This week I'm back in Guadalajara.  It's the middle of December and the skies are blue and the temp is around 70 degrees during the day and 55 in the evening.  Perfect.

I'm here with 2 clients... one a publicly traded pharma company that is building a new software application to better drive the quality of patient care and cost models. The other a privately held technology consulting firm that needed additional Java resources to augment their US based delivery teams. Both sent down senior technical and product leaders to work with Unosquare engineers in our office.

I have to say here... this is the right way to do Nearshore.  The amount of information covered in our conference room is one thing. It is what we do all day long when clients come to visit. Besides, you would agree that debating the approach taken with technical requirements and clarifying business requirements face to face is invaluable to any project. 

But drinking margaritas and getting to know each other in the evening is where the magic happens.  Teamwork, as a concept, only delivers its best result when friendships are formed.  That's my view anyway.

So, to clients and projects alike, I ask you to consider the wisdom of coming to Guadalajara to work with your team during the day and enjoy the festive life of Mexico in the evening.  Yes, you will be pleased with the business results. But even more you will be thrilled with new friendships.

Did Mario DiVece go to enjoy the beach and the sunshine this month? Not really. He was there as a special guest presenter for the Festival de Software Libre, or Open Source Software Festival. DiVece was invited to speak at the request of Microsoft Mexico and the University of Guadalajara. Unosquare is a Microsoft partner, and the go to partner in Mexico for migrating and running open source applications on the Microsoft Cloud (Azure). 

DiVece, Co-founder and CTO at Unosquare, presented on moving and managing PHP applications on the Microsoft Cloud (Azure).  Unosquare has built a solid reputation in North America based on his work in this area.

Mario was in good company.  He was presenting with other notable leaders like Jon Maddog Hall, president of Linux International and Senator Francisco Javiar Castellon Fonseca, from the State of Nayarit just north of Puerto Vallarta.  If you want to see his slides on the topic, join the Unosquare Facebook site and send us a note.

Unosquare co-founder and CEO, Mike Barrett, has been instrumental in the formation of a new industry association of Nearshore executives. The Nearshore Executive Alliance is a formalized group of industry leaders from across the Americas. CEO's and Vice Presidents from companies like Softtek, Neoris, CapGemini, and CI&T all have a stake in the new alliance.

The goals of the organization include collaboration around best practices, ethical standards for business, anti-corruption efforts, and recruiting guidelines that will help make nearshoring a long term, sustainable solution for North American client companies.

The Unosquare CEO presented the idea to form such a group during the Nearshore Nexus conference in New York City last April. Since then, nearly 50 executives from over 35 different companies have enlisted. For more information, visit www.nearshoreleaders.com or email our CEO from the contact page on our website.

We believe that almost every software company out there has benefited from open source software. We also believe in returning the favor to the community. For this reason, we have decided to make the WebCore PHP Framework an open source project.

About 10 years ago, when PHP was transitioning from version 3 to version 4, the first version of WebCore was created by its main author, Mario Di Vece. It was only a few hundred lines of code and it was built to quickly re-implement a dated extranet for one of Di Vece’s customers. WebCore 1.0 was used in more than 10 small projects and it proved very handy.

Pretty much the same story repeated for the second version of the WebCore framework – WebCore 2.0 was nothing more than a handy library to create grids and forms with some basic scaffolding functionality. But when Di Vece teamed up with Geo Perez and Luis Gonzalez at Unosquare, they started cooking what would come to be the third version of the framework. They envisioned a framework that had automatic creation of an object model based on a database schema, lambda-like object queries, top of the line scaffolding, a clean templating mechanism, great-looking controls, support for custom renderers, and a plethora of other features that would make writing a PHP application fast, maintainable, and above all an enjoyable experience.

We are not anticipating that we’ll get a lot of attention, but if you’re interested feel free to download the source code and documentation at: CodePlex

(Excerpted from the book, Nearshoring to Latin America - An Executive Guide) 
There is enough x-sourcing and x-shoring terminology floating around to build a paper ark big enough to hold the high dollar consultants who invent the terms.  So, to establish a common ground, we need to apply a reasonable definition to the term nearshoring - one which can better frame the rest of this discussion. 
We all agree nearshoring should be just that… near.  It should be reasonably close to your primary base of operation, but not within your national boundary.  The suffix used, shore, clearly indicates another country is involved, although a body of water might not be crossed.  A broader view, at least for U.S. customers, asserts that nearshoring is the provision of professional services from places like Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, and other North and Central American locations.  Aside from the Asia-Pacific regions, the Latin American geographies are the number one area for new IT services expansion for the Global 2000.  These locations are within a few hours of major U.S. hub airport and fall within U.S. time zones. 
South American locations are also within U.S. time zones and therefore argue hard for a nearshore designation, but they are not as easily reached within a few hours.   Remember the default requirement of being “near”?   

Well, I'm not sure we qualify as a "scrappy startup" anymore... but this article is flattering nontheless. Mentioned in the same story with Dell and the leading edge video game developers is also a plus.  The writer of this story did get the DNA of Guadalajara correct.  It is a city passionate about business and technology and full of new ideas and startups.

At 40+ employees we're getting beyond the startup phase now... but I hope we never lose the entrepreneurial fire that got us all started in this business.  I'd like to have that zeal when we have 400 people.

Saludos!

The first book ever written and published on the topic of Nearshoring to Latin America is available now on Amazon.com.  Nearshoring to Latin America.  The book was written by Unosquare CEO Mike Barrett along with contributions and feedback from industry thought leaders. 
Chapters include:

• Who are the Players?
• Price Comparisons
• Your Biggest Mistakes in Nearshoring
• What are the Risks?

Most industry analysts play it too safe and most company white papers are too self serving. This book is different.  Plus, your direct feedback on the book can end up in future editions.  Enjoy!

What readers say about the book

"Mike brings to light all of the issues we need to discuss about Nearshoring with an emphasis on the truth, not the hype. A quick read that demonstrates the amazing advantages of Nearshore as well as discussing where countries like Mexico can continue to improve."
-- Dawn Evans, CEO, Sourcing Interest Group

"The practice of Nearshore outsourcing has matured rapidly in the last few years, but there is still a strong need for reasoned, well-balanced analysis of this fast-evolving marketplace. This book succeeds in summarizing the Nearshore ‘opportunity’ by identifying not just where the value is in this market, but also where to go find it."
-- Kirk Laughlin, Founder, Nearshore Americas

"Mike Barrett’s book on “Nearshoring” was both an informative and enjoyable read. In this time of increased global competitiveness in a slowly recovering economy an executive team must examine every conceivable way to manage cost out of their business without sacrificing time to market objectives around new product development."
-- Mark Reed, President, High Ground Partners, LLC

We finally got moved into our new digs and we all "love it".  We are just down the street from the old office but still across the street from the MacStore, Applebees, and most important... Starbucks.  





As always, clients and prospects and partners are always welcome to visit.  We hope to see you in sunny Guadalajara soon!

Unosquare has setup a facebook page for those wanting to see a little more behind the scenes.  As you can imagine, we've posted photos and videos and general news items. Feel free to join the discussion here. 

Unosquare and our CEO, Mike Barrett, found their way into another positive story about the Guadalajara region.  The story ran in Nearshore America's, the premier source for all things IT and outsourcing in the Americas.  Essentially, the article claims the labor pool is solid and the violence that gets so much attention lately is not a factor in the state of Jalisco.  We would agree.  The story also hilights the education system and how companies and government agencies collaborate with engineering schools to keep the labor pool relevant to the IT industry needs.

Unosquare and our CEO, Mike Barrett, found their way into another positive story about the Guadalajara region.  The story ran in Nearshore America's, the premier source for all things IT and outsourcing in the Americas.  Essentially, the article claims the labor pool is solid and the violence that gets so much attention lately is not a factor in the state of Jalisco.  We would agree.  The story also hilights the education system and how companies and government agencies collaborate with engineering schools to keep the labor pool relevant to the IT industry needs.

Nearshore Americas, an independent e-zine, rates unosquare as one of the top 6 red hot IT startups in Latin America. They looked for companies that have compelling features in the areas of global sourcing, software design, IT innovation, e-commerce or mobile/web applications and services. Their selection team chose startups that have a value proposition not just in benefits for their clients, but in forward-looking business ideas with true commercial promise.

Read the full article here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNnhsvtDzxQ

Here's one of our favorite customers sharing his thoughts about the Unosquare team in Mexico.  This was on a day we launched a new web based application that serves hospital pharmacy operations across North America.  Called Strategic Information for Pharmacy, the application aggregates drug purchasing and contract data across multiple systems and data sources to help pharmacy operations make wiser purching choices and save tons of money.  This app was all built within a Microsoft framework using .Net, SQL, and Silverlight.  Great job team!  On to the next one...

Unosquare, with offices in Portland, Oregon, and Guadalajara, Mexico, assisted an Atlanta-based $400 million healthcare services and technology firm in revamping its procedures and IT development processes. Unosquare helped to deliver greater quality and reduce the client’s IT costs. The client delivers products and services for hospitals and healthcare systems throughout North America.

Prior to contracting with Unosquare, the firm’s development staff was also responsible for software testing. Their focus was on unit testing, which examines the functionality of discrete portions of a software program without assessing how changes made in a specific module might effect other modules, or the larger program.
Many argue that unit testing can be time-consuming and tedious. It demands the development team be thorough and meticulously document their work. It is difficult for unit testing to account for every input scenario that may occur when the program is run in a real-world environment.
This is especially true when there is no automated quality assurance (QA) testing, a QA team separate from the software engineers, or a QA testing environment for new releases that is separate from production source code.

For this client, the result was end-users were experiencing too many problems during normal product use. And instead of focusing on developing new features, the client’s development team was spending valuable time pushing out software patches for discrete glitches.
Source code control was also a problem. This is magnified when the QA process focuses on unit testing. One developer would make a change and test that change in the code base, but that change might negatively affect changes made by another developer in the same environment. There was no process or documentation to control the development and release of new features.

According to Mario Di Vece, Unosquare’s Chief Technology Officer, Unosquare responded with three initiatives; an analytical system for pharmaceutical products, a system to categorize products sold in the healthcare market, and an independent quality assurance regime for software development. The key, however, was providing greater discipline to software development and deployment.

“We established a consistent, agile, development process in which we could plan and work through the features that needed to be addressed. We had meetings three to four times a week so that everybody was in sync with what we were doing,” Di Vece said. Unosquare established a process where the client could see a preview of the project each week. If there was some feature or functionality, discussed previously, that was not there, or needed to be changed, the client could identify it early and Unosquare could address the matter, Di Vece noted.

“This dramatically reduced the client’s workload because they did not have to produce detailed specifications, for the most part,” Di Vece said. “We can talk informally and then we will break that down into a set of work items in the proper format. And we keep the client informed and process their feedback every step of the way. We save them time. We save them effort. We document everything. And we get feedback immediately,” he said. Unosquare also ensures the software systems work properly. “If they do not pass quality assurance tests, then new software is not released,” Di Vece said.

The second project, called Product Data Utility, classifies all the products purchased by hospitals or any other health care facility. Hundreds of variables are analyzed for millions of line items. And many proprietary byproducts of that analysis are recorded. All of the elements of the analytical system project were applied here as well, Di Vece said. “We are using our source code control tools, our project management tools, and our issue tracking tools as value-added services, providing full visibility to our client,” he said.

The third project was to set up a dedicated quality assurance team. A major distinction in this effort is that Unosquare employs the client’s systems and procedures. “We seamlessly integrate and use their source code control tools, their project management tools, their issue tracking tools, and their time tracking tools,” Di Vece said. “In this since, we have been very successful in adapting to the client’s needs,” he said.

Moreover, the QA testing for any software release was done with “frozen” code. With the development team and the QA team being completely separate, one function did not bleed over into the other. That increases the control and reliability over the testing process. The cost of setting up and training a dedicated QA team was reduced by 40% by utilizing Unosquare’s Mexico-based team. Defects are now being caught by the QA team, tracked by the version reports, and logged within the tracking tool. All this came together as a well defined QA process within each software version. It also greatly reduces the chances that a customer will see a bug in production software

Unosquare continues to test client code in a more stable environment - not the development environment – with frozen code, thereby reporting only viable defects.

Unosquare Provides Development and Localization for  Vesta’s Prepaid.com International Recharge Portal

Guadalajara, Mexico and Portland, Oregon (July 26, 2010) Unosquare, an IT service provider with operations in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Portland, Oregon, today announced the completion of a development project with Portland-based Vesta Corporation supporting the latest release of www.prepaid.com. The Prepaid.com payment portal was developed and launched by Vesta, and allows anyone, anywhere in the world to recharge airtime for Telcel, Movistar, Iusacell or Unefon prepaid mobile phones for friends and family in Mexico.

In order to better tailor the site to Mexican and Mexican-American consumers, Vesta worked with Unosquare’s Guadalajara office to provide software development, testing services, and translation services for Prepaid.com.

“Prepaid.com provides a valuable service that allows US friends and family members to stay connected by securely sending minutes to prepaid mobile phones in Mexico,” said Unosquare CEO, Michael Barrett. “We are pleased that we could provide the resources and local expertise necessary to bring this solution to market.”

“As we were developing this release of Prepaid.com, it was important that the site appealed to consumers both in the US and Latin America,” added Joshua Rush, director of marketing at Vesta. “With its development team in Mexico, Unosquare was the perfect partner for Vesta to collaborate with on this project.”

"The Mexican government, over several years, has invested significant energy in building a robust information technology sector and the schools needed to build that economic segment. The schools graduate nearly 60,000 to 75,000 students over several IT fields," said Unosquare’s Barrett. "A vast majority of these engineers are proficient in English, and of course, their native language. That makes them a valuable asset for North American and Mexican IT projects. Unosquare's mission is to leverage that asset to deliver the greatest value possible to our clients," Barrett said.
Additional information on Vesta Corporation can be found at www.trustvesta.com, or www.prepaid.com

Unosquare partner and lead Microsoft architect, Juan Roman Escamilla (El Flaco) will be in Portland all week setting up a SharePoint Portal architecture for NW Natural Gas.  This solution will incorporate a third party Sarbanes Oxley tool along with complete document library migration... fun stuff.

I'm being asked by CxO's "How do you compare the costs of the nearshore labor force in Mexico with offshore [India] teams?"  You can probably guess my answer, "Hourly rate is not the only metric to be considered." Correct.  Several factors should be evaluated to find the right Total Cost of Service (TCOS);

1. Teams more than 3 time zones apart require special management, collaboration, and communication overhead. This is provided by relocation of personnel for periods of time at the 'other' facility and/or an individual at each company working a 'swing shift' to bridge the timezone gap.

2. Productivity for Indian engineers has been measured to be at a ratio of approximately 3 required versus 2 on-site workers. Various opinions exist for this cause... there is general agreement on a productivity discount.

3. For ongoing software development, QA testing or managed services such as administration / configuration, the outsourced workforce becomes a critical part of the service you provide to your customers. Both parties should have incentive to maintain low turnover, consistent knowledge of the work process and motivation to deliver good results on-time. The culture in Mexico plus the relatively smaller sizes of the companies located there, promote continuity, involvement and sense of ownership. Unosquare references will tell you "...they care about our projects as much as we do!"

4. Travel time and costs add-up significantly if the two firms are working to maintain a solid long-term relationship. Mexico can be reached in 4-6 hours versus 20 - 30 to Asia.

5. The Intellectual Property that your firm develops, is fully protected under the NAFTA treaty with enforcement recourse available.  Plus, hardware doesn't get stuck in customs for a month.  More like a few hours when shipping servers to Mexico.

6. Finally, certain projects just require a period of working together onsite. That necessitates a work visa. Providers from Mexico, like Unosquare, have a streamlined process that allows consultants to obtain travel documents in 1-2 weeks.

As a CIO/CTO, I have engaged teams from China and India for many years. At the end of each year, I added up the above hard-costs and found that they typically amounted to an extra 20-25% of the contracted hourly rate from the vendor. This number applied when I have two different vendors with team sizes of roughly 50 persons each. Smaller team sizes would have required similar overhead which would could make this markup percentage to be considered in a TCOS even higher.

emmett.zahn@unosquare.com

Here's the new and improved SessionManager pattern. I thought I would blog it because it looks so elegant and useful. Here it is:

namespace Unosquare.Patterns

{
    public static class SessionManager
    {
        private enum SessionKeys
        {
            User,
            IsAuthenticated,
            ClientEntity,
            ClientEntityId
        }

        private static T GetSessionProperty(SessionKeys key) where T : new()
        {
            var sessionKey = key.ToString();

            if (HttpContext.Current.Session[sessionKey] == null)
            {
                HttpContext.Current.Session[sessionKey] = new T();
            }
            return (T)HttpContext.Current.Session[sessionKey];
        }

        private static void SetSessionProperty(SessionKeys key, T value) where T : new()
        {
            var sessionKey = key.ToString();
            HttpContext.Current.Session[sessionKey] = value;
        }

        public static bool IsAuthenticated
        {
            get
            {
                var value = GetSessionProperty(SessionKeys.IsAuthenticated);
                return value.HasValue ? value.Value : false;
            }
            set
            {
                SetSessionProperty(SessionKeys.IsAuthenticated, value);
            }
        }

        public static User User
        {
            get
            {
                return GetSessionProperty(SessionKeys.User);
            }
            set
            {
                SetSessionProperty(SessionKeys.User, value);
            }
        }

        public static ClientEntity ClientEntity
        {
            get
            {
                return GetSessionProperty(SessionKeys.ClientEntity);
            }
            set
            {
                SetSessionProperty(SessionKeys.ClientEntity, value);
            }
        }


        public static Guid ClientEntityId
        {
            get
            {
                var value = GetSessionProperty(SessionKeys.ClientEntityId);
                return value.HasValue ? value.Value : Guid.Empty;
            }
            set
            {
                SetSessionProperty(SessionKeys.ClientEntityId, value);
            }
        }


    }
}

We have been having talks with Microsoft Mexico to port one of our client's products to SQL Azure (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sqlazure/) The integration starts today! This is hopefully our path to become a Microsoft Partner.

Last night I tried something called "Windows Cache Extension for PHP". In the world of PHP, accelerators are extensions which cache script opcodes in either the file system or memory so that the next time the script is requested, it won't need to be checked, parsed and converted into opcodes. Accelerators significantly increase response times, especially in large PHP applications and libraries (such as our PHP framework, WebCore 3x). So far I had been using eAccelerator fairly successfully. The problem with eAccelerator is that sometimes it will make Apache crash for no apparent reason. Well, Microsoft just realeased their own PHP accelerator extension and guess what? It works amazingly well. I'm testing the extension with IIS 6.0 + FastCGI + PHP 5.2.10 and so far, in terms of speed and reliability, I am very happy with it. This is the third time I've been surprised by Microsoft's work towards integrating with PHP. The first time I saw this, was when I discovered they were offering a SQL Server Driver (extension) for PHP. Then, Microsoft integrated PHP within their free Web Platforms Installer. This made it very simple to install PHP on IIS 6 or 7 and bundle it wih FastCGI. Finally, and most amazingly, thier new Windows Cache Extension for PHP really shows some interest from Microsoft to winning a large PHP user base over to IIS. I can't wait until Microsoft goes beyond the Phalanger project and creates a PHP compiler for the .NET framework as they did with Ruby and Python. I guess that with the DLR and the new "dynamic" C# 4.0 keyword, we will be seeing support for PHP.NET soon enough.

Worship Kitchen is one of the digital distribution channels of Integrity Media. What makes it different is that you can get extended content such as split-tracks, orchestrations, transposable music sheets, lyrics and so much more than your regular music provider. We had been working extremely hard to get the next iteration of Worship Kitchen out the door. It was not easy and we had to learn many things along the way but we finally did it. We ended up with a rock-solid product. We’d like to thank the team at Integrity. They gave us all the right direction, hard work and resources we needed to complete this iteration. There’s a lot more coming though. I’ll keep you posted

Defining the logo for a new company is always hard and our case was definitely not an exception. Our first approach to the logo was completely related to the square. After that approach, we moved towards something very similar to our final logo, we wanted to focus on the entire name, while still keeping focus on the Spanish/English part of the Company’s name – at that time we were also focused on colors, and we came with something like this:


Short after that Lorena Navarrete designed a different set of logos that actually looked more like real logos and not our “first-approaches”. Lorena, we are thankful for your all your help!


From this set of logos we really liked the following one – although none of our friends and family seemed to like it.



Finally we came up with the idea of leveraging the power of social networks to decide on our logo, and this became in quite an experience. We had people from everywhere giving opinions about this. People keep asking us which Logo won as if it was some sort of contest. To do this, we did an online Poll using Zoho Polls, which aside from the fact that it doesn’t manage comments well, did the trick for deciding on our logo.
Link to the original Poll
The winner was one of Lorena’s original designs - #4 on the Poll!

 
Although something quite interesting happened; when we analyzed the audience that voted, we realized that Executives preferred the more formal and simpler design while younger generations preferred the modern/colorful approach.
At the end, we decided for the formal logo, I think that it is just as dressing for a meeting with a CIO/CTO. Honestly I could just wear jeans and a t-shirt, after all, what matters is what we know and how well we can do it, but the bottom-line is that I wear a suit for those meetings. I want the person that is meeting me to focus on what I say and not how am I dressed. As for our logo, we want them to focus on our company’s services and not in how modern/colorful we look.
The final logo actually is quite smart; it allows us to do branding: unosign, unosap, unoblog, etc. It is formal, and the best, we can write it using True Type Fonts! So much for embedding images…