People are asking me again: why the bluebee® girls? We get a lot of positive feedback, people think it is a good marketing idea, although slightly weird and certainly unexpected from a company dealing with maintenance engineering… Truth is… people expect us to be boring.

I know some of our readers were hoping for a “Swimsuit Spectacular” issue with the bluebee® girls and our shapely Siveco girls (good recruitment policies we have here), unfortunately our editorial team (those shapely girls I was talking about) prefers to run a more traditional (boring) half-year recap…

Welcome to our June newsletter, the last one before the summer break! June was a busy month for our entire team… Several of our large multisite projects entering a critical “pilot” phase with bluebee®. We also have people in all corners of China delivering more traditional CMMS or maintenance consulting projects.

The report of our 2012-2013 Maintenance in China survey is out! I let you discover the results, summarised in this month’s Reliability article. Respondents will receive the full report, also available upon request.

As our business in Western China has grown considerably, we have moved to a more convenient downtown location, which will provide a central base for our engineers working in Sichuan province. We currently have teams in 5 different customers locations in Sichuan and Chongqing, with all support team in Chengdu.

Two years ago I wrote my first editorial on the topic of cloud computing “Mastering the cloud somersault”, marking the start of a great adventure for Siveco China (an adventure we had in fact less-publicly launched around 2008 when we set up our Shanghai R&D unit). I quoted from Journey to the West: “That night Sun Wukong moved his spirit, practiced the technique, and mastered the cloud somersault.