David on Emerging Technologies

[urls/news] The Global Grid: China's HPC Opportunity

2004-11-11T11:24:00.000+08:00

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Dateline: China

For this posting, I'm using an annotated urls format. Let's begin.

The Global Grid

Grid computing. HPC (high-performance computing). Lots of trade press coverage. Lots of academic papers. Generally, this is a GREAT convergence. Didn't hold with AI (artificial intelligence), but the coverage of grid computing is much more pervasive. Also, it's an area where I believe that systems integrators (SIs) in China can play with the globals. It's new enough that there are no clear leaders. Okay, maybe IBM is a clear leader, but it's certainly not an established market.

It's also a market where Chinese SIs can leverage work done for domestic applications for Western clients. This is NOT true in areas such as banking applications; the apps used in China are very different from the apps used in the States. Fundamentally different systems. But a lot of grid work is more about infrastructure and custom development. There's also a lot of open source in the grid sphere.

I've selected some of the best papers and sites for review. This is certainly not meant to be comprehensive, but simply follow the links for more info.

One last note: Clicking on any of the following links will likely lead you to an abstract and possibly to some personal commentary not included in this posting. You may also find related links found by other Furl users.

Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) Version 1.0 (PDF)

The "Bible" of the grid world. The home page will lead to many other relevant papers and reports. See also The Anatomy of the Grid (PDF).

IBM Systems Journal - Vol. 43, No. 4, 2004 - Grid Computing

Hottest journal issue in town!! Papers may be downloaded for free. See also Grid computing: Conceptual flyover for developers.

GlobusWORLD 2004 Conference Program (with abstracts & decks)

One of the better conferences; covers applications and provides links to several excellent papers and presentations.

Services Computing: Grid Applications for Today (PDF)

Well, the link has been replaced. Try to get a hold of this paper. It WAS available for free. SOA meets the grid. The lead author, Liang-Jie Zhang, is a researcher at IBM T.J.Watson Research Center and chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Steering Committee (technical community) for Services Computing. Contact him at zhanglj@us.ibm.com . Ask for his related papers, too.

Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Middleware for grid computing

Several excellent papers; recent conference. Middleware: Yes, middleware is the key to SI opportunities.

2nd Annual ATIP Chinese HPC Workshop at SC '04

Conference held earlier this month!! See who is doing what in China.

Brain Meets Brawn: Why Grid and Agents Need Each Other (PDF)

Want a competitive edge in the grid space? This is it!!

NOTE: A search for "grid computing" in my Furl archive yields 164 hits (and most are publicly searchable). See http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle .

Other News

Outsourcing & Offshoring:

Article Warns China Against Following India in Developing Software Industry

I don't agree with this, but it's worth reading, especially considering the source. I agree that China shouldn't try to be a clone of India, but the arguments in support of the domestic market don't consider margins.

Budapest, the Next Bangalore? New EU Members Join the Outsourcing Race

I'll be writing a column for the AlwaysOn Network about the disconnect between China's foreign policy initiatives and the realities of the IT sector. Suffice it to say that SIs in China should NOT chase after the EU. Again, do NOT confuse foreign policy with corporate policy!!

Romania IT Services Market Primed for Growth, Says IDC | Tekrati Research News

More of the same. Read my comments about Romania by clicking the link ...

Google to lean heavier on R&D centre in B'lore

Google is coming to China, too. Think MS Research in Beijing.

IBM expands China research site in midmarket push

Another great move by IBM; they're clearly leading the pack.

TCS shifts focus to China's market

This article is a bit confusing. I suspect that TCS is simply copying the IGS China strategy. But it's worth noting that they're moving beyond servicing their American clients with a presence in China.

Wipro in talks to buy US-based Cymbal

Yes, yes and yes. Expect a lot more of this. I wouldn't be surprised to see China's SIs forced to move a bit lower on the U.S. SI food chain for partnerships. Move up the chain by thinking verticals!!

BPO:

The next big BPO question

No need to click; it's all about security.

Carnegie scientists develop model to help Indian BPOs

No, not really a new model; more about a new certification!! Just what the world needs ...

Enterprise Software:

Introduction to Structured Content Management with XML

The title says it all.

Open Source Content Management with Plone

Maybe the "P" in "LAMP" should stand for "Plone"?

Some software vendors see opportunity in providing development tools for globally dispersed teams

A strategy for USERS, i.e., SIs in China.

Marketing & Management:

Four Ways to Pick a Winning Product

Product Management 101, courtesy of the Harvard Business School.

Free creative thinking tools on the Web - from InnovationTools

Spread this throughout your organization ... and then ramp up with some paid tools.

Information Processing, Knowledge Development and Strategic Supply Chain Performance (PDF)

SCM (supply chain management) meets marketing, but with a general management and strategy slant.

Strategic Decisions of New Technology Adoption under Asymmetric Information (PDF)

G2 planning strategies. A wee bit mathematical, but still fairly easy to follow.

Expect the next original posting in two or three weeks; my next column for the AlwaysOn Network will be sent to this list. Off to HK/SZ/ZH/GZ next week.

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

http://www.itestrategies.com (current blog postings optimized for MSIE6.x)

http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa (access to blog content archives in China)

http://tinyurl.com/2azkh (current blog postings for viewing in other browsers and for access to blog content archives in the US & ROW)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinasourcingalert (RSS feed)

http://chinasourcing.blogspot.com/atom.xml (Atom feed)

http://tinyurl.com/2hg2e (AvantGo channel)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle (Furl)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle/rss.xml (Furl RSS feed)

To automatically subscribe click on http://tinyurl.com/388yf .

[urls] Measuring the ROI of Software Process Improvement

2004-09-19T13:36:00.000+08:00

Saturday, September 18, 2004

Dateline: China

The following is a sampling of my top ten "urls" for the past couple/few weeks. By signing up with Furl (it's free), anyone can subscribe to an e-mail feed of ALL my urls (about 100-250 per week) -- AND limit by subject (e.g., ITO) and/or rating (e.g., articles rated "Very Good" or "Excellent"). It's also possible to receive new urls as an RSS feed.

All of the top ten are PDFs. Click on the link to read the abstract for each paper.

Note: Off to California for a couple of weeks. Probably no new, original postings until after the October national holiday in China. (I get a three week break from writing for this blog, but I'll still be writing columns for the AlwaysOn Network.)

Top Honors:

* Measuring the ROI of Software Process Improvement (relatively speaking, very popular among Furl viewers; highly accessible article with a lot of substance and pointers)

Other best new selections (in order of popularity as determined by Furl views, then alphabetically):

* A Framework for Off-The-Shelf Software Component Development and Maintenance Processes (this was THE most popular paper, although I liked the ROI article better; superb info, good guidelines, lots of food for thought)

* Agent-Based e-Supply Chain Decision Support (not as geeky as it sounds; lead author is with Carnegie Mellon's e-Supply Chain Management Laboratory & Institute for e-Commerce)

* B2B E-Commerce Stages of Growth: the Strategic Imperatives (a look at some case studies; provides some insights into B2B adoption and diffusion)

* Creating an Open Agent Environment for Context-Aware M-Commerce (from the Mobile Commerce Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon <no, this isn't necessarily CMU week>; I have a lot of doubts about this stuff, but it's worth firing a few neurons and giving it a spin)

* Development and Evaluation of Software Process Improvement Methods (Dissertation, 190 pp.) (superb overviews sprinkled with case studies; it was tough to choose between this dissertation and the ROI paper for top honors)

* Deriving a Diffusion Framework for Web-Based Shopping Systems (a bit of a technical flavor, but not too technical; puts e-shopping in a broader perspective, e.g., relative to EDI)

* Exploring Defect Causes in Products Developed by Virtual Teams (to all SIs developing a GDM - global delivery model - READ THIS!!; perhaps the most important paper among my top ten)

* Intelligent Support for Software Release Planning (a corporate technical paper describing a very useful software development management tool; see also the Release Planner (tm) home page)

* NaradaBrokering and its Applications (might be better than WebSphere; see also The NaradaBrokering Project at IU Community Grids Laboratory)

And my PERSONAL favorite:

> The Banality of Google (good for some laughs)

and many, many more ...

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

http://www.itestrategies.com (current blog postings optimized for MSIE6.x)

http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa (access to blog content archives in China)

http://tinyurl.com/2azkh (current blog postings for viewing in other browsers and for access to blog content archives in the US & ROW)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinasourcingalert (RSS feed)

http://chinasourcing.blogspot.com/atom.xml (Atom feed)

http://tinyurl.com/2hg2e (AvantGo channel)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle (Furl)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle/rss.xml (Furl RSS feed)

To automatically subscribe click on http://tinyurl.com/388yf .

[urls] Web Services Differentiation with Service Level Agreements

2004-09-01T23:33:00.000+08:00

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

Dateline: China

The following is a sampling of my top ten "urls" for the past couple/few weeks. By signing up with Furl (it's free), anyone can subscribe to an e-mail feed of ALL my urls (about 100-250 per week) -- AND limit by subject (e.g., ITO) and/or rating (e.g., articles rated "Very Good" or "Excellent"). It's also possible to receive new urls as an RSS feed. However, if you'd like to receive a daily feed of my urls but do NOT want to sign up with Furl, I can manually add your name to my daily Furl distribution list. (And if you want off, I'll promptly remove your e-mail address.)

Top Honors:

* Web Services Differentiation with Service Level Agreements, courtesy of IBM T.J. Watson; as the title suggests, this paper tackles SLAs. See also Web Services QoS: External SLAs and Internal Policies, by the same author. The latter paper was the invited keynote at the 1st Web Services Quality Workshop (this site provides links to abstracts for all the workshop papers as well as links to each author's personal site).

Other best new selections (in no particular order):

* Product Focused Software Process Improvement: PROFES 2004 (if you're going to read only one tech book this year, let it be this!!)

* Legacy systems strike back!! We all know that there is a good market in servicing legacy systems. See the following: Arriba: Architectural Resources for the Restructuring and Integration of Business Application (an introduction), Identifying Problems in Legacy Software, and Evolution of Legacy Systems.

* Online Communities in Business: Past Progress, Future Directions, Five Keys To Building Business Relationships Online and Advantages of Using Social Software for Building Your Network. (I can say with a fairly high level of confidence that these tools can be used to expand your business network. Been there, done that. Give it a try. Do I already know you and would you like an invitation to join LinkedIn? If the answer to both questions is "yes," let me know ...)

* Carnegie Mellon Project Aura Video (gets a bit silly at times, but the language translation component was interesting to see; the R-T example is still years away, but the idea is intriguing and this is where collaboration tools need to go)

* Innovation: Strategy for Small Fish (from the Harvard Business School; however, NVIDIA would not have been my choice for a case study)

* Stata Labs: Managing at a Distance, for Less (a pretty good case study; I firmly believe that China's systems integrators/contract developers need world-class collaboration tools and this describes one of the formats I support)

* An Authoring Technology for Multidevice Web Applications (one of my favorite topics -- and an area where I believe SIs in China can take the lead)

* Cheapware (or, "Changsha Gone Wild!!"; hey Qilu clan, are you listening? Go, Ding, go!!)

* How To Team With A Vendor (a "must read" -- and evidently a lot of my readers already did, even though I only made a passing reference in a previous posting)

Examples of urls that didn't make my "Top Ten List":

> ITU Internet Reports 2004: The Portable Internet (looks like this might be a great series; less biased than the typical IT advisory services report -- and a much better value, too)

> Software Cost Reduction (courtesy of the <U.S.> Naval Research Lab, this paper is a bit dated, but still worth reading; addresses problems with large-scale systems, albeit a bit light on practical examples)

> Japan IT Outsourcing 2004-2008 Forecast: IDC (might be a worthwhile purchase, especially for the Dalian-based systems integrators)

> The Power of No (Linux as a bargaining tool <see my Furl comments, too>; make Microsoft shake in their boots!!)

> Web Design Practices (a good reference site)

and many, many more ...

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

http://www.itestrategies.com (current blog postings optimized for MSIE6.x)

http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa (access to blog content archives in China)

http://tinyurl.com/2azkh (current blog postings for viewing in other browsers and for access to blog content archives in the US & ROW)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinasourcingalert (RSS feed)

http://chinasourcing.blogspot.com/atom.xml (Atom feed)

http://tinyurl.com/2hg2e (AvantGo channel)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle (Furl)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle/rss.xml (Furl RSS feed)

To automatically subscribe click on http://tinyurl.com/388yf .

[urls] Build a Better Enterprise Application

2004-08-12T21:44:00.000+08:00

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Dateline: China

The following is a sampling of my top ten "urls" for the past week or so. By signing up with Furl (it's free), anyone can subscribe to an e-mail feed of ALL my urls (about 100-250 per week) -- AND limit by subject (e.g., ITO) and/or rating (e.g., articles rated "Very Good" or "Excellent"). It's also possible to receive new urls as an RSS feed. However, if you'd like to receive a daily feed of my urls but do NOT want to sign up with Furl, I can manually add your name to my daily Furl distribution list. (And if you want off, I'll promptly remove your e-mail address.)

Top Honors:

* Build a Better Enterprise Application (on Web services and SOA; great review of all the pertinent issues)

Other best new selections (in no particular order):

* Adaptive Document Layout via Manifold Content (PDF) (another hit for Microsoft, this article proposes a user interface for authoring and editing Web content for different form factors; think formatting for ubiquitous devices and pervasive computing)

* A New View on Intelligence (on XML & EII, et al) (thoroughly enjoyable -- so good, I almost blogged it; insightful perspective)

* InfoWorld Special Report: Has desktop Linux come of age? (IMHO, a resounding "No!!" But there are other perspectives worth considering. I still think it's a lot of wishful thinking.)

* Negotiating in Service-Oriented Environments (PDF) (A slightly annotated excerpt: "The concept of delivering software as a service is relatively simply: 'do not buy software, simply use it as and when you need it'. Putting such a concept into practice, however, is far more complex and involves many issues. In this article, we address the question: What are the characteristics of a market for software services?" Hot topic, good paper.)

* Real Time Means Real Change (so much talk about the so-called "Real Time Enterprise"; this article takes a look at the realities behind the hype of the "RTE")

* Information Scent on the Web (PDF) (Courtesy of PARC, you need to read this for yourself; Google as The Matrix idea -- worse yet, The Time Machine Reloaded In reality, useful perspectives for Web designers.)

* Offshoring/Outsourcing: Fragile - Handle With Care (a brief but rather comprehensive overview; points to the various aspects of ITO and BPO along the IT value chain)

* IT Spending For Comprehensive Compliance (original article linked; good review of the various opportunities "thanks" mostly to SOX)

* The Executive's Guide to Utility Computing - ROI of Utility Computing (a broad perspective on utility computing, different from what is usually published)

Examples of urls that didn't make my "Top Ten List":

> Benchmarking Study Shows 75 Percent of Enterprises Deploying Web Services (need I say more?; includes stats on ebXML and grid computing, too)

> Probabilistic Model for Contextual Retrieval (PDF) (a sneak peek at Microsoft's emerging search technology?) See also Block-based Web Search, courtesy of Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing) and Tsinghua University, arguably China's best (the latter article is not urled; from the recent SIGIR conference). If you think Google is the last word in search, think again.

> Where To Find New Growth Prospects And What Challenges Need To Be Overcome (necessary action items and preferred geographic regions; China <not Russia, Brazil or the Czech Republic> comes in the number two slot after North America)

> CIO Magazine: Are We Happy Yet? (on ITO and BPO) (dumb article title, but smart content; good metrics to consider, including a take on SLAs)

> Developing Killer Apps for Industrial Augmented Reality (restricted access) (this page provides some complimentary information to the restricted access selection, although it's not urled). I just noticed something: The apps section of IEEE CG&A is edited by two mil guys, one from the (U.S.) Office of Naval Research and the other from the U.S. Army simulation and training office. Hey, who says all the good engineering jobs are outsourced!? Frankly, I believe that the best American engineers can always find jobs within DoD or the intelligence community. Besides, they do all the truly fun computing stuff!! Trust me, there isn't so much fun stuff done at Oracle.

and many, many more ...

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

http://www.itestrategies.com (current blog postings optimized for MSIE6.x)

http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa (access to blog content archives in China)

http://tinyurl.com/2azkh (current blog postings for viewing in other browsers and for access to blog content archives in the US & ROW)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinasourcingalert (RSS feed)

http://chinasourcing.blogspot.com/atom.xml (Atom feed)

http://tinyurl.com/2hg2e (AvantGo channel)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle (Furl)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle/rss.xml (Furl RSS feed)

To automatically subscribe click on http://tinyurl.com/388yf .

[news] Excerpt from a McKinsey Paper on IT Spending Trends

2004-08-09T17:52:00.000+08:00

Monday, August 9, 2004

Dateline: China

I recently urled the abstract for this paper, but CNET and McKinsey were kind enough to post the full-text of the paper on the CNET news site (which downloads at glacial speed, at least from China). Now that the article from the current issue of The McKinsey Quarterly is in the public domain, I'd like to include an excerpt in this posting. (Bolded and colored notations are MY emphasis.)

"Although IT customers also want to improve their software, they are wary of big-bang packaged applications--purchases that are just now rolling off accrual budgets. This time around, CIOs are shunning expensive panaceas, especially large-scale customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Many tech executives lost face (or jobs) when the promised benefits didn't materialize, often because the technology demanded difficult-to-realize changes in processes and in employee behavior. Even worse than buying packaged applications, CIOs told us, was buying applications and then customizing them, for this strategy made it necessary to reinvest in customization with each subsequent upgrade. CIOs now favor narrower, more-targeted, less-ambitious improvements that mitigate the risk of organizational rejection. Custom software that closely adheres to a company's existing processes (and therefore requires little or no process change) is popular, and so is software developed for a specific industry. Meanwhile, integration--a higher priority now than it was during the boom--is generating demand for enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies. Web services are gaining traction faster than anticipated, especially in small telecom and other companies at the forefront of IT innovation. Of the CIOs we interviewed, 8 percent said that Web services were their primary integration strategy. Despite these inroads, most companies are still at the experimental stage with this technology, which demands advanced skills and a high degree of commitment from the IT organization. Others are choosing a different path: Roughly half of the CIOs we spoke with have been (or are thinking about) investing in integration broker software, often combined with Web services. Adoption is strongest among telecommunications and financial-services companies, whose technical complexity makes the software especially attractive. The third-party services market could feel the pinch, however. Many companies, spurred by lower IT salaries after the economic slowdown, hired talent and brought IT development in-house. These new hires often support and develop the more-customized applications that today's IT budgets favor. But this move could boomerang on companies in the future: The absence of vendor support could reduce economies of scale and push up costs. Offshoring in less-expensive labor markets could, of course, offset them."

ADDENDUM: Seeing Beyond "Traditional" Market Research ...

I've already received a few messages regarding my "Seeing Beyond" posting.

One of the questions was very simple to answer. The question: Can you name a few ISVs in China which could develop a hosted version of their packaged software? Certainly. Simple answer: Bamboo, Kingdee, UFSoft (all three are in the ERP space).

A reader also asked me about Fisher-Pry, having heard of this technique but not really familiar with it. In simple terms, Fisher-Pry functions best as a substitution model. I'm not thrilled about using it to predict end of life and market size issues per se. Where I find it useful -- EXTREMELY USEFUL -- is in determining when a NEW technology is likely to EMERGE. I then put on my Geoffrey Moore glasses to look at the technology from a chasm crossing perspective. And, if I'm really interested, I'll put on my Ed Roberts and Gordon Bell glasses -- and will evaluate the technology using other techniques as well. But Fisher-Pry itself is extremely simple to use and a Geoffrey Moore analysis is also a no-brainer. (Ed Roberts' -- and I'm the unofficial president of the Ed Roberts fan club -- various approaches to evaluating new markets and technologies requires me to fire a lot more neurons than Moore's approach.) To me, Fisher-Pry is all about inflection points and EMERGING markets. To see an application of Fisher-Pry, read an A.T. Kearney report on wireless futures at http://tinyurl.com/4zcas (and it's an excellent report, too). See also a recent evaluation of the remote sensing market at http://tinyurl.com/6zxqm . For a brief review of Fisher-Pry and a couple of related techniques for technology trend analysis, see http://tinyurl.com/4hf7t .

Finally, another reader questioned whether MIT's Innovation Futures market was doomed to focus on short(er)-term "bets." My answer is that MIT may need to repackage Innovation Futures for addressing long(er)-term issues. Many of us in America can remember playing the stock market in one of our classes. For me, it was in my eighth grade government class. We had to pick stocks and trade them through the course of the year. Unfortunately, the very nature of this learning experience put a premium on trading versus investing. In other words, picking stocks which might be solid over a three-plus year time horizon simply wouldn't work; it was much better to "gamble" on high Beta (i.e., higher volatility) issues. Innovation Futures suffers from the same "need" to determine winners and losers on a relatively timely basis. Probably time horizons of three or more years won't suffice, at least not from a "gamblers" perspective (sans venture capitalists).

I'd like to see their system changed to allow different types of "players" and "traders," namely the crop I had suggested in my last posting, but also another class of "all others." Think of this as an experiment in social computing among technophiles, not online gambling. In some ways, it could reveal the type of knowledge that is found in the blogosphere.

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

http://www.itestrategies.com (current blog postings optimized for MSIE6.x)

http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa (access to blog content archives in China)

http://tinyurl.com/2azkh (current blog postings for viewing in other browsers and for access to blog content archives in the US & ROW)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle (Furl)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle/rss.xml (Furl RSS feed)

[commentary] Seeing Beyond "Traditional" Market Research + A Golden Opportunity for China's ISVs

2004-08-08T23:57:00.000+08:00

Sunday, August 8, 2004

Dateline: China

More general commentary than news commentary per se; let's dig in ...

Seeing Beyond "Traditional" Market Research

We're all familiar ad nauseum with market forecasts by firms such as Gartner, Forrester, IDC and even i-bankers (albeit i-bankers tend to have a shorter time horizon). I've always been a bit suspect of IT market forecasts and was delighted that the META Group (where I was VP, Electronic Business Strategies) focused on qualitative and consultative approaches to serving our end-user and vendor clients. We were more like a SWAT team version of McKinsey: Get in, get it done, get out, move on. The Kensington Group, an IT advisory services industry watchdog firm, has found that most forecasts are simply dead wrong. Frankly, it's hard to blame the IT advisory services: Forecasting is tough stuff!! Some of the firms claim that they are not producing forecasts, but are producing projections. Call it what you will: It's a forecast -- and it's usually wrong. (In defense of the IT advisory services, often the commentary which accompanies a forecast is quite useful. The forecast may be wrong, but often other issues are adequately -- and usefully -- addressed.)

I've been a long-time proponent of more "advanced" forecasting techniques ranging from Delphi (pioneered by the RAND Corporation) to cellular automata to Lotka-Volterra (which in a plain vanilla and watered-down form was the basis of a lead article in an issue of Harvard Business Review) to the good 'ol Fisher-Pry technique -- and just about every flavor of forecasting in between. Not only do I read Technological Forecasting & Social Change, but I annually read numerous papers published in a few hundred engineering journals and in all ACM, IEEE and SPIE conference proceedings which cite a paper published in TF&SC. (Think CiteSeer.) And something relatively new has captured my attention; I want to share this with the readers of this blog/e-newsletter.

MIT's Technology Review has embarked on a interesting project called "Innovation Futures". (They may not view this as a "project," but it feels like a "project" to me.) There is a fair amount of history behind the project -- and some may recall the related DARPA fiasco last year -- but I'd like to stick specifically to the MIT project. To quote Technology Review, "Innovation Futures is a predictive market system that enables technologyreview.com users to predict the outcome of events related to emerging technologies." Think of it as a futures and options market for emerging technologies -- NOT about companies, but about the underlying technologies. For example, rather than betting for or against Nanosys as a pure-play nano firm, a "player" (think "trader") can bet for or against a definable nano event (e.g., commercial devices produced using molecular self-assembly techniques with combined annual sales of at least $100 million by 2006). Something "easier" to phantom might be a bet that VoIP will be implemented in some form by at least 75% of G2000 companies by 2007. Think about this: Which would give a better indicator of buying intentions, the MIT predictive market system or an IT advisory service forecast? I'll put my money on Innovation Futures or a clone. (Frankly, I'd put my money on other technological forecasting techniques. But if the choice is between the MIT system or Gartner, I'll go with MIT. And the MIT market is a lot easier to follow than building a nonlinear model. Leave the tough stuff to Pugh-Roberts; leave the everyday stuff to Innovation Futures.)

At this point, the MIT site doesn't have very much and most of what they have is focused on short(er)-term bets. But this will be very interesting to watch, especially as broader -- and long(er)-term -- issues are market tested. What happens when the marketing folks at IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Accenture, CSC, TCS, Infosys and SAP play? And when the members of the Global Business Network and their brethren play? And when IT advisory services analysts play? And, perhaps most importantly, when CIOs representing companies of all different sizes and from all parts of globe start to play? Food for thought. I'll keep this readership posted: I plan to have several long discussions with the folks running Innovation Futures. I have many specific ideas to share with them. For more information, see http://tinyurl.com/5bevb .

A Golden Opportunity for China's ISVs

In the past I've talked about the opportunities for SIs (systems integrators) in China to work with utility computing vendors in the States. Well, I've given this a lot of thought and have another idea: What about ISVs (independent software vendors) in China floating utility computing offerings in the States? As one example, let's take Free CRM (see http://www.freecrm.com/ ). The totally free version seems a bit worthless, but gives a smaller firm a chance to play with the idea with very little risk. However, the "Professional" version is only $10 per month per user, far less than Salesforce.com's average of $70 per month per user. Okay, the "Professional" version of Free CRM (maybe they should call it "Cheap CRM" -- or some B-school grad might name it "Value-Driven CRM) certainly doesn't have the industrial strength features of Salesforce.com. However, think a modified Pareto strategy: A good chuck of the functionality, but at a fraction of the cost. Add a few zingers like syncing for a PDA/smartphone and/or pages automatically "modified" to fit any form factor (see the current issue of CACM for a great article on this; hot research area and tomorrow's urls listing will include a link to a downloadable paper on this subject) and the offering from the ISV in China becomes incredibly -- perhaps irresistibly -- enticing. And guess what: At least in theory the platform could be leveraged for both the market in the States and in China. (I have some reservations about this, but it's theoretically doable.) BTW, the Free CRM solutions are NOT hosted, but for in-house initiatives. However, the same marketing principles apply in this analysis.

Bottom line: This is truly a golden opportunity for ISVs in China. Don't target the F1000; go after SMEs, perhaps the same firms that are normally targeted by the largest ISVs using telemarketing. (I'm not suggesting a telemarketing strategy; I'm simply segmenting the market in Oracle fashion.) Think of a U.S. company with less than 500 employees. The world (well, at least the U.S. part of it) will be your oyster ...

China: A Hotbed for Management Consulting?

An interesting article published on the China Economic Net site (in Chinglish, no less) kind of uses the phrase "management consulting" in a rather broad way. But when it gets to specifics, it's illuminating. First, there is the claim that "China has become the management consulting market with the most rapid growth rate." Not sure if this is really true, but it's certainly one of the more interesting markets.

For specifics, BearingPoint is cited. Basically, they're bursting at the seams and projecting growth from about 1,000 today to 6,000 in 2008. CapGemini went the acquisition route. The average annual salary of a "good management consultant" is about US$40,000 -- a far cry from what a "good management consultant" makes in the States. And what do the consultants bring to the table? Well, this is where the article went from being written in English to Chinglish. But if I can make out what they mean, it's the ability for management consultants to help with implementation and operational issues. See http://tinyurl.com/43hlr .

Bottom line: SIs in China should look to adding so-called "management consulting" services to their offerings. I am NOT suggesting a massive move in this direction, but a selected approach. Also, China's SIs should look to partner with Western management consulting firms already in or planning to enter China. On the one hand, the BearingPoints of the world make good partners, especially for sub-contracting work. On the other hand, the BCGs of the world are more complimentary and not directly competitive. Have a strategy and plan for dealing with both types of management consulting firms, i.e., the strategy firms with a stake in IT (e.g., @McKinsey) and the IT consultancies/SIs with a strategy play (e.g., IGS, Accenture, ...).

What I'm Reading (and Why I Didn't Post as Often as Usual Last Week)

The new proceedings for SIGIR04 are out and I've been sifting through dozens of papers. Google seems like child's play compared to what is brewing. However, I have it on good authority that Google is brewing many of the same things. But so is Microsoft. In the future, we all benefit.

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

http://www.itestrategies.com (current blog postings optimized for MSIE6.x)

http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa (access to blog content archives in China)

http://tinyurl.com/2azkh (current blog postings for viewing in other browsers and for access to blog content archives in the US & ROW)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinasourcingalert (RSS feed)

http://chinasourcing.blogspot.com/atom.xml (Atom feed)

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[urls] Top 10 Urls: 25 July-1 August 2004

2004-08-02T20:54:00.000+08:00

Monday, August 2, 2004

Dateline: China

The following is a sampling of my "urls" for the past eight days. By signing up with Furl (it's free), anyone can subscribe to an e-mail feed of ALL my urls (about 150-350 per week) -- AND limit by subject (e.g., ITO) and/or rating (e.g., articles rated "Very Good" or "Excellent"). It's also possible to receive new urls as an RSS feed. However, if you'd like to receive a daily feed of my urls but do NOT want to sign up with Furl, I can manually add your name to my daily Furl distribution list. (And if you want off, I'll promptly remove your e-mail address.)

Best new selections (in no particular order):

* A Web Services Choreography Scenario for Interoperating Bioinformatics Applications (SUPERB, covering all the bases; might serve as the foundation for a blog posting)

* ICC Report: Software Focus, June 2004 issue (if you're not familiar with this monthly newsletter from Red Herring, it's worth scanning; this particular issue is their "annual" on enterprise software)

* Northeast Asia: Cultural Influences on the U.S. National Security Strategy (this might serve as the basis for a blog posting; EXCELLENT, broad-based review of cultural issues)

* Economics of an Information Intermediary with Aggregation Benefits (think B2B and e-markets, although the implications are wide-ranging)

* Top 10 Usability Blunders of the Big Players

* How to Increase Your Return on Your Innovation Investment (provides a link to an article published in the current issue of Harvard Business Review; good food for thought)

* From Information Retrieval to Information Interaction (ideas for life beyond search)

* Why Mobile Services Fail (insights from Howard Rheingold)

* A Global Power Shift in the Making (on China, from Foreign Affairs)

* Anything That Promotes ebXML Is Good (lots of good links; I'm an ebXML advocate, so the tone of this article is one which I fully support)

Examples of urls that didn't make my "Top Ten List":

> Grid Computing: Industry Standards and Business Benefits (webcast)

> Product Lifecycle Management Automation is Vital to Innovation, Yet Only Half of Consumer Firms Effectively Apply It, Says Aberdeen Group Study

> RightNow, Sierra Atlantic Announce Partnership to Deliver Enterprise CRM Integration (a trend in the making; I've talked about this quite a bit, i.e., systems integrators working with utility computing vendors)

> August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

> China vs. India in IT Offshoring

and many, many more ...

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/3mbzq (temporary, until Gmail resolves their problems; I haven't been able to access my Gmail messages for the past week)

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinasourcingalert (RSS feed)

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http://tinyurl.com/2hg2e (AvantGo channel)

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[news] Cognizant & the "Intelligent Internet" + a Peek at 2005 IT Budgets (Part 2 of 2)

2004-08-02T13:14:00.000+08:00

Sunday, August 1, 2004

Dateline: China

Ah, the World Future Society. Much to say about the WFS, but I'll save it for the end of this post. An article which appears in the March-April 2004 issue of The Futurist was reprinted in a recent issue of Government Computer News (see http://tinyurl.com/yrp2w ); the original paper which was the basis for The Futurist article is also available (see http://tinyurl.com/5ymos ). The article focuses heavily on findings from the TechCast Project at George Washington University (see http://www.techcast.org ; BTW, they're seeking beta testers).

The article acknowledges hype during the bubble, but goes on to indicate that 20 commercial aspects of Internet use should reach 30% "take-off" adoption levels over the next several years -- and will rejuvenate the (American) economy. One area of particular interest is a "conversational" human-computer interface, called "TeleLiving," based on advances in speech recognition, AI, hardware/grid computing, virtual environments and flat wall monitors. (Sounds like stuff out of PARC and Microsoft Research.)

Their Project results "portray a striking scenario in which the dominate forms of e-commerce - broadband, business-to-business (B2B), online finance, entertainment-on-demand, wireless, e-training, knowledge-on-demand, electronic public services, online publishing, e-tailing - grow from their present 5%-20% adoption levels to 30% between 2004 and 2010. TechCast considers the 30% penetration level significant because this roughly marks the 'take-off point' when technologies move from their early-adopter phase into the mainstream, where they permeate economic and social life." (Think of chasm crossing. Also think of expeditionary marketing within the context of broadband. BTW, bolded and colored items are MY emphasis.)

The authors discuss the notion that many think that the Internet is already mainstream, yet challenge that notion by stating that this is true only for nonpaying use, citing surfing for free information as one example. "As of 2003, commercial operations involving monetary exchange were limited to about 23% for broadband, 10% for e-tailing, 12% for B2B, 10% for distance learning, and 5% for music. And these are the most popular Internet applications. Others hardly register in adoption levels at all." Bottom line: It's all about e-commerce, I guess. Jerry Maguire said it best.

A Look at 2005 IT Spending

Not as much as I had originally hoped for in the Forrester glimpse at 2005 IT budgets, but some things to note. (See http://tinyurl.com/67pse .) Example: 52% of finance and insurance firms -- led by insurers -- will spend more on IT in 2005. Okay, sounds like an opportunity for SIs (systems integrators) building .NET solutions. (For those who don't know, Microsoft has fairly strong solutions for the insurance vertical.) At the subvertical level, media and nongovernment public sector plays look good, whereas the utilities and transportation sectors look weak. Also, Siebel and PeopleSoft customers are planning to spend more on IT relative to customers of other key vendors, most notably SAP. (I don't see this, but I don't dispute their data. Frankly, I think we'll see a lot of activity for SAP SIs in 2005. P'Soft is too hard to tell, especially with the confusion caused by Oracle. Oracle benefits whether the acquisition goes through or not!! It's the FUD factor.)

Not to be outdone, AMR came out with their peek at 2005 budgets for SMEs (small and medium enterprises). (See http://tinyurl.com/5vlvo . I got a lot more out of the AMR report.) Something that is rather common knowledge among IT analysts, but may not be known by those not involved in the IT budgeting process, is that a typical large U.S. manufacturer spends 2% of its annual revs (i.e., revenues) on IT and a large service firm spends 5%. However, the average for U.S. SMEs is 6.4% of revs, although a good chunk is for basic IT infrastructure.

CRM looks like a hot item for U.S. SMEs and the AMR report makes an interesting comment about the perceived need for other countries to implement a "keeping up with the Joneses" strategy. This being said, then domestic firms in China may follow suit. As far as operating systems are concerned, there is only one: Windows. And U.S. SMEs spend about 20% of their IT budget on software and software maintenance, with discrete manufacturers outspending process manufacturers or retailers. Typical apps are for financial management and customer management, although expensive CRM suites (think Siebel or Oracle) are rare. Sounds like an opportunity for utility computing vendors. Bottom line: If the SMEs market is your key market (by size), then go with Microsoft CRM solutions!

Fast Forward Over Three Decades

At this point, I'm going to get a bit personal. If you're not interested, simply skip the remainder of this message: It briefly covers three decades and my so-called "futurist" origins.

The first "adult" organization I ever joined was the World Future Society. (Remember, the basis for the first section of this posting was an article published in their flagship publication, The Futurist.) The year was 1971. I had been an adolescent "futurist" since March 1968, the month that my father bought me a copy of Sky & Telescope magazine. Although the Vietnam War was on the news each night, I was simply too young for it to really matter. Both the war and protests against the war were merely uninspiring TV images.

But something caught my imagination and that "something" was the space program. I can still recall the liftoff of Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969 at 6:32 am PDT. Believe it or not, I can still recite the countdown. I can also recite part of the landing sequence of the Eagle -- the Lunar Excursion Module housing Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin. And, of course, I can remember Neil Armstrong stepping off the foot of the LEM on July 20th, probably around 7 or 7:30 pm. Two movies also inspired me toward a "tech" future: The obvious, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the not-so-obvious, The Andromeda Strain. (My parents didn't let me stay up to watch Star Trek, so Star Trek didn't have any impact on my life during my early adolescence.) Although I have been a member of the L-5 Society and the British Interplanetary Society (anyone remember Project Daedalus?), the World Future Society was the most influential organization in my life during my high school years. Well, a wee bit of personal history. Those were the good 'ol days ...

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/4nr9h

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[urls] Top 10 Urls of the Week: A Taste of Furl

2004-07-25T23:43:00.000+08:00

Sunday, July 25, 2004

Dateline: China

The following is a sampling of my "urls" for the past week. By signing up with Furl (it's free), anyone can subscribe to an e-mail feed of my urls -- and limit by subject AND rating. It's also possible to receive an RSS feed. However, if you'd like to receive a daily feed of my urls but do NOT want to sign up with Furl, I can manually add your name to my daily Furl distribution list. (And if you want off, I'll promptly remove your e-mail address.)

Briefly, over the past week I added over 300 urls to my "goldentriange" Furl account. In the editing process, I whittled down the number to nearly 60 in my first pass and then deleted about 50 more urls to create "Dave's Top Ten (Urls) List" (of the week). Think about it: Only one in 30 made the grade.

For one thing, I've excluded ALL sites referenced in any of my three blogs. Also, ALL "dated" items with short shelf-life were cut (such as news stories), although over two-thirds of the "urled" pages over the past week were news-related. (My assumption is that everyone already has their favorite news sources.) OTOH, I didn't want to include items which are a bit too research-focused, either. Truly a delicate balance.

Enjoy -- and please zap me your feedback! And, if you'd like to receive the daily feed (which includes news items), please let me know.

* A Fitting Use for Web Services Technology

* Grid Tools: Coming to a Cluster Near You

* ROI Calculators - Nucleus Research

* Verticals To Grow By--And To Avoid

* A BPEL Primer

* Getting IT Right - An Approach to Managing IT Complexity

* Technology futures analysis: Toward integration of the field and new methods

* The Next Big Thing: Adaptive Web-Based Systems

* Time for a Redesign: Dr. Jakob Nielsen

* Google circa 1960

Examples of urls that didn't make my "Top Ten List":

> GLOBAL SECURITIES INDUSTRY IT SPENDING

> Top Tech Trends (from PC Magazine)

> 'We see global, offshore outsourcing converging' (Cognizant)

> The Eclipse Web and J2EE Tools Platform Project is Now Live

> The Virtual Debugging System for Embedded Software Development

and many, many more ...

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/3mbzq (temporary, until Gmail resolves their problems; I haven't been able to access my Gmail messages for the past week)

http://www.itestrategies.com (current blog postings optimized for MSIE6.x)

http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa (access to blog content archives in China)

http://tinyurl.com/2azkh (current blog postings for viewing in other browsers and for access to blog content archives in the US & ROW)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinasourcingalert (RSS feed)

http://chinasourcing.blogspot.com/atom.xml (Atom feed)

http://tinyurl.com/2hg2e (AvantGo channel)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle (Furl)

http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle/rss.xml (Furl RSS feed)

To automatically subscribe click on http://tinyurl.com/388yf .

[emerging tech] "Web Engineering: The Evolution of New Technologies" & the Ultimate Killer App

2004-07-23T14:05:00.000+08:00

Friday, July 23, 2004

Dateline: China

Reviews of papers from the current (July/August 2004) issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, special issue on "Web Engineering: The Evolution of New Technologies." To order articles from this issue, first click on http://tinyurl.com/5ktaw .

Earlier this week I posted excerpts from the lead article in the current issue of CiSE. The article was titled, "Managing XML Data: An Abridged Overview," which is a good, accurate title. The excerpts contain useful links, too.

I am going to take a variety of approaches for handling four other papers in this special issue. However, I first want to provide a link to the introduction to this special issue, i.e., http://tinyurl.com/6sbjx . The intro itself provides a few useful references and links.

The second article is titled, "Information Retrieval Techniques for Peer-to-Peer Networks." Fortunately, a full-text PDF copy of this paper can be accessed at either http://dblab.cs.ucr.edu/ or http://tinyurl.com/6v2ru, although the URL for the former looks a little bit too generic and might change at a moment's notice (also, the two papers are slightly different). I have 19 bookmarks on my smartphone for this paper, but I guess I can summarize by saying that IR for P2P networks is hard and very different from "traditional" search. The last statement actually says a lot -- read between the lines. This paper covers all the usual suspects and also includes Skype. This paper is based upon the lead author's Master's thesis which can be accessed from http://tinyurl.com/696ml . Other papers by the lead author can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/43kkh . This is an important issue which needs to be resolved, especially as collaborative grid computing (CGC) comes to life.

Two figures; 20 references (28 references in the preprint).

Less luck with the paper titled, "Web Searching and Information Retrieval," i.e., I couldn't find a free copy on the Web. The author's site is woefully outdated, too. The author does speak favorably of a particular approach to decentralized P2P web crawling called "Apoidea." A copy of a paper describing Apoidea can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/4m2v5 ; accompanying slides can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/4b4sh . As described in the CiSE paper, "Apoidea is both self-managing and uses the resource's geographical proximity to its peers for a better and faster crawl."

Two figures; 21 references.

To request a copy of this article click on: http://tinyurl.com/7yyl2 or http://tinyurl.com/6m6ff (I'm not sure which address works; I already have a copy of this article so I don't need to contact the author!).

"Web Mining: Research and Practice" is not available, either, but a lot of excellent info on the senior author's projects related to this paper is available. First, take a look at the eBiquity research areas at http://tinyurl.com/52p9n . Next, you may want to take a look at the abstracts for papers published as part of the eBiquity Group at http://tinyurl.com/5om58 (current through December 2004 -- it doesn't get more current!!). Move on to their "Semantic Web" page at http://tinyurl.com/4a8fr . I then downloaded a PDF copy of their paper titled, "Mining Domain Specific Texts and Glossaries to Evaluate and Enrich Domain Ontologies" (see http://tinyurl.com/3lg2m ). It looks like a relatively recent paper, newer than the CiSE paper (different authors and different subject matter, though). The PDF is part of their Semantic Web research, whereas the CiSE paper is more "generic." Anyway, the "Web Mining" paper is another call for distributed mining techniques, and covers fuzzy clustering as well as content-based recommender systems -- but doesn't forget good 'ol HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search), the basis for IBM's Clever and Google (to a certain extent).

No figures; 31 references.

To request a copy of this article click on: http://tinyurl.com/5xv3p .

Finally, "Intelligent Agents on the Web: A Review" was very disappointing. The lead author has impeccable credentials, but his paper is based on yesterday's news: Old, outdated, buried stuff (like Firefly). Matter of fact, the only live link I can recall finding was Recursion Software's "Voyager" home page (see http://tinyurl.com/3wpem ), which states that the "Voyager applications development platform provides the software layer which handles communications across the network for distributed JAVA applications." (Looks interesting.)

I did a little more digging and surfed over to two stand-by sites (both referenced directly or indirectly in the "Intelligent Agents" paper), namely the MIT Media Lab Software Agents page and Oren Etzioni's (oops, I mean the University of Washington, Department of Computer Science) page. At the MIT projects page (see http://tinyurl.com/4ocss ) is a listing of several "commonsense" projects, e.g., "Using Commonsense Reasoning to Enable the Semantic Web" (see http://tinyurl.com/4deq7 ). A draft White Paper on this is available at http://tinyurl.com/4e4bv , as is a presentation at http://tinyurl.com/4le2n along with a couple of video demos. I also downloaded a paper on GOOSE (GOal-Oriented Search Engine) at http://tinyurl.com/4fyeu . At UWash I went to their XML data management page (see http://tinyurl.com/5x98a ) and then grabbed two papers: One on "Probabilistic Methods For Querying Global Information Systems" dated 14 July 2004 (see http://tinyurl.com/45uz7 ) and another titled, "Learning Text Patterns for Web Information Extraction and Assessment" dated May 2004 (see http://tinyurl.com/6k5fz ). (To download other unrestricted reports, go to http://tinyurl.com/5z2x7 .) Frankly, I need a bit of time to digest the two recently published UWash papers.

As the chair of the Internet and Web applications session of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents (1996), I have a soft spot for agent-oriented everything (especially Web apps). I remember an old saying from IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) in the mid-70's: Artificial intelligence is better than none. (I probably still have a button with this saying somewhere.) I'm keeping the faith, sans the hype and more toward the realities of software agents. BTW, this CiSE paper isn't bad if you don't have any background in this space. It covers the basics, such as ACLs, but with an "updated" perspective.

No figures; 27 references.

To request a copy of this article click on: http://tinyurl.com/6zzqs .

The Ultimate Killer App

BTW, the "Ultimate Killer App" is attached and in some browsers it will automatically download. (See the bottom of this message.) You have to admit, this really is the ultimate killer app!!

I've never sent an attachment this way simultaneously to both my e-newsletter and blogs (and blog variants). Just in case the attachment isn't included, I've uploaded it to the "Photos" section of the e-newsletter (see http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa .)

>> Note to AlwaysOn readers: You'll need to go to the e-newsletter ( http://tinyurl.com/2r3pa ) in order to see the "Ultimate Killer App." You can try the blogs, but no guarantees.

Tidbits on Enterprise Software

.NET wins converts. For the VARBusiness story see http://tinyurl.com/3omd2 . Evans Data reports that .NET usage showed a sharp YoY increase in adoption with 52% saying they use .NET and 68% saying they plan to deploy .NET apps by 2005. In May, Forrester reported that 56% of developers consider .NET their primary development environment contrasted with 44% for J2EE. (It must have been a binary choice!) VARBusiness found in a May survey that 53% have already deployed a .NET app and 66% plan to do so within the next 12 months. In the VARBusiness survey, the most important reasons for going with .NET were ease of use and quicker time to market. A developer goes on to state that .NET development time is to Java what Java is to C++. (Wow, what a claim!)

Python and Perl beat Java? (See http://tinyurl.com/44m5t for the PDF file.) Actually, an indirect "attack" against all "mainstream" programming languages, notably Java, C and C++. The idea is that the "mainstream" languages are ill-suited for many distributed computing and integration apps. Gives a "thumbs up" to Python, Perl and PHP, with a peek at PEAK -- the Python Enterprise Application Kit. (Sorry for the pun.) PEAK's developers claim future superiority over J2EE. They also knock Java for not being suited to rapid application development. PEAK's developers believe a Python-based approach to component-based apps will result in systems that are simpler, faster and easier to install, manage and maintain than variants in J2EE. PEAK, however, is still immature.

Grid computing takes off. Another survey from Evans Data (see http://tinyurl.com/4l2qb ). 37% of database developers are implementing or planning to implement a grid computing architecture. In related data, 34% of companies are focusing their database development work on BI (business intelligence) platforms. See also Oracle's spin on this at http://tinyurl.com/4n2kf .

The spoils of ROI. From IDC's Group VP, Solutions Research, there are several issues which must be addressed in order to maximize IT ROI. (See http://tinyurl.com/228kv .) Four of the key issues are:

Should the IT agenda include investment in outsourcing technologies or services?
Does the future of the business include operations in, or electronic trade with, additional countries - China, for example?
Are the services of an outside provider being considered to help in managing proliferating applications or complex "interenterprise" business relationships?
What role will utility computing play in the future of IT?

(All items in bold are my emphasis.) The article goes on to discuss various ways of evaluating ROI, including one of my favorite ways, ROA (real options analysis).

TTFN. Have a GREAT weekend!

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/58rbd

WARNING: To avoid spam (well, to avoid getting at least some spam), I'm using a Gmail account with a special address. However, I have NOT been able to access the messages in my Gmail account for the past FOUR days!! Not sure how long this will last. In the interim, also use:

DavidScottLewis.2520656@bloglines.com -- but also Cc: the above address. Of course, if you already know me, feel free to send messages to my primary and secondary e-mail accounts. (If you know me, you already know what they are. The primary account is working fine.)

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[emerging tech] "Managing XML Data" (Web Engineering: The Evolution of New Technologies)

2004-07-19T16:12:00.000+08:00

Monday, July 19, 2004

Dateline: China

Excerpts from the current issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, special issue on "Web Engineering: The Evolution of New Technologies." To order this article, click on http://tinyurl.com/6v3cc . (Note: Formatting has been changed from the original article; however, ordering is consistent.)

XML's flexibility makes it a natural format for both exchanging and integrating data from diverse data sources. In this survey, the authors give an overview of issues in managing XML data, discuss existing solutions, and outline the current technology's open problems and limitations.

A diverse set of factors has fueled the explosion of interest in XML ( http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml ): XML's self-describing nature makes it more amenable for use in loosely coupled data-exchange systems, and the flexible semistructured data model behind it makes it natural as a format for integrating data from various sources.

But much of its success stems from the existence of standard languages for each aspect of XML processing and the rapid emergence of tools for manipulating XML. Popular tools include parsers such as Xerces ( http://xml.apache.org/xerces-j ), query processors such as Galax ( http://db.bell-labs.com/galax ), and transformation tools such as Xalan ( http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j ). The development of this standards framework has made XML dialects powerful vehicles for standardization in communities that exchange data.

In this article, we discuss the main problems involved in managing XML data. Our objective is to clarify potential issues that must be considered when building XML-based applications---in particular, XML solutions' benefits as well as possible pitfalls. Our intent is not to give an exhaustive review of XML data-management (XDM) literature, XML standards, or a detailed study of commercial products. Instead, we aim to provide an overview of a representative subset to illustrate how some XDM problems are addressed.

Because data typically is stored in non-XML database systems, applications must publish data in XML for exchange purposes. When a target application receives XML data, it can remap and store it in internal data structures or a target database system. Applications can also access an XML document either through APIs such as the Document Object Model (DOM; http://www.w3.org/DOM ) or query languages. The applications can directly access the document in native format or, with conversion, from a network stream or non-XML database format.

In contrast with relational database management systems (RDBMSs) that had a clear initial motivation in supporting online transaction processing (OLTP) scenarios, XML applications' requirements vary widely. Applications must deal with several different kinds of queries (structured and keyword-based) in different scenarios (with or without transaction support, over stored or streaming data), as well as data with varying characteristics (ordered and unordered, with or without a schema).

Commercial database vendors have also shown significant interest in XDM---support for XML data is present in most RDBMSs. Examples include IBM's DB2 XML Extender ( http://www4.ibm.com/software/data/db2/extenders/xmlext.html ), Microsoft's support for XML ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/sqlxml/ ), and Oracle's XML DB ( http://otn.oracle.com/tech/xml/xmldb/ ).

In XML, common querying tasks include filtering and selecting values, merging and integrating values from multiple documents, and transforming XML documents. While XML has enabled the creation of standard data formats within industries and communities, adoption of these standards has led to an enormous and immediate problem of exporting data available in legacy formats to meet newly created standard schemata. Several publishing languages have been proposed to specify XML views over the legacy data---that is, how to map legacy data (such as tables) into a predefined XML format.

In this section, we discuss limitations of existing solutions as well as some open problems. Our discussion is biased toward problems we have encountered in trying to create effective and scalable XDM solutions; it is by no means exhaustive.

Parsing and validating a document against an XML Schema or DTD are CPU-intensive tasks that can be a major bottleneck in XML management. A recent study of XML parsing and validation performance indicates that response times and transaction rates over XML data cannot be achieved without significant improvements in XML parsing technology. It suggests enhancements such as using parallel processing techniques and preparsed binary XML formats as well as better support for incremental parsing and validation.

By using XML-specific compression techniques, tools such as XMill compare favorably against several generic compressors. Compression techniques have also been proposed that support direct querying over the compressed data, which besides saving space, also improve query processing times.

The ability to support updates is becoming increasingly important as XML evolves into a universal data representation format. Although proposals for defining and implementing updates have emerged, a standard has yet to be defined for an update language.

Three figures & sample code; 23 references.

To request a copy of this article click on: http://tinyurl.com/6kcqw .

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

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[humor] The Mind of an American Programmer (courtesy of Sun Microsystems)

2004-07-19T14:42:00.000+08:00

Monday, July 19, 2004

Dateline: China

Go to: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/features/insidejack1/start.html . A wee bit off topic, but a great perspective on the thoughts of an American programmer ... I mean, "developer." This is the funniest thing I've seen in a while; it accurately captures life in Silicon Valley. Even better than Dilbert (although yesterday's Dilbert on execs collecting "trophy wives" was pretty good).

There's audio with the animation, so turn on your speakers and turn up the volume. Watch out for the jab at IBM Global Services ...

Next: As promised, the blog posting on "The Evolution of New Technologies," a review of five emerging technologies.

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

e-mail: click on http://tinyurl.com/6xeue

[news] "Urling" Instead of "Blogging"

2004-07-17T16:55:00.000+08:00

Saturday, July 17, 2004

Dateline: China

Note: To skip the following chatter, simply go to: http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle . The link is self-explanatory.

Next posting: "The Evolution of New Technologies" (in a couple/few days).

I just did a Google search and it looks like I've created a new word: "urling." Some may argue that it should be, "URLing," but it doesn't really matter to me. For now, I'll stick with "urling." And, as "blogs" are to "blogging," "urls" (again, some may argue that it should be, "URLs") are to "urling."

Two sites inspired me to come up with the new term, Furl and Spurl. (See http://www.furl.net and http://www.spurl.net ; there's a more popular site with somewhat similar features, but I can't stand it.) So what in the world am I talking about? The best way to describe what I'm talking about is to paraphrase a bit from the Furl FAQ. In essence, blogging is about creating (and created) content; urling is about consumed (and consuming) content. Notice that there is a slight difference in tense, which also notes another difference between blogging and urling.

We all know what blogging is, so let me attempt to explain what urling is. Urling is the sharing of annotated URLs (i.e., "urls"). In practice (and this is what really counts), urling is the process of sharing cool sites by simply saving them via a bookmarklet.

So, big deal. Why should I care? Well, in practice, Web users bookmark very few items that they actually see. However, there are often a lot of sites that users visit that might very well be worth sharing with others. But doing this (i.e., sharing bookmarks, especially if someone regularly goes on a bookmarking rampage) is a rather tedious process. Using a Furl or Spurl bookmarklet, urling makes it simple to share the cool sites users visit with all others who may be interested. They can even be shared as XML feeds!! Furl and Spurl are a generation beyond the bookmark sharing sites circa the bubble.

Furl and Spurl also capture "urled" sites, offer recommendations, even provide a pseudo-social networking feature (although I'm a bit skeptical about this feature).

Two Days in the Life of Urling: The Practical Differences Between Blogging and Urling ... and a Peek at Urling Futures

I try to blog two or three times each week. But in the process, I review dozens (perhaps hundreds) of articles and sites just to come up with some original content for my blog. As we all know, blogs often tend to copy from one another. ("Copy" may be viewed as an inflammatory word to some bloggers. No harm intended.) Blogging is kind of strange in that if bloggers trackback to one another, their Google results improve. Great for catching fads, I guess, but I'm not sure if any of this really matters for serious content. I'll go so far as to say that many (most) blogs do not have very much serious content.

Urling can get equally as ridiculous and people may want to share all sorts of questionable sites. But it's also possible to find like-minded individuals and subscribe to what they're urling each day. Also, not everyone likes to write. (Some love it, some people hate it -- especially since words put to a blog are seemingly immortalized.) Now, people who don't like to write, but find a lot of cool, useful information can share with others in a way which is not at all intimidating. No need to think about pithy things to say in a blog; simply share a cool new site you've found or a new article describing whatever by urling.

I'm planning to use Spurl for my personal urling and I'm already using Furl for my public urling. I can't comment on Spurl's bookmarklet feature, but I must say that Furl is rather slow. Fact is, I can save an item using Bloglines much faster than I can using Furl. So speed is an issue. (I hope the folks at Furl read this.)

I also wonder why Bloglines can't do something just like Furl (or Spurl). For my "master edition" of Bloglines, I have 64 feeds, including numerous newsletters I receive through Bloglines (including about two dozen Google News Alerts, Computerworld newsletters -- which to me are easier to read than their XML feeds, and newsletters from Line56 <they don't have XML feeds> plus Network World newsletters, among others). Frankly, the ability to receive e-newsletters along with my XML news feeds is one of Bloglines' coolest features. This "master edition" of Bloglines comprises most of my "must read" trade and industry news sources. So, Bloglines should simply add the same features provided by Furl and Spurl. Right now I have to save an article I come across through Bloglines twice: Once as a clip in Bloglines and another via urling. It would be much, much simpler if I was able to "url" (which rhymes with "Furl") once in Bloglines, and still have the same sharing, recommendation and annotation features provided by Furl.

Back to my "two days" perspective. Over the past two days I tried urling with Furl. I "urled" 39 articles and sites on Friday and about 20 today (but the day is still young). Lots of good stuff, but NOTHING that I want to blog about. Also, yesterday and today were/are light reading days. My guess is that I would average at least 50 "urls" each day, with a ratio of about 100 "urls" per blog posting. That's right: A 100:1 ratio.

I'm even testing to see how things get picked up in the "urlosphere." (Sorry, I just had to say this! I hope nobody really uses the term "urlosphere.") I tossed out to fellow "urlers" the links to a few potentially hot sites, including the sites for the iRider and Deepnet browsers, and for BYU's Data Extraction Research Group (focused on Semantic Web apps). It will be interesting to see what happens to these links in the "urlosphere."

Take a look at my entries: http://www.furl.net/members/goldentriangle .

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Bottom line: Let's see how this goes. Frankly, I'd rather focus my blog on two subjects: ITO (from a trade and business perspective) and "hot" technologies (but from a more contemplative and technical perspective, NOT a knee-jerk reaction to jerky press releases). I'd rather leave the non-ITO tech trade stuff to urling and still have the ability to share noteworthy findings.

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

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[news] A Special Report on Business Intelligence

2004-07-09T00:18:00.000+08:00

Thursday, July 8, 2004

Dateline: China

One of my favorite industry trades, Computerworld, recently published a special report on business intelligence (BI). (See http://tinyurl.com/2w8j2 .) As regular readers of this blog know, I'm hot, hot and hotter on BI. Not only are BI apps booming in their own right, but BI also provides an open door into other structured data apps (e.g., ERP and SCM). Also, there is a burgeoning number of apps requiring both BI and knowledge management (KM) solutions, providing a host of new opportunities. (For now, think of BI for structured data and KM for unstructured data. But the lines between KM and BI are blurring.)

The Computerworld report includes an introduction to BI titled, "BI for the Masses," an introduction to Web harvesting, and a superb article on text mining; there are several online exclusives as well. In this post, I'm going to focus on an article titled, "Predictions for BI's Future," by providing excerpts with commentary. As usual, items in bold are MY emphasis; items in red are MY commentary.

Embedded BI. "Over the next four to six years, BI systems will become embedded in small, mobile devices, such as manufacturing sensors and PDAs in the field, which in turn will be linked to more centralized systems." -- Erik Thomsen, distinguished scientist, Hyperion Solutions Corp., Sunnyvale, Calif.

PB DM (petabyte data mining). "Within three years, companies and governmental agencies will be able to successfully run analytics within a centralized data warehouse containing 1 petabyte or more of data -- without performance limitations." -- Dave Schrader, technology futurist, Teradata, a division of NCR Corp., El Segundo, Calif.

HPC to the rescue! "Within the next two to three years, high-performance computing technology used by scientific and engineering communities and national R&D labs will make its way into mainstream business for high-performance business analytics. This transition will be driven by the growing volume of complex data and the pressing need for companies to use forecasting and predictive analytics to minimize risk and maximize profit-generating opportunities." -- Phil Fraher, chief operating officer, Visual Numerics Inc., San Ramon, Calif.

BI meets AI. "In the near future, business leaders will manage by exception, and automated systems will handle significant loads of routine tasks." -- Mike Covert, chief operating officer, Infinis Inc., Columbus, Ohio

Visualization. "Over the next two to three years, BI systems will automatically suggest appropriate visualizations, which in turn will dramatically increase the use of visualization and our understanding of complex relationships." -- Erik Thomsen, distinguished scientist, Hyperion Solutions

BI + BPM + BAM. "Businesses need more than a rearview mirror to drive their business forward into the next era. A new category of intelligence tools will emerge over the next two to three years that combines business process management, business activity monitoring (BAM) and business intelligence to enable the "actively managed enterprise." This will combine the scorecards and rearview-analysis capabilities of BI with the real-time, event-driven analysis of BAM and feed that information into automated business processes for on-the-fly steering of the business towards scorecard goals. This will exponentially elevate the speed at which businesses are able to operate, adapt and make critical decisions." -- Tim Wolters, chief architect of business activity monitoring solutions, webMethods Inc., Fairfax, Va.

Bottom line: Go to a BI-related ACM or IEEE CS conference and you'll hear a lot of presentations on all of the apps described above. It's where the rubber meets the road: This stuff is real!! However, it's important to differentiate "real" BI with much more simplistic reporting software (like a good "chunk" of the so-called BI solutions provided by Business Objects, Cognos and even Microsoft -- via their recent acquisition of ActiveViews).

A BI Site to Review

Last week I came across a paper published in the current issue of the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. In this paper the project called "Data Mining and Decision Support for Business Competitiveness: A European Virtual Enterprise" (SolEuNet) is used as a case study and "the source of lessons learned." The paper provides a link to the SolEuNet Web site (see http://tinyurl.com/3x5vo ); at the SolEuNet site I found a wealth of case studies with supporting technical documents on leading-edge BI apps (see, for example, Workpackage 7 on "Combining Data Mining and Decision Support with Information Systems" at http://tinyurl.com/yqkqm ). Remember, strategy consulting isn't merely about comparing product specs (regardless what the IT advisory services may say).

The Gartner Conference on BI

I got my hands on three i-banking analyst reviews of the Gartner BI conference. The Morgan Stanley report (dated 27 April) noted that customer activity levels appeared to be strong and "many seem to be taking a more strategic approach to BI, resulting in the emergence of larger transactions." (My emphasis.) Corporate performance management (CPM) is driving some of the larger deals, with Cognos and Hyperion taking the lead. Evidently, systems integrators (SIs) are getting religion and developing collaterals around CPM messaging. RBC Dominion Securities produced a more in-depth report (dated 29 April) and noted the following:

Gartner expects the market to accelerate in 2004.
The ETL (extraction, transformation, and load) market will flatten (finally).
CPM is hot. "Hyperion, Cognos, and SAS appeared to be the best positioned non-ERP vendors to capitalize on the CPM market opportunity." However, "(they) believe that SAP is the best-positioned large enterprise software vendor to execute in both the BI and CPM market ..."
Finally, the Gartner BI conference itself was hot, with 973 attendees, an increase in attendance of 70% over last year.

UBS chimed in with their own report (dated 30 April), which in some ways was a bit more technical than the other two reports cited above. UBS noted that heterogeneous environments require independent tools (e.g., it is very difficult to get heterogeneous data into an ERP data warehouse <DW>). Gartner's rule of thumb is that an ERP-derived BI/DW solution should be on the short-list only if more than 60% of an organization's BI data resides within that single app vendor. UBS also noted that the importance of BI is leading to the formation of BI competency centers. They also believe that SAP and Microsoft remain significant long-term threats to the independent software vendors such as Cognos and Business Objects. BTW, all three reports seemed a bit down on Business Objects.

Another Computerworld feature on BI

Sometimes advertorials can be a good thing. A case in point is the 26 April issue of Computerworld which provides a link to a new, six page Computerworld White Paper on BI. The paper is titled, "Charting the Course: A Guide to Evaluating Business Intelligence Products"; it's a good, practical read. Tactical, product spec advice and guidelines, but still a good read. The PDF can be found at http://tinyurl.com/2gt3d .

Recent Tidbits on BI

The New Straits Times (Malaysia) via Asia Africa Intelligence Wire reported on 24 June that SAS "expects the BI market in Asia to register double-digit growth for the next five years. (Don Cooper Williams, director of marketing and alliances for SAS Asia-Pacific) cites a recent report from research house International Data Corp, which predicts that BI software market in the region (excluding Japan) to grow by 12 per cent this year, up from 7.5 per cent in 2003." Note to SIs in China: BI isn't just hot in the States; leverage your skills for serving the U.S. market and the domestic market.

From the channel, India Business Insight (also via Asia Africa Intelligence Wire) on 31 May announced that "Business Objects has entered into a long-standing systems integrator agreement with Wipro Infotech (WI) to provide business intelligence (BI) solutions to customers." Note to SIs in China: Don't be left without a dance partner.

Additional Articles for Review

I did a quick scan of trade lit and found a few articles worth reading. First, the March-April issue of Financial Executive talks about CPM -- Corporate Performance Management -- as it relates to BI. The May issue of Insurance & Technology takes a vertical look at BI (rather basic apps), as does the April issue of Business Credit. Always think verticals.

A Final Wrap (or Should I Say, "Rap"?)

Back to Computerworld. More specifically, see the 29 March issue of Computerworld. According to a survey conducted by IBM Business Consulting Services, BI is a high priority on the plate of C-level execs. In a Computerworld poll, 39% of IT executives listed business intelligence projects as their most critical IT projects. By 2005, market research firm IDC projects that the worldwide market for business intelligence software will total about $6 billion -- up from $2.5 billion in 2003 -- signaling a major increase in business intelligence projects. IT executives say the skills they need on business intelligence projects include systems integration, data modeling, database administration, data standardization and project management.

Cheers,

David Scott Lewis

President & Principal Analyst

IT E-Strategies, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA & Qingdao, China

http://www.itestrategies.com (current blog postings optimized for MSIE6.x)

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