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Saturday, November 19, 2011

Appeon - New Offices

** News Special **


  
Shenzhen, China
   Appeon Corporation just had a grand opening of the their new office in Shenzhen software park. Shenzhen is a major city in the south of Southern China's Guangdong Province, situated immediately north of Hong Kong. The area is one of China's most successful—Special Economic Zones (SEZ). It also currently holds sub-provincial administrative status, with powers slightly less than the province. Shenzhen's modern cityscape is the result of the vibrant economy made possible by rapid foreign investment since the institution of the policy of "reform and opening" establishment of the SEZ in the late 1970s. Both Chinese and foreign nationals have invested enormous sums in the Shenzhen SEZ. Shenzhen is now reputedly one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Being southern mainland China's major financial centre, Shenzhen is home to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as well as the headquarters of numerous high-tech companies. Shenzhen is also the third-busiest container port in China, after Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Main Entrance at Appeon
   The new Appeon office can hold up to a maximum of 120 people and has a great view of  the Shenzhen software park.  Shenzhen Software Park is located on beautiful Shenzhen Bay, which is integrated with Shenzhen Hi-tech Industry Park. The Shenzhen Software Park now has over 400 member companies, employing over some 40,000 people. After just several years of construction and development, the Shenzhen Software Park has become one of China's most important software product research and development centers.

   
Enjoying a workout in the new gym.
    Appeon built their own gym room that houses state-of-the art equipment, weights, tread-mills, board games, table tennis and much more. This gives the employees an area where they can relax and recharge before returning to their work area. Appeon has also provided the employees with a video games room inside the main office for the employees. Appeon's CEO Armeen Mazda explained that "We’re trying to bring a little Silicon Valley culture to China to spur creativity, productivity, and loyalty" - much like they see in other North American high technology companies. 

Jason Zhang (left) Regional Sales Director with CEO Armeen Mazda


    Appeon Corporation was founded in 1999. The name “Appeon” is composed of two words “app” + “eon”.  “App” is for application of course and “eon” means for a very long time.  The significance of the name then is to help companies build really great applications that will be useful for a very long time. Appeon was funded by Sybond Ventures, the investment arm of SMC (Shell Electric Manufacturing Corporation) in Hong Kong. Now Appeon today is a subsidiary of SMC. The SMC group of companies consists of electronics contract manufacturing service (CMS), real estate investments (in China, Hong Kong, and USA), and technology businesses (like Appeon, semiconductor company, private cloud service provider, etc.). The SMC group currently employs 5,600 staff worldwide.
New work offices in the main building.
    All of Appeon's core technology was created in-house and developed independently (that means no OEMing or licensing of 3rd party technology).  As such, Appeon has had to build up a team of the strongest and most knowledgeable PowerBuilder developers in China.  It has taken many years and over USD 20 million to get their flagship product – Appeon for PowerBuilder – to the point it is today.  By growing the company and product themselves has given Appeon the benefit of the strongest Web deployment product on the market and 100% control over the technical direction, design, support and customer satisfaction (a big factor for the company). Appeon were the first company to commercialize an AJAX solution for Web application development.  In fact, they were doing AJAX before it was built-in feature of today's Web browsers! So Appeon had to come up with our own way of doing it without adding to the web browser over-head like other solutions. This was so successful that Appeon now have US patents on their unique AJAX approach. To this day they continue to use their own AJAX engine instead of the one built-in to Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, offering significantly greater performance and reliability.

Developing Appeon  - Hmm on the xBox?    :-)

The development team is now working hard on their next version of the Appeon product. They are also building on top of it to produce a new range of products for future devices. Not only will this add significant features into the current web enabling base product, it will also add new tablet and smart phone capabilities that will allow any PB Developer to extend their new or existing applications towards today's hot technologies. These extensions will target HTML5 browser deployment and native compiled applications for the Apple, Android and Blackberry O/S based devices on the market today. In fact, Appeon's CEO Armeen Mazda was on hand at Sybase / SAP's Techwave event in September, 2011 located in Las Vegas demonstrating the new mobile product's capabilities on the iPad. As far as cloud support, Appeon already supports this aspect today with version 6.5. Accenture demonstrated this in production at Sybase / SAP's TechWave conference in Las Vegas in September. There was no need to wait or to buy anything extra on top of Appeon product for cloud deployment.

 So stay tuned for some great new software from Appeon in 2012 and all the best in your new offices in Shenzhen from your friends at the Ottawa Sybase User Group!

Executive Offices
More workouts!

Jenny Yu (right) Financial Director with Armeen Mazda


Regards ... Chris