Brij Singh's Random Musings

IT Doesn't Matter

....they all became commodity inputs. From a strategic standpoint, they became invisible; they no longer mattered. That is exactly what is happening to information technology today, and the implications for corporate IT management are profound."
IT Doesn't Matter

Five-Step Strategy for Enabling Utility Computing Operations

Five-Step Strategy for Enabling Utility Computing Operations

In a recent survey, 49% of over 180 global IT decision makers told Summit Strategies they are actively evaluating one or more utility computing infrastructure options

Important recommendation -

key building blocks such as comprehensive standards-based instrumentation and cross-tier configuration mapping MUST be deployed before an enterprise can even consider itself ready to implement true services-oriented utility computing strategies.

IT management processes and business/IT policy making systems have to be adapted for utility computing—and how this requirement will slow the implementation of aggressive utility computing visions

This problem needs to be evaluated from the business owners point of view. Having a model in place which manages the demand side requirements and then letting that model drive the alignment with IT management processes. That will bring out the true economics of utility model based IT infrastructure.

Radical promise of BPM

BPM is the next 50 years of IT

"The reason people are thinking of and implementing BPM is that they face a host of process related issues," explains Smith. "That's similar to what happened with data because it all became embedded in applications, and people said there had to be a better way of managing the data. But now applications have become the problem, with business process fragments locked away in stovepipe applications, and people want a better way to manage end-to-end processes. The IT litter across the organization has become so voluminous that people are looking for a way to renormalize it and put it into a standard form."

One effect of the current fascination with process is that a large number of vendors are coming out of the woodwork as BPM players. Beware, though, says Smith, they may not be what they seem: "Many companies are describing their products as BPM when what they're really doing is relabelling existing products. We want to be precise."

Smith recommends two tests to separate the real contenders from the pretenders. First, ask if the product allows business processes to be developed and fully managed without going down into the technical plumbing of existing applications. If you're expected to tinker with the underlying application infrastructure — even at a web services level — then the product fails the test.

For the second test, he recommends asking if it has "pi-calculus inside." According to industry body BPMI.org, pi-calculus gives BPM systems a solid mathematical underpinning, comparable to the relational algebra that serves as the foundation for an RDBMS. It bases its specifications for process design, deployment, execution, maintenance and optimization on pi-calculus mathematics

Integration that defies EAI convention

EAI versus Enterprise Service Bus

"..the emergence of service-oriented integration has introduced a far more efficient, flexible and low-cost approach. It obviates the need for complex integration adapters and a proprietary messaging hub through the use of web services standards such as SOAP for document recognition; XML standards such as XSLT for transformation; and asynchronous messaging standards such as JMS (Java Message Service). It allows applications to participate in processes without having to be tightly coupled together, enhancing agility and reusability. And it is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper to implement than EAI. "

Though it would be interesting to analyze what is the range of "order of magnitude" advantage we are anticipating with ESB. As the building blocks for integration are increasingly reaching zero cost from the development side, total integration cost will eventually come to match the labor cost involved in actually tying the systems together. Open source apis such as Apache Axis will make the integration projects much cheaper to execute if not that easier.

Quest for nacre

http://www.pearlinfo.com/consumer/born.html

The birth of a pearl is truly a miraculous event. Unlike gemstones or precious metals that must be mined from the earth, pearls are grown by live oysters far below the surface of the sea. Gemstones must be cut and polished to bring out their beauty. But pearls need no such treatments to reveal their loveliness. They are born from their mother oysters with a shimmering iridescence, luster and soft inner glow that is unlike any other gem on earth.

A natural pearl begins its life as a foreign object, such as a parasite or piece of sand, that by accident lodges itself in the oyster’s soft inner body where it cannot be expelled.

In an effort to ease this irritant, the oyster’s body takes defensive action. The oyster begins to secrete a smooth, hard crystalline substance around the irritant in order to protect itself. This substance is called nacre.

As long as the irritant remains within its body, the oyster will continue to secrete nacre around the irritant, layer upon layer. After a few years, the irritant will be totally encased by the silky crystalline coatings. The result — the lovely and lustrous gem called a pearl.

But how precious pearls are formed from what an oyster regards as merely protection against irritation is one of nature’s most prized secrets. For the nacre is not just a soothing substance. It is composed of microscopic crystals, each crystal aligned perfectly with each other so that light passing along the axis of one is reflected and refracted by the other to produce a rainbow of light and color. Cultured pearls are formed by oysters in almost an identical fashion. The only difference is that man surgically implants the irritant — a small piece of polished shell — in the oyster rather than leaving it to chance, then steps aside to let nature and the oyster create their miracle.

JBoss founders - bootstrapping ideas

How to bootstrap a business model based on open source software

Main points -

"I found that working from the bottom up - building the product, going after the business – is better than working from the top down - looking for the money first to fund a raw idea. For fledgling entrepreneurs, the lesson is clear: focus on your core competencies, and do the work yourself – don't count on someone else. And keep your overhead under control.

Very early on, I knew I had a product that people wanted. I just had to figure out a way to make money from it. After a false start, I was able to do that by believing in the product, listening to the customer, and finding the right people to work with me. The money followed pretty quickly from that point. Since then, the challenge to building a self-funded company has been to manage growth in stages so that revenues stay ahead of overhead. "

Its interesting to read this since we tried the first model early on and now trying the bottom up model.

Room to read

http://roomtoread.org/.
Is there any way to measure the effectiveness of these good initiatives. Measurements and stats will help new initiatives to focus on the non-overlapping areas.

Distributed Computing Economics

Jim Gray. Distributed Computing Economics

Need to dissect this further for our COW attack.

The Quiet War Over Open-Source

The Quiet War Over Open-Source (TechNews.com)

"The proposal for the meeting had come in a letter from nearly 60 technologists, economists and academics from around the world, and was organized by James Love, who runs the Ralph Nader-affiliated Consumer Project on Technology.

Love and others argue that in some areas, such as pharmaceuticals or software that powers critical infrastructure or educational tools, developing nations in particular would benefit from less restrictive or alternative copyright, patent or trademark systems. "

I think its essential to identify and isolate corporate influences over open source computing initiatives. Open source would require same kind of careful patent protection (as their corporate counterpart have it) if affordable computing has to take off in a big way. If more and more patents and copyrights are falling on the open source/creative commons camp then all this lobbying game will be an academic exercise.

Nutch Search

Complete stack story: Search

Nutch: organization