I’m sure most IT professionals would have had at least a cursory look at the new Microsoft Windows 8 Customer Preview by now. It’s a bold ‘bet the house’ move by Microsoft and quite ironic that it’s the Redmond corner doing the big moves now while Cupertino’s latest efforts seems only incremental. It could just [...]
February 3, 2012
Do your customers trust you to deliver value?
Anyone going to be buying Facebook shares? I think I might – if only because it will be THE cool icebreaker for the next few months. What’s not to like. But $100bn? That’s a big number – even in America where a billion is not quite what it is here in Europe. Where does that [...]
January 19, 2012
Build Measure Learn
Here’s a take on business building that I thought would be worth sharing. I figured it may be of use in your own efforts and also serves to provide you with an insight into ours. Lean startup methodologies have been around for a few years now and as more supporting evidence is fed back many [...]
December 20, 2011
CentraStage in 2011
Those of you who kindly follow this blog will have noticed a deathly quiet from about September time. Deathly quiet doesn’t quite capture it actually – it’s more the kind of quiet you get when cotton wool falls on to a deep pile carpet, and then misses, falling slowly into an abyss of blackness…well you [...]
September 6, 2011
Reselling the Cloud
The imminent move of our CentraStage platform to the Amazon Cloud will have positive implications for our users in the form of faster access and improved availablity; but what will it mean for our resellers? CentraStage will no longer be available as an in-house installation thus removing the opportunty to resell the software. Before looking [...]
August 14, 2011
Customer questions are the best answers.
Last week I did a customer webinar during which I demonstrated our new patch management feature and briefly touched on some of the new features due for release in the next few months. The feedback was really positive but, more important were the questions. We try really hard to prioritise existing customer requirements when planning [...]
August 2, 2011
Clean and clear user interface design
Sounds a bit like a skin cream I know, but making sure that our user interface (UI) is kept really simple is a major driver for us here at CentraStage. Remote management and monitoring tools are typically complex beasts and making all that functionality available without overwhelming the user – or looking like the dashboard [...]
July 27, 2011
User authentication: Toby or not Toby?
Sign up for just about any online service and you are bound to have to choose a username or password. Enough has been written about weak passwords for me not to repeat it here, suffice to recommend to you that you always add at least one caPital or specialch.aracter. (It has always pleased me that [...]
July 19, 2011
Does free still add value?
Within the next month or so we are going to give away some of our best technology for free. Loads of it – in fact as much as you can eat. You’ll have to wait for the launch for all the details but I can tell you that our lead agent developer Kevin @deapsquatter is [...]
July 14, 2011
Empower your users
I saw a t-shirt today that immediately resonated with me. Splashed across the front was “No, I won’t fix your computer”. Genius. Mention to anyone that you’re in the IT business and you’re sure to get a request to sort out a computer problem. Before I get any cold shoulders let me make it clear [...]
Ian van Reenen
Hi. I’m the CTO for CentraStage, a cloud based remote device management product. This blog is a space for me to share some insights into how we develop software at CentraStage, and how I’d like to keep improving that process. Again and again, and again.
Best regards,
Ian
March 19, 2012
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