OK, the cat is out of the bag. I'm leaving Exony to join Microsoft as an application development consultant. The decision to leave Exony was extremely difficult given the interesting work they do but the offer presented was too good an opportunity to pass on. I would just like to thank everyone for making Exony such a cool place to work for the last 6 years. I wish you all the best in the future.

As I mentioned in an earlier post we have been putting the finishing touches on the latest version of our reporting and analytics product. I'm pleased to say we have now set it free into the wild to fend for itself. Many thanks to the developers that worked on the project - Ant, Ezzat, Gautham, Jon, Koan, Richard, Ryan, Scott, Tom and Vikram. The company press release is as follows:

Exony 4.5 Reporting and Analytics increases visibility, control and reporting for contact centre managers

Exony has launched Exony 4.5 Reporting and Analytics, a software tool designed to increase visibility and control of the overall customer interaction process and of contact centre performance. The tool will enable contact centre managers to further improve the customer experience, as well as increase productivity and efficiency. Exony is the leader in communications software solutions for contact centres and IP communications.

Exony 4.5 Reporting and Analytics builds on the success of the Exony MI suite by addressing the key problems of business users in complex customer interaction environments. Specifically, Exony 4.5 Reporting and Analytics has been developed in close co-operation with major enterprise customers in the UK, Continental Europe and the USA, in order to improve the end-user experience and empower both operational and strategic decision-making.

Analyst group Gartner estimates the market for contact centre technology sales in Western Europe to be $607m, with a massive rise in IP communications forecast*.

Ian Ashby, Chief Executive Officer of Exony said: “Exony 4.5 Reporting and Analytics is a big leap forward in empowering business users to manage customer interaction processes more effectively. The feedback from both customers and prospects has been extremely positive to the enhanced integration capability, improved analytics engine and business user-friendly tools. We believe the new product will make a big impact on productivity and efficiency, particularly in large enterprise and hosted contact centre environments.”

[Please excuse the gratuitous linking but I've got this blog setup to auto-link to Exony and a press release contains more than it's fair share of the word.]

A large proportion of the staff at Exony conveniently have birthdays in the same week. A meal followed. Scott has the pictures plus a big thanks to Ez for organising the evening.

We have a position open at Exony for a test developer (what Microsoft calls a Software Design Engineer in Test or SDE/T). For some reason most testers in the UK are what I would call QA engineers and do not consider writing code part of the job specification so if you fancy working for a young dynamic company that:

• Scores highly on the Joel Test
• Provides you with your own laptop and pays your mobile phone charges
• Allows for plenty of home work (some office time is a requirement though)
• Practises agile development with Scrum
• Uses the latest products and technologies

You should send me a copy of your CV/resume to the e-mail address at the top of this page. You should have the following qualities to be eligible:

• Ability to work in the United Kingdom (Newbury, Berkshire to be exact)
• Experience with XUnit (NUnit/JUnit) frameworks
• Ability to code C# in your sleep
• Strong troubleshooting, debugging, and analysis skills
• Good verbal and written communications skills
• Experience with SQL Server, Windows 2000/2003, ASP.NET and web services
• A passion for software testing and quality

You will work as part of the development team to understand customer requirements, develop the appropriate test tools, processes and code, identify and analyse bugs, raise quality and drive the product towards shipping.

No calls from recruiters please. I have a number that I am already dealing with and don't have room in my schedule for more.

[Edit: This position has been filled. Thank you to everyone that applied. I will have more positions posted in the near future.]

Today was the company family day. This year it was held at Highclere Castle. Rather than talk about it, I took some snaps...