The ICT Journal and ALP ICT have released their 2011 study on employment within the IT industry sector in Western Switzerland. IBM, HP and SITA stand at the top of the list as multinationals. blue-infinity is ranked 4th, but is the largest independent local employer. Read the full article, written by Rodolphe Koller, that provides very interesting statistics on the evolution of the industry, including lack of IT resource, outsourcing strategies, mobile technologies, cloud computing and the economic climate.

A few facts that you will not find in the article which have fuelled blue-infinity’s growth:

• Ability to provide fully managed services in the areas of support, infrastructure and large-scale migrations
• One of the largest Microsoft and J2EE development teams in the regions, delivering both custom and packaged solutions for enterprise
• A team of ERP experts to complete teams on the ground
• Cost-effective Open Source solutions for collaboration and e-commerce
• Focus on Information Architecture, Usability and User Interface Design for enterprise applications
• Focus on mobile technologies for consumer and enterprise applications
• A digital marketing agency to optimize brand visibility, convert customers and manage reputation
• An internal PMO, with solid methodologies and tools
• Continuous training and certification of our teams
• Partnerships with leading software providers
• A flexible, creative and fun work environment, focused on the employee
• Realising that we need to improve every day

And most importantly, we could not do it without our talented and hard working teams, and our clients who give us the opportunity to work on great projects!

In conjunction with Visilab, Ted Baker’s new campaign is now online: http://ted-visilab.ch/index_jeu.php.

 Visilab asked blue-infinity to conceptualise and develop an online campaign.

 If you want a chance to win a weekend in London for two, visit the website and join the game!

La Praille recently launched its new website: www.la-praille.ch, with the aim of providing better service and information to their customers.

The site, which was completely designed and developed by blue-infinity, provides practical information on shopping, leisure, promotions, events, opening times, how to get there, etc..  You will also find information on the Stadium, the Ramada Encore Hotel and the Event Centre, all part of the complex.

“La Praille is a modern complex with a wide range of activities and services. The website needed to reflect both the modernity and warmth of La Praille, while providing each store the ability to promote its brand”, says Pierre Leroux, Art Director. “We used big images so that the user is instantly transported into the environment. The mega-navigation is a modern way to give quick access to information.”

“The project required close collaboration between our UX, design and development teams. In addition, we provided a solution so that the site can easily be updated with new promotional content”, adds Julien Lechenne, Project Manager.

Isabelle Desbeaumes, Communication Assistant, La-Praille. “We were congratulated by management and the stores. The website definitely fulfils our objectives: a modern image, as well as good functionality, clarity and interactivity for our customers!”

November’s ICT journal saw two articles by blue-infinity’s Fabrice Perrin and Jérôme Lorido.

In ‘5 Digital Strategies for Luxury brands’, Fabrice explains how luxury brands have become champions of rich media, B2C, one-to-one and innovative iPad applications, and looks at some of the digital strategies used by these companies.

In ‘Sales and After-Sales Services: when Technology helps Luxury Business’, Jérôme outlines two examples of how luxury brands are benefiting from technological advancements in the world of IT; whether it be to increase operational performance, or perhaps reinforce the position of a brand.

Click here to read the original articles (in French) 

The International Academy of the Visual Arts honours blue-infinity with three W3 Awards for outstanding web design

Up against competition from over 3’000 other entries submitted by small creative firms to the largest agencies, our work for Vacheron Constantin, Mavic and Clinique La Prairie has been recognised by the International Academy of the Visual Arts as outstanding examples of creative excellence on the web.

Whilst we have already been honoured with awards for our development of the Mavic and Clinique La Prairie websites, this is the first time we have won an award for the Vacheron Constantin mini-site.

blue-infinity was asked by Vacheron Constantin to produce a promotional website for their ”Treasures of Vacheron Constantin’ exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore. The website incorporated an innovative layering effect upon scrolling, displaying a selection of the items on exhibition against an eye-catching, dynamic background.

Aside from a focus on the exhibits, the site offers practical information on the event, and is geared up to encourage sharing across social media sites.

Take a look at the Treasures of Vacheron Constantin site here

For our work on Mavic, click here, and Clinique La Prairie, here.

For the second year running, blue-infinity has been honoured with an award in the Web Marketing Association’s annual WebAwards.

The WebAwards is the premier annual website award competition which names the best websites in 96 industries while setting the standard of excellence for all web development.

This year, our work for the Clinique La Prairie on the development of their new site has received the ‘Medical Standard of Excellence Award’, which recognises outstanding web design and development in the medical industry.

Our development team utilised a number of cutting edge technologies to realise the project, and the site features some exciting design features, which are talked about in our previous article on the launch of the website.

In addition to being honoured with an award, the Web Association’s judges noted that our website for the Clinique offered ‘beautiful design that captures the essence of the company’, and that it ‘captures the brand’s character’.

We would of course like to agree; but to judge for yourself, visit http://www.laprairie.ch

The internet has become an extremely competitive space to market products, so how do you stay ahead of the competition? Without physical sales people, how do you encourage visitors to click on the oh-so-important “add to basket” button?

These were just two of the issues addressed by blue-infinity at this year’s “Salon eCom”, which took place on the 24^th May at the Ramada Hotel in Geneva. Laetitia Giannettini, Lead User Experience Consultant, and Guillaume Arluison, Open Source Solutions Practice Manager, teamed up for a presentation on how to optimize product landing pages to convert visitors into buyers. To illustrate this, Laetitia and Guillaume discussed usability best practices across different e-commerce sites, which included the often overlooked work that goes into attracting people to your product page – effective SEO.

The Mavic website, created by blue-infinity, has once again won an award for outstanding web-design. This month, blue-infinity was awarded Gold at the prestigious 41st Creativity International Awards – the shortlist of which can be viewed here

To view our work for Mavic, please visit www.mavic.com

I’m proud to be in a company that puts measures in place to decrease its footprint on the environment. Since today marks the annual World Environment Day, organized by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), I thought I would give you a brief overview of the takes steps we take here towards a sustainable environment.

Read the rest of this entry »

blue-infinity designs website and adapts logo

February 2011 saw the launch of Clinique La Prairie’s new website, just in time for their 80th birthday celebrations.

Situated in Montreux, on the shores of Lac Leman, Clinique La Prairie is a world renowned medical clinic known for regeneration and cosmetic surgery. The Clinique offers a wide range of medical and paramedical services, and is the recipient of numerous awards relating to its outstanding spa treatments.

With a desire to update their website, La Prairie chose blue-infinity as their new web agency due to its track record in designing and implementing complete web solutions for a number of high-profile luxury brands. In addition to blue-infinity’s award winning experience in web design, our advanced content management system also proved to be a major attraction for the client.

Read the rest of this entry »

blue-infinity is now an integration partner of Sinequa, further expanding the range of Enterprise search solutions that we can offer our clients, which already include Microsoft Search Server Express, Microsoft SharePoint Server, FAST Search Server as well as Autonomy and Attivio.

blue-infinity’s new partnership with Sinequa will enable us to continue to provide the most effective and cost efficient Enterprise Search solutions, tailor-made to our clients’ needs.

Sinequa’s all-in-one solution is built around a customizable search engine that incorporates linguistic and semantic analyses and can take a user’s business context into account, enabling organisations to tame complexity and handle large volumes of heterogeneous data.

More than 250 companies, some of them amongst the largest international corporations and the biggest consumers of information and data, already use solutions from Sinequa, such as Crédit Agricole, Siemens, Bouygues Construction, SFR, EADS, Mercer and the French Ministry of Defense, just to name a few.

Juan Manuel Garrote, Partner at blue-infinity, states that ‘We are really excited about this new partnership, and are sure that this will continue to strengthen our position as Switzerland’s number one provider of Enterprise Search solutions.’

For more information about Sinequa’s solution, please visit http://www.sinequa.com/

Having recently announced our new Social Media monitoring and engagement services, which were showcased alongside our new Social Media Lab at this year’s LIFT conference, blue-infinity were asked to contribute to the ‘Social Intelligence’ file for the ICT Journal, a Swiss information technology business magazine.

The file, published in April, consisted of three key sections: the sectored approach to social networks, the utility of a control centre for social networks and an interview with the CEO of HyperWeek, Raphaël Brinner.

View the full article (in French)

Our website for Mavic has just been awarded the Official Honoree in the Retail category in the 15^th Annual Webby Awards.

This Official Honoree distinction is presented to the top 10% of the 10,000 pieces of work that were entered into this year’s awards, and aims to celebrate remarkable achievement, and honor an outstanding caliber of work in this international competition.

See http://www.mavic.com/fr

The Challenge

Having been a user of a leading CRM tool for nearly ten years, blue-infinity had faced some doubts about its adoption due to questions of flexibility, ergonomics and integration. In addition to this CRM tool, blue-infinity uses a large number of specialist applications that provide support for collaboration, document management, knowledge management and blogging. This vast array of tools, often developed internally and updated and improved continuously, poses a well known challenge: integration.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once again, blue-infinity will be an official speaker at the TechDays conference taking place in Geneva on April 5th-6th. We will be presenting two sessions; the first of which will detail the search capabilities of SharePoint 2010, where we will be discussing the different search options available in each version. We will then examine ways to extend the search, using integration methods, search federation and customization.

The second session will focus on identity management and federation through Active Directory Federation Services Version 2. Initially developed to enable trust relationships with external entities, ADFS is becoming more crucial as it allows federation of identity within the enterprise and in the cloud.

This year’s AIESEC OCP Career Days took place on the University of Lausanne’s campus on the 10^th of March. The event is organized by members of the Association Internationale des Etudiants en Sciences Economiques et Commerciales (AIESEC), the world’s largest student run organization, and provides graduates of HEC, UNIL and EPFL the opportunity to meet with top Swiss and International employers across a range of industries. blue-infinity was present to welcome the bright and talented business graduates that HEC, EPFL and UNIL produce, who are interested in careers in consultancy.

Throughout the day we encountered enthusiastic graduates seeking roles in Business Development, Project Management and Business Analysis in fields ranging from IT/IS, to HR, Finance, Strategy and Marketing and Communications.

Recently ranked as the 4^th largest recruiter in Suisse romande, our stand at the event attracted a lot of interest from potential candidates, who have heard about the diverse and interesting projects on which we have worked, and continue to work on.

The event was a huge success, although we now face the mammoth task of following up with the large number of young, promising graduates eager to join blue-infinity!

Over the past six months, blue-infinity has felt the strong buzz of activity within our clients. And in order to support our customers’ projects in Asia, we have opened a branch office in Hong Kong this week. Already present in the Czech Republic and in neighbouring France, blue-infinity continues its growth, supported by 300 employees; of whom 200 work in Geneva. “In 2010, we achieved a turnover of 42 million Francs” reports Pierre Aebischer, one of blue-infinity’s three partners.  “We still see our growth in Switzerland”, he continues, “but, today, we need to look at opportunities for growth abroad. Asia is an interesting market for our clients within the banking and luxury sectors.”

blue-infinity hopes to benefit from a return to the decentralization of IT within enterprises. “The support required from providers such as ourselves therefore becomes even more crucial”, concludes Pierre Aebischer.

For more information, please contact Sonia Nair

Take a look at the articles on our expansion in the La Banque Suisse, ICT Journal, Le Temps, market.ch, PME Magazine and the Tribune de Genève - in French.

The LIFT11 Conference in Geneva is an annual event, bringing together a community of pioneers to explore the social implications of new technologies. The three-day conference offers insights and discussion into the current and emerging usage of digital technologies, with a big emphasis on online communities and social media.

blue-infinity’s VIP lunch at  LIFT11 was led by our special guest Tiffany St James, the former Head of Public Participation for the UK Government. Tiffany specialises in digital strategy and training, and helps organisations to better understand and engage with social media.

Tiffany St James with blue-infinity's Sonia Nair and Pierre Aebischer

Tiffany’s open discussion session with our audience of Swiss-based business leaders focused on how the way we communicate through media has changed, with a shift of power towards the consumer – thanks to social media. The importance of having a solid social media strategy was highlighted, with key elements being those of both engagement and monitoring. 

During the session, we showcased our new Social Media Lab and our cutting edge monitoring and engagement services. Our team of expert social media analysts monitor social networks on behalf of our clients, feeding back important intelligence through periodic reports. Depending on their brief, they may focus on quickly identifying and relaying the development of potential crisis, researching what consumers think of a brand (through sentiment analysis) or producing in depth reports to give a detailed view of how a brand is perceived throughout the social media landscape. Through our Lab, our social media analysts are also equipped to engage with consumers, building trust and strengthening relationships with a brand.

Contact us for more information on our pragmatic and cost-effective start-up package.

Read the ICTJournal’s coverage of blue-infinity’s service (article in French).

The ICT Journal and ALP ICT, the cluster of information technology and communication in Western Switzerland, have released a study on employment within the computer industry sector in Western Switzerland.

In this study, blue-infinity has been ranked as the 6^th largest IT employer in Suisse Romande, and also the 4^th largest recruiter. With 280 employees, and 30 new recruits in 2010, blue-infinity is a prime example of how Swiss IT companies are significant players in terms of job creation.

In addition to hiring the best people for our projects, blue-infinity also invests highly in training and personal development, with over 75 professional certifications being awarded to our consultants on average every year.

Additional facts from the article:

In 2010, the 297 companies that participated in this survey employed a total of 11,230 people. At the time, they had recruited 765 staff for 293 renewed positions, leaving a balance of 472 new positions – representing growth of 4.39%. It also appears that it is the Swiss firms (60% of total) who are the most active in terms of job creation.

These figures are encouraging, but they mask certain realities. First, the technology sector in Switzerland is aging: 60% of employees in the industry are over 40 years old, according to the latest study by Swiss ICT and the GRI. In addition, demand outweighs supply at all qualification levels. The growth of IT recruitment could be even greater if this sector that represents 5% (25 billion) of the Swiss GDP could find enough suitable personnel.

For more details, please click below to read the full article by Fabrice Delaye.

Please click here to read the full article (in French)