jab's joblog

Impressions from Velocity 08 and Structure 08

2008-06-30T14:28:00.013+02:00

Last week me and one of my colleagues attended two conferences in San Francisco focused on web applications, Software as a Service and cloud computing. Spending dozens of hours on airplanes to attend events in a time zone that’s nine hours behind you might not sound like a fun week – but now that my jetlag is fading away I can honestly say that it was well worth the trip. I will not in this post be sharing any thoughts or analyses on how what we saw can impact our industry (need some more time to think...) but I’ve embedded some of the more interesting presentations given during the conference below:

Sean Quinlan (Google Inc), "Storage at Scale"
This is a brief but interesting talk about how Google manages storage (and db-like storage) in the scale of petabyte. Should be interesting both for developers and system engineers.

Harald Prokop (Akamai Technologies), "How to Accelerate Non-cacheable, Dynamic Sites Leveraging a Globally Distributed Platform"
Akamai (the largest commercial CDN available today) talks about their new offering - acceleration of non-cacheable, dynamic sites. Snake oil or the real thing?

Luiz Barroso (Google), "Energy Efficient Operations: Some Challenges and Opportunities
Another speak about google that is relevant to those of you that run and manage data centers or are concerned with the rising energy consumption from data centers.

John Fowler (Sun Microsystem), "Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure"
Focused on Sun's hardware platform but it contains a lot of interesting thoughts on the development of cloud computing and web architecture.

Artur Bergman (Wikia), "The importance of operations and performance"
This speak emphasises the importance of operations and performance for web applications and should be watched by developers, system engineers and even business focused managers.

Scott Ruthfield (whitepages.com), "Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation"
As web applications become more and more "heavy" on the client side, it gets more and more interesting to measure performance on the client side of web application. Scott from whitepages.com shares some of his experience and launches a new open source project.

A variety of presentations from GigaOM Structure 08
The speaches from Structure 08 are unfortunately not as accessible as above. But the videoplayer embedded below will make it possible for you to browse some of the presentations given (select "on demand" to access the different episodes).

You can also access blogposts on each of the sessions on http://gigaom.com/2008/06/25/live-coverage-of-structure-08/

Do you really want to know about the bugs that inhabits your bed?

2008-03-07T19:52:00.006+01:00

I cannot say I'm crazy about documentaries that teaches me about the all the bugs that inhabit my living space. Sometime ignorance is bliss, right? But I hope our customers don't get too itchy about the fact that we're now publishing information about known bugs in our application. We recently reengineered most of our IT management processes and as a part of that the bug management process has now become much more transparent that earlier. For those of you interested, here's the answer to a few of the questions you might have:

Q: Do you publish all bugs?

No. There is a degree of editorial control to the bugs list. Only bugs actually verified by a developer/tester are published. Minor bugs are left out not to clutter the list. Security related bugs will also be left out of this list.

Q: Why can you not give us the actual date for when the bug is fixed?

Let's just say that software development and release management is a complicated process! The scope of a release is changed continuously during a development cycle and last minute testing can also affect the outcome of a release. Since new bugs reported potentially could reshuffle the priority of other bugs we feel that giving out an exact date is, well, dishonest. However, the status of a bug is a rough indicator of when you might expect a bug to be fixed.

Q: Can you explain what the different statues really means?

Approved: The bug has been confirmed by a developer/product manager and is put into the backlog of development work planned.

In progress: The bug has been assigned to a developer and most likely a fix would be released in one of the upcoming planned releases.

Ready for testing: The bug has been fixed by a developer but is awaiting QA/testing. Potentially this fix could be included in the next release but it might also be stopped in the QA process.

Fixed and verified: The bug is fixed in the version indicated by the field "Fixed in version". (Please note that even though the bug is fixed this particular version of it's learning might not have been released yet. The current version of it's learning is stated clearly on the login page, bottom left corner.)

Q: Why the heck do you make bugs in your application?!
Bugs are unfortunately a natural part of development and product lifecycle management. Denying it would just make things worse. Our job is to both minimize the number of bugs making it into our product and managing the ones that got through. Making our bug management process more transparent will hopefully make us better at that job.

Enterprise software as a service growth

2008-01-13T21:26:00.000+01:00

According to the economist, revenues in the enterprise SaaS industry will reach $6bn in 2008, accounting for 17,5 % of all enterprise application sofware. The article is also an interesting read on NetSuite recent flotation and the business of enterprise Software as a Service in general. Read it here.

The prime minister, the astronaut and me...

2008-01-08T18:20:00.001+01:00

Don't ask how, but today I was lucky enough to participate at the annual conference of NHO (Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise) in Oslo. Even though I knew that this must be the most prestigious conference you could possibly find here in Norway, I was slightly struck by all the familiar faces of politicians, journalists and billionaires that got crammed together in a fairly intimate conference hall. (The conference hall itself was a bit out of the ordinary with a 360 degree canvas showing images, movies and presentations being played around a rotating stage. )

The theme of this year’s conference was education and enterprises role in education. After an inspiring introduction by the American astronaut Robert Curbeam, OECD's vice-secretary general Aart de Geus presented the cold facts from the last Pisa survey that sadly shows that Norway is well below the OECD average in terms of skills in reading, math and science (A fact that everyone that took stage later, including a wide range of politicians, agreed was a serious issue). His advice to the Norwegian educational system can be summed up as follows:

Ambitions (on behalf of the pupils and students)
Autonomy (to the schools and educational institutions)
Accountability (school leaders must be responsible for the end results)

Other speakers ranged from three different Norwegian ministers, a former labor minister to the Clinton Administration, a Danish minister and a range of researchers, CEO's and other politicians. The whole conference was wrapped up by the prime minister himself, that I think surprised everybody (certainly me) by giving the perhaps the most charismatic, personal and humorous speech of them all.

Some of the presentations and videos from the event have already been published here:

http://konferanse2008.nhosp.no/category/Multimedia/category.php?categoryID=27

Now I'm off to sneak into the equally prestigious annual dinner party :-)

Radio silence has ended; happy new year!

2008-01-02T21:00:00.000+01:00

Seasons greetings! I apologize for the prolonged silence to the few of you that follows my blog on a regular basis. Desember was busy as always, but now that next years budget is nearly finished I will try and post on a more regular basis.

I have to confess I didn't spend much time in front of my computer this holiday. But here's a few of the things I did this christmas that could be worth sharing:

1. Converted to using Google Reader as my main rss reader. About time? I used to think it was a mediocre but the massive improvements made to this piece of software over the last year has made it into the best online applications I've ever used. I will try to post items worth sharing here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02565532683670666986

2. Read a brilianty simple and short article about privacy which I hope all of you will find time to read trough: An Inalienable Right to Privacy.

3. I learned to use keyboard shortcuts in gmail.

4. Upgraded my work-computer to Windows Vista. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised (even the "horror" of the new security feature "User Account Control" hasn't bothered me much), allthough expectations where low considering all the flack it has received over the last year.

Consumer SaaS vs. enterprise SaaS

2007-10-08T10:32:00.001+02:00

First; for those of you not familiar with "SaaS" - Software as a Service, here's my simple definition of what it is: Software as a Service is the business of delivering software via a browser over the internet, typically enabling a range of customers to use the same single instance of the application. (I have written a few blogposts related to this topic previously without really explaining what it is, sorry:-)).

There are plenty of famous services on the internet that can be labeled SaaS. Over the last few years we have all become users of SaaS solutions like Google Apps, hotmail, youtube, facebook and del.icio.us. The service my employer offer, itslearning.com is also a typical SaaS solution, but there is a slight difference between the earlier mentioned services and our own. Our customers are educational institutions, or enterprises, while the more profiled solutions are consumer-based. But even if Facebook get's all the coverage, a significant industry is now developing for enterprise-based SaaS software (the most famous being salesforce.com).

From time to time opinionated people in the educational sector seems to think that services provided by the likes of company will be wiped of the face of the earth by the more profiled consumer-based services. Where it so easy. There are a number significant differences between Consumer- and Enterprise based SaaS that will require a good solution. But if you want to try and prove me wrong and put us out of business with a learning platform based on consumer-based technology, here's a list of differences between customer and enterprise SaaS that you might want to think about:

Characteristics	Consumer apps	Enterprise apps
Revenue model	Ad-based.	Subscription fees.
Sales	word-by-moth, trends.	Tenders, DM's, knocking on dors.
Data privacy	Vendor "owns" your personal data.	Enterprise keeps full ownership of data.
SLA	No (remember skype going down for two days?)	24/7 Availability guarantees, response time guarantees, financial, guarantees. The list goes on.
Support	Not directly. Community driven discussion groups, blogs, etc.	professional help desk.
Training	Hey, if you can't use it - why sign up for it?	professional training services.
Integration and customization	Generic API's.	Consulting services, 3rd party integrators.
Development road-maps.	Innovation. What will be the next trend that signs up more users?	A mix between innovation, strategic development for expanding market shares and pleasing existing accounts.

Technorati Tags: SaaS

What did you do last summer?

2007-10-07T19:45:00.000+02:00

In our line of business, the summer holidays are basically the only time of year when we can catch our breath and do heavy duty maintenance and prepare our data center for a new season of crazy growth. This summer we where painfully close to filling up our existing storage units so for months ahead we planned expanding our storage solution with a new piece of equipment from Dell/EMC, known as a CX3-20 SAN array. Being by far the biggest investment ever done by our company hardware wise, i thought I might share a few interesting (?) facts about this piece of machinery that you don't need a computer degree to understand...

It can be set up to be connected via fiber channel to 128 servers.
In theory it has 1000 times more bandwith than your average USB disk drive.
It supports up to 120 disk drives (either "cheap" iSCSI disks or very expensive Fibre channel discs - depending on your I/O requrements).
It's maximum raw data capasity is about 83 TB.
If the SAN detects that a piece of hardware is about to fail an e-mail is immediately sent to Dell Gold support in Dublin. A harddisk can actually be changed remotely since there are several spare harddrives in the storage array.
You could change one of it's power supplies without turning it off or in any way affecting it's operation.
You could easily configure one of these to cost you as much as this one or approximately 2500 of these. :-)

it's learning is great!

2007-10-01T19:09:00.000+02:00

it's learning is great. It's a terrific product, it's a good service and it's a great place to work. Maybe I'm not a very objective or credible as a source for this information having been one of the managers of this company for the past 4,5 years. Being one of the people with the initial idea to the product back when I was a student might also have clouded my vision. Perhaps there are even days when I don't feel this is true myself. (It doesn't happen very often, but we sometimes have days like this or this)

But that's not really my point. What I am trying to achieve is to counter-balance something that has been bugging me for quite some time. If you search for us using Google, one of the first results points to a web-site that compares our product/company with manure.

If you're a potential customer or just looking for some info on us, please read this:

The mentioned web-page is, in my opinion, about as full of it as it claims it's learning to be. Please get a demo of our product before you make up your own mind.
Last week we had more than 250.000 unique users logged in to it's learning one or more times - a proof that a lot of people find the software quite useful.
Not only do we have the dominant market share in primary and secondary education here in Norway, we are also the supplier of virtual learning environments to some of the biggest universities in Scandinavia (To mention a few: University of Copenhagen, University og Malmö and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
We're a company still largely owned by the former students that originally founded the company back in 1999 and our financial situation is very robust.
We're qualified for the BECTA Learning Platform Services Agreement in the UK after a very througout tender process that looked at a lot of different sides of our product and services.

If you're an existing customer, a partner, a friend, a blogger, a competitor or just an opinionated fellow, please do the following:

Comment this post. Let us know a little bit about who you are and what you think about or product, services or company. (I do moderate my comments because of random spam problems - but I will of course let critical remarks pass!)
If you find this post interesting and feel slightly sympatetic please link to it or pass it on to others. This way mabye we can actually get this article up on Google's ranking to counter-balance some of the bad karma from the prevously mentioned post.
If you do not think we deserve to be known to the world as escrements, please do not link to any web-site describing us in this manner, it will only increase its google ranking.

Thank you, yours sincerely,

John Arthur

So how many users do you have?

2007-09-27T16:00:00.000+02:00

The potential customer asks: "So, how many users do you have on your system?"

System engineer 1: - "Well, perhaps 25.000 concurrent users during peek hours."

System engineer 2: - "We have 80.000 active sessions during peek hours".

System manager: -"Every week, more than 350.000 unique users logs into the system".

Product Manager: - "We have more than 1.000.000 active users!"'

Sales manager 1: - "We have 4.000.000 users!"

Sales Manager 2: - "We have 10.000.000 logins a month!"

Managing director: - "We have 100.000.000 page requests a week!"

So who's lying? Answer: They might all be telling the truth. The problem is not the answer but the question. To illustrate my point; imagine you wanted to choose the vendor with most users. You asked five different vendors and they all responded differently as above. The vendor most likely to give out the highest number would probably win - even though this might have been the vendor with the least users.

(disclaimer - these numbers are fictional and not related to it's learning. But i will give you a number that is not: We had 262.240 unique users logging on to itslearning.com one or more times for the past seven days.)

IMS Enterprise Services

2007-09-24T22:31:00.000+02:00

We have recently made a few changes and enhancements to how it's learning can be integrated with external applications and services. Allthough we have more than sixty userdata integrations (think: users, groups, courses, etc) behind us, all of these integrations are batch-based. This means that all the chances happening to your user-data is only imported into it's learning once a day. With the support of IMS Enterprise Services v.1.0 (SOAP based) it is now possible to build integrations that allows for on-the-fly updates of userdata within it's learning.

Q: Does this then mean that we can now offer all of our customers IMS ES?

A: Nah. It takes two to tango. An integration between learning and and external student administrative system involves two parties - the "sender" of userdata (the administrative system) and the receiver (us). Not that many administrative systems yet support IMS ES. There are some honorable exeptions. Capita's SIMS in the UK supports it (if you allow for a slightly loose interpretation) and several customers are currently implementing support for their own homebrewn systems.

Q: Is it possible to customise the IMS ES solution?

A: Even though IMS ES is a pretty clear and precise specification, it allows for extentions. The way we have implemented the IMS ES specification we have taken into account the need of customisations. This means that we can allow for extentions and different interpretations of the IMS ES spesification.

Q: Is it free?

No. In addition to mabye needing the help of one of our consultants you will need a maintenance and support agreement. But investments in integrations usually pays off pretty quickly - the manual labor required to maintain it manually is usually not free...

Q: What technology is is build upon?

The interface (and also the specification) is purely SOAP based, so support with a wide range of platforms and technologies should be guaranteed. To move messages around, transform data and add customisation capabilities we use MS Biztalk 2006.

Downtime, part 2

2007-09-12T19:07:00.000+02:00

My last post touched on some of the reasons why we scheduled planned downtime when updating it's learning to version 3.2 Thursday evening/night. Unfortunately, the following day we got some unplanned downtime and had to temporarily roll most of our customers back to version 3.1 while troubleshooting and sorting out the bug. Fortunately we quickly found a resolution to the problem, but it is a textbook example of how easy it is to mess up your performance in a large data center.

To explain what happened, I have to start off with the basics of how our hosting environment works (simplified version!):

1. Content switches. This is the entry point of any request to our web-server. The primary function of the content switches is to route you to a pool of web servers based on what it's learning "site" you belong to (our customers are divided into 4-5 different pools of web-servers at the moment - maybe a subject worth blogging about at a later time). The content switch also terminates https traffic; load balances web-servers and caches static files.

2. Web server(s). Every pool of servers consists of 5-8 web-server. This is where the actual application is installed. Based on the load on the servers in the pool a request is assigned to a server. (so for every page you click inside it's learning you could access a different server).

3. Session state server. HTTP is a stateless protocol. Every request from your browser to the server is initiated and terminated. To keep track of who you are a session ID is created. This session ID is stored in a cookie on your computer and on the server. Since we have a lot of web servers and you can be assigned a random server between requests, all sessions are stored on the session state server. When you access http://www.itslearning.com/ you are assigned a session on the session server. This session will continue to live on our session state server until 20 minutes after you close your browser. So with the amount of traffic we receive new sessions are created and expires every second.

4. Database server. This is where the customer databases are stored. Depending of the size of the customer there could be one, two or a heap of customers residing on one database server. It's learning is a very database dependent application, and the amount of traffic makes it important to have finely tuned database servers.

5. File server. The file server(s) act as a client for the SAN where all the files uploaded into it's learning are stored. These are directly connected with dual fiber cards to a very, very expensive hard drive.

So what happened? The problem came with a new security measurement introduced to it's learning. you can now only access files and similar from a separate domain (files.itslearning.com). What we didn't realize what that the implementation created a new session on our session state server for every file that was opened by a user in it's learning. This simply was to much for the session state server, and it froze. We ended up with one of these guys on our servers:

Why downtime?

2007-09-06T22:33:00.000+02:00

So if you have been trying to access it's learning for the last few hours, you have probably been gotten a glimpse of the following message:

A few of you might be wondering what exactly goes on behind the scenes when we take down it's learning and start upgrading. So for the most curious of you, here's a simplified list of what our eager staff of system engineers and developers (I currently count eight of us here!) are currently doing:

Backup. Every update starts with a full backup of all customer data. This typically takes a couple of hours, including verifying that the backup has run properly on every customer database.
Patching. Before we start reinstalling we make sure that every server is patched properly.
Databases are updated with necessarily changes to the new version of our application.
Optimalization scripts are run on each database (new indexes, obsolete data is removed, etc).
The core application is installed on all of our web-servers.
Connected applications are upgraded (like exam, mobile, community and importapplications).
Backup verification. We make sure that all backups are running properly after upgrade is finished.
Documentation. All of our configuration documentation is updated to make sure it is now reflecting our new data center configuration.
Testing. A crew of testers make sure that the application is installed properly before customers are let back onto the servers.
We let you back in. And funny enough, even four in the morning hundreds of users starts logging in :-)

it's learning 3.2 is just around the corner...

2007-09-05T19:55:00.000+02:00

Yup, tomorrow is the big day. We're upgrading it's learning to version 3.2. I am sure that feelings are mixed amongst our superusers at the moment; some of you probably remember that our last upgrade took the entire site down for a day and left a few of our customers with performance issues for about a week. Others feel that the timing could have been better - if the upgrade had happened a bit earlier teachers would have been better prepared for the new features.

I am not brave or foolish enough to give my 100% guarantees that the upgrade will be unproblematic. There's still some known minor bugs in the new version of the application and we know from experience that the swarm of it's learning users out there collectively are even better at digging up bugs than our professional testers... But I know this: Never have we spent more resources on preparing for an upgrade, never have we done more performance testing than this time and never have we had more beta-testers submitting feedback to us during our beta period. 2500 users have been involved in beta testing and a whooping 689 posts have been made to the beta-forums! In addition to this we have done significant investments in testing and verification environments over the last few months (VMWare and Dell are sending us love letters) and rewritten our change- and release procedures.

So what's new in it's learning? For this upgrade we've focused on the basics. We have identified some of our most used and popular tools and given them a proper upgrade. There's a new editor coming based on dhtml that is much less troublesome than the existing activex and java editors. The message/email system has had a complete makeover, the same for the discussion tool. More features are added to the mobile application and some useful improvements have been done to the assignment tool. The online help has been completely rewritten and SCORM content has now better support within it's learning. There are also a few changes happening under the bonnet. Some extra layers of security are added and minor performance tweaks are also a part of release.

So come Friday morning all of our customers should have a good impression of how well the upgrade went. Please don't hesitate to share your feedback and thoughts here on my blog!

Rising Star?

2007-09-05T16:45:00.000+02:00

We seem to be heading into the award season again. Yesterday it's learning was awarded the Rising Star price, a local award for companies in the Region of Hordaland. Amongst the prominent jury was Victor Normann, Ph.D. in economics and former minister of Trade and Industry.

http://www.deloitte.no/

Presenting Sofware as a Service

2007-08-24T15:40:00.000+02:00

So I guess I haven't exactly updated my blog frequently for the last couple of months. Besides spending quality time off work, moving offices and putting out bushfires I've also spent a bit of my spare time lately trying to compile a good presentation on Software as a Service. But how good is it really? Well, if you drop by the Norwegian .NET User Group in Bergen next week you can judge yourself.

Sign up here:
http://www.nnug.no/Avdelinger/Bergen/Moter/Brukergruppemote-August/

New office and vacation

2007-06-24T22:51:00.000+02:00

The last week has certainly been a busy one. We just move our company from old (and tiny) offices to larger and brand new offices. We even got ourselves a purpose built server room. Here's a few pictures of the work in progress:

Our new canteen. Still waiting for the furnitures.

My new office to the right...

Room for lots of developers :-)

I'm now off for three weeks vacation, and will spend the first two driving around California. I can't promise keeping away for blogging but I will try to stay offline as much as possible...

Bulding data centres

2007-06-05T19:21:00.000+02:00

Being in charge of it's learning's data centre I quite often think about how to make sure that we can manage growth and keep track of all the hardware and software we stuff into our hosting environment. Well if this guy can do it i'm sure we'll manage. :-)

It seems like the world of Saas makes Data Centre Manager a pretty safe career move.

Free. Gratis. Given away.

2007-05-13T22:09:00.000+02:00

It is not an uncommon thing to meet potential and existing customers wondering about our pricing policy on storage. I have compiled a list of the most common questions an made an attempt to answer them:

- Why do you charge for storage, i can get 2GB on Gmail for free!!!
No you can't. Gmail and other services offers you mail and storage functionality in exchange for being allow to target you with very efficient text advertisement based on the content of your e-mails (This has made Google a very, very profitable company). There's no advertising within it's learning, and i very much doubt our customers would like to see that change!
Also many of these 'free' services do not provide you with an SLA. Our company guarantee an availability of 99,7%,overnight backup to two physically separate locations and we'll keep the backup for three years after you delete the file.

- I can buy a 300 GB hard drive online for less than 1000 NOK, which is only a fraction of what we have to pay you for storage!
Comparing a hard drive for your private computer to enterprise storage is like comparing a bike to a Rolls Royce with a private driver, free petrol, a mechanic and another Rolls Royce driving behind you just in case the first one breaks down. Your hard drive will ultimately fail you and if you don't have performed a backup yourself you'll loose...everything. When a hard drive in our storage unit is about to fail, a technician in Ireland calls us to tell that he has deactivated it and enabled a spare disk - over the internet. A new disk is automatically dispatched and no data is lost, not even for a second.

- But even if your hardware is much more expensive than low-end hardware, the number doesn't really add up. You must be making a fortune off this!!!
Remember that it is not hardware we're providing you with. It's a storage service. In addition to the physical storage unit (and all the redundancy that comes with it) the storage service includes electricity, personnel costs, backup, training of personnel, network connection, management of the service and even support (the more your users use our platform, the more support you will be needing from us). There are also other overhead costs such as selling and invoicing you for the service...

- We have a big storage unit locally at our it-department. Can we use it for storing stuff that goes inside it's learning?
Yes and no. It is not difficult to link external content into it's learning and make it work together fairly seamlessly. But it is not possible to store content under the same application context externally. It would make it really difficult for us to guarantee availability and response times (not even mentioning backup) if a large part of our solution was dependent on hardware and network resources outside our control. And at the end of the day, the total cost for a customer to build a high performing enterprise storage solution would probably be much more than actually buying storage from us.

- Storage is increasing rapidly, will the cost of storage with it's learning decrease at the same speed?
Over the last few years our standard storage price has dropped significantly. I am sure that this is a trend that will continue as hardware costs go down and economy of scale kicks inn. However, actual storage has exploded so there is no question that the total storage cost has increased. But is that really that strange? Over the last few years there has been a massive growth in the computer-to-pupil/student ratio. This has increased the need of investment in many areas, storage being just one of them.

My favorite blogs

2007-05-06T21:46:00.000+02:00

I find myself spending less end less surfing the net and more and more browsing my list of feeds these days. Here's a small roundup of my current favourite blogs, please let me know what I'm currently missing. :-)

tech-bloggers
http://www.gizmodo.com/ (witty gadget blog)
http://www.lifehacker.com/ (geeky productivity blog)
http://www.downloadsquad.com/
http://solsie.com/feed/ (Mobile tech blog)

Management and marketing blogs (loose term)
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/ (Guy Kawasaki, former Apple marketing guru and inventor of software envangelism)
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ (Seth Godin, marketing guru)
http://tompeters.com/ (Tom Peters)
http://www.blueflavor.com/blog/
http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/
http://blogcabin.37signals.com/posts/ (37signals blog)

Software as a Service blogs
http://thinkitservices.blogspot.com/ (Jeff Kaplan, THINKIT services)
http://www.saasweek.com/
http://www.saasblogs.com/
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa699384.aspx (Microsofts SaaS Centre)
http://blogs.msdn.com/gianpaolo/default.aspx (Microsoft SaaS architect)
http://blogs.msdn.com/fred_chong/default.aspx (Microsoft SaaS architect)
http://blogs.msdn.com/eugeniop/default.aspx (Microsoft SaaS architect)

Erik's last day (not really)

2007-04-26T18:39:00.000+02:00

One of my greatest colleagues, our Sales Director Erik, had one of his last working days today. It is in many ways a sad day since Erik is both a huge asset to the company and a great colleague.

But all isn't lost. Erik will still have a major role to play in it's learning in the future too. He is joining our company's board and will still be involved in growing and evolving our company in years to come.

Still, we can't deny the fact that Erik has been responsible for bringing in a majority of our customers and business single handed. Luckily we now have a large enough team of great employees to fill the gap!

The 25$ ERP system

2007-04-19T22:54:00.000+02:00

My last post touched briefly on an observation I suddenly realised could be something to write about; some well-known figures in the SaaS industry seems to be in high demand in India and China. This suddenly reminded me of something interesting I've been reading a few articles about lately: the growing car industry in the two largest countries in the world.

For the last couple of decades India and China has been very eager on attracting the biggest car manufacturers in the world. Most of the bigger players in this industry are well established the region and are now competing in what effectively is the worlds second biggest car marked. But the Chinese had a plan; by attracting foreign competence, they have also successfully managed to establish a significant local car industry. There are now for instance hundreds of Chinese car companies, and it is believed that the Chinese car industry is about to surpass the German industry in terms of volume.

This enormous, growing marked has also sparked another race. A race to produce really, really cheap cars in order to open up an enormous market. India's Tata Motors plans to launch a $2,500 car next year, about what a moped costs here in Norway.

So why is this relevant to the computer industry? India and China is attracting an enormous amount of IT companies these days. And just like with the car industry we will soon see that India and China will be some of the biggest players in the global computer industry, just like they will be a massive exporter of cheap cars in a few years.

Another, and in my opinion even more significant, reason takes us back to the start of my article. How do you produce really cheap cars? Or cheap clothes? Or cheap electronics? Or cheap toys? Really low production costs. Labour cost is of course the most common discussed advantage of the East. But if you want to create a really large company that sell really cheap cars in a global market place you also need a lot of computer systems supporting your operations, also known as ERP systems. And just as with labour, you want it to be cheap. Oracle isn't cheap. SAP certainly isn't known to be cheap.

So my prediction: in a few years we will see Indian and Chinese 25$ ERP systems - based on the low cost SaaS delivery model.

Is Microsoft getting it?

2007-04-17T22:28:00.000+02:00

In December I published a post that slightly slagged off Microsoft Learning Gateway for being outdated and not getting the message from Ray Ozzie: Software as a Service. And Indeed it seems like Microsoft is pouring resources into their services strategy. Microsoft SaaS Architectural team seems to be receiving a lot of focus. They just released a sample application, Litware, and Gianpaolo and Fred Chong is spending a time in China and India (which I believe is quite significant but I won't go into that here).

Microsoft's latest announcement is SaaS Incubation Center Program, a global initiative to help independent software vendors (ISVs) adopt the Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model. I've noticed that some ISV's have allready been working with Microsoft on this, for instance at the Danish Microsoft Innovation Centre where CMS vendor Sitecore worked on a SaaS proof of concept a few weeks ago.

But still, it seems that Microsoft's previous technology dominance is forever lost (If you haven't already done so, read "Microsoft is dead"). And even if my employer might be the biggest, Microsoft technology based Software as a Service vendor in Norway, we aren't exactly being run down by Microsoft. The only Microsoft representative that keeps calling me is selling software licenses. There is some cruel irony to that.

What do you think, will Microsoft climb back?

Advertising in the school

2007-03-30T08:26:00.000+02:00

Norway's Minister of Education and Research, Øystein Djupedal, is banning commercial advertising in the Norwegian school.

It's a pragmatic ban; Djupedal states that he doesn't want to see advertising in school books, but he says he accepts that pupils are exposed to advertising when surfing the net for educational purposes.

But here's a dilemma for you; what if I sell your pupil an online, digital school book, can I freely put advertising in it?

Probably not. My interpretation of this is that whatever resources that are under the schools control (think procurement) should not contain commercial advertising. So no "Google Apps Education" for our pupils then?

Here's the story: (in Norwegian)
http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/innenriks/1.2150726

The digital video marketplace

2007-03-27T08:41:00.000+02:00

Interesting news for us digital media addicts; Microsoft claims that their Xbox live video market place has grown to become the second biggest distributor of digital video just four months after launching it (you guess right, itunes still rule).

Microsoft has finally come to their senses and understood what a potent media center their xbox 360 is (You could say it has taken them a while considering just how good their old Xbox runs with the illicit Xbox media center). They are even adding IPTV support for the 360.

The question is; how long will we have to wait before they manage to negotiate digital video rights here in Norway... I suspect that we still unfortunately have to live in the grey area between piracy and crappy tv-industry solutions.

Security and learning platforms

2007-03-19T18:44:00.000+01:00

Sven Andreas is trying to spark a discussion surrounding security, learning platforms and full disclosure (the practice of making the details of security vulnerabilities public). I've contributed to the discussion (Norwegian), feel free to join in...