Service Architecture - SOA

Vendor Managed Infrastructure - Are clouds just a VMI solution?

2009-07-03T16:02:00.003+01:00

Tweeting with Neil Ward-Dutton I had a thought about what he has written on public v private clouds and it made me think that the only real difference between them is in the who manages and pays. This might sound like a big thing but taking a leaf out of the retailers book it doesn't need to be that large.Vendor Managed Inventory is simply where a supplier takes over the management of a products

When successful systems go bad - boiling frogs with Technical Debt

2009-06-25T21:48:00.000+01:00

One of the challenges I often see in companies is when successful systems go bad. These aren't the systems that were delivered 3 times over time and 5 times the budget, these are the systems that many years ago delivered real benefits for the business and delivered in a reasonable time and budget.The problem is that all those years ago the team in question was focused absolutely on getting the

Religion as a Service

2009-06-24T07:34:00.002+01:00

Okay a few weeks ago I had a brain-wave for a new business. What do you really need for a business to take off in the "as a Service" space?It needs to be 80%+ commodityYou need a large customer baseYou need the end customer to add their own differentiationAbove all I wanted a business that would be a much higher margin one than simply a SaaS business, which meant including the actual business

The Clint Eastwood school of change

2009-06-18T01:53:00.002+01:00

Change is hard, change against people who don't want to change is extremely hard bordering on impossible. In any change programme therefore you need to be clear about what you are up against and what success looks like.This is where Clint Eastwood can help. Sure Chuck Norris can run around the world and punch himself in the back of the head but Clint Eastwood has many more lessons on delivering

Why would a cloud appliance be physical?

2009-06-16T08:14:00.004+01:00

IBM often lead in technology areas and with the history of LPAR on the mainframe they've got a background in virtualisation that most competitors would envy. So clearly with cloud they are going to go after it. Sometimes they'll do what they did with SOA and tag a (IMO) dog of a product with the new buzzword (MQSI = Advanced ESB - I'm looking at you) and other times they will actually do

Single Canonical Form? Only Suicidal Dinosaurs need apply

2009-06-12T10:15:00.004+01:00

Now I said a while ago that Single Canonical form wasn't for SOA well now I've been doing some SaaS projects and I've realised with traditional modesty that not only am I right, but that people who are still pushing it as an approach can be described as suicidal dinosaurs.If SaaS is anywhere in your future, and it will be unless you are a military secure establishment and even then it might me,

The challenge of "build for the web" to SaaS economic models

2009-06-01T23:28:00.001+01:00

Build for the web is a strong meme. Most of the time people focus on the technical elements of this and the end user elements. What I haven't seen people talk about much is the impact that this has on the current financial models from SaaS vendors. SaaS can give great benefits for companies by enabling an OpEx rather than CapEx model but the solutions today do assume that a person is using them

SaaS and the Cloud a development challenge

2009-06-01T08:58:00.000+01:00

A while back I blogged on how to do ERP with a middleware solution. The point was to leave the package untouched while adding your customisations in an environment that was better suited to the challenge. It made upgrades easier and also would help to reduce your development timescales.Well the world is moving on and now I'm looking at a challenge of SaaS + cloud. A standardised package

Will Apple dominate the cloud?

2009-05-25T14:57:00.005+01:00

At dinner the other night with a friend we were talking about what we wanted the iPhone to do. We agreed that a new camera would be good but neither of us thought that a forward facing camera had any point as we don't know anyone who has made more than two video calls despite having phones that could do it.So what we thought would be really good for the 4th Generation iPhone? In particular what

Hypocrites are alive Jim

2009-05-22T18:27:00.004+01:00

Anne updated her SOA is dead blog which includes some quotes from analysts and others who are now bemoaning that SOA hasn't delivered, in part because over over-hype and expectations. What is stunning about this (and Anne doesn't call them on it) is that the main reason is exactly what Anne says. Namely that SOA isn't a technology thing, its a practice thing.So having vendors claiming "we are

Just the facts, not the opinions

2009-05-18T09:56:00.003+01:00

A common IT discourse: Person A: "X is better than Y"Person B: "Why is it?"A: Well you can develop twice as fast in X than YB: Are you sure?A: AbsolutelyB: But we use Y and we've measured a 40% increase in productivity over the last three yearsA: Well X will double that productivityB: Could you show me the study that shows that?A: Look at these client referencesB: But these people are building a

The revolution in IT is economic not technological

2009-05-12T14:10:00.002+01:00

NIST has come up with a cloud computing definition the first five items end with an economic pitchPay per use. Capabilities are charged using a metered, fee-for-service, or advertising based billing model to promote optimization of resource use. Examples are measuring the storage, bandwidth, and computing resources consumed and charging for the number of active user accounts per month. Clouds

Do clouds require redundancy?

2009-05-07T04:59:00.005+01:00

Having a twitter debate with Dan Creswell and Andy Hedges one of the topics was what a cloud is and what is required. In 140 characters Andy tweetedCloud Computing: the commoditisation and associated automation in provisioning and management of execution contexts.Which isn't bad in 140 characters. One of the questions though was what level of resilience and redundancy does a cloud need to

JDO makes a come back

2009-04-13T17:01:00.002+01:00

Back in, I think, 2002 I went to JavaOne and the most over-subscribed sessions were on JDO, literally queues out of the room. Since then it sort of died a death and with the Hibernate/EJB 3.0 approach taking over the OO persistence layer surely the battle was lost.Just kicking off a Google App Engine 4 Java (thank you Google, I can code like a human being again) session I note with some

Kill the LEDs

2009-04-10T15:20:00.003+01:00

LEDs are much more efficient than traditional bulbs and can be better than the new energy efficient ones as well.But there are certain LEDs out there that are just a complete and utter waste of time, I'm talking about those that are INSIDE computers. No idea if there are any inside the MacBook Pro I'm using now but I know there are a bunch inside my home PC. I'm not complaining about external

You stole my flashing lights

2009-04-10T14:15:00.004+01:00

"I don't understand the hardware, I don't understand the software, but I can see the flashing lights"This sums up the basic problem with cloud adoption and over the last week or so its been even clearer while chatting with some clients and journalists around the issues of cloud.Simply put the current regulatory, compliance and security world is basically based around that statement. Security

The line missing from Open Cloud

2009-03-31T10:00:00.003+01:00

Ron Tolido made a good point about the link between the new Intel processors (can't wait for the new Mac Pro) and cloud in that people can still do internal work pretty quickly and these processor help. But I think there is a more obvious link that is missing from the Cloud Manifesto.Open Cloud means x86It really is that simple, for a cloud to be open and allow portability then you are going to

The importance of common reference points

2009-03-30T12:49:00.002+01:00

Recently I've had a couple of occasions where a major issue was created from something quite simple because a perceived common understanding just didn't exist. What does this mean? Well it means that one team thought that the definition of X was something and that the other team thought it was something else. Because however it was so clear to both teams they didn't check and it became an

Trains and QoS

2009-03-26T11:29:00.002Z

One of the challenges of designing a service is understanding the Quality of Service (QoS) both in terms of what it is, and importantly in how it is measured. The point about QoS is that it should be from the perspective of the consumer rather than from the producer. Historically people have ignored pieces like the network connectivity and latency but this is rapidly becoming a nonsense as

Beware designers and other's prentending to be professionals

2009-03-24T10:24:00.003Z

First off an admission, I'm an HCI guy and spent the first 6 years of my career working on front end thick-client high interactivity sort of interfaces where the accuracy of the interface was critical.I then got into the Web world and learnt to distrust designers very quickly, for the simple reason that 95% of them were interested in designing a "pretty" interface rather than a functional

How IT departments plan to make themselves irrelevant in the down turn

2009-03-17T17:38:00.003Z

Since the beginning of the year its been rather clear that the business imperative is cost cutting. From renegotiating licenses, looking at Open Source to looking at using Cloud and SaaS to provide a more "scale down" model for IT (we've always been good at scale up - pay more, use more). Now what I've observed is two very clear approaches from ITFirstly there is the business centric view which

SaaS isn't software its service

2009-03-10T15:28:00.002Z

I've said it before and I'll say it again. SaaS isn't about SOFTWARE as a service its about a SERVICE as a service.Salesforce.com don't sell software, they sell a CRM solution. They also sell and INFRASTRUCTURE or DEVELOPMENT platform as a service but it still isn't the software that you are buying its the whole platform service.This is the problem that the Middleware as a Service type vendors

Cloud watching - does that one look like Churchill?

2009-03-09T05:43:00.002Z

Clouds are wonderful things, they come in lots of types and just like the old game of cloud gazing where you try and find clouds that look like things you can do the same with the various different types of cloud.Firstly though lets work out the different types and their level of realityInfrastructure cloudsAmazon.com type thing. These are the easiest type of clouds to get you head around at

Clouds are officially the new T-SOA

2009-03-09T05:31:00.002Z

One of the questions I raised last year and early this (with the SOA is Dead meme) was what would be the next hype item that the analysts and vendors started flogging. Would it be cloud, would it be something else....Well its definitely cloud.IDC say it will be $42 billion by 2012 trumpeting the race to the cloud. Now before I start this rant lets be clearI think cloud computing is importantI

Setting and measuring KPIs - or how Whistler rigs its SLA

2009-02-24T22:10:00.002Z

Last week I went to Whistler where they've just had a large dump of snow. Last week however conditions could be described as "spring like" or to put it another way "rocks, ice and slush". Now during this time the resort was reporting a "base depth" of about 150cm and that 200 out of 200 runs were open.What was interesting about this was where on earth do they measure the depth from? Clearly