To make good contracts and sustain a profitable business depends on business expertise and quality of the the management boards, but to code products that also receives the community recognition is something else - a plus in terms of software quality engineering and a prize for any company that reaches this level of competence - including Netcetera AG. I am not surprised because the Swiss profile is always focused on quality and also because I know the processes and the developers that made NeTS possible, but it is a nice moment to say congratulations NeTS team!

NeTS is an acronym for Network-wide Track Management System, a rich client application that allows the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB - Schweizerische Bundesbahnen) to organize its trains timetable. To have a better dimension on the challenge of this project, I copied some quotes from the SBB web site:

• Every year, SBB transports about 306 million passengers and 54 million net tonnes of freight
• The Swiss Federal Railway (SBB) manages to operate 96.2% of all trains with less than 5 minutes of delay.
• The demand is increasing - 6% last year in passenger traffic alone.

Currently planned hardware expansion, with new routes and double capacity trains, is not likely to be ready until 2014. This situation motivated the desire to better exploit existing infrastructure using more ambitious software, hence the Network-wide Track Management System (NeTS).