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Interview with the CEO: Three Home Runs at the Mid-Market Advisory Council

This last March, IBM held its bi-annual Mid-Market Advisory Council (MMAC), a two-day event geared at educating IBM business partners about the new technology coming out this year, in Raleigh, North Carolina. “There were three technologies they’d announced that I felt are of particular interest and relevance to Small and Medium Businesses in the e-commerce industry,” says Teresa Zobrist, CEO of Zobrist Software Group Inc.

The first of which is the IBM’s new Smart Business solutions.   Smart Business is all about maximizing return on investment by making it cheaper for businesses to run their intranet and internet web applications.   The Smart Business solutions are a combination of hardware and software that deliver an application-ready platform pre-configured and ready to use.  Businesses can access the Smart Marketplace to acquire and deploy web application to their Smart solution.  If a business is just getting started, it can acquire a Smart Cube already containing the applications of interest.  No manuals, no learning curve, just out of the box functionality. Better yet, this system updates itself, patches its own applications, rotates its own logs, etc.  It maintains itself, saving money and time that would otherwise loose to downtime after downtime.

Second is IBM’s Rational AppScan.  IBM created a suite of software that automate and ease security testing of web applications.  Security is a topic that is always at the top of our minds at Zobrist Software Group Inc. We have always taken security seriously in all of our projects. This new suite allows businesses to take control of all web applications’ security.  It conducts security scans on a number of areas such as permission controls, authentication, privilege escalation, and static code analysis, identifying gaps in security that must be closed.

Third is IBM® WebSphere® sMash.   It is an extremely light development and runtime environment that enables development in PHP and Groovy.   Developing with WebSphere sMash reduces complexity and risks, shortens development time, and minimizes learning curves.

We at Zobrist Software Group Inc. always look for better products to provide our customers better custom solutions in terms of ROI, efficiency, security, and ease of administration. Usually that means developing our own intellectual property, but sometimes a product comes along that we think is fantastic as is.   If you’d like to know more about how these products would benefit your business, please feel free to contact us!

Contact us: tzobrist@zobristinc.com