Straightforward – Python

Today, we are starting a new series of articles dedicated to the typical things we have at ERNI. Let our colleagues tell you what is of habit in our company life.

With the industry-wide shift towards cloud computing, securing access to compute and data is becoming more important than ever. Unfortunately, strong security often limits ease of use. This is often felt within teams employing dev-ops practices like continuous integration and continuous deployment.

The EDD (ERNI Development Day) was the first ERNI event I attended after I joined the company 8 months ago, that’s why it is so special for me. I could get an impression about the authentic ERNI spirit here.

In the sense of “old ways don’t open new doors”,  ERNI is putting emphasis on training and developing the communication skills of its employees.

Attention! This year you will find us for the first time at the IT Days 2019 on 9-12 December in Frankfurt am Main.

Swiss Software Engineering goes West: ERNI now has its own office in the middle of New York’s Manhattan district.

How should a self-driving car decide when an accident is inevitable? Who is allowed to suffer damage and who is not? An exciting question that machine ethics is dealing with.

At ERNI, we believe the digitalisation is important across industries. The healthcare is not exempt from this improvings. Listen to new ERNI Podcast and learn more.

In our Insider Tips Series, this time we chose to present one colleague who is Bernese – through and through.

Soon, algorithms will decide in many areas, and not people. What role does ethics play in this?

Often, we hear the buzzword “Design Thinking” but what does it really mean and what’s behind it?

The next participant in  Insider tips series is our ERNI Germany colleague “Doru” Vasile Teodor…

On October 15, ERNI once again sponsored a meetup for software architects in Zurich, this time on the topic “The Distributed Big Ball of Mud”.

After the exciting string of job fairs that our Recruiting team participated in during the first half of the year, we are going on now.

Mulugheta Samuel (ERNI) – Agile Coach at ERNI Deutschland – came to Germany with the fall of the Berlin Wall end of 1989/beginning 1990.

If you have experienced nearshoring or offshoring, you already know that the choice of the right partner is crucial.

The WHO (World Health Organization) published a comprehensive report on the trends, challenges and solutions for our ageing population. The report sheds light on many aspects we all globally will have to deal with at a point of time in our lives.

Tipura Ilija, Professional Consultant at ERNI Switzerland reveals some pieces of his background in this episode of our Diversity Series.

Capabilities Leaders Need to Have to Ensure the Survival of Companies

Which are the biggest challenges of the healthcare industry in 2019?

How to combine teambuilding, fun and nature care in one? (Part 2)

Maneka Fahrer is Managing Director of Bloom Identity which – as of 2018 – is part of the ERNI Ecosystem…

Outsourcing tasks, projects or services is not new. It is nothing more than a modern form of labour division. Companies concentrate on their core competencies and outsource other activities to appropriate specialists. For example, the entire IT operation, individual tasks such as security and telecommunications, certain business processes or software development.

How to combine teambuilding, fun and nature care in one?

Which are the health events no one in the industry should miss in autumn 2019?

Franziska Grohmann is our third candidate in our Diversity Series. She works as a Senior Consultant for ERNI Switzerland but originally comes from Northern Germany.

The iconic doctor with a leather suitcase, illegible handwriting and conservative views is being substituted by the first internet generation: the handwriting is still illegible, but it does not matter, as the tech-savvy millennials typewrite everything.

We’re moving in a world that spins faster than it already does. New technologies are popping up that serve as enablers for the creation of new business models.

Highly praised by some – feared by others. Scepticism and concerns about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not only expressed by many employees who worry about their jobs, but also companies see risks – especially when it comes to data security.

Selim Akyol, Managing Director of the digital marketing agency NexMarket belonging to the ERNI Global has half Swiss and half Turkish roots.

Will artificial intelligence have the same impact as the steam engine had? Find here our brief overview of possible potentials and application examples for AI and data science.

ERNI scholars deeply express their gratitude to ERNI for opening up vast opportunities, and for igniting their interest in IT education. As the next step, the top three graduates will proceed with an internship at ERNI where they can further enhance their learnings and use their theoretical know-how to practical work.  

Allow us to introduce you to the future of manufacturing. The fourth wave of industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, is already changing the world of manufacturing in many ways. Intelligent connection of all machines involved in the manufacturing process, automated data collection and analysis, autonomous decision making based on the current data from the environment – these are just some of the hot topics that manufacturers are talking about.

In the first episode of our Diversity Series we do not get tips from one person only…

Machine learning is research-intensive work with a more-than-usual amount of uncertainty that provides new challenges to an agile mindset. Furthermore, data scientists often have an academic background and have limited exposure working in a customer-focused engineering environment.

On 20th June 2019, at the ERNI Development Day taking place in Bern, Switzerland, a new Service was introduced by the name AI & Data Science.

Have you ever wondered what a day at ERNI looks like? Watch the second video from our “One day at ERNI”.

After a year now, on 8 June, nine colleagues from ERNI Slovakia again participated in the “Our City” initiative (Naše Mesto) making Slovakian capital city Bratislava a better place to live.

The benefits of IoT are many, but something that is common for most of them is cost reduction. Whether it is through better quality of products, fewer work-related accidents, or better tracking of shipments – the implementation of IoT typically brings in significant cost savings for a company. In our experience with clients, we’ve identified the following benefits:

The Summer Outing/Team Building is an annual company event that every employee looks forward to.

Read this interesting interview with our colleague Soňa which was included in series Women in IT.

Already 5^th year of IT Fooscup happened last week in Bratislava. This special event connects the world of IT with the favourite office activity – foosball.

What kind of tests can be automated and why is test automation an essential part of the development process? With the Information Technology industry developing more and more and becoming one of the core industries in society, the need for having the best and most reliable product is irrefutable.

At ERNI, we strongly believe in the benefits of intelligent apps. Currently, we are developing the “Intelligent Meeting Room”, where members of the meeting are recognised by a camera. Listen to ERNI Podcast and learn more.

Oracle. A company that holds the license to Java. Java. One of the most popular programming languages, according to Octoverse. Oracle Java. An implementation of the Java language which costs money. Are you using Oracle Java? Are you paying the Oracle license fee? Continue to read if you want to find out what other options there are for using Java, like not to pay.

The new study of the “Institute of Financial Services Zug (IFZ)” of the University of Lucerne states that Swiss banks outsource more services than ever. The outsourcing volume of Swiss retail banks alone is estimated at CHF 2.2 billion. An estimated CHF 1.75 billion (80%) of this is accounted for by IT services.

Augmented reality has been a part of “the real reality” for a while now. It is predicted that AR would reach its peak in 2019. Do you agree? Listen to ERNI Podcast and learn more.

On 8-9 April in the premises of our Zurich office, our 18 ERNI colleagues went through a Leading SAFe course. This prepared the participants for the SAFe Agilist certification that they are entitled to take afterwards.

The n-tier or layered architecture is one of the most known and used concepts in enterprise development.

Welcome to our new home: You can find the ERNI office in Zurich now at Löwenstrasse 11, only a few minutes’ walk from the main train station.

Last month the EPH Social Project Core Group team paid a surprise visit to the ERNI 15 scholarship students.

Have you ever wondered what a day at ERNI looks like? We are starting a new video series about our colleagues and their working day.

Unit economics, a term from business meaning the fundamental minimum piece of your business that you can measure to understand where your revenue comes from, helps companies stay in control of their return of investments (ROIs).

This article can help you set up fully automated deployment of Azure DevOps build agents. It explains step-by-step instructions on how to set up automated deployment of self-hosted agents using Azure DevOps Pipelines.

Helping someone to see them become better is not an easy task. You need to exert all your efforts, attention and time to achieve it.

The winners of the internal ERNI Hero Team contest decided to use their reward for a good purpose – to visit the Haribon Foundation at Lumban for seedlings preparation.  

Who says coffee is only good for drinking? It’s now good for painting too! Anyone can enjoy the art of coffee painting. This has encouraged me to start some Coffee Painting Workshops.

What does a Predictive Maintenance solution look like?

On 2 April 2019, we had the pleasure to attend the ETH Polymesse job fair in Zurich.

As a habit already around mid of March, also this year the ERNI Performance Days (EPD) took place near the Bratislava site – this time in a recreational area of the city of Senec. Between 14 – 16 March the crew spent two days fully packed with workshop sessions developing technical as well as soft skills, networking and some sports and leisure activities.

Imagine a scenario wherein you need to quickly setup APIs or microservices for your POCs or small projects without the hassle of provisioning or managing of your infrastructures.

At ERNI Slovakia, we have an established group of 3D enthusiasts. This week their new 3D printer arrived – bringing their passion to a new level. The machine came in parts so the printer had to be assembled. Michal Molčány and Miloš Karas tell us more about it.

Nowadays there is a great deal of hype around Data science. But what exactly is it? Let me take a stab at a basic definition. And also explain why Python is the programming language to go for in this field and why Dask comes into play.

Software developers are facing a lot of trade-offs every day. This list is not meant to be complete. It is just a selection of interesting trade-offs we expect to pop-up during this year. Also, there is no simple answer to the trade-offs we discuss here. The correct answer is, as always, “it depends”.

The Marketing team of ERNI dedicated its internal “Hero” reward to the breeding of fallow deers at the ZOO in Bratislava.

Last week we had the opportunity to participate in the MWC19 as Friends of the Swiss Pavilion.

Let us talk about the advantages that apps bring to the customer interactions and communication

Did you know that this year we changed the format of our information about the facts and figures from the world of ERNI?

The management consultancy McKinsey not only dedicated a study to this topic in 2018, but also developed the McKinsey Design Index (MDI) from it. This should quantify the business value of an appealing design.

Each ERNI site has its own way of hiring and recruiting.

I remember one time I was working with a mobile project and it was already deployed to the client. It work out well from planning, development, testing to deployment but after a while the client was clamoring that the app is getting slower and slower when it was continuously being used up to the point where it will just crash suddenly. Well it is a given fact maybe not all but I’m guilty of it that we really love our code, so in that sense I was pointing the blame on maybe the device or something unusual that the client was doing with the Application. To make the long story short I’ve learned that Profilers are programmer’s best friend.

The research company “App Annie” has revealed that worldwide app downloads have increased by 60 percent between 2015 and 2017 to a total of more than 175 billion annually – statistically this means almost two downloaded apps per inhabitant per month. No wonder, since the number of apps available on Google Play and the iOS App Store has now grown to more than six million.

Last year 2018 ERNI Spain had the opportunity to start a collaboration with Theodora Foundation bringing smiles to the hospitalized children and their families.

Since 2010, Hans Hess has been President of Swissmem, Switzerland’s largest industrial association, and Vice-President of economiesuisse, the Swiss Business Federation. For our .experience magazine, he contributed with his guest article on industry 4.0.

ERNI will be sponsoring and attending the Barcelona Mobile World Congress from 25-28 February organized by the GSMA within the Swiss Pavilion.

Apple founder Steve Jobs once said: “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.” Jobs was known for placing a high value on the design of his products. But he wasn’t the first.

PEDCO and ERNI will work together in fostering the growing numbers of Applied SAFe® customers; where PEDCO delivers its own product Applied SAFe® and ERNI with its 25 years of experience in Swiss Software Engineering delivers consulting, technology, delivery, and agile coaching in order to bring the Scaled Agile Framework to live at Applied SAFe® customers.

As a more than 4-year-long SAFe® practitioner and trainer, I see that SAFe offers a lot of chances for our customers. Generally, in the long run, enterprises want and need to change the way they are working, but often do not know where to start.

Nearshoring as a way to focus on the core business and let a nearby location take care of your software development is around for some decade. However, the competition among nearshore locations in Europe has intensified and it is not an easy decision to pick the right one for your needs.

RPA is a buzzword of today. What can we imagine under the term and what definitely not? Let us explore the topic more deeply.

Last month our ERNI team in the Philippines experienced a memorable event. We all got united for one purpose and that is to extend our generosity and love. This year, instead of having the usual exchange gifts we came up with an idea to raise funds and give donations to our chosen charity. This program was called “Exchange your gifts to those in Need”.  

How-to: a simple introduction based on a workshop for the HR department.

When we as ERNI visit a customer for the first time and they explain to us how the company works and what their structures and internal conflicts are, we typically recognise the three infamous silos.

The advantages of cross-platform apps are similar to those of a hybrid application. Eager to know why they are a recommended app solution? Read our article.

In a nutshell, a physical object is created from a virtual design, i.e. the digital design is converted into a physical three-dimensional object by adding material layer by layer until the object is formed.

At ERNI Slovakia, we took the opportunity to make some dreams of kids in Slovak foster homes come true.

How do you get from a great idea which you believe could have a significant impact to a tangible product? In a recent community project at ERNI, we put ourselves to this task.

Currently, according to Statista, WhatsApp is by far the leader among cross-platform apps (Android and iOS), followed by Facebook, 20 Minuten, Instagram and various weather apps.

Switzerland has been named the most innovative country in the world for eight consecutive years, according to the Global Innovation Index.

When we talk about innovation in general, we talk about three steps. Let us explore which ones.

Why is cybersecurity gaining importance for everyone and how can you eliminate risks? Read our newest Technology Post.

Another team portrait from the Our Teams series in awaiting you on the following lines.

Apps have become the most important channel for customer interaction for almost all industries and countless companies within just a few years. This is particularly true for so-called Mobile-First markets, where mobile devices are the No. 1 platform and many of their users have completely skipped the generation of desktop devices at the desk.

Recent rapid developments in business and technology require businesses to become faster, more global, more agile.

How do you get from a great idea which you believe could have a significant impact to a tangible product?

What attributes make Progressive Web Apps attractive? Explore our second article.

On October 15-16, 2018 we came together in beautiful city of Barcelona to celebrate the 5 Years @ERNI Event.

We all have dreams and dreams are always good. Especially if you have a dream within your team.

In our new series we present you our teams at ERNI. Get to know us better.

Progressive Web Apps: What does it mean particularly? Let’s explore it deeper in the article.

We have entered into a strategic partnership with QCENTRIS in order to grow faster in the German market.

Being socially responsible is a respectable act. Do you agree? We do.

What are the challenges of the modern agriculture? And what uses does IoT have in this field?

After a successful Hack and Hike event in Switzerland, another one took place in Slovakia this weekend. Twenty employees joined this event in order to spend some free time with their co-workers, enjoy the fresh mountain air and organise a few hack sessions.

Attending conferences is a door opener in every business area. In Madrid, The Swiss Business Hub Spain as representative of the Swiss trade and investment promotion agency Switzerland Global Enterprise (S-GE) and part of the Embassy of Switzerland in Spain organized the Swiss fintech conference and B2B event FINTECH SWITZERLAND.

Since the beginning of 2018, starting with our market entry to the U.S., a group of three ERNI experts has been performing work for our medical technology customer in the States. What is it like to be working in the U.S.A. and how are our colleagues doing overseas? We talked to one of them – Nuria Lluch, our Barcelona Lab Manager about the experiences.

At the end of every summer, the developers meet and spend a weekend together surrounded by nature. This activity, called Hack & Hike, brings an opportunity to escape from daily routine, clear the minds by hiking and come up with new ideas during the hack sessions.

Previously, we already talked about the healthy lifestyle pages of our colleagues from ERNI Philippines and the engagement of our Slovak colleagues for the Capital city of Bratislava. Today, Stefan from ERNI Switzerland tells about his support of a non-governmental organisation in Madagascar.

Oliver Gramberg from ERNI Switzerland closes up our series My favourite programming language. Read why he has NOT ONE single programming language.

As on the job, also in life, walking challenging ways pushes your inner strength forward.

Read a success story of our colleague John who motivated also his colleagues to lead a healthy lifestyle and get back on the track

Since several years, at ERNI Slovakia our team has been volunteering within the initiave “Naše Mesto” making life in Bratislava more enjoyable.

The majority of challenges that businesses in the medtech industry have to face are related to innovation and market access, says a study carried out by the Swiss Medical Technology Institute.

Why it matters and what to do about it

Andreas Gisler becomes CEO of the ERNI Group with immediate effect. He also remains Delegate of the Board of Directors of ERNI Global and thus responsible for the operational management of the company with the three divisions ERNI, SEI and People Business.

On 19 July 2018, the ERNI Philippines Community Core Group held its 4th External Community Event in the company premises.

Do an experiment, approach your friends or colleagues and ask: “How do you think you will have changed in the next 15-20 years?”

During a TEDx talk in Calgary, Alberta last summer, MIT doctoral student Steven Keating explained how curiosity about his brain led him to volunteer to have it scanned for a study.

Testing the latest medical technologies

An overview of the skills needed for both small- and large-scale projects

As a developer who regularly uses multiple programming languages, it’s always hard to single one out as the “favourite programming language”.

Agile methods and sprint-based development make our teams more effective.

Agile is a methodology that can be used to launch new software projects efficiently and rapidly.

Read these two case studies about external scrum master and nearshored scrum team

An active learning culture is a crucial part of a modern organisation that wants to attract and nurture the best talent. Fostering communities is a great way to achieve this.

The previous two articles in this series introduced the Azure Machine Learning Workbench and walked us through the process of wrapping our ML model in a self-contained Docker image. Now is the time to take this image and deploy it into a production-grade environment.

My favorite programming language

In change initiatives one key success factor is to create a shared view on what the future will look like. Visualising of the envisioned target state is a powerful method for guiding the change team on their way through the change.

The first part of this series of articles introduced the Azure Machine Learning Workbench and showed us how to setup the resources required to operationalize our machine learning models. In this article, we will see how to get our model into Azure and run it locally for testing purposes. Let’s get to it!

Machine learning and AI are everywhere. More and more people are discovering the advantages that learning algorithms can provide – decreasing costs, improving efficiency, eliminating menial tasks, etc. Knowing at least a little bit about how these algorithms work is quickly becoming a necessity. Read it now.

Interns at ERNI series: Isabelle Rüthemann

Interns at ERNI series: Adrian Chiorean

Many of our customers’ data projects are subsets of larger Internet of Things initiatives. Although the IoT produces data, the scope of the IoT projects is usually more extensive and covers a broader pool of activities. This illustration describes/shows the ERNI collaboration model for IoT projects.

Interns at ERNI series: Viera Maronová

A cyclist full of energy, a passionate painter, a handball player jumping in the air with a clear goal to score: Anyone who is currently looking at the external presentation of ERNI can see a clear move.

The upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years.

Interns at ERNI series: Nikoleta Žišková

Five practical case studies

The second part of our Managing Stakeholders article evolves around further phases of data projects and what stakeholders to involve.

Developing ourselves with many interesting sessions.

We are all working together at ERNI, but not all of us can see each other daily. Some of us have the opportunity to work closer with other teams and know each other better – long distance is not a limiting factor anymore.

Why is culture an important element of our company? Check the video from our latest workshop in ERNI Geneva and learn more.

Radu has a bachelor degree in Robotics.

It is not just securing the transmission and storage of data against hacks that is important. Here are some easily missed security pitfalls.

Get to know some of our young and successful ERNIans!

Continuous Integration / Delivery is bread and butter of every agile development team nowadays. Visual Studio Team Services or Team Foundation Server is one of many tools providing this feature. Although I will use VSTS/TFS in this article same process can be used with any other CI/CD tool.

Innovation can be hard to implement if there is no common understanding about it between the organisation’s stakeholders (colleagues, partners and leadership). For a project manager, stakeholder management is not only important but it can also often make or break the project.

DevOps is an important facet of mobile app development that is now a requirement for a successful app life cycle. When building and delivering mobile apps nowadays, one has to consider setting up a lot of different things.

In our 7 under 30 series, we are introducing you our young and successful ERNIans!

We have worked hard on the implementation of our website. The result is a page with a new design, new content and simplified navigation. It fits into the new overall appearance of the ERNI Group.

An integral part of consultancy and software development in a VUCA world – meaning volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguine – is focusing on making feedback loops shorter and more efficient. The agile mindset is spreading within organisations – from agile software development to business or corporate. Here are the 5 major methodology trends we see for 2018.

Are you sitting next to a Hero? Has your team member positive impact on personal and company development or social engagement?

With the recent status of digital transformation, besides the technical skills of teams, soft skills for fostering collaboration are gaining even more importance.

Get to know some of our young and successful ERNIans!

Applying “Business-centric user experience” is decisive for whether an application will be used by the end users or will fail.

Technology Post No. 61

Existing business models must be reviewed during digital transformation, with new business ideas developed, sorted and evaluated.

This is the first time at ERNI, that our employees had the chance to nominate any of their colleagues for their positive approach or social engagement.

Laura is 28, married and living in a small village close to the mountain called Begues, Barcelona.

“DevOps as a Service” ensures that a solution with a directly measurable benefit is found.

Get to know some of our young and successful ERNIans!

“Innovation as a Service” delivers customised methods for the entire process from creating ideas to implementation of a solution with measurable added value.

With the adoption of smart technologies for business innovation, it is crucial for IT governance to be a process of continuous improvement.

The beauty of digital solutions lies in their ability to adapt to customer specifics. The underlying technology framework does not have to be recreated each time.

Enrique joined ERNI shortly after graduation and ever since has devoted himself to his responsibilities of quality assurance.

Vendors can no longer only rely on the monitoring and management of IT infrastructures to keep pace with market needs.