Effective Monday November 5, 2012, ISCient has ceased operations. Its one and only employee has been working full-time for Melbourne-based software development company, HSD, for over three years now. During this time, Iscient Pty Ltd has been effectively dormant, but is now officially defunct.
This site and the domain will continue to operate for the time being.
ISCieNT was an information technology consultancy specialising in Linux/Open Source. Its principal and founder, Peter Giorgilli, has over 15 years' experience in the IT industry as a software developer/systems engineer.
When we started back in '95, our focus was web development. Over the next few years we developed sites for a range of Australian businesses including Australian air Express and Education Credit Union, often working in conjunction with graphic design agencies.
At around this time most web sites were hosted on UNIX servers, and most CGI-programs were written in Perl. In short, web development was centred on UNIX. It was around this time that we discovered Linux, a free, "as in speech", UNIX-like operating system.
By late '98, the web development business had become overcrowded and extremely price sensitive. It seemed "every man and his dog" was into it and people didn't necessarily appreciate what went into making a good web site or what one might expect to pay for one. Deciding that it was time to take a break from the pure web page design/hosting business, we decided to re-enter the enterprise space.
It's almost a straight line from then to now -- from late April '99 to early April '06, we were engaged on what turned out to be a long-term contract for John Fairfax Holdings, publisher of The Age newspaper here in Melbourne, to help develop an electronic commerce application for advertisers to place print (newspaper) ads via the web.
Our main contribution to the project was in the areas of software development (mainly Perl) and UNIX/Linux system administration.
In June '06 we were engaged by Ford Credit, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, to work on a migration project. The company was in the process of migrating their core business administration system from a proprietary mainframe platform to Oracle on Linux and needed help adapting to Linux.
Here again, our main contribution to the project was in the areas of software development (mainly Perl) and UNIX/Linux system administration.
Briefly returning to web development, in March '01 we completed work on a web site for a Japanese company which features an online catalogue of the company's product range and includes a secure order facility. To cater for both domestic (Japanese) and overseas customers, the site operates in a dual language/currency mode.
The "something else", unrelated to the work we do, that may be of interest to readers -- hello! you out there -- of this page: Book reviews. The reason for my including a link to the reviews linked-to hereunder is shameless self-promotion. Not my own, mind you. The author of the reviews is my brother. Without further ado...
