While in Ottawa this week, I had the chance to chat with Teknision‘s Gabor Vida and Tony MacDonell in an empty conference room at the Ottawa Sheraton. Teknision works primarily in Flash-based technologies — Flash, Flex, and AIR — and serves as a good example of the “designer/developer” role that I’ve seen emerge over the past year as Ajax and RIA have gone mainstream.

Gabor and Tony explain what it means when they say they created “branded applications,” a concept that Teknision is well known for and and successful with. We then get into one of my favorite topics for small shops: how do you manage the ongoing relationship with clients, esp. pushy ones. On this topic, we talk about what I’d call “agile design,” or the way that agile software development ideas and practices can be applied to the design/developer process.

Check out their blog for more write-ups of the Teknision philosophy and practices.

While at the Eclipse Marketing Symposium in Chicago, I caught up Virgil Dodson on the goings on in the BIRT community. BIRT is an Eclipse project that focuses on providing a framework and runtime for reporting; see the previous RedMonk video with Virgil for more detail and a demo.

Virgil’s update is primarily about the new BIRT user community, BIRT Exchange. As Virgil tells and then demos for us, BIRT exchange allows users to not only share tips and trouble-shooting about reports, but also reports themselves and other BIRT “configuration” artifacts.

Disclaimer: Actuate and Eclipse are clients.

This week at the Eclipse Marketing Symposium, I had the chance to talk with Innoopract‘s Jochen Krause. We start talking about Innoopract’s decision to move to Eclipse several years ago. At the moment, Innoopract is working with Eclipse on the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform project, or RAP, which Jochen tells us about. Then we move onto talking about the component-driven programming model that OSGi enables, along with several “ah-ha moments” for typical developers moving into that style of development. Finally, we talk more about Innoopract’s business model, and I drill a little deeper into the idea of “sponsored development” for open source projects.

During the BMC Analyst Summit in Sonoma, James Governor talks with BMC Software‘s Kia Behnia about the role and benefits of strong community in the mobile device and IT management worlds. James and Kia first talk about hacking phones, esp. his HTC Hermes. They then move on to the question of the role community takes in the BMC world, and round-out with a discussion about open source at BMC.

In the second part of my conversation with BMC Software‘s Israel Gat, we talk about virtualization and IT Management for SaaS. Israel points to the energy savings benefits of virtualization and also the deployment benefits it brings, using the example of managing many different types encryption software.

We then talk about pulling knowledge from the mainframe world into a more virtualized world: are there lessons to re-learn? When it comes to SaaS, Israel explains how multi-tenant systems can be used to upgrade customers when they’d like to upgrade, and also how a SaaS hosted environment might allow for more targeted features per a customer. Managing those deployment processed, of course, are ripe for IT management software, platforms, and services.

At the BMC Software, Inc. Austin campus (one of my former employers), I talk with Israel Gat about introducing and then benefiting from Agile Software development at BMC. The projects under Israel are each “enterprise software” and peopled with large teams. Thus, his experience and the lessons learned from introducing Agile on such a large scale are interesting to hear. To sum up, he says “the most important thing is staying out of the way,” followed by internal and external evangelism. Once the teams are sold on the idea, they just need the corporate leeway to mold Agile development to their work.

Additionally, Israel talks with me about a few new ideas BMC has for benefiting from Agile: introducing more customization for customers (while incorporating them back into the main release) and adapting the rapid releases to the longer enterprise sales cycles.

Last week, I talked with Lauren Sell and Josh Dilworth of Porter Novelli Austin about doing PR for tech startups. My primary interest was figuring out what the day-to-day life of a tech PR person is, and to figure out and lessons learned. In this first part, we primarily talked about establishing trust and relationships with the press, helping being the eyes and ears for clients by keeping up with relevant news, and also how flexible plans for PR campaigns work with startups whose own plans change frequently.

Cote talks with Zane Rockenbaugh of Liquid Labs about selling software in the banking market. As Zane comments, the banks are quite conservative in their technology purchasing as their business model assures steady income and, thus, they avoid change. The need for change comes, however, largely from external demands such as regulations or new banks using technology (like online banking in the 90’s) to compete with existing banks.

After discussing the market for banking software, Zane tells us several methods of bank fraud that one of his company’s applications — Fraud Sweep — help banks detect. In doing so, he gives us a rare glimpse into the several ways that people try to defraud banks. Most interestingly, he comments, losses from straight up fraud with commercial accounts far out-weigh losses from identity theft.

Coté talks with Zane Rockenbaugh of Liquid Labs about the company’s business model for working with clients — namely, sharing the IP of the resulting the code. Additionally, Coté and Zane talk about growing a small software shop from one person to a team, and the challenges in making that jump.