S M A G A Z I N E
Running hot
< Copyright 2005 Intergen Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission of Intergen Limited >[email protected]
INTERGEN SYDNEY >>
SLEEPYHEAD >>
2
2
3
4/5
6
7
8
INTERGEN CONSULTING >>
TECHNOLOGY >>
TECHNICAL PREVIEW >>
CASE STUDY - AMP >>
UI DESIGN & CRM >>
Breaking news: Intergen acquiresEcentric. Ecentric brings an areaof expertise and client base tocomplement Intergen’s current work.
Ecentric is known for its work in theentrepreneurial sector, involvementwith start up companies and newinitiatives. It was responsible for thedevelopment of a number of wellknown ventures such as Trade Me,Carter Holt’s e-cargo, and theAnchorville site. The acquisitioncomplements Intergen’s focus onestablished business solutions.
ASP.NET 2.0 in action. Known asearly adopters of new technology,Intergen recently appeared onMicrosoft’s Customer Evidence siteshowcasing a recent ASP.NET 2.0project we developed for the BexhillFunding Group (search for Bexhill onthe Microsoft site).
Intergen sponsored and ran the Hands-on-Labs, which gave conference goers the
opportunity to use some new or advanced Microsoft technologies by working
through real examples. We used the labs that had been prepared for TechEd USA,
which involved testing them, fixing any problems, learning the content, setting up
the 100 computers in the lab and providing staff to assist with questions. This was
a great experience for us. Our staff really enjoyed working together to set up the
labs (including some very late nights) and helping people work through labs and
use technologies they might not otherwise have the opportunity to see.
In addition to running the Hands On Labs we also provided four speakers for
TechEd sessions. Jeremy Boyd was one of the hardest working speakers at the event,
delivering seven sessions in New Zealand and Australia including
an extra session on SQL Server 2005 after his first session
was ‘sold out’. Andrew Tokeley received the third highest
speaker rating, beaten only by two of Microsoft’s
international stars.
We are very proud of our contribution to TechEd and we
congratulate Microsoft on running a great event. The
New Zealand event had over 2000 attendees, making it by
far the largest TechEd per capita in the world.
To bring an international perspective to some of the coming trends and technologies
we brought Mike Iem to New Zealand to speak at our think! conference and to
visit with clients. The presentations covered new Microsoft products that improve
our ability to deliver the kinds of systems that our customers are starting to demand.
We are excited about these technologies and will be using them with our clients.
Intergen’s team at TechEd
AustralasianIntelligent Business
>> INTERGENITE:
< S M A R T S - T H E I N T E L L I G E N T B U S I N E S S M A G A Z I N E . I S S U E T E N >>> I N T E R G E N S Y D N E Y / I S S P>>2
Martin Johnston
What do you do?As the CEO of Intergen in Australiamy role is to establish the business,by building a client base and anIntergenite pool.
I specialise in IT strategy andarchitecture, and large scale programmanagement.
How do you make a difference?I challenge the way customers lookat their business problems andopportunities, and the way they createsolutions to those problems.
What do you love about your job?The challenge of starting somethingnew, and working with clever,enthusiastic people to do that.
Innovation is my passion. I really enjoyworking with clients and the talentwithin our organisation to bringinnovative ideas to life.
A bit about meI have worked in the professionalservices industry for over 25 years.I was a partner at Ernst & Young andthen a vice president at Capgemini.
Marilyn and I are pretty much keptbusy “24/7” by our four boys. They’rea lot of fun, whether it’s weekends atthe beach or watching them play sportor performing music.
In early 2005 Intergen joined the ranksof companies with operations on eitherside of the Tasman. This expansion isthe first small step in an importantphase of our business growth.
It is also important for our ability to remain at the forefront
of providing innovative “intelligent business” solutions for
our customers and helping to ensure we continue to provide
interesting and challenging work for our people.
Expansion into the Australian market offers us a larger base
across which to invest and maintain our leadership position
whilst continuing our high standards of customer service
and quality delivery.
We are excited about this stage of our development but
we’re also careful to ensure that we maintain the core values
of our business as we move forward. Intergen is an exciting
and innovative place to work and work with. We will be
working hard to see it stays that way.
New Zealand is without question the foundation of our
business and likely to remain so for sometime to come.
The addition of an Australian operation is seen as building
upon that foundation, using the proven Intergen recipe for
success for our customers and ourselves.
It is early days yet, but as we progress we’ll keep you posted.
Welcome aboard the Intergen family to Martin Johnston,
a friend and associate of many of us for many years.Martin Johnston’s children:
future Intergen Australia staff.
Martin Ellis, Group GM at Sleepyhead,talks to SMARTS about Intergen’sEnterprise Resource Planning (ERP) expertise.
We understand that you were facing a significant business challenge with a
project to upgrade your ERP system.
We had a strategic vision on where we wanted to take the business and needed
to assess whether our current ERP system would provide us with the appropriate
platform or whether there was something better in the market.
Why did you choose Intergen to help you to review the situation and recommend
a way forward?
They came highly recommended by a colleague.
Sleep easy After recommending a way forward, how did Intergen assist you in implementing
those recommendations and getting the project back on track?
The issue we had was two-fold. First to resolve the huge number of outstanding
bugs we had with the version we were running at that stage.
Second, to work with our provider on what enhancements we needed to provide
us with a viable solution.
What do you perceive to be the strengths of Intergen’s capabilities?
They have the ability to keep a cool head in testing conditions as they keep
emotions out of the decision making process. They also can draw on a huge
amount of knowledge they have gained from
work with other organisations and packages.
Would you use Intergen again for similar
consulting work and why?
Yes, because they get results.
Your helping hand
Intergen is not only the best developer of Microsoft.NET applications in New Zealand – we also haveexceptional business and technical consultingcapability.
We carry out a variety of consulting assignments, all of which straddle the divide
between business and information technology. You can either look at it as ‘IT
consulting with a business edge’ or ‘business consulting with an IT edge’.
Our consulting capability is drawn from across all our teams, providing consultancy
in many areas: business, information systems (IS), technical, development, QA
and creative. But the focus of this article is on our business and information
Two of Intergen’s senior technical staff, Jeremy Boyd and Derek Watson,recently returned from Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference(PDC) in Los Angeles where they received in-depth insight into futuretools and technologies.
>> INTERGENITE:
Stephen Andrew
What do you do?I’m the Business Development Managerfor Intergen in Auckland. I work toensure that clients are delighted withour services and solutions, and thatour technology solutions are beingapplied to meet their business needs.
How do you make a difference?I ensure that every interaction we havewith our clients is as professional aspossible. I help team members toprepare properly and ensure that theythink about the client’s business firstand foremost. I bring experience froma range of IT roles, which helps temperthe team’s rampant enthusiasm.
What do you love about your job?I enjoy being able to channel thesignificant resources available atIntergen to meet and exceed clients’expectations. As a BusinessDevelopment Manager the thrill of anew deal is what drives me, but I’malso passionate about fostering longterm relationships, as these are criticalto the ongoing success of Intergen.
A bit about yourselfI’m the proud father of three primaryschool-aged children. I’m committedto coaching my kids so they can funda life of leisure for their mother and Iby playing for Real Madrid, atWimbledon or the Black Caps.
>>6 >> T E C H N I C A L P R E V I E W - P D C
Five minute future preview
< S M A R T S - T H E I N T E L L I G E N T B U S I N E S S
PDC is held every two years and is recognised as the premier event to network with the architects of Microsoft’s
technology vision and to see what’s on the horizon.
There is a huge wave of new technology coming from Microsoft over the next two years that will enhance
the software industry’s value to business. The transformation of the industry has been underway for a number
of years now, with service orientation changing the way people think about software architecture. However,
the tools and technology haven’t really caught up with thought processes and the demands of business and
end users until now.
Much of the new technology is aimed at making software systems more dynamicallyconfigurable to allow business to adapt as change occurs. The next two years will see new
tools being released to allow us to build this type of system faster, better and cheaper. It will also allow us to
put more power back into the hands of the users of software, with tools like SQL Reporting Services and the
Windows Workflow Foundation. These tools allow the relevance and usefulness of software to be maintained
by the business throughout its life. And adhering to the principles of service orientation allows us, as developers,
to incrementally add new capabilities without having to scrap and rebuild.
The other major step forward with new technology is from a user-interface perspective.Many business applications are not intuitive to use, and end users need substantial training to understand them.
With a new presentation platform and the new set of Expression™ tools from Microsoft, we can build visually powerful
interactive experiences for users that more accurately reflect their understanding of what they are doing when working
with information. Much of the change to Microsoft’s own range of products, such as the upcoming release of Office 12
and Share Point version 3, are driven by the same motivation to substantially enhance usability.
What this means for us as a software solutions provider is rapid positive change. The challengewith any new technology wave though, is to apply it to create new opportunities for business.We would love the chance to talk with you more about how we can help.
framework based on SOA principles and best practices, and we could capitalise
on the implementation of amp.co.nz by bringing all our external facing applications
up to one consistent high standard.” Shirley McIntyre, AMP.
Leveraging the new technologiesUsing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 allowed AMP to utilise SQL Server Integration
Services. This greatly improved the importing and transformation of retirement
information sourced from AMP’s retirement processing mainframe. Overall
complexity of the import and transformation processes was reduced, thus resulting
in increased maintainability. In addition, overall performance of these processes
increased by approximately 300 - 400%.
Six week transitionMeeting the timeframe showed integrity according
to AMP’s Project Manager Michael Coffee. “They
resourced accordingly, and their technical ability
and pre-knowledge of Microsoft’s new offering meant
they developed exactly what they said they would
do. If there were challenges, Intergen absorbed them,
rather than passing on costs.”
22,000 members and 750 employersuse NZRT on-lineAs a work-based retirement scheme, being on-line
provides instant capability for employees and
employers to check balances and manage contributions. The use of banner ads,
brand colours and easy usability means a more consistent experience for AMP
customers.
More leverage is planned, with excellent opportunities for AMP to grow their
technology footprint says Shirley McIntyre.
“In summary, we have an energised offering on our web site; and the technology
we have delivered these applications on has been future proofed for further
expansion and growth”.
THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Tackling the future head-on is familiar ground forAMP, whether it be helping people gain a longlasting income in retirement, or providing qualityadvice on insurance, investment or financialplanning decisions.
AMP wanted to bring their retirement scheme, New Zealand Retirement Trust (NZRT),on-line. Hosting penalties on the existing platform created urgency and a need todeliver on time.
First in the marketAMP took up Intergen’s recommendation to futureproof with an ahead-of-the-market solution utilisingMicrosoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 and SQL Server2005. As a company well versed in risk analysis, AMPviewed the opportunity as innovation not‘experimentation’ and went into the project with solidexpectations.
“Intergen have an extremely close partnership withMicrosoft and through that expertise were ableto convincingly demonstrate areas of high businessvalue using Microsoft’s new .NET toolset and SQLServer database. To be the first company to deliveran application based on this innovative framework was exactly where we wantedto be as a forward looking company.” Shirley McIntyre, Enterprise SolutionsManger AMP.
Gaining more business value through a reusable frameworkLeveraging their investment was a major business driver for AMP in this project.
“There was a lot of business value to be gained by redeveloping the web site
solution to bring NZRT on-line. .NET gave us the opportunity to use a common
>> INTERGENITE:
Jonathon Mitchal
What do you do?I am a proud member of theDevelopment and Integration teamat the Christchurch Intergen office,and have recently been involved inprojects using C#, ASP.NET, CMS, CRMand SQL Server 2005.
How do you make a difference?I have gained a strong knowledgebase from university, which allows meto apply myself to new technologiesand situations.
What do you love about your job?I thrive on providing professionalsoftware solutions for clients to putinto practical use.
I also enjoy the great workingenvironment and talented peer-basethat Intergen provides.
A bit about yourselfI graduated from CanterburyUniversity last year with a Bachelorof Science. With my spare time atuniversity I DJ’d throughoutNew Zealand and enjoyed moderatesuccess with vinyl releases of originalmaterial overseas.
>> C A S E S T U D Y - A M P < S M A R T S - T H E I N T E L L I G E N T B U S I N E S S M A G A Z I N E . I S S U E T E N > >>7
Going leading edge proves good insurance for the future
CustomFile Task
Preprocess Each File andSend an Email
Send notification emailif pick up fails
Move all the input csv’sinto a working directory
Preprocess each ofthe csv files
Load the staging tables
Update the main databaseonce the staging process
has been completed
For each user, put the user intoactive directory and add them
to the appropriate groups
Send the emails with thedetails of the upload process
If processing flow fails email out an error
Send FileError Email
Load Staging Tables
Load Working Tables
Update ProductionDatabase
New User Setup
SMTPServiceEmailhelper
�
AMP Integration Services Package
Send GeneralError Email
>> U I D E S I G N & C R M < S M A R T S - T H E I N T E L L I G E N T B U S I N E S S M A G A Z I N E . I S S U E T E N >
Closer customer relationships
Using databases to facilitate and improve customerrelationships will be easier with the release ofMicrosoft CRM 3.0 early next year.
The new version of Microsoft Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) will allow
additional customer specific entities to be added to the base system. Intergen
will be able to extend and configure the product without significant development,
ultimately lowering the total cost of ownership to customers.
New Microsoft CRM 3.0 features include:
>> Marketing automation including campaign management, response tracking
and marketing list generation
>> Enhancements to existing sales management tools including support for
identifying complex customer roles and relationships
>> Enhancements to existing service case management tools including service-
based scheduling and integrated knowledge base
>> Powerful new reporting capabilities based on SQL Server Reporting Services,
including drill down ability and report scheduling
>> Enhanced user experience capabilities with role-based customisation and
personalisation of the Microsoft CRM work environment
>> New service-oriented architecture (SOA) for systems integration including
web service description language (WSDL) interfaces for the core CRM business
platform providing enhanced integration opportunities to other web
applications, portals and business systems
>> Optimised email integration for both delivery and tracking
>> Enhanced mobile experience for remote sales and customer service
professionals.
Microsoft CRM 3.0 is designed for small and midsized businesses, large
organisations and divisions or departments of global enterprises that want to
build strong customer relationships by managing all customer interactions from