This is a great story on how exactly the 2008 crisis happened and what events were essential to creating this unique clusterfuck.

A really nice read, a lot of interesting information regarding the financial details of CDO, CDS, how them crazy bankers sell risk and all other things.

The book reads like a James Bond book or even better like Robert’s Ludlum Bourne series, but better. Because it’s real. You’ll have fun while reading the book and at the same time learn something new about the financial world and how they manage to earn their million sized bonuses.

I haven’t checked the statistics for siebel custom search for some time now, surprisingly:

that’s more than double the visits from last year at some point. Just thinking about adding more websites, and maybe making it more usable, what do you think? Any suggestions?

Heeeey, long time no see, actually more like a year or something, and part II (part I) is ready – here it goes:

During 2009 while everyone was struggling and recovering from 2008 economic clusterfuck we were hiring like crazy. Practically trying to get every good and experienced  Siebel/Java/BI/Integration professional on board.

When we really hit the jackpot with hiring was during the summer. And this was a very vivid picture of not only why small companies can adjust quicker but also what benefits can they get from that. What happened was that Accenture globally was reacting to the 2008 events, but as always with such enormous empires, it was 1) almost a year late 2) reacting without proper adjustment to market/situation. As usually the solution was more practical than creative/effective and they just slashed salaries by 15% and did some firing (they did fire a lot of executives though – ~10% surprise-surprise, never mind the bonuses, here comes the harsh reality).

As I understood local Accenture office didn’t have much to say about this and had to follow the orders from the big boss. As you might have already guessed after such an event the loyalty and expectations of people there wasn’t THAT great, and this basically showed that we can offer something substantial and different in a good way. Compared to a company that is considered by a lot of people, myself included, as a very good place to work and gain expertise. In the end this allowed us to grab some really great and senior people, and that in turn helped in building up the internal structure of the company as well as laying the foundation of our .NET practice (btw we are hiring).

To provide even better value for our people, we chose a partnership with Sampo Life and their Life Insurance and Investment Insurance packages for everyone. As a side note, back in 2009 people got to choose their investment strategies (conservative/balanced/agressive), well 2011 seems not so good for global investors (or the fund managers at Sampo are slackers) and all agressive portfolios are losing money :(

Overall the year was again something we didn’t expect, the 2008 financial meltdown had pretty much no negative effect on the business and even allowed us to attract more talent and expand. By the end of 2009 we moved to our new office and celebrated the 2 birthday of IPR as a 40 people strong company. Yay!

Сегодня добрый ХБР прислал по теме три пункта, похоже в среду на самолет в 5:45 утра, все пункты кроме одного удастя удачно пропустить.

По ссылке можно найти ещё больше полезных советов о том, как выжить, если Вы много путешествуете.

It all began in November 2007.. or maybe not.. it probably began earlier than that for different reasons and motivations but as a company Idea Port Riga was registered by it’s 5 founding members in November 2007 almost 3 years ago to the date.

The initial meeting/ working/ planning/ eating place was a pizzeria nearby and probably during the first weeks or months they really started to recognize us there. There’s definitely a great feeling of entrepreneurship, all the possibilities that you envision while sitting and discussing plans and actions for the next couple of months and thinking about how it will all be moving forward, adrenalin rush, supplemented by a so-so pizza and a beer!

Soon the first opportunity came and we rushed to prove that we are worth the money we wanted to earn. Our first true client was based in Moscow, and a week before NY three years ago we took a plane to cold and snowy capital. Ok, I have to admit, at that time a knew next to nothing about what we were going to do there, but with a little help I slowly started to understand bits and pieces of how the business is ran. Almost at the same time we moved to a small room enough for us 5 and a couple of hired people to staff the project that was forming really fast. The great atmosphere in that room is still felt, partly to the fact that we knew practically all of the people that we hired and partly to the fact that we issued shares of the company and all people were eligible to receive compensation according to their involvement in company activities.

During the next months I started suspecting that our client was really happy with what we were doing and how we were doing it, since we first doubled the number of people and continued hiring non-stop. We quickly outgrew the small room and had to move to a new room two floors higher. During year 2008 there were ups and downs, discussions till late in the evenings, working hours during the weekends and enormous amounts of experience, today I think I would have done 99% of things differently, but that’s the whole point of learning, isn’t it? Anyway we grew to around 30 people and by the end of the year moved to an even bigger space in a nearby business center that just opened. To wrap up the first year of Idea Port:

I want to give BIG KUDOS to our clients that trusted us during that first year, we couldn’t have made it without you.

I want to give BIG KUDOS to the four guys who had the balls to leave well payed jobs and start everything from scratch.

I want to give BIG KUDOS to everyone who believed in Idea Port Riga, joined or supported us when we really needed it.

It’s really exciting to start something, invest time and energy to the fullest. Also really fun. Also really scary – since there’s no way of knowing what the result will be. But definitely worth it.

With a little lag, Happy Birthday IPR!

How do you attract customers that seem to be immune to advertisement?

Use creative ads?

What do you do if Flashy ads don’t work on the web? You use text based ads and hope that you’ll hit a relevant audience.

But it seems sometimes a leaner version without all the bells and whistles is more effective. Especially if you don’t even flash your company name anywhere, but provide some content (organically inserted into a content publishing website). So what company hides behind “LEARN MORE“?

Just a quick update for those of you who didn’t notice and some explanation behind the remake of our website @ Idea Port Riga.

We received a lot of help from a wonderful and down to earth company in Izhevsk, the decision didn’t come easy not to mention the fact that we tried to do some face lifting by ourselves with little success.

But overall we are happy with the result, even if it took a little longer to get the whole thing operational and it’s clearly not that easy to work remotely without ever physically meeting the team “on the other end”, well whoever solves that problem will probably become a very rich person.

Now stop reading and go check out the website if you didn’t do so already, and we still have a lot of things to do, starting probably with organizing our Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook presence or maybe something else.

Happy that people are using the Google custom search engine for Siebel

maybe you’ll also find this helpful in your day to day work http://siebel.collected.info/.

Very simple and straightforward, get the rss feed of all Siebel related info.

Just had a great birthday a couple of days ago, thanks to everyone who came, the party was goood )

And here’s an improvised invitation we did with a colleague for our joint birthdays at work: