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Frédéric Lasnier
Title: President&Chief Executive Officer
Bio: After a quick passage in a national marketing service company, Frederic Lasnier founded Pentalog with four colleagues, academics like himself. During a period of economic stagnation (in 1993).
In 1995, he decided to open permanently the capital of Pentalog to the participation of his employees. This participation now has reached 56%. It was a political vision that he shared with the founding members. Starting from 1997, Pentalog exported their first services outside of France. The percentage of foreign activities subsequently reached 60% in 2006.
In 1999, as part of a large software project (10 000 man-days in J2EE), he made his first trip to Romania and laid the foundation for the Pentalog policy of European "low cost". In 2005, he initiated the creation of BPO services (Business Process Outsourcing) and offered a New Business Model to Pentalog High Tech. In 2006, with the help of Ausy, one of the 5 most important players in the French market of outsourced R&D services, he created Pentalog Technology, a joint venture between Ausy and Pentalog, co-owned equally by the two partners. The Joint Venture aims to provide low cost but high quality R & D to global players. Pentalog took operational control of this alliance.
In 2008, Pentalog Deutschland, the German subsidiary of the group was created.
In 2009, Frederic created Pentalog Vietnam.
In all these areas, the management is provided from Orleans and it is here where 70% of the consolidated value is held.
Frederic is the father of the adaptation of the "design to cost" for intellectual services in France.
Aymeric Libeau
Title: CIO - Vice President Infrastructure & R&D
Bio: The management of infrastructure and R&D Aymeric is supervising includes all the technical aspects (for the company as well as for our customers), whether they are related to corporate needs, resources to complete a project, R&D activities or quality control.
Aymeric is the one who defines the strategy of development of our infrastructure and information system.
This former peacekeeper has led several international operations, in particular in Eastern Europe. He remains operational for some of our customers, whether as an expert in architecture, a project director or consultant in the choice of technologies.

Monica Jiman
Title: Deputy CEO
Bio: Monica graduated in Marketing and Production from the University of Orleans, and joined Pentalog as a trainee.
She then became the Manager of the branch office in Bucharest, today employing 50 people in the field of outsourced software development on the offshore as well as local market in Romania.
In May 2009 she became Chief Operational Officer. Monica is now in charge of operations in Vietnam, Eastern Europe, France and Germany, involving over 300 employees. She manages sales and business lines, the creation of new branch offices, recruitment, human resources and the responsibility of contractual operations.
Monica has been Pentalog's Deputy CEO (Deputy Chief Executive Officer) since August 2011. She is in charge of operational management, including the management of production and production structures, financial and reporting management, administration and development of existing partnerships, supervision of the information systems, technical management and … the incubator.
Alexandra Mondanel
Title: International Operations Officer
Bio: After a 4-month internship within the Pentalog Orleans Team, Alexandra was recruited to develop the company's international activities. She holds a postgraduate degree in International Business and foreign languages and she is European to the core: her mother is German and her father is French; she attended a British University, and used to work for the German subsidiary of a French company before joining Pentalog in 2005. Her ability to speak four languages will be determining to find partners all accross Europe.

Sophie Lelarge
Title: WW Sales and BL Director
Bio: Sophie is the group's Sales Director and manages the 3 Business Lines: Information Systems, Embedded Systems and BPO.
She ensures the dialogue with consultants and project managers, as well as the monitoring of our commitments, in coordination with the project managers.



Pierre Peutin
Title: Head of Business Line for Information Systems
Bio: Pierre entered Pentalog as a developer, in 1999. He has worked on web and client/servers projects, on missions of medium and long duration in both France and Belgium. After several years as a developer, Pierre oriented himself towards Business Intelligence by participating in various reporting projects for customers like PSA Peugeot Citroën, Loxam or the ACTICALL group. Later, Pierre became Project Leader for specific application developments, managing teams of 1 to 7 people based in France and offshore for Pentalog. Pierre then naturally served as an offshore Project Director before taking on the responsibility of the Business Line for Information Systems.
Pierre is presently responsible for writing business proposals, monitoring existing customers, commitment control vis-à-vis our customers on projects, compliance with Pentalog quality system procedures and control and optimization of expenses for the Business Line.
Mickaël Hiver
Title: Head of Business Lines for Embedded Systems & BPO
Bio: Mickaël entered Pentalog as a Network Administrator in February 1997 with the aim to gain global understanding of information technology in order to assist and guide users in meeting their real needs. For 8 years he was an in-house producer for Pentalog clients. With his acquired experience, Mickaël progressively left production to become first a Project Manager, then Project Director and finally the Head of Business Lines for Embedded Systems & BPO.
Mickaël is a hands-on and open person, with an acute sense of organization and priorities. Through his assistance and counseling he gives his clients and prospective clients the opportunity to focus calmly on their actual core business.
Eric Gouin
Title: Administrator
Bio: Eric graduated from a renown school of Physics and Chemistry in Paris. While he was a student he used to develop websites related to his student activities.
After two research internships within a French company producing mobile phone components in the Sophia-Antipolis Technopole, he joined the IT world in which he held several key positions.
He now is a finance and management control consultant.

Aleth Delcenserie
Title: Quality Manager
Bio: Associate-founder of Pentalog and board member, Aleth Delcenserie first evolved in the graphics department of the company. Gifted with a strong sense of organization and a taste for detail, she conducted with rigorous methodology publishing projects and electronic media for over ten years, and launched the Pentalog BPO-DTP sector at the end of 2005.
From September 2007, Aleth has been responsible for the definition and for the implementation of the Pentalog Quality Policy, leading to the ISO 9001:2008 certification of the group, on December 24, 2008.
As the Director of Quality Control, Aleth is now based in Moldova since 1 January 2009, where she now shares her time between coaching project managers in implementing effectiveness control and the progress of Pentalog Quality.
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I took advantage of the few (exceptional) weeks that I spent in France by attending a few spring seminars:
- March 31st: ScrumDay 2011, organized by the French Scrum User Group
- April 1st: VMWare seminar on virtualized workstations
- April 5th: Seminar on Cyber Criminality, organized by Stonesoft

ScrumDay 2011
For ScrumDay 2011, I wrote a series of articles on our new thematic blog, called Methods and Technologies, where I presented all seminar sessions that I attended.

Virtualization of workstations
This is a subject that I regularly follow, as it is part of a scheme of industrializing our developers’ work environment. But the business model is not yet a viable one as regards the gain in workstation management. I was recently talking to a top manager of a French IT facilities management group which already offers package solutions. We agreed on the fact that the market was not yet ready for a massive deployment of DaaS (Desktop as a Service), but that service providers needed to be prepared.

Several companies were present at this seminar, as the VDI is not a solution, but a chain:

- VMWare: bare-metal virtualization. Other solutions are of course possible, but this solution is reliable, robust and is not new on the market.
- ThinPrint: Solution that facilitates remote printing
- RES Software: Tools for managing the deployment of patches, applications on platforms.
- RiverBed: It is now possible to deploy the appliance in a virtual machine. This is becoming more flexible than the hardware version. Moreover, it seems possible to optimize the RDP flow. We have done the test in order to optimize our flows with Vietnam, and I can say if gains are possible on the RDP, we shall ask ourselves the question again.
- Wyse: Their new product “Zero” is interesting: it is even less cumbersome, more energy efficient, without a local OS, but dedicated to one use.

Nevertheless, I doubt that a desktop environment, which is rather static, could have real gains, despite offering some benefits:

- Anonymization of the workstation: changing the physical support, but keeping the software environment
- Better data security: the workstation is more accessible, USB access is more restricted
- Reducing energy consumption: physical machines stop based on the need of virtual machines

In the Pentalog context, the gain consists in offering standardized working environments in an automated manner.

AET – Cyber criminality
The seminar on cyber criminality was really interesting. It was organized by StoneSoft which presented its approach on AET (Advanced Evasion Technique). This seminar was hosted by Anicet Mbida (an IT reporter on BFM TV) and included three stages:
- Presentation of the AET approach by Juha Kivikoski, Stonesoft’s COO (AET site)
- Presentation of Gartner’s 10 pieces of advice by Bob Walder, for choosing a protection solution.
- Debate on cyber criminality, which included the above-mentioned participants who were joined by Nicolas Arpagian, editor-in-chief of the “Prospective Stratégique” magazine, and Pierre Polette, LEXSI’s director.

The debate began with a fact related to accounting. Over the last three years, three major cyber crimes were noted. In 2011, the three major crimes already occurred in the first quarter. This can be analyzed from several points of view:
Protection systems are more and more reliable and attacks are better identified. Let us not forget that a good intrusion attack succeeds when it is not known/seen.
There is a growing awareness with regard to the need to present facts which could serve as a reminder. The events which have taken place at the French Ministry of Finance can be an example.
The number of Mafia-type organizations or the desire to cause harm is increasing and flaws are more and more exploited.

I have already tackled security in one of my previous articles of the ISD saga and I want to add a few things. I would just like to discuss a case that was mentioned: an identified employee from the financial department was caught off-guard and proved to be vulnerable. He was asked on three occasions by phone, by a person who assumed the identity of a manager, to make a bank transfer of one million euros every time. It is only the fourth time that he began to ask himself questions. This story is meant to emphasize that security concerns everyone and that one must not expect the technical department to provide solutions to all faults of the human behaviour.

Posted on Fri., 15 Apr. 2011 7:25 by Aymeric LIBEAU (399 day(s) old)
Categories: ISD
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