Cygnet Launches New Brand Identity with a New Corporate Logo and Website

Cygnet, on its 14th anniversary launched its New Brand Identity with a newly designed Corporate Logo and Website.

The New Logo has been launched to set up a solid foundation of our presence and uplift Cygnet brand across the globe in the coming years. With the new Cygnet logo, we have united all our products and companies under a single umbrella of Cygnet Group which will help us represent Cygnet as a stronger brand identity and will position us distinctly in correlation to The Name – Cygnet and its meaning - Baby Swan.

Swan represents harmony, fluidity and balance due to its distinctive characteristics of living amongst the three elements of nature ­– earth, air and water. Similarly, the Swan in Cygnet’s logo signifies our philosophy of Liquid Dynamism and reflects our ability to be agile, flexible and responsive to our client needs.

As mentioned above, alongwith the new logo, we have also launched new face of Cygnet Infotech website with a new concept and theme to position our services more in alignment with our real expertise and deliver information more quickly and in organized manner.

Take a look at the fresh face of Cygnet Infotech website

With these positive changes, we look forward to serve clients more better and continue our journey of achieving greater prosperity, client satisfaction and global expansion in the 15th year.

Cygnet is Participating at CeBIT 2014

Cygnet is participating at CeBIT 2014 between 10^th and 14^th March, 2014 at Hannover, Germany.

CeBIT is the world’s largest ICT conference and exhibition that unites leading IT masterminds, experts and IT solutions providers at one place. Over the years, CeBIT has emerged as the most prominent platform for companies and individuals to initiate deals, form synergistic partnerships and tap opportunities to network with top influencers of the ICT industry.

Claim a Free Complimentary Pass to CeBIT 2014

This is the third time that we have packed our bags for CeBIT after participating at CeBIT 2011 and CeBIT 2012. At CeBIT 2014, we will be showcasing a host of services across software development lifecycle with a view to make further inroads into the European IT markets.

Schedule a Meeting with Cygnet

Our offerings at CeBIT 2014 will comprise of services ranging from software product designing to re-engineering and modernizing applications, application testing and digital marketing. In addition, we will be presenting an extensive expertise in the areas of enterprise content management, cloud computing, enterprise mobility and business intelligence.

Visitors can visit us at Stand D-04, Hall No. 6 to personally meet our representatives and discuss their areas of concerns around software development and maintenance.

To claim a free complimentary pass to CeBIT 2014 or schedule  a meeting with us, write to us at info@cygnet-infotech.com or fill up a form here.

See you at CeBIT 2014.

JOSH 2014 – Annual Sports Meet @ Cygnet

Cygnet Infotech celebrated its Annual Sports Day on 8 Feb 2014. Titled JOSH 2014, the event was held at the Veer Saavarkar Sports Complex. It was a fun-filled day with about a 100 participants bringing their competitiveness, energy and verve in every sport. While a majority were excited about the cricket matches, dozens participated in basketball, volleyball, badminton, table tennis, tennis, chess and carrom.

The event started with fresh faces early in the morning at 10 AM, and while most of us were worn down by our exertions by the end of the day, there was a big smile on the faces of the winners in the evening!

But in spite of the physical effort, it was a fabulous day for all, owing to the healthy breakfast in the morning, fortifying lunch in the noon (followed by tea in a couple of hours), tasty snacks in the evening, and the constant stream of energy drinks -- all thanks to the perfect organization by the HR team and enthusiastic help from the support staff.

Words can’t do much justice to our power-packed sports day. Better let the pictures do the talking!

The Top 5 Android Apps to Use in an Office

These days, there are so many android apps use in offices that you couldn’t be expected to keep track of them all. Even so, a few of the apps available to professionals are such efficiency boosters that you really can’t afford to work without them. To that end, we’ve compiled a list of five must-have apps for office workers:

The Top 5 Android Apps to Use in an Office

Android Apps to Use in an Office

Cisco WebEx Meetings

This is an ideal app for professionals on the go. If your company uses WebEx to schedule and conduct meetings, you can then use this app to take your web meetings with you wherever you go. It includes plenty of handy features that are designed with your Android device in mind. To begin with, your phone gets a call-back number so that the meeting can reconnect with you should you be logged off. On top of that, it features full-screen view and multiple-connection capabilities. 

Free, but must interface with an existing WebEx account

Touchdown

 

This app interfaces with your companies MS Exchange server, and that’s a big deal for professionals who require Exchange support (quite a few people, in other words). Through a single interface, the app accesses your calendar, contacts, tasks and email. It also offers a host of configuration options, which is really where the app starts to set itself apart. You can select which buttons appear on the viewer screen and can tweak just about any aspect of its functionality that you could dream of. Touchdown includes strong security measures, so your IT administrator is probably going to be okay with you using it to access the Exchange server. In fact, once they see this app in action, they’re likely download it themselves.

US$19.99, with a 30-day free trial

Dropbox

 

With an increasing number of professionals heading to the Cloud to collaborate on projects and store files, we’re starting to see less collaboration in the brick and mortar world. Sure, you and your colleagues share the same office space, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily share the same storage systems and databases. Platforms like Dropbox help consolidate aspects of the Cloud into a single, manageable space that you can share with anyone you choose. There may be better Cloud-based apps out there, but Dropbox performs solidly and enjoys unprecedented support across multiple products and platforms.

Free and premium (more storage space) versions available

SwiftKey X

 

This award-winning Android app will drastically reduce the number of times you hit the delete key as you’re typing on your Android device. When you’re at work, time wasted is time that could’ve been billed, and this adds up over the long term. SwiftKey X uses artificial intelligence technology to remember words, phrases and sentences that you have typed in the past, and uses this to predict what you are about to type now. This may sound trivial, but it has to be tried to be believed. Once you start using this app, you’ll be hooked.

One-time fee of US$1. 96 – more than worth it

CamCard

This is one of those apps you never knew you needed until you actually started using it. After that, you’ll wonder how you ever did without it. CamCard uses your device’s camera to scan a business card and extract information from it. Better yet, this information is then saved directly to your contacts. For starters, this saves you the time and hassle of creating a new contact every time you’re introduced to a new colleague or prospective client. And if we’re being honest, we’ve all lost a business card or two in the course of our careers. The ability to scan in all the cards you received at the end of a day increases your chances of retaining new contact info.

Ad-supported free (limited) and premium versions available

Regus is the world’s largest supplier of flexible office space and other office related services, with 1800 business center locations over 100 countries.

Christmas Celebration Week at Cygnet

While the Santa Claus was about to arrive with Jingle Bells and lots of surprise gifts, we at Cygnet thought to pep up everyone in the Christmas mood. To instil the excitement and festive feel among employees, we announced a Christmas Week at Cygnet with fun-filled activities and of course lot of surprises.

The celebrations started on 25^th December that is exactly on Christmas Eve. We decorated all the offices with illuminating Christmas trees, lights, balloons, and much more. All the offices were blooming in Red color as the employees too followed the Red & White dress-code for the day. 

The evening saw a huge excitement when the Santa visited every office to give gifts and chocolates to every employee. The whole atmosphere was dipped into Christmas mood and the employees enjoyed gorging on cakes and clicking photos with Santa.

Here’s a quick look at the funniest moments of the Christmas day at Cygnet.

Day 2 was declared as a Green day when all the employees came in green dress-code. The day was going like another working day until a Sudoku Competition was announced. The competition saw a huge participation from all the employees.

Here are the glimpses of Green Day and Sudoku Competition

On the 3rd day we celebrated Blue day with Pizza party while on the 4th day, we organized a Quiz competition when all the Cygnetians teamed up in Yellow color.

On the 5th day of celebration i.e. on 31st December, we bid goodbye to 2013 wearing black color. We all enjoyed making the most of the last day of 2013 by playing games and doing fun activities. One the whole, we celebrated a great year-end at Cygnet.

The celebration continued till 1st Jan, 2014, when we welcomed the new year wearing multi-colored clothes so that the year brings colorful and challenging projects and opens up more avenues to achieve success and great heights. 

We all greeted and wished a great new year to each other as well as clients and ended the celebration with a resolution to achieve more client satisfaction, expand the capabilities and create footprints in more countries and industries.

Check out the chilling moments below

Java Based Frameworks Perform Faster than .NET, Rails or Python! (Findings)

While Oracle released Java 7 update 40 a few months back, it seems that Oracle’s push for Java is not just its illusion! According to the recent tests by TechEmpower, Java web apps or frameworks really beat its toughest rivals, such as .NET, Rails & Python, when it comes to the performance. In a test, Java whitewashes the other popular frameworks with a great lead in terms of faster performance.

From the beginning of March, 2013, TechEmpower, has performed a series of performance benchmarks for different popular web applications server frameworks including Ruby on Rails, Django and others, to test their performance. The benchmarks are released as an open source over GitHub, so anyone willing to have their own framework benchmarked can easily tap the code, add their own tests and submit the results.

You may find plenty of resources over the internet claiming that ASP.NET frameworks, Django and others are more powerful and performance-driven compared to Java, but the benchmarks have brought some surprising results for die-hard Java fans. During the tests, most of the frameworks like Sinatra for Ruby, ASP.NET frameworks and Django for Python failed to rank well in terms of performance. Among all the test frameworks, Java-based frameworks really dazzled everyone through their performance!

Over the years, Oracle is trying hard to push the Java as one-size-fits-all solution, and has left no stone unturned to convince the world about its performance. The recent benchmarks would definitely boost its confidence in Java for sure.

With the rapidly changing technology, Oracle is planning to bring Java 8 in the near future that will be a unified solution of all the Java editions in order to help developers write a single code for both embedded devices and servers. Another revolutionary Java project is “Java Avatar”, which is nothing but a JavaScript and HTML5 services layer for Java that is going to work with Grizzly, a Java framework.

Of course, Java frameworks perform well, but is performance enough for Oracle to gamble about in the future?

What’s your take on this? Share your opinions or views in the comments…!

127 Units of Blood Donated at Cygnet’s Annual Blood Donation Drive

Every year, Cygnet Infotech organizes a blood donation drive as a part of its CSR activities. This year, with the help of Gujarat branch of Indian Red Cross Society, we donated 127 units of blood.  We began this initiative in 2010, and more and more employees have been coming forward to donate their blood every year.  

Last year, 106 employees had volunteered to donate their blood, while this year 127 people stepped forward for blood donation. This is our largest blood donation contribution till date, and it was kicked off by the first donor: our Managing Director, Mr. Niraj Hutheesing. Pleased with the tremendous response to the campaign, he said, “I am thrilled by the enthusiasm and love with which so many Cygnetians have taken part in the blood donation campaign. I appreciate their actions and am grateful to all the donors for their selfless actions.”

Indian Red Cross Society’s team leader for the event, Mr. Viral Joshi, highlighted the issues faced his medical organizations in Gujarat, “We do not have enough blood donors in Gujarat. People in our community are averse to donating blood because of baseless fears and superstitions. And, this creates a big problem for the community as there is barely enough blood to meet the needs of emergency and regular patients. Gujarat also has over a thousand Thalassemia major children who need blood transfusion on a regular basis. So, receiving such a substantial quantity from Cygnet is highly appreciated.”

Moved by a desire to help the children, several employees resolved to donate blood on a regular basis. Currently, out of 60% of eligible donors in India, less than 5% donate their blood. Some institutions estimate that while the country needs 40 million units every year, only 4 million are available. Cygnet Infotech is committed to make real contributions to the society, and by educating and encouraging our employees to donate blood and participate in other similar initiatives, we hope to inspire a sense of social responsibility and care in our organization.

10 Tips to Make Your Offshore Java Development Productive

ISVs and software vendors are always in search for alternatives to fulfill their business objectives and goals at the lowest cost possible. One of the best possible strategy that can help them save money while reducing the development and IT overhead is to outsource the software requirements to the offshore development company.

For almost every technology, you can get a reliable outsourcing partner who can steeply reduce your development as well as maintenance cost.

There have been lots of articles and blogs written about the outsourcing process. Of course, it is beneficial for you to make yourself familiar with the outsourcing process, but do you know how to make your offshore development more effective and productive for your business?

Let us try to find an answer today for ISVs and software development companies who are Java development company and are considering Java development outsourcing to make their overall process more effective and productive.

1. Don’t forget to clearly define the scope and plan for your Java development venture

This might seem a must-to-do thing whenever you outsource your Java development venture, but any successful Java development project always initiates with the clear scope of the project. It is important that you define your project requirements up front for the service provider in order to get precise proposal and a reasonable price quote for your project.

Moreover, try to be straightforward about the deliverables you’re expecting from the vendor. Also, you should be clear about the project schedule requirements as it may have a huge impact on the overall cost of your project.

2. Well-defined criteria and Quantifiable objectives

It is very important that the objectives are quantifiable in order to make it achievable through outsourcing. If it is possible for the potential customers to compare the performance with the pre-established objectives, the benefits of outsourcing would be quite clear. Moreover, it would help the service providers to know where they stand when it comes to fulfil the expectations of the customers.

A well-defined criteria like what framework of Java to be used, what database to be deployed, which Java server to be deployed, etc. would help you achieve quantifiable objectives, service quantities, quality and customer satisfaction on the go.

3. Know & learn JAVA

To make your Java development outsourcing successful and productive, it is very important that you power-up your understanding with Java. It will help you leverage qualitative services for your application development. All you’ve to do is to sharpen your Java basic knowledge like coding structure, frameworks, availability, usefulness and more. You can find a whole host of reference material and documents online. 

4. Find Your Needs

Once you’re done with Java basic knowledge, it is time for you to create a road map for your Java development venture. You can conduct a small research over Java using websites and portals to know the exact nature of your website. It will help you identify desired features of your application or website.

5. Search for skilled Java professionals that suit your project needs

Generally, the offshore Java development partner you choose will have enough experience of developing projects that you’re undertaking, but that doesn’t mean you overlook other things. It becomes more critical when you’re having a project requiring a lot of technical expertise. Therefore, always look for professionals and skilled developers who can understand your business needs and deliver the right kind of solution to achieve your goals. If possible, go for a company which provides Java certified developers to work for your project.

6. Never choose a service provider based on PRICE

Of course, price is the major concern whenever you outsource your Java projects, but that doesn’t mean you choose a vendor based solely on price. The success or failure of your Java development project does not depend on the price quote offered by the service provider. It is important you look for a service provider that offer a balance of good value and quality results.

7. Monitor and Track the development

Once you’re done with the hiring process, it is important you spare some time to look out for the development process. You can ask the service provider to provide development process updates either on weekly or regular basis. It will help you understand the ongoing process of your project by going through the reports. Moreover, you can also show your concerns about the specific task during the development process.

8. Arrange payment for pre-defined project milestones

It is important that you have a work plan for your Java development project with pre-defined milestones. With the help of pre-defined checkpoints to review the progress of your project is the easiest way to meet the deadlines. Moreover, you should tie the payment with each milestone. You can pay 20-30% of the payment up front, but remaining payment should be done at the completion of the pre-defined milestones.

9. Negotiate ownership of work straightforwardly

When you outsource your Java development project, it is important that you have a clear idea about who is going to own the code and resulting product. Ensure that the offshore partner understands how you are going to use the deliverables provided by them.

10. Extend the Contract

If you feel satisfied with the work of the offshore partner, you can extend the contract further in order to keep the developers available for you whenever you need any changes or technical support from them. You can go for long-term contract as it will help you leverage from the low maintenance and service charges.

Ensure you follow all the tips discussed above in order to make your Java development outsourcing productive and effective for your business. Have you tried any of these tips before? Share your views and experiences in the comments…!

Is it Ruby on Rails or Java for You?

So you have a web development project in mind to be developed from scratch. For sure, it is a complex web application that has got to be rich in feature, scalable and maintainable. Among these core requirements, it’s difficult for teams to choose a programming language or a web framework that is objectively the best to suit the given requirements.

There are hosts of technologies and programming languages available. Of these enterprises have widely embraced open source object-oriented programming languages like Java, Python, Ruby etc. for their web development requirements. Considering the coding advantages and structure of language, the most preferable languages that come to my mind are Ruby on Rails and Java since the other language i.e. Python is loosely structured which makes the development process longer.

Now the question here arises whether to choose Ruby on Rails or Java technology for your web application development requirements.

Let us take a closer look at both these technologies from the following perspectives to make an objective decision-

Find out the bests of Java & Ruby

Tools, Libraries and APIs:

Since Java has been around for a long time, there are several tools, APIs and libraries available which makes its infrastructure more powerful than Ruby. Having this kind of infrastructure is more essential when a company matures and customers demanding high quality services and features expands. Since Ruby is younger than Java, it lacks the support of such tools, libraries and APIs. This makes Ruby stand lower compared to Java.

Learning Curve:

As Java comes with various combinations of libraries and technologies to be applied while coding, developers have to spend more time in learning different architecture and sorting out the details. On the contrary, Ruby helps you get started quickly due to its simple development architecture which is easy to learn and apply. Hence the vote goes to Ruby for the advantage on learning curve.

Manageability of Codes:

With Java, managing codes and defining classes is easy owing to its statically typed programming language. In Java, especially with Eclipse, you can search defined methods and classes which are better than calling something hypothetical as in Ruby where handling codes and naming classes is difficult due to its dynamic language type. With dynamic typing, it’s confusing and difficult to assume what you are typing and changing since there are no warnings from the Static compiler. This ends up spending more time in Ruby and difficulty in managing codes.

Testability & Robustness:

Although both the languages have good support for regression testing, Ruby is slightly ahead of Java as it relies strongly on automated tests which ensure things do not break easily if there are changes at the other end of the application.

Scalability and Stability:

In terms of scalability and stability, Java beats Ruby due to the scalable architecture of all the frameworks of Java. In the event of outages and unfavorable environments or with a large number of users and database, Java frameworks are more secure and dependable than Ruby. Even corporates prefer Java over Ruby for their critical applications which means Java outweighs Ruby on scalability and stability grounds.

Percentage Hiring:

A survey conducted two years ago in cooperation with the SHARE user group, IBM and Northern Illinois University on 376 employers revealed that Java is the most sought after language by enterprises for hiring. Java accounted for 56% while Ruby constituted only 5%.

Considering the above perspectives, you may find that Java is better if you want the backend of your application to be more scalable and manageable while Ruby can be a choice if you want to get it done quickly. For those who cannot decide, here is an example of the social media giant – Twitter. 

Find out what and how it did.

See what Twitter did

Twitter is one of popular and highly used micro-blogging and social networking services started in 2006.

Twitter in its early years was running on Ruby on Rails. With over-usage by people across the world, there was a time when Twitter became vulnerable as the number of tweets and queries increased which created load on the back-end server. Moreover, the search latencies also increased which reduced the request handling making it unavailable for users.

Hence in 2010, the engineers at Twitter realized that Ruby was not enough capable of juggling with the tweets of millions of people across the world.

The team found that Java frameworks because of higher scalability and maintainability were well-suited to develop web-services that can stand the large traffic. The engineers started rewriting the Twitter search engines and moved it from MySQL to Lucene. They also replaced the frond-end Ruby with Blender – a Java Server to improve the search latencies and sustain the traffic.

Twitter engineers also installed JVM (Java Virtual machines) across all their servers and created an independent web service which communicates with each other constantly but also looks after various part of their web application. Like there will be an independent web service that will look after Twitter homepage and another that will handle tweets from mobile.

As a result of these changes, Twitter started running 3x faster without any problems.

Mazen Rawashdeh - Twitter's VP of Infrastructure Operations Engineering then said “The bottom line: No matter when, where or how people use Twitter, we need to remain accessible 24/7, around the world.” "We’re hard at work delivering on that vision."

This is how Twitter moved from ROR to Java and managed to be on top even after so many crisis.

Java surely rules it

From the above example, it’s evident that Java is better than Ruby on several grounds. It is not only a programming language for developing application but also a virtual machine that can run codes built in myriad languages. Even big operations like Google, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Square, have adopted Java because of its ease of use and ability to handle multiple operations through the JVM.

Owing to its lightweight and fast-to-deploy architecture, Java is gaining recognition. As published in a post on Zd.net, Wired Enterprise’s Editor Cade Metz observed that "Like Twitter, many other companies have realized that Java is particularly well suited to building web services that can stand up to the massive amounts of traffic streaming across the modern internet,"

However, it is still portrayed as an insecure framework but after Oracle acquired Sun – the original producer of Java, it has become more stable and secure programming language.

So now what do you think? Is it ROR or Java for your web development project? Do let us know in commens section. 

Download our Free Whitepaper on Grails: Accelerating J2EE Application Development

7 Must Have Modules in an Ideal Property Management System

The real estate industry is getting more ‘n’ more complicated with each passing day. It requires a lot of paperwork, which consumes a vast area of storage. As the industry grows more paperwork will start to increase the number of files needed to manage it. To overcome such issue, it has become imperative for the people associated with the real estate to invest in web-based software or property management portals that has the ability to store a huge data while helping them streamline entire property management related activities on the go.

A good property management won’t cost you, but it will help you make more money on behalf of your real estate business. No matter who you’re, whether you’re a property owner, fee manager or developer, you can leverage from a whole host of benefits from the effective property management portal or real estate management system. It lets the real estate owners manage their day-to-day tasks, enable tracking of multiple accounts, minimize security risks, save costs and offer a lot more benefits on the go.

However, when it comes to choose the real estate or property management system or application, many people forget to consider a few very important modules or features. Are you looking for an ideal property management portal or a system? Ensure you consider all the important software modules discussed below in this article:

1. Does it offer Lot management module?

Lot module helps the real estate agent or property dealer to define categorize buildings in terms of lots and numbers. Such modules would enable developers with ease of segregation and grouping of the properties. It becomes very handy when you’ve multiple properties to deal with.

2. Unit management matters a lot!

Units serves a critical role in the property management portal. It is very important for the developer or a property dealer define units appropriately and fill up the details accurately. An ideal property management portal should offer efficient unit management, which will help property dealers or developers to define units and fill up the details, such as unit number, type, entitlement, lot number, building number, floor area, car parking and so on.

3. What about owner management?

It is one of the most important feature that every real estate management system should provide to the user. An ideal property management portal or system should easily display the information about current owner, their email address, unit owned by the specific owner, position, property related documents and other details related to the owner.

4. Should provide effective tenant management

If someone has assigned his/her property to the tenants, it becomes crucial for the real estate agents or even for the property dealers to keep the up to date details about it. An ideal property management portal or system should provide ample details about the existing as well as past tenants. Moreover, it should provide details related to the lease, such as start date, expiration date, related contracts and more.

5. Efficient service charge management is crucial

While dealing with the properties, dealers or developers should be aware about the service charge that is going to be taken from the users as well as manage them smoothly. It involves a service charge defined for the specific property for the financial year selected and create invoices respectively. It should clearly state whether the service charge conducted is normal, special or includes any other charges along with other details.

6. Well-managed discount and penalty details

The real estate management system should also offer efficient and well-managed discount and penalty details, which includes specific discounts and penalty for non-payment and prepayment of funds in consort with the ability to provide due date and grace period. It will greatly simplify the way property dealers manage such critical details.

7. Contract and agreement is crucial!

While dealing with the properties, it is important to keep track record of the contractors who have assigned services to be provided from their end. An ideal system should offer a means of managing such crucial details. A system should offer developers or dealers to define different types of contractors who are assigned special tasks to be accomplished to the property and their agreement with the property.

Apart from all these, one should also consider other features and modules like the ease of collaborating documents online, customizable analytics and reports that will help you take better decisions, instant access to the key properties, budget and forecasting, lease tracking, repair and maintenance, expense management and more.

Here’s an example of an ideal property management system developed for a Dubai-based real estate operator. This system was developed in Java technology using Grails framework. Check out how it helps in managing property related issues 

Do you want to develop a real estate management system or a property management portal? Get in touch with us.