Ideaca one of Canada’s top ICT Companies in the 2012 Branham300 Rankings

Ideaca have been listed in the 2012 Branham300 ranking of top Canadian ICT companies.  The Branham300 highlights the top Canadian and Multinational ICT companies operating in Canada, as ranked by revenues. 

“Ideaca managed to weather the difficult economic times by building and maintaining trusted relationships with our customers,” said Mike Alkier, Managing Partner, Ideaca.  “With the market rebound, we were able to grow our organization in 2011 and are poised for continued success in 2012 and beyond.” 

Check out the news release!

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Best Workplaces in Canada Second Year in a Row!

Today it was announced that Ideaca was recognized for the second year in a row as 2012's Best Workplaces in Canada - Medium organizations. Best Workplaces in Canada is ranked using the results from employee surveys and comments. This year, we ranked at number 17 surpassing last year's number of 69! What an amazing accomplishment and an outstanding achievement for Ideaca and our employees!

The full list of companies will be posted in today's Globe and Mail and also can be viewed here.

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Moving Towards the Cloud: Ideaca Profile with Terry Bradshaw

Ideaca is featured on television show Profiles hosted by Terry Bradshaw, 4-time Super Bowl Champion, broadcaster and successful business man. This episode of Profiles is a feature on "Leading Developments in Business Application Consulting".

Ideaca chose to focus on Cloud Computing for this segment and its role as a highly disruptive and revolutionary technology that is quickly gaining momentum in today's marketplace. We describe why this computing methodology is changing the landscape of information technology and Cloud's capabilities in revolutionizing internal IT systems in any organization.

Look out for this segment on your local news network!

Check out the clip here.

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Virtual Shopping, the future is here!

After a day of hard, excruciating work, most people are just interested in going to their homes and doing what they do best - relaxing. However, for many people, a hard day’s work isn’t completely over until you make a visit to your local grocer.

Imagine, having to push your way through a large crowd to try and get to a relatively available check out, only to be forced to wait for an extensive period of time in a long, endless lineup. That thought has propelled the latest development in mobile technology – Virtual shopping! According to the Globe and Mail's article Virtual shopping gets real at Toronto subway station, these mobile devices are increasingly becoming more elaborate and intuitive to a point that they can also do our daily shopping, as proven by Tesco (a multi-national supermarket) and Samsung.

Adapted in South Korea by Tesco and Samsung, ‘virtual 3D’ stores were installed in subway stations across Seoul, South Korea which allowed commuters to simply scan the QR code of the item that they desire with a mobile device. When those customers arrived at their homes, their items would have been shipped – and possibly even delivered - to them within the same day. This technology has been recently adapted by the online retailer well.ca, who has launched their version of ‘virtual 3D’ stores amongst Toronto subway stations, forecasting a possible change in retail marketing as we know it.
 

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Ideaca Renews Multiple Microsoft Gold Competencies in the Microsoft Partner Network

We have renewed our gold competencies in Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Portals and Collaboration and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as well as silver competencies in Virtualization, Web Development, Application Integration and Data Platform.

"These Microsoft competencies showcase our expertise and commitment in today’s technology market and demonstrates our deep knowledge of Microsoft and its products,” said Mike Alkier, Managing Partner, Ideaca.  “Our plan is to accelerate our customers’ success by serving as advisors for their business technology needs.”

“By achieving a portfolio of competencies, partners demonstrate deep expertise and consistent capability on the latest Microsoft technology,” said Jon Roskill, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. “These partners show true commitment to meeting customer technology needs today and into the future.”

Check out the full story here.
 

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RIS Reveals 2012 Mobile App Award Finalists

Mobile apps have become huge in retail and are continuing to grow in popularity at a rapid rate. They are becoming ubiquitous in the retail landscape from both a consumer and corporate standpoint.

Retail Info Systems News (RIS) has just revealed their 2012 Mobile App Award Finalists, categories include: Enterprise Excellence, Innovation, Shopping, and Store Operations.

A few facts based on recent RIS research were also included in the article:

• More than half (a total of 57.2%) of responding retailers update their mobile apps every three months, or more frequently, 42.9% every two to three months, and 14.3% every month
• 50% of consumers return to the retailer's app at least once a week
• Mobile app budgets are on the rise among nearly three-quarters of surveyed retailers
• Among those with growing budgets, the average increase is 50%

The finalists, and the above facts, speak to the advancement and innovation occurring in the retail mobile app space. Retailers are starting to pick up on this so the next year should be interesting...

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Corporate Mobile Application Strategy

In the March/April edition of Exchange Magazine, Ideaca's Brad Blaskavitch wrote an article around creating a Corporate Mobile Application Strategy for your business.

In this article Brad outlines five essential technology components for a successful mobile strategy:

1. Mobile Devices: Smartphones and new generation tablets are more powerful and capable than ever before, and keep evolving at a rapid rate. Their power allows for more advanced applications. The ability to store data when network connectivity is lost, has been critical to corporate mobile application initiatives.

2. Mobile Applications & Platforms: Previously, organizations delayed investment in mobility for fear of tying themselves to a single hardware vendor, causing paralysis. Today's mobile computing platforms and development tools have advanced to the point that device OS/manufacturer is no longer significantly relevant. Mobile applications can be developed once to run on Android, Apple iOS and Blackberry.

3. Network/Carrier Infrastructure: Wireless telecom companies have made tremendous investments to improve the speeds of data transfer and expand their geographic coverage. We have seen the transition from 2G to 4G networks. These improvements allow mobile applications to have more capability and perform at acceptable speeds.

4. Corporate Technology: Many companies have invested heavily in corporate systems and line of business applications to improve operational efficiencies in administrative functions, systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Financial, Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence. Organizations now have the key internal infrastructure to support a true corporate mobility strategy and extend these capabilities to their mobile workers in an integrated solution.

5. Cloud Computing: While many will argue that it isn't a core requirement, cloud computing has allowed many organizations to scale their technology footprint without incurring the significant capital costs of a more traditional on-premise hardware strategy. The ability to scale up or down the computing power of an organization, eliminating hardware and IT resource constraints, has freed up capital and IT resources to focus on value add solutions to increasing the organizations competitiveness.

For the rest of the article, click the link below to check it out on page 32-33. http://www.exchangemagazine.com/currentissue/ExchangeVol29No4/

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