Can (Jon) Aydinova's Posts - Disruptive Thoughts, Game Changers and New World Order

Adult Learning - Theories, Analysis and New Opportunities for Adaptive e-Learning

2011-10-31T11:30:00.000Z

Application of Adult Development and Andragogy

As humans mature as adults, their life experiences, social roles, the need for motivation behind and immediacy for knowledge significantly shapes what they will learn, when they will learn it and how they will learn it best. This creates unique demands on adult educators who must not only shape the curriculum content for optimum relevancy for her adult audience but also design a delivery method that accommodates the specific adult learning needs and styles (Brookfield, 1995).

Synopsis of Adult Development, Cognitive & Intellectual Development and Memory as Adults Age

Study of adult intelligence has been predominantly viewed through three traditional approaches, namely biological approach, individual differences approach and cognitive processes approach (Marriam, Cafarella & Baumgartner, 2007, p.360).

Biological approach concentrates on study of how brain operates and its impact on intelligence. It also looks at the role of genetics in formation of intelligence. The underlying assumption in the biological approach is that journey of aging being natural part of the ongoing biological processes, translates into degradation in many bodily functions, including those of brain functions.

Individual differences approach is grounded in the principle that intelligence is a measurable construct and hence grounded in psychometric tradition. This approach focuses on intelligence measurement techniques to identify effect of aging on intelligence. However, measurement methods are very specific and potentially ignore understanding and measurement of aspects of adult intelligence which are actually positively influenced by age, including experiential and contextual knowledge that enable dialectical thinking and self-reflection. One of the central (and limiting) tenants of this approach is that it assumes that a measurement of a person’s intelligence can be summarized by measurement of few cognitive factors.

Cognitive processes approach takes a more holistic look at intelligence and aging. Baltes, Berg, Dixon and Schaie (as cited in Marriam & Baumgartner, 2007, p.367) where intelligence is viewed as consisting of multiple factors where while some of factors associated with intelligence do in fact decline, some stay stable and some actually improve. This approach takes closer look at specific age groups and its research demonstrates that there is no intelligence decline in neither early nor middle adulthood. Additionally, it also demonstrates that even in the late adulthood, decline in intelligence in certain areas is not conclusive across the same age group and asserts that some of the measurable decline in various intelligence factors may be due to disuse, which may be circumvented with increased self-directed learning.

Theory of Andragogy and Other Principles of Adult Learning

Andragogy

According to Knowles (Marriam & Baumgartner, 2007), adult learning demonstrates unique characteristics that clearly distinguishes it from pre-adult learning and he termed a label “andragogy”, “the art and science of helping adults learn”, distinguishing it from “pedagogy”, “the art and science of helping children learn”. Knowles identifies a model of learning assumptions, which establish the cornerstone of andragogy. The main tenets of these assumptions are:

1- As an adult moves to maturity, self-learning increasingly takes more prominence than that for dependent learning in pre-adulthood learning.

2- Adult’s life experiences become active contributors to the overall learning experience.

3- An adult learner’s life situation both in terms of social role and existing development gauges the readiness of an adult to learn.

4- As a transition to adulthood occurs, the motivation for learning shifts from knowledge for future use towards that for immediate application.

5- Adult learners are intrinsically driven by internal rather than external motivations.

6- Adults need clear rationale and relevance to what they are being taught.

McClusky’s Theory of Margin

McClusky theory of adult learning (as cited in Marriam & Baumgartner, 2007, p.93) is grounded in the assertion that adulthood is a time of growth, change and integration where one constantly tries to strike a balance between conflicting priorities and associated energies and time needed to manage these conflicting priorities. He describes this concept ratio between the “load” (L) of life which consumes energy and the “power” (P) of life which are individual sources of energy which enables an adult learner to cope with the load. Accordingly, an adult must have some margin of power available in order to be able to participate in a learning activity.

Illeris’s Three Dimensions of Learning Model

Illeris focuses directly on the learning process itself, and identifies three dimensions to the learning, namely cognition, emotion and society (as cited in Marriam & Baumgartner, 2007, p.97). Cognition involves knowledge learning skills, while emotion involves feelings and motivation behind the learning processes which can significantly impact the learning process. Both cognition and emotion are internal processes, whereas environment/society is an external dimension consisting of learner’s place and role in communities and society in general and their collective influence in shaping what’s appropriate and acceptable for an adult learner.

Jarvis’s Learning Process

Jarvis asserts that learning always begins with experiencing and this experience comes through the five human senses of sound, sight, smell, taste and touch (as cited in Marriam & Baumgartner, 2007, p.101). He explains that human beings are more than simple cognitive machines, but rather a much more holistic being with mind and body where our previous experiences and knowledge have significant impact of how the learning occurs, interpreted and adopted into personal knowledge repertoire.

Analysis

Andragogy has resulted in significant number of debates as to whether it’s a theory, a model or a guidelines for future theory or it should simply be treated as a learning best practice as argued by Elias and Hartree (as cited in Marriam & Baumgartner, 2007, p.85). Brookfield (1995) on the other hand puts serious doubt on the “self-directed learning” aspect of adult learning, which effectively defines much of the predominant view of current adult learning. He questions prevailing view of the current understanding of the “self-directed learning” as a dogma that suffers both from lack of longitudinal and life history research. He criticizes the shortfalls of associating self-directed learning solely as an age dependent phenomenon but rather being viewed as a phenomenon which may be influenced by other factors such as adult life experience, domain of knowledge being taught and specific adult development tasks at hand. Brookfield views adult learning not as a distinct learning phase that stands on its own, but rather part of an over-arching life-learning experience that exhibits forms of learning that are unique during adulthood, namely thinking dialectically (Brookfield), deploying logic, capacity to know how we know what we know.

Knowles later on also admits that the journey from pedagogy to andragogy is a learning continuum which situation dependent as much as it’s age dependent. For example, an adult that have very little prior knowledge in a topic may require a significant amount of dependency on an educator, whereas a young child who is naturally curious may realize significant benefits in a learning environment that provides additional means for self-directed learning.

McClusky’s theory is based in the pragmatic acknowledgement of the challenges adult face when it comes to integrating adult learning into their adult life situations including those associated with family and workplace. However, its biggest challenge with McClusky’s theory is that it’s rather an assessment tool than a theory that explains learning process.

Illeris’s learning model is simple yet fairly comprehensive as it takes into account the strong inter-relationships that constantly exist between the cognitive learning processes and how those learning processes are influenced by prevailing emotions of an adult learner including motivations and societal context within which she lives.

Jarvis’s learning processes is experiential focused and emphasizes experience as the core of any learning activity via five human senses, against the backdrop of life history and pas experiences. It’s considered to be the most comprehensive of the models above as it identifies learning as an interactive and experienced based process that occurs embedded in a societal context.

Practical Applications & Relevance

Common threads that seem to run across all these theories and models discussed above are:

1- Importance of recognition of previous knowledge

2- Importance of recognition of societal context

3- Importance of recognition of life-stage of an adult learner and the conflicting priorities of family, workplace and learning

4- Relative importance of heavy pragmatism needed for adult education due to the immediacy of application of the knowledge versus future use of that knowledge

5- Ability to capitalize on the aspect of self-directed learning that increasingly takes a more prominent role in adult learning with less likelihood of dependent style learning (observed in pre-adulthood) with increased preference for independent learning that comes with age.

I believe acknowledgment of above common themes can create a hybrid method that can positively influence how formal, informal and non-formal training and education are carried out in organizations. Many of the workforce education programs I have observed over the years myopically focuses on a single dimensional view of “teaching the topic” and the end goal being passing all the relevant knowledge associated with that topic. There is typically very little recognition of the learning styles and previous knowledge of the audience, let alone how the delivery of the topic should be designed such that learning process can be integrated into existing environment to maximize its effectiveness. Also, an outcome driven training modality with relevant and meaningful outcomes which incorporates an increased level of interactivity with the adult learner would likely result in increased motivation and hence increase the level of engagement.

Many of the factors discussed above increasingly confirms my belief in the importance of increased action-oriented research (Small, 2005) opportunities in adaptive eLearning that provides the platform for adopting to learner’s different learning styles and previous knowledge via ongoing real-time assessment either in a purely on-line interactive learning model that is self-directed focused, or in a more hybrid model delivered in more traditional class-room like setting such as learner’s workplace, community or educational institution.

References

Brookfield, S. D. (). Adult cognition and lifelong learning. Manuscript in preparation. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/lifelong-learning/papers/index.html

Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Adult learning: An overview. Retrieved from Google Scholar database. ()

Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Fransisco, CA: Josey-Bass, A Wily Co.

Marriam, S. B., Cafarella, R. S., & Baumgartner, L. M. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A comprehensive guide (3rd ed.). Retrieved from http://www.credoreference.com.library.capella.edu/book/wileyla

Small, S. A., & Uttal, L. (2005). Action-oriented research: Strategies for engaged scholarship. Journal of Marriage & Family, 67(4), 936-948. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2005.00185.x

Cloud Computing - The Exciting Era of Computing as a Utility Service & New Standards Development

2011-06-09T06:00:00.000Z

There are numerous definitions of cloud computing and the most comprehensive definition available is by Brendl (2010) who defined cloud computing as "collections of IT resources (servers, databases, and applications) which are available on an on-demand basis provided by a service company, available through the internet, and provide resource pooling among multiple users.

With democratization of access to the Internet, increasingly cheap computing resources and maturity of the Open Source movement have collectively contributed to the emergence of cloud computing as a commercially viable service for organizations big and small. Cloud computing stack consists of three layers of offerings:

1- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with solutions such as Google Apps, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, and Workday.com.

2- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) such as cloud development environments from Salesforce’s Platform.com, and Google’s Apps Engine.

3- Infrastructure-as-a-Service Platform (IaaS) with solutions such as those from Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure (Anthony & Rahman, 2011, p. 30).

In an era where IT organizations are under significant pressure and scrutiny to be much more cost efficient, innovative and agile, cloud computing is receiving serious consideration by many CXO’s. Potential opportunities that cloud computing offers are immense and increasingly steady adoption of and incorporation of these services into the overall IT fabric of service offerings are testament to its value proposition. However, long-term successful adoption of cloud computing will require crafting of a comprehensive Security Architecture and Integration strategies that acknowledges this new hybrid world of services both in-cloud and on-premise.

Advantage and Disadvantages

Disrupting Traditional Software & Infrastructure Licensing Models. The first but not so serious challenge towards traditional software and infrastructure licensing models from likes of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM came from the OpenSource movement. Then companies such as Google and Amazon took the OpenSource movement and commercialization of it to the whole new levels. The next new stage of this journey, is Cloud Computing where application and infrastructure services have been successfully packaged into a pay-for-use utility to the delight of many organizations but to the borderline panic for companies who depend on lucrative revenues from traditional licensing models.

Demand Elasticity and Cost Optimization. Cloud computing provides many advantages when it comes to managing costs. Customers of cloud computing can easily scale up their computing capacity due to temporary increase in the demand for processing and then scale down when demand returns to normal at the cost of a nominal extra fee (2011). Contrast this to the traditional approach where IT organizations purchase compute capacity that is typically based on estimated maximum demand, where most of the time computing resources are significantly under-utilized

Initial Capital and Ongoing Maintenance Costs. Cloud computing lowers the barriers of entry and initial capital investment needed for acquiring computing resources for new or increased business operations. This eliminates the need for having to secure capital or allow organizations to set aside their precious capital for investments in other critical business operations.

Time-to-Market. Reducing the effort associated with purchase, implementation and deployment of application and infrastructure services prior to launch of business operations can significantly reduce the time-to-market needed to launch new business initiatives.

High-Availability and Disaster Recovery. Cloud computing era has brought along a level of high-availability and disaster recovery alternatives that were simply cost prohibitive to many organizations. This is thanks to the collective multi-tenant model of a cloud computing and hence, an organization splitting the cost of high-availability and disaster recovery with other “neighbors”.

Security Regime. Introduction of cloud computing as an extension of corporate on-premise services creates an enterprise business operations that traverse the traditional corporate security boundaries into public clouds. This new world will require a holistic security regime that provides a comprehensive identity access management with a federated trust model that enables simple provisioning, authentication and authorization to services both on premise and in cloud while ensuring the secure transmission of confidential corporate data.

Integration. In a hybrid in-cloud/on-premise model, Integration emerges as one of the most critical IT competencies that need to be in place in order to ensure a successful transitioning into this new model of business operations co-existence in private and public networks. In a hybrid co-existence model where business data now exist across multiple SaaS and IaaS providers in addition to those that exists on-premise, one will to manage “cloud”-to-“cloud” and “cloud”-to-“on-premise” data flows and hence integrations. This is further complicated by the added complexity of having to understand information data structures that exist within those public cloud service providers. Accordingly, a comprehensive Integration strategy will require partnership with integration specialists in this space, such as Cast Iron or iWay Software. This Integration strategy will also heavily depend upon services of the holistic Cloud Identification Management Solution (IAM) with a strong support SAML and Kerberos integration.

Challenges & Opportunities for Researchers. Cloud computing is still in its infancy and lacks mature cloud-specific standards. However, these challenges are also the perfect catalysts for new action-oriented research with opportunities for scholarly research that are grounded in solving real business issues. Two areas of gap are:

- Lack of standards in application programming interfaces (API’s) needed for inter-operability between different vendor cloud solutions (Illango & Khajeh-Hosseiini, 2010). This standard void can impose risks in potential vendor-lock-in for organizations as it can create incompatibility issues between different vendor cloud implementations.

- A generic cloud framework that provides a holistic model for inter-operability and trusted security regime for business operations spanning across private on-premise and in-cloud service offerings across multiple vendor solutions.

- Best practices on how to implement practical cloud governance process to ensure a systematic decision-making for fitness for use, risk identification, mitigation and management.

Conclusion

IT discipline by its very nature has extensive association in design, use and deployment of technologies to solve multi-disciplinary business problems. This uniqueness is due to sheer rate and level of innovations and advancements that come from the very fast pace of change in emerging technologies, and their ongoing impact on the IT discipline and its field applications. However, this fast pace of change can create a void in standards, best practices and governance which can be a barrier to faster adoption. Cloud computing is a good example of an area of IT discipline where technologies advancements have so far outpaced development of operational best practices associated with governance, adoption and operational management of these technologies. These challenges however also provide exciting research opportunities for action-oriented research that advances scholarly knowledge while solving pressing business problems. It’s my strong belief that increasing commercialization of cloud computing as a utility service will drive industry and academia into increased collaboration and consensus on clear standards and best practices that addresses some of the growing pains in this new wonderful platform that is disrupting the traditional software and infrastructure licensing models that had taken many organizations hostage for far too long.

References

Anthony, B., & Rahman, S. M. (2011). An overview of the security concerns in enterprise cloud computing. Internation Journal of Network Security & It’s Applications, 3(1), .

Illango, S., & Khajeh-Hosseiini, A. (2010, January 19). Research agenda in cloud technologies. ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, .

Interactive & Adaptive e-Learning

2011-05-29T22:30:00.000Z

Interactive & Adaptive e-Learning

Ubiquitous and commodity nature of the Internet, technology and enablement of rich digital content are increasingly shaping our daily lives of how people interact and collaborate with others at work and in personal lives and how they keep informed. This wave of change being revolutionized by technology is now gearing up for its next frontier, education.

One part of the population that has the most significant adoption of Internet, technology and the digital world, are children and youth. They are already well immersed in use of many of these technologies as part of their daily lives, whether using Internet to carry out simple school projects, preparing multi-media presentations for school presentations, using mobile messaging to keep parents informed their whereabouts, or using playing highly interactive video games. Emergence of the technology-savvy new generation who has and is growing in a technology enabled environment requires the review of traditional methods of education delivery and how these technologies can be re-deployed in design and adoption of new educational curriculum that raises the overall learning experience in a format that is familiar but also fun to children.

Adaptive e-Learning is ability of the curricula to continuously assess, adjust and personalize curriculum delivery that takes into account learner’s unique attributes. These attributes include previous knowledge, topic bias, learning styles, and unique cultural biases. Task or outcome-based aspect of learning introduces additional opportunities for enhanced learning by embedding a learner into a video-game style setting where environment and tasks are outlined and where student is given continuous feedback and reward on steps and decisions taken. Unique formula that combines and integrates these two dimensions may have significant positive implications as a game-changer delivering new exciting ways of learning experiences that are relevant and interesting to children of the 21^st century.

Adaptive e-Learning

Traditional teacher to class lecture format curriculum delivery is based on what topics need to be covered during a specific period of time. This traditional method makes little allowance for potential of the existence a very broad spectrum of differences in student attributes ranging from student previous knowledge, learning styles and pace to topic bias and cultural nuances. This is particularly critical for those topics when learners knowledge base is at a novice level where significant amount of instructional support is required at the pace and style personalized for the needs of that learner (Kayluga & Sweller, 2005, p. 86). Unless there is a close match between a teachers teaching style and that for learner’s own, gaps in student learning can be easily understood.

Adaptive e-Learning aims to close this gap. It proposes to do this by reducing the student cognitive load by designing a method of delivery that is able to not only recognize both initial and ongoing levels of a learner’s skill level but also adjust instructional levels accordingly based on learner’s progress at any point in time. The core capability of this new approach requires the incorporation of a rapid student expertise assessment in real-time at frequent intervals during the delivery of course content.

Video-game style interactive e-learning

Natural attraction by children and young adults to increasingly highly realistic virtual worlds with embedded role playing, real-time interaction and feedback makes video game format an ideal partner in a holistic adaptive e-Learning design and experience. However, this format is not without its obstacles as it brings forth new challenges into game design that was previously not present. The challenge comes from how to strike a balance between instructional learning aspects of the game design in such a way that it optimizes the right balance between “learning” but also “fun” gaming aspects of the format (Egenfeldt-Nielson, 2011). In order to achieve this balance, three major design principles need to be taken into consideration by an instructional game designer, namely integration, motivation and focus. Integration is the seamless integration of learning and gaming aspects of the game where the learner’s experience of both feel seamless, balanced and natural. Motivation is the focus on creating a game that is interesting, engaging and calibrated for right level of challenges; personalized to learner’s attributes of previous knowledge, bias, learning style, and right amount of real-time feedback and rewards. Third design principle is having a right focus for the overall game and maintaining it throughout. If the focus of the game is about algebra then spirit of learning algebra must be maintained. With a background setting where players are astronauts and traveling in space, while it may make some sense to give players some sense of how to navigate the spacecraft at warp speeds, it would make sense not to overplay this against the real focus on learning, i.e. how to solve key algebraic equations that will get them back to earth in the most efficient manner with limited fuel and food source.

Conclusion

Adaptive e-Learning provides a framework for broader aspects of personalized learning processes whereas video-game style interactive learning is well positioned as opportunistic enabler for enhancing student learning by capitalizing on intrinsic motivational and fun aspects of video gaming.

References

Egenfeldt-Nielson, S. (2011, February). What makes a good learning game?. eLearn Magazine.

Kayluga, S., & Sweller, J. (2005). Rapid dynamic assessment of expertise to improve the efficiency of adaptive e-learning. Educational Technology Research & Development, 53(3), 83-93.

Cloud Computing - The 4th horseman of the software licensing nightmare?

2010-04-28T21:30:00.000Z

Traditional licensing models – Already a confusing landscape

For as many packaged enterprise software deployment methods that exist, there are equal if not more flavors of vendor licensing models. Traditional licensing models range from per CPU/core usage to number of devices in the network that “can access the software” to total number and/or concurrent number of users, or number of instances of the software running and any combination of the above methods. A process already extremely confusing one for many customers, has become incredibly even more confusing thanks to vendors changing their licensing models every couple of years, if not more often.

I completely appreciate and understand the software vendors’ need to maximize the profits from their intellectual property, and hence the need for a software licensing model that plugs in as many holes as possible to ensure maximum return. What I don’t understand is, software licensing today stands alone, in a software industry where one has witnessed non-stop evolution and sometimes revolutionary progress in innovation, as the practice that not only has not evolved but it has actually regressed in the eyes of many corporate and retail consumers. The words such as “standard” and “consistency” are not in the vocabulary of the “Art of Software Licensing”. There are times when one cannot help but think that there is a conspiracy out there to keep consumers in the total state of confusion by constantly morphing into shapes and forums that require specialty skills to unraveling the complexity.

Then comes the world of Virtualization….

Just when it looked like the software licensing models could not get any more confusing, then came the new era of virtualization. In the last 5-6 years, many organizations have, and rightly so, jumped into the world of virtualization with both hands and feet to reduce operational costs by increasing mostly idling enterprise resource utilizations from 10-15% to as much as 70-80% while at the same time benefiting from the new deployment and operational efficiencies afforded by virtualization software packages such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen. Virtualization broke the traditional rule-of-thumb where one needed a server(s) for each application because many applications had special deployment and resource needs that were unique and in some cases specific to an operating system and/or hardware. By inserting a special (hypervisor) level between an application and the hardware resources, virtualization software effectively broke the hard-wired dependency between an application and the computing resources it needed. And by doing so, it opened up the new era of being able to cohesively run and manage multiple business applications on the same computing resources, with the added benefit of the ability to have the option of dynamically scaling up and down the computing resources on-demand. Throw in to this mix, the significant savings in power usage and cooling(anywhere from $200-$600 for mid-size servers), then you really got a winner.

In a virtualized environment, a concept of a physical erodes into a world of the virtual and so is the concept of concrete physical computing resourcunits. For example, the concept of a physical CPU becomes irrelevant as a CPU can be partitioned among multiple applications. Or an application may be provisioned additional temporary system resources (CPU, memory, storage) on demand for peak volumes, and then scale back and in some cases scale down resources during periods of low activity. And this is where things completely break-down for traditional software licensing models, which by design are based on “maximum usage” versus actual usage. In a virtualized environment, how does a vendor charge a customer who uses only a ½ CPU or 2.25 CPU? Or how to charge a customer whose application only needs 4 CPU’s during normal business hours, only one after-hours, and 7.5 CPU’s during holidays? In the case of the latter, telling the customer that they need to license their application for 8 CPU’s is no longer going to fly as it means charging a customer for maximum usage that is only needed for brief periods of time. While this argument could have been easily made 5-10 years ago, times have changed and so have the options and many customers will (or should not) have any patience for this rationale whose age is beginning to show.

And the complete licensing breakdown- Welcome Cloud Computing!

Let’s notch this up a bit, and take the problem in to the next dimension, the cloud computing. One can think of cloud computing as the virtualization beyond the traditional boundaries of corporate data centers; a next-generation on-demand infrastructure virtualization in the “cloud of the Internet”. An organization providing a cloud-computing service provisions compute resources (database, CPU, storage, etc.) to its clients that need the additional resources as per usage basis. It’s a win-win situation. Definitely a win for a customer who may be looking for temporary compute resources during processing peaks by avoiding the need to spend additional capital by “renting” this additional capacity for a nominal fee instead of having to purchase it, and hence incur fixed costs for years to com. A win for the cloud-computing service provider, as by spreading incremental usage across large set of clients, it can maximize utilization of its cloud capacity and hence profit maximization. Few examples of companies in this ever growing cloud computing market are Amazon (yes, Amazon does lot more than selling books online), Salesforce.com, Terremark, Google, RackSpace, GoGrid, IBM, and Joyent. Modeling software licensing in an hybrid environment that consists of a customer data center, supplemented by that of cloud computing services that will be shared across hundreds if not thousands of other corporations, is even worse than the licensing challenge scenario mentioned. In this new equation, monitoring and control over what resources were used, when and by whom takes on a whole new level of complexity which current traditional licensing schemes are simply not equipped to deal with.

So how do we deal with this impasse?

I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts in how the future may and should look like, some of which include overcoming various technical hurdles that need be resolved as part of any meaningful long-term solution.

Need for Shift in software design practices & underlying infrastructure

Yesterday’s traditional applications and application development practices are not equipped in providing secure, true multi-tenant, “meter-able” fee based utility services over the Internet. Throw into the mix the limitation of the underlying traditional relational databases, and the technical challenge becomes insurmountable (not counting the old ASP model, where one effectively runs a business application on a dedicated resource on the host provider’s premises).

Leaders in the cloud computing space, such as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com have been quietly working behind the scenes designing and building a baseline infrastructure and supporting software design patterns and key development practices that are tuned to build applications that operate and provision services in the cloud. Amazon with its Elastic Compute Cloud Architecture already provides rich portfolio of Web based services for provisioning virtual servers, simple relational database services and hosted simple queue services that enable guaranteed delivery of messages between systems. And who knows Internet better than Google. Google has been offering numerous productivity tools and online storage in the cloud for millions of users for couple of years and in the last two years has been targeting similar offerings at extremely attractive prices to enterprise corporate customers. Google also offers Google App Engine, platform-as-a-service offering for developers, where developers can develop, deploy, test and host their applications, all in the Google cloud infrastructure.

Building and maintain large corporate data centers are extremely capital intensive with extremely long-payback periods, if any. The transition to developing cloud-aware business applications will take time and how long it really takes will be driven by sense of urgency and demand for cloud infrastructure as intrinsic part of an organizations’ capacity planning activities.

Increase use of Open Source in the corporate virtual or cloud Infrastructures

Open source community is experiencing a healthy growth in the number of viable, commercial, enterprise grade business and infrastructure applications. Few examples are SugarCRM (Customer Care Solution), Compiere (ERP solution), Alfresco (Enterprise Content Management), Pentaho Open BI (Business Intelligence Engine), Intallio BPMS (Business Workflow Engine), Magento (eCommerce), Mule (Enterprise Integration Bus), and Hadoop (for massively parallel computing and data access– used by Amazon). As such, open source can play an increasingly attractive supplementary role when it comes to easing the pain and lack of creativity in the existing traditional software licensing models, particularly for software used on-premise or rented virtualized cloud infrastructures. While one still needs to incur the cost of professional support, an open source application/software or commercial software based on open source code, by design takes care of the licensing challenge in the virtualized worlds, because either there is no licensing fee to speak of, or there is a nominal fee for the initial purchase.

This option is meaningful for organizations that have appetite and the technical depth and breadth required for open source support, and business and operational capabilities that be served by an open source solution. The current recession from which we are just coming out of, has tweaked the interest of many organizations, small and big, to at least educate themselves about open source alternatives and their viability to become part of their overall business solution delivery while managing one of the most significant cost of their IT operations, the cost of software licensing and maintenance.

Short-term opportunities

Ability of vendors to offer multiple tier licensing models based on usage patterns could be a win-win situation. For example, a software licensing approach that makes provision for “normal usage” and “peak usage” would help relieve headaches for many customers which may find themselves in a non-compliance situation during short intervals during the year (typically days or a week or so, say during a holiday period) where they may need to temporarily assign additional compute resources to an application to meet the short-term demand peaks. Today, to account for this scenario, many customers would typically need to license the software for “peak usage” which could easily make it a cost prohibitive value proposition, and hence either result in a costly acquisition with very long payback, or looking at other more cost-effective software options or not buying application software all together resulting in a loss of a sale, with a cumulative effect of hundreds of millions of dollars of lost sales for the entire software industry. Software licensing flexibilities such as this could also afford the software vendors with opportunities for real-time monitoring of the compliance on customer premises, in return for this flexibility.

Many software vendors have typically little insight into software compliance at a customer premise, unless they decide to invoke a compliance audit which is not only costly, but also not a great way to manage customer relations. More proactive measures that blend flexible licensing options with built-in usage monitoring, is a much more sellable and healthy position to take with customers.

Emerging competitive advantage for innovative software vendors

On-premise virtualization, and cloud computing, and a hybrid processing scheme that capitalizes on both, will become the defacto method by which organizations will increase their enterprise utilization rates, reduce capital costs and increase operational efficiencies that can react to changing business demands at the speed and agility relevant to their business partners. This trend has left the station and is not stoppable.

Software vendors that recognize this change and re-tool accordingly to start a transition path for designing virtual and cloud-aware applications while providing short-term licensing flexibilities in the new virtualized worlds of customer enterprise will gain a significant short and long-term competitive advantage.

In the meantime, I would closely watch players such as Google and Amazon as disruptive innovators of the “Cloud” as they are strategically positioned in terms of influence and extensive relevant experience in the Internet domain and massively parallel processing in the clouds for millions, not to mention their edge in unique software and hardware architecture patterns which by their very design assume operations in the cloud.

Evolution of Internet and its Next Frontier: Education

2010-04-13T17:37:46.000Z

Internet: The medium of disruption

Ubiquity of Internet in our daily lives and its increasingly profound impact on how it shapes our personal and work lives may be increasingly less obvious, not because we are not aware of them, but because they are so increasingly intertwined into our daily lives that we don’t even think it’s there.

Take the most basic aspect of Internet, the good old email. Today, for many millions of people, lack of access to a personal or company mail rate in the “Top 10 worst things that can happen in my life” list. Traditional post services are the thing of the past, unless you are still very keen in sending a Christmas card to your grandmother. In the last decade, adoption and reach of Internet and those technologies delivered through Internet have changed the way masses receive and consume information for personal or business decision making (such as buying/selling) and new means to forge, mobilize and maintain relationships and communities of interest.

Many traditional media companies starting with newspapers, radio, cable are just beginning to grasp the fact that Internet is here to stay with its tentacles reaching to all corners of this planet and that it’s now one of the largest and fastest growing medium for consumer consumption, social interaction, networking and business transactions.

Internet has been the disruptive energy behind many new technologies that have turned many traditional business models upside down. Examples are endless, but you will all recognize what Apple has done to the record industry, Amazon to the publishing, eBay to buying and selling, and Google to the whole business model of advertising. Equally important, Internet has become the single-most equalizer for leveling the playing field for access to massive amount of information and large audience of consumers ready and willing to buy, and hence competition.

Role of Internet & Technology in Raising the bar and reach of Education

Internet and Internet delivered technologies can not only play the role of supplementing the traditional brick-and-mortar education delivery methods but also transforming them. Our children today are plugged into technology and Internet at very early ages and to them, use of technology and Internet is as normal as brushing their teeth at night (and hopefully in the morning as well). Explosion of adoption of technology and Internet use by children and youth has been at a rate many orders of magnitude larger than that for adults.

So, on the adoption side of things, Internet and technology are already a mainstream for kids. If there is a fear that exists, it’s that for some traditionalist who either don’t fully understand the inherent power of Internet in enabling higher quality education or fear that Internet may altogether change the core of how and where education is delivered to the masses.

An online delivery of a curriculum and delivery through traditional brick-and-mortar in-class setting are not mutually exclusive but rather two facets of learning that complete each other. Many people warn of the possible harmful effects of using technology in the classroom. Will children lose their ability to develop social skills and become dependent on technology to learn? How are we going to prevent them from accessing inappropriate materials? It’s too expensive. Kids need to learn the basics first (as if somewhat technology is an inhibitor to basics). History is a witness to many innovations such as printing press, radio, television, automobile, etc.), most of which received the similar grave concerns. While possibility that they could be used inappropriately always existed (and still does), overall they have given humanity unbounded access to information that cultivated social awareness and knowledge. With appropriate guidance and application, Internet and Internet driven technologies can equally be invaluable tools for the development of higher order thinking skills and breadth a whole new level of interactivity and joy into the overall learning experience.

Internet by design incorporates all of the major multi-media content (documents, messaging, voice, video, documents) plus all the collaboration and social-networking capabilities that are essential in building a high quality and cost effective education delivery mechanism that is highly interactive, visual, collaborative and fun. For instance, packaging and consistent delivery of select multi-media classes across education jurisdictions would not only enhance the learning experience, it could also provide significant synergies for cost containment in a time where educators are increasingly being asked to do more with less.

Online learning journey has already started and led by few private innovators, mostly in the under-graduate level programs. Initial success of these select online universities is a strong confirmation that that not only online education is a very viable but also be a profitable business. Why? Because it addresses some significant challenges while providing new options for those who could not or would not attend the traditional educational setting such as a brick-and-mortar university/college. With increasing work hours, increasing need for both parents having to work, the option of attending a degree program with strict time schedules and specific campus location requirements are frankly not viable for many. For many others, lack of college and university campus in a close proximity has always been a significant barrier in attending a higher education for many reasons including cost, commute and unwillingness or inability to leave the community (e.g. single mom, someone having to take care of dependent relative, etc.). For others, it has been inflexibility of the program curriculum (e.g. time and frequency of delivery of courses).

Sadly, but not suprisingly, most of the criticism of online education has come from brick and mortar education institutions, educators but particularly from universities. Some of the understandable original concerns were around accreditation. Good news is that this problem has already been solved as all of these well known reputable online universities have already been accredited by the same agencies that accredit local state University or colleges. The ones that are not are in the same boat as some of the traditional Universities or colleges that fail to either renew their existing accreditation or secure one. So the system works equally well for both traditional and online Universities. Next concern has been around the quality of the educators at online universities. Review of ratio of the credentials and education levels of teaching staff, like any other traditional university is part the accreditation process. When I attended the typical brick-and-mortar University, the profile of my lecturers spanned the entire spectrum of seasoned professors (with PhD’s), to lecturers with masters or in some cases undergraduate degrees. And yes, the quality of teaching changed from one semester to another depending upon quality of the teaching staff. So, while I understand the growing pains in any new university setting, quality of teaching may be equally spotty in a traditional setting as it can be in an online setting depending upon who is teaching it and how.

The state of the exploitation of the power of Internet and technology in our K-12 educations system is literally at dark ages and I believe is increasingly hindering the pace and quality of learning as its traditional methods of teaching is at odds with cognitive learning tools that today’s children are comfortable with. Barrier to adoption is not a cost issue as usual as Internet by design brings along significant economies of scale in terms of curriculum production, distribution and re-use with potentially significant cost savings in an environment that increasingly becomes paperless and digital.

Many industrialized nations including United States, rate dismally against some of the Asian counterparts (such as Singapore, Korea, and increasingly China) in capitalizing on the power of Internet and technology as enablers for high quality and cost effective education.

Closing this gap will require finding new ways to educate policy makers and connect learners and teachers with the results, implications and procedures of Internet and technology enabled learning supported by strong research.

Business Model for Open Source/Free Community Initiatives: Possible but requires solid strategy

2010-03-23T04:30:00.000Z

Establishing a revenue stream out of Open Source projects or free community networks (particularly those in the social networking) is a challenging endeavor even for some of the most successful ones.
Well known and successful l projects with huge adoption such as those included in the Apache Community, typically demonstrate commercial value in support of other commercial activities undertaken by a company. Some great examples of creative work coming out of Apache community are projects such as Apache Http Server, Tomcat, Maven, Ant, Active MQ, Struts and Hadoop. According to the latest Netcraft statistics, Apache Http Server has over 50% of the Internet market share when it comes to Web Server platform implementations on the Internet. And yet, no company became rich providing services for Apache Web Server.

Latest January 2010 statistics by comScore Inc, puts number of Twitter visitors above 75 million (including both direct twitter.com and users that come through applications using Twitter API’s). Yet it’s publicly well-known the dodging challenge Twitter founders are having in coming up with a suitable business model to create a revenue stream out of Twitter.

Establishing clear strategy

An upfront clear strategy that describes the financial motivation in launching an open source or free community style software is key to creating a strong plan of execution. Some questions that need to be asked from onset are:

Are you pursuing an open source or free community approach to cut into the revenues of a competitor? An example here would be Google Apps/Gmail that directly competes for the consumer demand for popular office applications offerings by Microsoft. Another example is the arrival of Android as the free alternative to other licensed based handset OS’s including MS Mobile, Blackberry, Symbiant, etc.

Trying to establish a new product that you plan to monetize by generating a significant developer community interest and hence supporting products around it? One example would a company like IBM providing strong support behind open source projects such as Linux even though IBM still markets its traditional Unix variant AIX. This is not because of specific love affair IBM has with open source community but a clever strategy to be perceived as an open source community friendly organization that not only influences future project direction but also capitalizing on the huge industry adoption of Linux by developing value-add services around it.

Are you trying to increase the adoption of your commercial products by offering an entry-level community version, and use it as a launch-pad for your commercial products? An example here would be Novell who is the sponsor of openSUSE community which provides the baseline for its popular commercial product, SUSE Linux. Another example would be one of the most popular open source eCommerce platforms, Magento. Magento provides two versions of its products, one the community version and its enterprise version with a very impressive development community that provides rich portfolio of free and licensed versions of extensions to both versions of its software.

Is your intent to generate critical mass (both on consumer and developer community sides) for your free offering in order to position yourself for a buy-out? Examples of some lucky ones are YouTube (by Google), MySpace (by Rupert Murdoch), Hotmail (by Microsoft), and lets don’t forget MySQL who is now owned by Oracle via the SUN acquisition.

Is your strategy to build a commercial product built on open source stack in order to offer a low cost but innovative feature rich product or service offerings? A great example is Amazon. Amazon has built one of the most impressive Web Services offerings on the planet supported by a massively large cloud computing framework with a technology stack that is almost exclusively built on open source stack that includes MySQL, Perl, Mason and Hadoop (a Java framework for massively data intensive distributed applications). Amazon has one of the largest fee-based cost-effective offerings for cloud based computing today.

Or is it your intent driven by offering functional but free software that is designed to create opportunities for service offerings around it. We all know the monetization marvel that followed the immense popularity of the Google Search engine. Facebook is now generating enough ad revenues that cover the cost of its day-to-day operations.

Having a clear motivating strategy for the end-game is paramount to the success of an open source or free community based software as it sets the groundwork of driving both the business and design principles for the execution stage. It’s also key that one narrows the focus so that there are not too many and hence potentially conflicting motivating drivers for monetization. As such, one should typically focus on one or at most two motivating factors.

Innovation: Some organizations drink from this fountain while others gurgle!

2010-03-13T08:00:00.000Z

According to Wikipedia Innovation is defined as “a new way of doing something” or "new stuff that is made useful”. Another more apt description of innovation is “Innovation is a conversion of knowledge and ideas into a benefit which may be for commercial use or the public good; the benefit may be a new or improved products, processes or services. Innovation is a process of continuously generating and applying new ideas”.

What do companies such as IBM, Cisco, GE, 3M, Nike, Nintendo, Proctor and Gamble, Disney, Target and HP have in common? Well, they all have been successful companies that have been around for a while (with Cisco being the youngest, at about 25 years), and have constantly exercised the art of constructive destruction, re-inventing themselves. These companies seem to have developed and institutionalized innovation as a critical aspect of their operations and business development. As such, innovation in these companies is viewed as a strategic business strategy and engrained into the psyche of their workforce culture.

Let’s look at an example. Late in the 80’s and early 90’s, with the start of the mind-numbing advances in processor chip design , related advances in manufacturing processes and hence commoditization of personal and business computing, many people had thought the days of IBM, the father of mainframe computing, were numbered. Mainframe revenues then effectively made up most of IBM revenues. During that very same period, not so surprisingly, IBM revenues were not only in red but the future of the company was in question. Fast forward the clock and over a quarter century later, while re-affirming its commitment to mainframe computers, it gradually moved away from low margin products (such as PC’s, printers, etc.) to higher margins software and consulting business, becoming increasingly technology agnostic and priding itself being able to integrate with many of its competitors’ products. It embraced Intel based architecture (anyone remembers IBM Powerchip) into its product portfolio and has become one of the avid supporters of the Open Source Linux movement. Today, IBM holds more patents than any other US technology company with eight research labs worldwide and is one of the most profitable technology companies on the planet. IBM was able to re-invent itself from what it looked like a certain doom thanks to commitment innovative leadership and engineering which always pay big dividends.

Let’s look at another not so great example. Kodak, the company that invented 35mm film and had become synonymous with photo films, had dominated this film market for decades. However, the same company had its rug pulled under its feet with the arrival of digital photography. Not only Kodak was not ready for it, it seemingly did not understand the immense consumer potential and its negative impact on its business, as it was extremely slow in its response to the threat of digital photography. During that period, with overwhelming adoption of digital photography in the consumer market, Kodak’s revenues took a nose dive, which included de-listing from Dow Jones Industrial index that it had been part of for over 70 years. Kodak was not able to re-invent itself and had fallen asleep on its old innovation bed for far too long.

So, why innovation is such a big deal and why in some organizations it’s treated as strategic business objective and molded as a key attribute into the corporate culture, while in others it’s treated as some after-thought, nice-to-have, we-will-do-it-when-have-time practice?

Why Innovate?

Simply put, companies that can constantly churn innovative products and services are able to separate themselves from the rest of the herd. They can do this because they are able to distinguish themselves on unique, niche features and charge premium prices for them. It’s amazing to observe how consumers who would bargain hunt for the cheapest PC/laptop and refusing to pay more than $400-500, would also have no problem in dishing out over $1000 for a Mac. While many PC/laptop makers in a never-ending death-dance trample all over themselves in a bid for a cheaper laptop/pc which, a phenomenon that kicked into high-gear during the recession, Apple managed to hold firm on its prices across all its product line. In addition, innovation significantly increases future earning potential of a company and with it the shareholder value. Simply put, innovation is all about making a difference in your top and bottom lines by establishing a pipeline for long-term sustainable revenues that are driven by differentiation, be it a process, a product or a service that sets an organization apart from the rest of the competition.

How do you know when you are innovating?

There are some good indicators that provide a sense of how innovative a company is. Some examples are:

- Number of existing and pending patents

- % of budget set aside for incubating ideas, research and development

- Corporate culture towards innovation – One of my favorites. Is innovation a lip service and a feel good conversation whenever everything else fails, or there is a genuine support system that encourages and rewards creativity?

- Are there organizational processes in place that encourage, capture, incubate, champion and reward creative product and service ideas directly from staff?

- Time it takes to takes to turn a concept/ideation into a packaged product and service; months versus years or never?

- Number of new product/service announcements every year?

All the companies mentioned above, including some of the more recent arrivals such as Amazon, Google, and eBay score extremely high on these indicators.

Innovation at work

In the world on innovation, it’s the extreme nature of the idea that counts not the good or average ideas. According to extreme value theory, there is a higher likelihood of extreme ideas when sample of ideas generated and variance among those ideas are large.

Innovative companies have seemingly managed to tap into extreme value theory by setting up the organizational support mechanism including the necessary culture for soliciting, incubating and nurturing ideas in large numbers directly from its workforce. The end result being a steady pipeline of large number of ideas-flow that significantly increases the likelihood of capturing couple of extreme ideas that may have the disruptive nature, if properly incubated, developed and implemented. Suffice to say, it’s better to have one extreme idea per 500 average ideas than one good idea out of every two not so good ones.

Innovation support mechanism starts with strong moral and financial support right from the top. In fact, typically CEO becomes the defacto champion of the innovation movement. Other part of the support structure is formulation of an innovation governance framework that encapsulates formal but agile processes and collaborative technologies that ensure capture, assessment, funding and incubation, development and commercialization of select disruptive ideas.

The other end of the spectrum – The Innovation void?

On the other side of the corporate innovation spectrum, innovation is synonymous with crazy ideas by those people who have typically too much time on their hands. In these organizations corporate culture is driven by status-quo and preservation, and hence anything that may challenge current thought and new ways of doing or running business face strong upstream currents. Labor force tends to have an extremely homogenous experience thanks to limited external experiences, with very little turn-over and with long unbroken tenures. External hires in strategic roles are far few in between, if any and the survival expectancy of the occasional hire of an innovative strategic thinker is not good thanks to insurmountable frustration and cultural resistance he/she faces.

These organizations suffer from severe case of mediocrity and group-think. Idea generation is in the domain of the few which results in serious constipation of number and quality of good ideas, let alone extreme ones. Innovative thinking is a matter of either corporate ridicule or a concept that organization dabbles with whenever there is “free” time. Attempts to “innovate”, is typically starts and ends with some poor sole setting up a collaboration tool and sending out an invite to the staff to send in their ideas!

Few of my favorite innovation excuses that I heard over the years are:

- We are too busy to spend time playing around with new ideas!

- No need to be bleeding edge! We are not a R&D company, we just sell commodity stuff!

- We are not measured for innovation but getting things done!

- Let’s talk about this next year!

- We really don’t have any money for innovation!

- Innovation? Please, let’s focus on execution! (As if the two are mutually exclusive)

- We already got too many ideas…

- We have limited resources already for the things that need to get done …

- I prefer staying under the radar ….

- We already got our marching orders ..let’s don’t waste time …

- And feel free to add your own ….

These organizations always seem to go from one crisis mode to another, always in a catch-up mode to the competition. Product and service offerings are either stale or incoherent and with little, if any, differentiation in the market place in quality and uniqueness; with the end result of portfolio of products and services with extreme price elasticity and hence susceptible to price fluctuations in an increasingly commodity market. The common thread that runs through this mediocre performance is the very lack of innovative spirit and creativity for which they seem to have no time for. It’s a sad video clip that is stuck on re-play.

Innovation pays …

10 Years from Now ....

2009-06-28T23:30:00.000Z

10 YEARS FROM NOW …

I was at our local farmers market this morning. I am always amazed by level of energy that radiates from these places. As usual, the place was bustling with people, everyone jostling to check out local fresh produce lured in by the beautiful aroma of fresh fruits, vegetables, sausages, bakery, etc. In the midst of this dying tradition, I was equally amazed by the degree of electronics gear that people of all ages were equipped with, me included.
Farmer markets are effectively local community social networks, where instead of electronic messages between individuals, people are exchanging messages via small conversations, hand-shakes and exchanging cash for food or some art work.

During my walk at the market, my observation was that Blackberries and iPhones were the most visible followed by iPods, and GPS watches. Once in a while, I would also run into a merchant with a PC or a Mac (an obvious choice by many local artisans). Multi-tasking was in full force with texting and online conversations interspersed while checking and in some cases squeezing the produce. Penetration of technology in our lives and their influence in shaping them was beautifully exposed in one of the oldest traditions left standing in our modern western societies, i.e. farmers’ market.

For the rest of the day, I could not help stop thinking about what our daily lives may look like in 10 years from now. While the spectrum of change and impact in our lives will surely be extensive, couple of specific areas stood out for me as the candidates that will see a great deal of change. Here are some of my thoughts, in no particular order, of future glimpses of how technology may inter-mingle and fuse into our daily lives in the next 10 years.

Health Care
a. Nanotechnologies will make significant inroads into patient care including diagnosis, selective drug delivery and tissue engineering resulting in significantly less intrusive surgery and treatment modalities replacing or significantly reducing very invasive and mostly ineffective treatments such as chemo-therapy.

Personal/Home Computing & Entertainment
a. Desktop computers will be long gone.
b. Laptops will get smaller and lighter becoming like netbooks and netbooks will become much more powerful like laptops, eventually any distinction between the two disappearing all together.
c. Smartphones will be increasingly more sophisticated becoming a platform of choice for running many of the consumer and business applications previously not possible.
d. The new gray zone of personal computing will be between smartphones and netbooks/notebooks.
e. Virtualization software will be the defacto way of managing capital in IT enterprises of organizations and increasingly all new business applications will be developed to run on top of virtualization layers. This will finally eliminate years of heavy coupling and dependency between business applications and vendor OS/hardware providing organizations complete freedom of hardware.
f. Virtualization will also gain adoption in smartphones and laptops, finally allowing consumer applications to become fully device/OS independent. This will allow consumers to buy an application once and use it across multiple devices such as buying an iPhone app and running it on Blackberry or vice versa.
g. Real-time streaming TV will be the mainstream together with next generation of TV consoles which will effectively be multi-media digital platforms providing seamless application mash-ups including music, video, TV, news, blogs, texting, etc.
h. Broadband speeds of 50Mbs will be available as a general service to consumers (BTW Virgin Media is already offering trial versions of 50MB in UK)
i. Mobile payments will become the preferred method of payments for many consumers (via companies such as Obopay) and will force evolution of and reduce the grip of traditional credit companies such as VISA benefiting both consumers and merchants.
j. Consumers will finally be able to monitor their utility usage in real-time and make adjustments to their utility consumption patterns to reduce home electricity usage. This will become mainstream thanks to extensive collaboration between software/networking companies such as Google, Cisco, Microsoft and major utilities. Google and Microsoft are already developing power monitoring software that will allow consumers to view their utility usage via a browser by tools such as PowerMeter, and Hohm respectively.

Transportation
a. Transportation (and particularly car industry) will have gone through a major renaissance with significant number of new players entering into the market with disruptive technologies that will shake the grip of big players in the industry.
b. There will be new technology breakthroughs in battery/cell energy storage and charging that will level the playing field between traditional fossil fuel powered cars and electric hybrids.
c. Electric hybrid vehicles (cars, motorcycles, etc.) will finally be a reality at reasonable prices with extensive network of EV charging stations across North America, Europe and Asia.
d. China will have the largest adoption of electric cars and network of charging stations in the world followed by USA.
e. Fossil based fuel prices will exceed $8-10 in US, and will be finally be at par with prices in Europe and rest of the world.
f. Anti-collison and auto-steering systems will be offered by most vehicle makers (Remember iRobot!). Elements of these systems are already available today in few very select models of Lexus, Volvo, and BMW.
g. Most major airlines will start using alternate fuels to power their passenger jets due to extreme cost of fossil based fuels (Continental Airlines is already doing some initial test flights with algae and weed based fuels).

Energy Production
a. Fossil based energy drilling will flat line while alternate harvesting of energy from wind, solar and other methods of energy production such as algae-based fuels will experience extreme growth supported by significant global infrastructure investment to finally realize the necessary commercialization needed to make them mainstream. There will also be a significant growth in nuclear energy in parallel providing the necessary bridge as nations transition from fossil based economies to economies powered by renewable energy sources.
b. Home utility prices (particularly in North America) will go through a period of significant price increase (which will curtail consumer energy usage) eventually stabilizing once the initial investments in alternative energy infrastructure starts paying some significant dividends.
c. There will be breakthrough in massive energy storage methods where renewable energies such as solar and wind can be captured, stored for later usage.
d. There will be major breakthrough in energy distribution and management methods that will allow creation of sophisticated digital power grids fed by multiple energy sources from solar and wind farms, nuclear power plants, etc. Some of the current technology leaders in the Information Technology such as Cisco and IBM will play a significant role in extending their deep experience in managing networks for digital information flow into management of network of power grids allowing much more efficient and effective power distribution and usage.
e. Cheaper production of solar panels and increasing electricity costs will increase consumer motivation to install solar panel to supplement home energy demand.

Education
a. Online education will be become at par with traditional brick and mortar schools and for many educational institutions including public schools, it will become indistinguishable part and extension of the traditional teaching methods providing legislators, educators, students and parents with new delivery options in education that are agile and can be customized to take into account needs that can vary by region, financial constraints, life-styles and specific learning needs.
b. Cheap netbooks will be available to all students and will be the platform for in and out-of-class teaching

Cloud Computing
a. New enabling infrastructure technologies and development tools specifically designed for cloud computing will mature enabling true on-demand service in the cloud, making cloud computing a predominant and cost effective resource compute model of choice by many organizations. This paradigm will be led by companies such as Google, Amazon, Cisco, VMware, IBM with Open Source community and startups acting as the catalyst.
b. Cloud Computing will catapult adoption of Open Source software for the masses including corporations.
c. Cloud computing will significantly change existing traditional software licensing models (expanding on the similar change that came about with Open Source) as it will provide the means for pay-for-use only and hence eliminating the need for consumers or organizations to pay for full licensing and ongoing maintenance costs for software that they may use occasionally, or need for a fixed period of time. This will also level the playing field for many SMB’s as it will eliminate the cost as a barrier for entry for using enterprise-grade applications and competition with other more established players in the market.
d. Pay-for-use model for consumers will eliminate the need for full feature desktop/laptop operating systems and powerful expensive hardware needed to run that operating systems such as Windows. In this pay-for-use model, consumers will only need small light-weight operating systems running on a broadband and media enabled low power devices such as netbooks. As such, low powered chip architectures such as AMR, and light weight operating systems such as Android will gain significant penetration in consumer computing environments.

Internet
a. Social networks will continue to evolve and together with mobile computing will become the environment of choice for online consumer and business-to-business transactions.
b. Online business will become a dominant medium for doing business-to-consumer and business-to-business transactions at the cost of brick and mortar stores which will increasingly play secondary role to online businesses.
c. As extensive digitization of infrastructure in major industries take hold (e.g. energy, transportation, residential and commercial buildings), the risks associated with nation-state vulnerabilities to electronic attacks by rogue or other nation states or “pirates” will exponentially increase. Internet Cyber security will be one of the most critical aspect of national security strategy.

First the Internet, then Open Source, then Web 2.0, and now Cloud Computing & Netbooks: The New Tipping Point - Information for the Masses

2009-04-07T04:00:00.000Z

There is something brewing in the air that feels like we are nearing a new tipping point in evolution of information access and affordability for consumers and businesses.

Initial game changer was the commercialization of Internet with its first ISP’s appearing in early 1980’s. The genesis of Internet was based on a small research work that had started in the labs of UCLA in late 1960’s. Since then, the role of Internet as the new emerging platform for communication and information exchange for masses is out there for everyone to see. Internet had laid the first layer of platform for breaking the walls of proprietary technology and information access for masses.

Then came the Open Source movement whose initial roots can be traced to Richard Stallman, originally a programmer at MIT Labs, who launched GNU project and Free Software Foundation with an aim to build operating system that could be used and distributed freely by any one. The movement and the resulting community of innovation with its core spirit of developing high quality free software for masses quickly became a major phenomenon introducing us to house-hold name software such as Linux, Apache, Eclipse, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and MySQL. Since then Open Source has evolved into even more business critical areas of corporate enterprise infrastructure with high-end commercial business applications that include Business Analytics, Document Management, Customer Relationship Management, etc.

The next milestone that followed the Open Source paradigm was Web 2.0, a term first coined by Craig Cline and Dale Dougherty in early 2000, one of the co-founders of O’Reilly Media with Tim O’Reilly. Web 2.0 is a collective term used to denote the technological advancements (such as increased bandwidth capacity, better management of browser traffic, numerous rich client side features , etc.) that shifted Web from one-way read-only information dissemination tool to a platform for complex collaboration supported by rich functionalities previously only seen in traditional thick client applications such as PowerBuilder. Today Web 2.0 supported by frameworks such as Ajax, introduced us to popular collaboration applications such as Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter opening a new chapter not only in information sharing and exchange, but also a platform for developing rich, complex applications. Open Source community was and still is a major catalyst in many of advancements associated with frameworks that helped us leap frog into the Web 2.0 space. Next couple of years we will be seeing an exponential growth in rich consumer and business focused applications specifically developed for use on Internet.

And now we are just on the tip of the next major evolution. This next shifter will capitalize and build on the existing Internet fabric made up of infrastructure for information access, supported by rich set of high quality free open source software and extensive collaboration capabilities of Web 2.0. This stage will offer on-demand services for computing and other compute resources (such as storage, networking, security, etc.) for both consumers and businesses. What differentiates this from your typical outsourcing or other ASP services is that it will offer significantly higher degrees of freedom and vendor independence for both consumers and corporations.

Specifically for consumers, this will mean reduced need to purchase and own software, and even less need for powerful home computers/laptops to run applications which will now be hosted somewhere on the Internet. A light weight desktop OS (such as Android) running on cheap hardware (such as a Netbook) will in most cases do the job more than sufficiently for most consumers most of the time. Google has been the pioneer in this space with its free Gmail and Google Docs with online storage that offer basic but very functional productivity tools for word processing, spread sheets, and presentation.

For organizations it will translate into technology investments shifting from capital to expense expenditures as they increasingly opt for on-demand services in the Cloud and rid themselves of major capital infrastructure purchases to run and maintain those business applications. Compute resource on Demand will also mean much more cost effective means of handling of resource peaks. In other words, IT organizations will no longer have to build an expensive infrastructure that is designed for peak usage. Amazon with its comprehensive Web Services offerings is beginning to demonstrate what commercial Cloud Computing may look like.

The biggest challenge in the Cloud Computing space will be getting a consensus among major stakeholders (such as IBM, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon, Open Source community) on the initial framework for establishing key foundational standards that address inter-operability, data privacy and security issues. Recent announcement of Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF – www.cloudforum.org) was a small but significant step in the right direction. Major participants in the initial launch included well known names such as Cisco, Intel, IBM, SUN, Reuters and RSA. However, notable names that had opted to sit out for the time being included Amazon and Microsoft.

However, there are few burning questions that linger. What does this all mean for company such as Microsoft whose consumer business model significantly depends on the fact that you run those application on your desktop/laptop, particularly Microsoft Office Suite and hence the need for a full-featured desktop OS? What’s Apple’s place in this trend and what role are they willing to play? How far is Google will take its Android OS against Windows and is this also the kiss of death for Linux desktop which against all attempts have failed to take off? How quickly is the Cloud Consortium is able to get a consensus and broad enough support to do some meaningful work in establishing key standards essential for broader adoption of Cloud Computing as the platform for “Application and Compute on-Demand”?

Exciting times ….

Capitalizing on Open Source during Lean Economic Times …

2009-03-29T22:09:29.000Z

The deep recession that has grabbed our economy and is expected to last well past 2010, will require both corporations and consumers to look at new ways of managing their precious shrinking budgets when it comes to buying new business software or managing their own personal productivity. Open Source as an option is increasingly a very viable alternative that must be on the list of both corporations (particularly those small to medium size businesses) and consumers.

Open source software is a tool or an application developed by participation of a close nit community of developers typically distributed all around the world. Major motivation for many of these developers is being able to contribute to a product development of specific interest to them and being part of a group of people that is willing to freely donate their skills and time towards building high quality functional software that solves a specific problem.
Open Source community produces software that targets both consumers and corporations. Open Source penetration into the mainstream Information Technology and Internet over the last 15 years has been phenomenal. In fact, over 90% of the web servers today run on Apache which was borne out of the Open Source Community. PHP, another Open Source Community product, is one of the most popular web scripting tools used on Internet. Open Source is now also making some inroads into the back office of larger corporations as well with products such as SugarCRM (customer contact software), Alfresco (Document management system), and Green Plum (High performance data warehousing analytics engine)

On the productivity side, there are some well known mature Open Source tools that could rival in both quality and functionality (found in) similar commercial products on the market. Few examples are OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) a free downloadable, fully functional office suite that was designed to compete against Microsoft Office. If you are looking something little lighter and bit more mobility in this space, you can opt out for Google Docs (www.google.com/docs).

At any point in time there are thousands of open source projects in various phases of their development. For a comprehensive look at ongoing Open Source projects go to http://sourceforge.net.
Open Source offers benefits across multiple fronts. These include very low (in some cases no initial software purchase cost), no vendor lock-in, high quality software via extensive peer community review, and a very significant negotiation leverage against traditional software vendors. The joke in the Open Source community is that, during software negotiation with a traditional software vendor, an organization will get an instant 20% discount off the cost of their software, if they enter the room wearing “I love Open Source” t-shirts!

However, Open Source is not for everyone. While the initial software cost is typically free, you still have to pay for annual maintenance (typically referred to as subscription fee) if you think you will need support and professional services. Organizations need to take a few things into consideration when considering broader adoption of Open Source software:

1- Maturity of the Open Source project and how long it has been in distribution
2- Size of the community that supports that supports the specific software
3- Availability of professional support, if needed
4- The level of in-house expertise in Open Source development products if you have plans to customize the product
5- How much the particular software needs to integrate with rest of the business applications in your organization? High level of integration to other traditional vendor business applications may result in a higher risk and cost that may negate the initial value of cost avoidance and other advantages of a open source software.

Next time you are shopping for new software either for yourself or your company, do your homework and check what options are available in the Open Source space and if nothing else, use some of the competing Open Source software as leverage against your traditional software vendor.

Jon.

Small World: Good, Bad or Just Right?

2009-03-23T01:50:19.000Z

With ubiquitous technology things are well within our reach and sometimes in our faces. You want to get together with friends for a quick drink after work you tweet them. You want to express yourself to the rest of the world you post a blog or even better whip a little video and post it on YouTube. That little manuscript that no publisher wanted to look at ..screw them.. you can publish it yourself and sell it on Amazon. You have an idea/product/service that you believe has monetary value, you get a domain name, open a merchant site on Yahoo and whip your very own commerce site (using a template) and you have access to millions of consumers who are looking for something, all for less then $40/month ..all done in less than an hour. You want to find your spiritual self ...no problem. Fire-up your cheap flight search engine, book a flight to Delhi and if the price is making you grim but don't have the time to waste looking for one ..just go to a site such as www.yapta.com and ask it to notify you when the price drops. Then hop on a plane .. a snooze, two dinners and 5 movies later you are on the other side of the world. If you are worried about a family history (heart attack, cancer, etc.), you can get a DNA genetic test (at a premium price) which will tell you if your gene pool is clean. You want to get in touch with old friends (or may be you don't have any friends and want to make some), pick your favorite social networking site (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Dig, many more). And on and on ..

Don't you love it ...I surely do and would not want to go back ..Here is the other side of the ubiquity that may be we should ponder ..Your ISP or God forbid your wireless service provider had a power failure in their Data Center (or worse your PC or your Blackberry is dead!); what do you do?. With all that information you have posted about yourself on Internet, everyone and their 2nd cousins have more info on you than your Aunt Louise. You just got back from a week seclusion with a Guru in India at far remote village in the North, a home of a tiny little virus that no one knows about but you are having the privilege to introduce it to North America. Or you just got your genetic results back. There is a gene or two that is not picture perfect (but you are feeling great though) and there is a 5% chance that you may develop cancer but there is nothing that you can do about it other than the fact armed with this very expensive information, you have the rest of your life to worry about it ..

Our small world is getting smaller by the day .....May be it's just right. What do you think?