Slinger Jansen

Noldus Information Technology

The first software product from Noldus Information Technology was written by Lucas Noldus, the founder, during his PhD research into animal behavior. A number of reasons led to the creation of Noldus Information Technology BV, the attention and positive feedback the software attracted being two of the most important reasons. The desire to be his own boss, the opportunities he spotted for his software in other markets, and the fact that he enjoyed creating tools to support insect behavioral research more than doing the research motivated Lucas Noldus to start his own company. Noldus Information Technology is currently active in over 25 different niche markets and maintains its extended customer base of approximately 5700 customers with offices in the United States, Germany, France, Spain, China and a development office in Hungary. Their customers, which include universities, academic hospitals, research institutes, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing companies and others, have a wide range of products to choose from. The Observer and EthoVision products are the most important for Noldus Information Technology, since they bring in about 60–70 percent of revenues together. The mission of Noldus Information Technology is: ‘To provide the best possible tools for behavioral research, allowing our customers to improve the quality of their data, increase productivity, and make optimal use of human and animal resources.’ Figures 6.1 and 6.2 show the trend lines of the revenue and employee growth of Noldus Information Technology.

Defining software ecosystems: a survey of software platforms and business network governance: Analyzing and Managing Business Networks in the Software Industry

Currently, there is little understanding about how different types of software ecosystems must be governed for the preservation and improvement of ecosystem health. This paper explores the definition of software ecosystems and provides a classification model for software ecosystems. The classification model is applied to 19 cases previously explored in software ecosystem literature, and governance tools are observed for the different types of ecosystems. The governance tools are summarized in a governance model that, when used correctly, serves ecosystem coordinators in determining strategies to maintain and ultimately improve software ecosystem health.

Workload-Based Clustering of Coherent Feature Sets in Microservice Architectures

In a microservice architecture, each service is designed to be independent of other microservices. The size of a microservice, defined by the features it provides, directly impacts its performance and availability. However, none of the currently available approaches take this into account. This paper proposes an approach to improve the performance of a microservice architecture by workload-based feature clustering. Given a feature model, the current microservice architecture, and the workload, this approach recommends a deployment that improves the performance for the given workload using a genetic algorithm. We created MicADO, an open-source tool, in which we implemented this approach, and applied it in a case study on an ERP system. For different workloads, the resulting generated microservice architectures show substantial improvements, which sets the potential of the approach.

Ultimo Software Solutions

Ultimo Software Solutions was established in 1998 from a management buyout by the current owners. At that time, Ultimo Software Solutions was still called Informatie Systemen Holland (ISH; English translation: Information Systems Holland). The basis of the software product Ultimo Software Solutions sells today was developed in 1988. The development of this product, which was called Ultimo Maintenance Management, was partly initiated by Jaap van Seventer, who joined the company in 1988 and identified a market opportunity. After a couple of turbulent years, where there was a significant lack of focus, there was a change in management in 1994 when the majority of the current management — J aap van Seventer, Erik Huisman and Michel Vloemans — became in charge of the company. The management buy-out happened in 1998, when ISH was bought by the three managers and two employees. In 2007, ISH changed their name to Ultimo Software Solutions. From here on, the company name Ultimo will be used, instead of a combination of Ultimo Software Solutions and Informatie Systemen Holland. Ultimo, with currently 110 employees, delivers the Ultimo software product in different market segments, among others: facility management, maintenance, IT service and infra asset management, from offices in both the Netherlands and Belgium. Usability and flexibility are the key concepts of the Ultimo software that is used by more than 900 organizations. The trend lines (Figures 17.1, 17.2 and 17.3) show the growth of revenue, profit and employee numbers of Ultimo, starting from 1999.

Lessons of Software Entrepreneurs

The main part of the book contains the descriptions of the decisions that were identified by the interviewees of the 16 companies that were interviewed. In describing the decisions these entrepreneurs have made while building their company, we attempt to describe the early-life decisions in such a way that other software entrepreneurs can learn from it. The 16 different companies that are described in this chapter deliver a diverse range of products; from ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and HRM (Human Resource Management) software, from BPM (Business Process Management) software to an electronic hospital information system (EHIS), and almost everything in between. There are a number of companies that make the same type of software and are competitors of each other, which provides an interesting comparison of results. Each chapter starts with an overview of some of the company data, followed by a short introduction to the company. For the majority of the companies, this introduction ends with up to three graphs that show the trend lines of their revenues, profits and number of employees from the start of the company until 2010. Some of the companies did not have the exact numbers from the early days for these graphs, and have therefore estimated what these numbers were. It should also be noted that the graphs use different scales and are to be considered as indicative trend lines. While some of the graphs might indicate for instance the number of FTEs, the graphs of other companies might indicate the number of employees. In a similar way, some profit numbers are before tax while others are after tax. A number of companies preferred not to present these data and in some cases the data were not available.

Introduction: Collaboration in Outsourcing

Even though the concept of IT outsourcing dates back to the 1960s, it remains a surprisingly challenging field for IT professionals. The geographic distance, though seemingly decreasing, remains a variable that affects the industry in every sense. We identified the need for more research on this topic in 2009 and decided Utrecht University should play a major part. A research project was initiated that brought our research team from Utrecht to a plethora of exotic locations and world-class companies. The result of our research efforts is in front of you: each of the research themes identified was condensed into a chapter of this book.