opportunity

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).

It has been interesting to see www.vakuutuskone.com a site/company I Co-Founded to increase its traffic manyfold now that the economy is in the gutter.

The site does comparisons between insurance and finance product options. Much like www.moneysupermarket.com in the UK and similar sites in other markets.

Sounds pretty logical; people feel the financial squeeze -> there's a burning need to switch to lower cost (essentially better) insurance options -> traffic on sites like Vakuutuskone (loose translation: the insurance machine) goes up manyfold.

Vakuutuskone.com is still the only site in the finnish local market that does customized comparisons between companies and their product options, all the other players in the same space rely on non-customized bulkish comparisons, often limited to price only.

It will be interesting to see how much opportunity, and what kind of opportunity, rises from the economic downwards spiral. So far the outlook on many sites is not bad.

One of the largest webstore platform providers in Finland just today reported that their customers' Xmas sales went up despite the current situation. Seems like websales is still very much alive and kicking, even if retail is slumping.

Have you heard any recessions-defying success stories lately?