It looks like Mahendra Vora, the prolific Cincinnati-based entrepreneur and venture capitalist, is strengthening his offerings in the local and global sourcing and IT project market. Vora Ventures announced today through VTech Holdings the acquisition of Cincinnati’s own Professional Data Resources, or PDR, and Bangalore’s Electronic-City-based Ascendum Systems. The combined entity, Ascendum Solutions, will operate out of Blue Ash.

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Hey, next week is the most active week of the month in terms of the user group community in Cincinnati. One of the purposes of this space is to highlight the generally high-quality of the content and information transfer at the different user groups in order to drive attendance. I would estimate 98% of the Cincinnati developer/BA/PM community does not take advantage of some of these excellent, reliable, and low/no cost resources.

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Happy Valentine’s Day! I ran into a lot of people at last night’s SPIN. The meeting was held at the PDR offices, and PDR’s QA Practice Director, Pat Freeman, presented on Software Quality Metrics for Decision Making that we’ll get into in a minute. Kishore distributed copies of Better Software magazine. You can apply for a free digital subscription. About 30 folks attended this meeting. Matt Cardarella, Katie Pattison, and Bridget Ganow (I’m sorry if I butchered your last names) of Speedway traveled from north Dayton to attend this meeting. As I said earlier, SPIN will change the way you work and increase the quality of your output, and seeing these folks make the trek down just reinforces SPIN’s value for me.

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I had lunch today with Joni Burton, who recently moved from CIBER to Trasys. Joni took the president role at Trasys and has the opportunity to guide and work with that organization unencumbered by delivery responsibility for organizations that had no reporting responsibility to her.

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For those planning on attending, I just called MAX Training and got word that tonight’s Sharepoint User Group meeting has been canceled due to the inclement weather.

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The latest DevCares, from my perspective, was an appropriate deep dive after Tuesday’s MSDN Event covering application security. The MSDN Event was a little less than stellar, and we found out why at DevCares. Uber presenter (and ex-LÛCRUM-ite) Bill Steele had a family emergency, so the MSDN presenter was probably working off of one-day’s notice. It’s forgivable. Mike Wood picked up the ball and handled DevCares. Given the circumstances, Wood handled the ball with the heart of the bat. Get it? Wood? Bat? Oh, never mind.

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This week I had the opportunity to spend some time with Ciber’s Global Program Manager, Tom Kent. Tom has been a mentor to me for the last seven years or so. We discussed the different dynamics in the corporate world in comparison to the consulting world, over french toast and oatmeal at the Kenwood First Watch. Many of you probably understand this, still I cannot stress enough the positive affect a mentor can have on one’s life and career. I know that my father struggled when his best friend and confidant moved away, and my dad stressed to me over the years the importance of having someone to talk to. If you don’t have a mentor, look around. Look for someone who’s life you respect and approach them. Ask them if you could get their advice. Most folks are flattered by this question. Use it to begin a valuable relationship that will serve both of you well.

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