Brain Alliance

As the new Managing Director / CEO of Soprano Brain Alliance I have had the pleasure of stepping in the middle of surging demand and huge growth opportunities.

It seems that PHP based solutions, like Drupal, Zend Framework and others are conquering new ground all the time; gaining significant market share as the household name and choice of large organizations mass-migrating their various sites into Drupal, amongst other PHP market victories. Similar shift can also be seen in more and more B2B and professional services field as well; as companies like Apple are not going to support Java in their iPhone and iPad products; which means that this needs to be a design consideration from now on. PHP is also gaining market share from Microsoft's .NET, meanwhile Ruby on Rails and Python isn't really flying all that well - and the lack of RoR/Python developers doesn't quite help at all.

Steve Job's quote on Java puts it quite well ;) "Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain." Recently I have received feedback from many corporate customers that they feel the same when it comes to Java and web solutions; too much failure, historical baggage, too costly development, always over schedules etc. However Java still certainly has a place in enterprise backend systems and similar heavier stuff. And I still believe people can build good Java stuff, if they do it with an agile way (aka the only way).

All of this means that there's a tectonic shift in the market: so many companies and corporations are committing to PHP and building their future revenue streams on top of it! Thus we feel the need to grow and to grow fast!

What we can offer to an employee?

* Good environment to expand your knowledge, learn and develop your competence

* For example, we have weekly internal events that facilitate collegial learning; lectures about technical topics of importance etc

* We have an active coaching program to coach our experts and develop their competence as professionals and as growing & learning human beings

* We by nature hard working, curious and open to new ideas and ways of working; quality and great ideas are much valued in our culture

* Our employees are a blast to work with; our workplace has an open & direct atmosphere, plenty of humor and occasional fooling around

* We employ great passionate people that enjoy their work very much, and hope you are an equal personality to add to our bunch of scifi enthusiastics, musicians, black belt martial artists and champagne connoisseurs

* We are a fast growing company with no lack of growing responsibilities and challenges from our clients; we can offer you an environment to grow to your potential as a top grade professional, including the roles of a manager

* Our goal is to balance your individual situation with your work; offering an environment where people and their well being comes first

* We are a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq-OMX stock exchange; our financial stability is transparent and stable - you can rely on us for being there for the long haul

We are seeking competent and driven people to these roles:

- Drupal Architect

- Drupal Developer

- Project Manager

- PHP developer

- Magento software architect

All applications and requests for info should go to rekrytointi -atz- brainalliance.com -email address. Or contacting me is also ok (all tho it might be slower due to my schedule).

Coming back to the previous blog post:

http://tane.li/2010/free-sail-blue-oceans-once-more

I started on a new post today. As the Managing Director of Soprano Brain Alliance, and Executive Vice President of Soprano, Plc, and a director in the Plc's board of directors.

The finnish language news piece about it can be found here.

This can be categorized as a "corporate entrepreneur" kind of job.

Our aim will be to take the company into new heights and significantly develop it further - for the benefit of our clients and partners alike. It being a public company; there's some limitation to what I can blog about. Keep an eye on us ;-)

Just 6 minutes ago this stock market filing (in finnish) went live from Soprano. It outlines an acquisition we have been working on lately:

Soprano Plc is to buy Brain Alliance Solutions, Ltd (www.brainalliance.com). Asmo Halinen and myself are in the board, together with the CEO-Entrepreneur Jukka Hassinen.

Moments like these are rare cool stuff: despite of being an entrepreneur for more than 10 years and having 4 tradesales behind me already, stuff like this is not on the agenda every day.

Soprano is a publicly listed company in the Nasdaq OMX market, and in this acquisition they acquire 51% of Brain Alliance - effectively making Brain Alliance a public company.

The talks that lead to this acquisition progressed quite quickly - as is typical when two parties that share a strong common interest "discover" each other. Brain Alliance's CEO Jukka Hassinen has a nice entrepreneurial war story behind him: starting about 6 years ago with nothing straight from school, and now selling to a well-known public company. That's first class entrepreneurial example for you! (althou I must admit that the scale is still quite small: these companies are not mega-corporations yet, but they have such a huge potential for growth. Especially when combined together like this).

It was a pleasure and a privilege to be working on this.

This was my second time being involved in a tradesale to a public company: back in 2003 I sold Fuksiini Sites, Ltd. as its CEO, to a company listed in the same stock exchange.

People have been recently citing that "we need entrepreneurial examples in this country" - well here's one, so spread the word!

Brain Alliance Ltd announced today that me and Mr. Asmo Halinen (ex-CEO of Apaja/PlayRay, etc). Have joined the company's Board of Directors.

There a finnish language press release here.

Brain Alliance is the largest PHP-specialized programming house in Finland, with emphasis on agile web projects etc. They are the main representative of Zend Technologies in Finland. And they have for example made the tech for this blog of mine.

The company has been growing by the rate of 3231% over the past 3 years and the new board members' role is to facilitate further growth and help the company to continue their success story. Their CEO Jukka Hassinen still owns 96% of the company and has managed to grow it very fast without any outside financing etc.

I am so much involved in consumer Internet projects and in social networks that I consider it quite healthy to get heavily involved in a proper B2B business and professional services organizations for a change.

So, if you have a web-project that needs agile and prompt execution; please be in touch ;-)