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Camwood sign partnership deal with ConverterTechnology:
(M2 PressWIRE Via Acquire Media NewsEdge)
ConverterTechnology, experts in Microsoft Office deployment and migration projects, today announced a new partnership with Camwood, the leading application migration consultancy. Camwood will be using ConverterTechnology's new OfficeConverter 2007 software solution as part of its end-to-end consultancy and deployment offerings. The software will enable Camwood to help large enterprise customers understand the file compatibility challenges involved with application upgrades, recommend best practice, reduce risks, and deliver cost saving file remediation functionality.
Tony Probert, Business Development Director for ConverterTechnology says "Our solution gives Camwood the ability to help UKenterprises more easily manage their upgrades from older versions of Office to Office 2007, ensuring they maximise their business uptime, information availability and data security. Efficient and automated migration processes are things that these companies cannot afford to get wrong."
Camwood provides consultancy based around an application-centric model across all Microsoft products, including Vista, XP, Office, Softgrid, SystemCenter and SharePoint 2007. Many of their customers request help with file migration assessment of Vistaand Office 2007 deployment projects.
Tony Fones, Professional Services Manager of Camwood said: "We deal with a number of corporates with a significant portfolio of applications. The drive is always towards effective application rationalisation to realise benefits of an effectively managed estate, reduction in licensing and business benefits of optimising the support services. Without exception, all of these organisations under-estimate the impact of data and will commonly miss-out on the full business benefits of application rationalisation." He continued: "Adding the software solution from ConverterTechnology to our data migration framework enables us to proactively drive the business benefits. Couple this with our accreditation as a Microsoft Desktop Deployment Planning Services (DDPS) partner, which focuses on removing the deployment challenges of Vistaand Office 2007, we are able to advise and implement a full end-to-end migration programme including the data."
Using OfficeConverter 2007, Camwood will be able to advise their customers on the Microsoft Office data-sets that will run successfully after their upgrade and which data-sets can be consolidated. Files which will not open in the Office 2003 or Office 2007 format are identified by ConverterTechnology's solution and the majority of these will be automatically fixed and converted. For data-sets that have extra challenges, Camwood will provide specific added-value services to remediate the data. Camwood consultants, fully trained in ConverterTechnology's solution, will be able to provide a complete, end-to-end service including initial assessment, governance and rationalisation of data.
Tony Probert concludes: "Our solution is very complimentary to Camwood's core business focus and this new partnership will bring increased value to the services they deliver for Office 2007 deployments."
http://crm.tmcnet.com/news/2008/04/23/3403866.htm
Camwood divides to conquer for 2008 :
LONDON, January 11 2008 – In order to better serve its current and future customers and to maximise the market potential for AppTitude, Camwood, the leading application migration specialist, today announced that it is to split the company and create two separate businesses. From January 2008, the consulting services company will retain the name Camwood, while a new company called AppDNA will manage the research, development and creation of an indirect sales channel for the AppTitude product, a software solution that automates the application testing requirement for companies migrating to Microsoft Vista.
Camwood has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past year, as an increasing number of organisations migrate to the Windows Vista environment. Explaining the rationale for the restructure, Frank Foxall, CEO of Camwood, said: “This strategy will be central to the on-going success of AppTitude, as it allows both the consultancy services and the software development and sales businesses to play to their respective strengths. It will allow us to commit to the highest level of consultancy service required both pre and post sale, and we will also be able to dedicate focused resources to building, developing and selling the AppTitude product through our partner channel, allowing us to take it to the international market.”
Under Foxall’s direction, Camwood will continue to operate as a consultancy, developing and delivering a comprehensive range of services and solutions to support Microsoft Windows migrations and ongoing application management strategies. Camwood assists businesses to envision, prepare and execute the programmes and changes required to deliver excellence in managing their application environment.
AppDNA, led by Mike Welling, CEO, will take responsibility for developing and selling the AppTitude product, which is used to determine quickly and accurately which applications will work with a new operating system, and which will need remediation effort. Welling said: “AppTitude has been an essential part of the Windows Vista migration programme for many companies. The changes we are making in company structure will provide us with the scope to further develop AppTitude and sell it through our indirect channel sales model. Camwood will be one of several solution providers the we are engaged with that will sell and service AppTitude .”
AppTitude’s automated testing algorithms ensure that an entire organisation’s software portfolio can be tested in days vs. months. The customer receives a visual display of the compatibility issues they face – a green, amber or red light indicates whether an application will migrate without problems, whether it will have some problems, or whether it will not migrate effectively. A detailed report is then supplied to enable the IT team to address the specific problem areas for remediation, with detailed technical information highlighting the necessary ‘fixes’ they need to implement to ensure an application installs and runs correctly under Windows Vista.
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IT Week: Service packs bolster Windows and Office:
IT departments have an early present this year with the release of Vista SP1
by Martin Veitch and Dave Bailey
IT departments will have a busy period updating clients during the festive season and into the new year as admins get to grips with new service packs for Windows and Office.
SP1 for Office 2007 has just been released, and rounds up a number of fixes intended to improve stability, performance and security. “Stability was one of the most important themes, so the engineering team was told to take on the top five challenges in each program,” said Darren Strange, Microsoft Office product manager.
Microsoft also recently uploaded a first release candidate (RC1) of the first Windows Vista service pack, boosting the controversial operating system’s chances of becoming a mainstream desktop environment in 2008. Microsoft is scheduled to have the full SP1 ready early next year, at which point many firms that are currently wavering could commit to large deployments of Vista.
Gartner analyst Annette Jump said, “Fewer than five per cent of users have adopted it and many of those are part of early-adopter programmes from Microsoft. For historical reasons a lot of companies still think SP1 is important and firms have often waited a year after the OS release [to deploy]. The timing links quite well with the time it takes ISVs to support the OS.”
Richard Hall, chief technology officer of Microsoft/Accenture joint-venture services company Avanade, agreed that many firms will only now be considering deploying Vista, having gone through extensive application compatibility testing.
However, Frank Foxall, chief executive of UK application migration services firm Camwood, said, “The last calendar quarter has seen Vista deployment pick up dramatically and tyre kicking has near enough stopped.”
However, users frustrated by Vista performance should not expect SP1 to be a panacea. IT Week Labs found that installing SP1 RC1 had no significant impact on performance.
The release candidate is about 447MB in size and is delivered as a self-extracting executable. The size of our fully patched Vista Ultimate image, with no applications loaded, was over 9GB, and installing SP1 brought this to well over 10GB.
Also, changes made in Vista SP1 may cause application compatibility problems with programs that run cleanly on unpatched systems. On its web site, Microsoft warns, “There is a chance that some applications ultimately will not run on the final version of Windows Vista SP1, even though they run on Windows Vista today.” Microsoft said a list of these applications would be published when SP1 is fully available.
For the full story: http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/news/2205873/service-packs-bolster-windows-3717764
IT Analysis: Camwood Technology Puts Tube Lines On Track For Early Vista Migration:
London Underground maintenance and upgrade company aims for "business-as-usual" upgrade to latest Microsoft operating system
LONDON, November 28, 2007 - Tube Lines announced it is using technology from application compatibility specialist Camwood to prepare for the move next year of its 2,500 users to the Windows Vista operating system. Camwood's appTitude™ application compatibility testing solution is helping the London Underground maintenance and upgrade company carry out its planning for a "business-as-usual" migration to be completed by the third quarter of 2008.
"Tube Lines is an innovative and forward-thinking company. Having the latest technology fits in with what we are trying to achieve as a business," said Adrian Davey, head of IT at Tube Lines, adding: "We wanted to move to Vista before it became imperative, so we would always feel comfortable about the transition."
Having taken the decision to migrate 12 months ago, Tube Lines has already done much of the planning, but Davey insists this would not have been possible without Camwood. "We had a list of things that had to be in place before we would do the refresh and one of them was an absolute understanding of our application estate, of how our 211 applications would work with different operating systems. The solution from Camwood has given us the assurance that we are on the right path."
Tube Lines is using Camwood's appTitude to determine quickly and accurately which applications will work with Vista and which will need remediation effort. It is planning to deploy Microsoft's virtualisation platform, SoftGrid, for applications which will not make the transition.
Tube Lines is looking forward to the collaboration benefits Vista can bring. "If an engineer is trying to fix a train in a depot, traditionally they would physically have to go and find the paperwork and look up the wiring diagrams. Whereas, in today's world of collaboration, with Vista, Sharepoint and Office 2007, they can use Windows Mobile to see how to fix it there and then. It's all about doing things quicker and ensuring the reliability of the assets we maintain," commented Davey.
The organisation also believes it is well equipped for the future, having gained control of its application estate using Camwood's appTitude. "This is not a one-off exercise," says Davey. "It's more about ongoing business as usual as it enables our service desk analysts to support the end users more effectively through greater knowledge of our application estate."
appTitude is a client-server software solution that automates the application testing requirement for companies migrating to Microsoft Vista. appTitude draws from Camwood's experience working with applications migration data from consulting projects with over 100 large corporations, supporting some 50,000 applications. Automated testing algorithms ensure that an entire organisation's software can be tested in days vs months, and the customer receives a visual display of the compatibility issues they face - a green, amber or red light indicates whether an application will migrate without problems, whether it will have some problems, or whether it will not migrate effectively. A detailed report is then prepared to enable the IT team to address the problem areas, with detailed technical information highlighting the necessary ‘fixes' they need to implement to ensure an application installs and runs correctly under Vista.
http://www.it-analysis.com/business/change/news_release.php?rel=4285
Silicon: Vista not grabbing businesses... yet:
Frank Foxall, Camwood CEO talking with Tim Ferguson from Silicon.com
XP and compatibility issues are limiting the OS's appeal, say analysts
Businesses feel a move to Microsoft's Windows Vista OS isn't worth the effort yet, due to compatibility issues and it offering too few benefits over XP.
Almost a year after the businesses version of Vista was released, it seems take-up remains sluggish and analysts predict this won't change significantly for a while.
Mike Silver, research VP at Gartner, told silicon.com: "From what we've seen so far, enterprises in the US and Europe have been slow to take it up."
In addition, companies don’t seem to see much point in using Vista over XP, the operating system it replaces.
Silver said: "Organisations really are not sold on the benefits [of Vista]."
But Silver predicts uptake will accelerate in 2008, with increased planning and testing and the arrival of the first service pack (SP1) fuelling demand.
"It's [SP1] still a bit of a bellwether or milestone for some organisations," he said.
David Bradshaw, analyst at Ovum, agreed that take-up has been slow. He said: "It's taking a bit longer than expected with business take-up."
He added: "Realistically, it's a major cost for businesses and businesses really, really need to see the benefit first. And that benefit isn't going to emerge completely for a year or two."
He explained: "There's no one killer application. You have to decide whether it's critical to your business."
He predicted the tipping point will come in two or three years when more applications work with Vista than XP. Bradshaw said: "Businesses know that they'll adopt it in the long term."
He added that many enterprise agreements with Microsoft will include an upgrade to Vista and so it's only a matter of time before businesses take the plunge.
Richard Edwards, senior analyst at Butler Group, was less positive. He said: "I'm not seeing any uptake of Vista whatsoever… and there's absolutely no appetite for Vista."
He added: "I think at the moment XP is doing a good enough job. The market is not hunting in any particular areas that Vista is addressing."
And with technical support for XP running until 2014, Edwards said IT directors will have plenty of other things to worry about first.
Frank Foxall, CEO of Camwood - which, among other things, helps companies migrate operating systems - told silicon.com: "In the first year, I don't think it's [take-up] anywhere near where Microsoft wanted it."
He added: "The biggest competition is still XP. The biggest intangible [challenge] is what will and what won’t work."
But he added lots of Camwood's customers are now preparing for Vista as they know they'll need to make the move at some point soon.
He said: "The biggest driver for Vista is eventuality."
He predicted around 70 per cent of Camwood's customers will want help with Vista preparation in 2008, with full take-up of the OS taking place over the next couple of years.
But despite these views, Microsoft told silicon.com it's satisfied with the global uptake of Vista. The company said it has sold 88 million licences for the OS (consumer and business versions combined) and expects to have sold 100 million by the end of the year.
Full article here: http://software.silicon.com/os/0,39024651,39169287,00.htm
