The ceremony was held in the Cyclo Café at Majestic Hotel in Hồ Chí Minh City’s District 1 famous for its luxury. The first sight to the restaurant when we came was that it was very big and beautiful with a lot of lights along the walls designed with domes.

It was also decorated with Santa Claus and small house models with chimneys covered by artificial snow outside. In the hall, the combination of ancient and modern styles was used to make the restaurant more impressive. The rickshaw at the entrance attracted the attention from many guests.

The sweet melodies performed by the pianist were very relaxing and to the left in the hall was the area for our party. There were a nice stage, some shiny long tables decorated with flowers and a buffet was lined up. The warm light and gentle music made the atmosphere both formal and warm.

The ceremony started at 6:30 PM, everyone was warmed up when the MCs welcomed all Catglobians. Then everyone gave a big applause to hearty welcome our specially invited guests, we were honored to have Ulrik Hjarnaa (CIO) from Denmark, and Michael Rangstrup (Business Manager Asia) from Philippines present for the occasion. And the attendance of all Catglobians made the ceremony become nicer and warmer.

Thomas Bindzus (Regional Director) started out with a presentation about the first years of Catglobe, how Catglobe Vietnam grew from just a handful of employees to the strong company we know today with nearly 60 employees. The development of the software as well as the company over the past 5 years was reviewed, and it was meaningful to us, since it encouraged us to continue keeping the tradition of the company: solidarity for a stronger Catglobe and growth through partnership.

We are very proud of providing world leading software for the research and analysis industry and we recognized long term commitment from Catglobians as being one of the key elements to the success of our software, therefore long term employees were invited to the stage to receive a token symbolizing the company’s deep gratitude to them.

The ceremony turned more formal when Thomas, on behalf of Catglobe Vietnam, sent many thanks to Michael for originally forming Catglobe Vietnam and for his many contributions to the success of the company. Michael is now responsible for business material for our software and he still contributes to the development of our software with new features. Everybody gave a big applause as Thomas gave Michael some special and lovely gifts.

The lights were turned off for the most interesting part of the ceremony; celebrating fifth birthday of Catglobe Vietnam. Five candles on the birthday cake were lit while Catglobians came close to the stage to sing the Happy Birthday song together.

After the cake was cut, Thomas and Dennis Haney (Technical Director) opened champagne bottles and poured to a pillar of glasses.

There were fireworks and the Happy Birthday song was played, everybody sang and celebrated the company until the lights went on again.

After properly celebrating the birthday of our company it was time for Ulrik to say some words in connection with the release of Catglobe version 5.8, and also to inform all Catglobians about the importance of the work we are doing here in Vietnam.

Over the year, Catglobe Vietnam has contributed to Catinét’s success with Catglobe Intelligence, both in terms of development projects, but also in terms of research production related assignments. Ulrik could inform us all that there would be a lot of new exciting challenges for Catglobe Vietnam in 2010 as well.

After that, Ulrik and Thomas cut the red ribbon that symbolized the release of Catglobe version v5.8, which will be deployed for Catinét by the end of December 2009.

When the ribbon was cut, everybody rushed to the scene to take pictures together to record the anniversary; everyone stood together smiling and waving their hands for this occasion.  The happiness appeared clearly on everybody’s face. It somehow showed the effort that Thomas, AC and all Catglobians gave to hold the ceremony so successfully.

After the ceremony, it was time for the buffet. Everybody was recommended to fill their stomachs up since there were still some games to come with many fine prizes waiting for them after the buffet.

Food was put on tables along the walls and served by waiters and waitresses, everybody were able to find something they liked. There were many kinds of food both fresh and cooked. It seemed that lobsters attracted everyone the most. There were plenty to drink as well; most people chose soft drinks instead of beer. That was a good choice since we still had a lot of activities ahead.

When everyone was almost full, the MCs appeared asking for everybody’s attention for the games that were about to begin. There were 3 games planned in the program with two criteria: fun and solidarity.
The first game was a beer drinking competition. In this game, five players were each given a bottle of beer. The bottles were very special since they were baby bottles. But instead of milk they were filled with beer. The one who drank the most beer became the winner.

Michael was enthusiastic to join the game with four other guys, Thắng, Phú, Đức and Phúc. When the countdown started they all tried their best to finish first. After some time, Thắng raised his empty bottle up and became the winner; however, all of them got prizes for their spirit in the game.

The second game was a feel and guess game. Three teams were formed with two people on each. A box was prepared with a number of items for each team. The teams, of course, had no idea about what were in the box. One member from each team had to put his hand into the box, grab a thing in the box and describe it to his partner, his partner should then try to guess what it was, based on the description given, and write the name on the white board. Each team had two minutes, and after two minutes, the team which named the most items correct won the competition.

The three teams who joined this game were Team 1 (Lệ and Phong), Team 2 (Mẫn and Hương) and Team 3 (Ân and Ngọc). After some tense minutes, the winner was team 2.

The last game was a lottery; Michael was invited to pick up 3 lucky numbers randomly. Three lucky people who had the numbers won a prize.

And the person in the picture above was the lucky guy who had the number picked up randomly by Mike. Oops! I’m not sure exactly who was the winner, Dennis or Oliver? God knew

When the game was finished, it was quite late and all Catglobians had to say good bye. Thanks to Thomas and AC for holding this ceremony and giving us a great night!

“Goodbye all. See you next week. Good night.”

We went home with smiles on our lips for the great party. We had a lot of fun together and that made us closer. Thanks to the company again.

Trần Thị Loan
QA Team

It is of course The International Women’s Day on the 8th of March and Vietnam’s very own Womens’ Day on the 20th of October which happens to be Today.

During our lunch break, all our girls lined up for a photo of this year’s present, super cool Catglobe T-shirts, which definitely will be noticed!

Happy Women’s Day to all Vietnamese women from Catglobe Vietnam!

The increase in production-related work from Catinét gives us more hands-on experience and knowledge about how Catglobe is used by our customers. We have found some new approaches, and ways to make solutions using our system, which we would probably not have found otherwise.

The most important thing to mention about our new web-site is our blog, all contents from the old web-site transformed nicely into pages in Wordpress, but we didn’t have a blog before.

With the blog it is our intention to make our web-site come to live, we will keep our readers posted about releases of new versions, guidelines which will explain step-by-step how to setup specific solutions using Catglobe, best practices, and who knows what else we might add, some posts might even be related to the development of Catglobe.

As suggested by one of our project managers, each module will eventually get a blog category, which will allow us to keep customers posted about current technical problems, and when we expect to have them fixed. Those categories will not be added until we actually have something important to write though.

Of course there will be lots of appraisals for Catglobe, which we believe is  a system which contains so many opportunities for our customers. Make sure to check out our web-site often, both if you are a customer but also if you are looking for job opportunities, new job ads will be posted soon, to support our demand for both developers, testers and data consultants.