You surely know Volkswagen…

• 330’000 employees worldwide
• 12’000 exclusive dealers worldwide
• 50’000 employees at the headquarter in Wolfsburg, Germany

• thereof 25’000 for production
• and 10’000 for R&D;

Multi-branding…

Wolfsburg’s factory

• 3’600 cars/day
• 1.6km2 (= area of Monaco)
• one production-line = 2.2km long
• 5’500 bicycles
• one car = 13 hours production time and 17 hours process time
• 90% of the production automated
• 95% of cars produced are already sold

…But did you know that

• at Volkswagen

• About 70% of all new Volkswagen cars are sold in combination with Financial Services!
• 2/3 of the profits of the VW Group were generated by the Financial Services in 2005!

• After real estate investments, the acquisition of a car is the 2nd biggest investment, done up to 10 times in a customer’s lifecycle!
• About 70% of all cars in Western Europe are sold with a financing or leasing product.

…And did you know that

Dr. Bernd Pischetsrieder, Chairman of Managing Board Volkswagen AG, declared:

“…We have two strategic business fields:

1. The primary automobile service and
2. Life cycle services. Lifecycle services comprises customer-related services such as:
• Financing
• Leasing
• Rental
• Insurance

The relationship between the two strategic business fields is reciprocal.”

Financial Services by Volkswagen

Crazy and very disturbing to see how far this very efficient, fully-automatized and huge car producer is now depending on….Financial Services.

A great example of fuzzy frontiers between Industries.

[via Scoble]

I haven’t known this code for life from Miguel Ruiz, good stuff.

Agreement 1

Be impeccable with your word – Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

Agreement 2

Don’t take anything personally – Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

Agreement 3

Don’t make assumptions – Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

Agreement 4

Always do your best – Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

It’s vital to ensure a balance between business and technology needs from the get-go.

Another great article about our ecenter story and our SOA approach published by InfoWorld, based on a great interview from China Martens made last week (link, pdf). The article is also mentionned on java.net.

Some abstracts (strange to quote myself ;-).

“One thing to understand is that the implementation of SOA takes time, it’s a journey,” Didier Beck, the head of eBusiness Center at Helvetia Patria, said Wednesday.

He cautioned against rushing headlong into an SOA deployment. Instead, he suggests a company spend time at the start of the project to come up with a vision followed by a road map with milestones for what it hopes to achieve both technically and in a business sense with the deployment. It’s vital to ensure a balance between business and technology needs from the get-go, Beck added.

Goals for eBusiness Center included speeding up application development and promoting reuse of common components. Helvetia Patria also wanted to be able to develop applications that could then be used by a variety of distribution channels such as the Web and intranets instead of having to write applications separately for every channel.

Helvetia Patria went live with its first application developed based on eBusiness Center in February 2002, according to Beck. Since then, the company has put in place four to six new applications per year, he said. Development times for new applications are now between four and eight months, making development two to three times faster than was previously possible.

Update: the same article from China is also published at ComputerWolrd Australia (link, pdf).

[via BetaNews]

Umh, that is interesting :-) Some remarks from Ellison about the acquisition of JBOss by RedHat. Have a look.

Oracle, most known for its database software, is considering whether to release its own Linux distribution, and has even discussed the possibility of buying Novell in the process. The news, revealed Monday by the Financial Times, follows the purchase of JBoss by Red Hat.

With JBoss providing software that competes in the business market with Oracle, Red Hat has become a potential rival. Red Hat is the largest distributor of the Linux operating system, which Oracle relies upon to sell its own products. “We have to re-look at the relationship; so does IBM,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told the FT.

“I’d like to have a complete stack,” Ellison said, referring to both applications and the operating system they run on. “We’re missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.”

According to the FT report, Oracle has even considered acquiring Novell, the second largest Linux vendor thanks to its purchase of SUSE. But at this point, such talk is merely explorative, Ellison says.

Dear all
We are flying to the south of France in some hours, near Nice, exactly at Vence. Seems to be great, weather forecast is positive, break is needed!!

Happy Easter and take care.

Hewlett-Packard published two press releases about our ecenter case. You can find both posts at the HP Newsroom or at Yahoo Finance:

• Helvetia Patria Doubles Return on Investment with HP Service-oriented Architecture (Yahoo, HP)
• HP Introduces Industry-specific Service-oriented Architectures (Yahoo, HP)

Some extracts:

“In the past, we were spending a significant amount of time and investment maintaining multiple IT environments that created more challenges than opportunities for us,” said Didier Beck, head of the eBusiness Center, Helvetia Patria Group. “HP is a true partner who worked with us every step of the way to create a solution that could speed our entry into new sales channels and market segments.” […]

Helvetia Patria turned to HP to implement a centralized Internet-based platform for the insurance industry that links information among its employees, partners and customers across Europe. […]

The resulting eBusiness Center helped Helvetia Patria by substantially decreasing time to market for new products and helping to expand distribution channels. Additionally, SOA opened new opportunities to expand partnerships (for example, with brokers and agents) and enter different segments of the insurance market.

The HP SOA also has helped the company lower business transaction costs by improving efficiencies through repeatable processes and consistent data on clients, policies, claims, benefits and accounting.

“Four years ago, we found ourselves dealing with a disarray of sales channels built on various software applications all across Europe,” said Nick Stefania, deputy head, eBusiness Center, Helvetia Patria. “We used HP’s SOA framework to help solve this problem, and after just months, our eBusiness Center has operated so successfully that we’ve spun it out into a standalone company, called eSolutions Center. The SOA has enabled more seamless communications between sales channels, better access to real-time information and, as a result, better service for customers. In short, the new architecture has definitely played a key role in the eSolutions Center’s success.”

[via BetaNews]

Linux vendor Red Hat announced Monday it has entered into an agreement to acquire JBoss, maker of middleware, or software that connects disparate systems and applications to facilitate faster and cheaper development. Red Hat will pay $350 million in cash and stock for the company, with another $70 million payout based on performance.

With the acquisition, Red Hat says it will transition to service-oriented architectures (SOA) in order to enable running next-generation Web applications atop a low-cost open source platform. JBoss has a similar business model to Red Hat, offering service and support for its open source middleware applications.

Have a look also at the official press release from RedHat.

I have told you here that we had exceptionnal snowfalls on March 5, 2006. About 60 cm within 24 hours, which blocked completely the whole streets. Some pictures from this day, after the snowfall.

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We have finally managed to fix our logo within our office last week :-)

Laurent, who is working with us at ecenter solutions since October 2002, announced the great news on last Wednesday:

I was renewed as Microsoft MVP in the category Visual Developer – ASP/ASP.NET.

MVP means Most Valuable Professional, have a look at the MVP profile of Laurent and the definition of this Microsoft’s program.

Laurent is also the founder and editor of one of the most valuable and well-known French portal about Microsoft .NET technologies, Tech Head Brothers, where about 11 MVP’s are now publishing regularly.

We are all very honoured to have you on board!