Non-Linear Changes for IT Companies

IT companies are in process of reinventing themselves to adjust new scenario of competition. Traditionally, volume based growth was the only way to grow linearly, but with changing dynamics of market, where customer asking for value add, scarcity Good technical resource and competitive price pressure, are forcing companies to think “Alternatively Growth Plan”. That is about non-linear growth which can come from re-modeling existing business model around platform, product, Intellectual property and Automate processes. After refering few news articles, here are few offerings which could potentially drive new revenue growth.

• Differentiated Service Offering
• Using intellectual properties or domain expertize to solve client’s technology, business or operational challenge
• Productized Solution
• Platform or product into niche area to address replicable solutions across multiple customers.
• Flex Delivery Models
• Leveraging economy of scale by consolidating similar work across the clients through a well defined process, tools, interfaces and centralized scalable team.
• Lifecycle Accelerators
• Pre-developed software that automates particular business problem or an aspect of product development to reduce 30% to 70% of the code can be reused across clients
• Alternate Commercial Models
• Outcome based pricing models that ensure that client pay only for service which delivers business value. This allows IT companies to transform client relationship from mare technology partner/vendor to strategic business relationship.

My Android Apps

Most Used:

• Map
• Browser
• Calender
• SugerSync
• Angry Bird
• ES File Explorer
• ES Task Manager
• YouTube
• Google Reader
• Facebook
• Toshl
• TuneIn Radio
• TweetDeck
• Twitter
• Blogger

New Apps:

• Pocket Salsa
• Thinking Space

Less Used:

• Evernote
• WordPress
• Google Buzz
• Firefox

Decommissioned Apps:

• Howcast
• Opera Browser

Nokia, my Nex(us)t One!!!

It is over… Nokia lost the battle to Google in winning my heart & mind.

After lots of contemplation, I decided to go Google’s Nexus One way (Named it “Nexus SX4″).

Nexus One Boxed

Although, Nokia could keep me as a proud owner of their handsets for almost a decade (from 3536 to N82), but could not bring a rabbit-out-of-hat in today’s changing time.  When I reason out my decision, it comes down very simple;

• “Where do I live and where do I store!!!”.
• Other broader reasoning ” who is best in providing integrated web infrastructure amongst different handset providers”.

I am sure, all will agree that Google beats everyone else in this game with ecosystem of Search, Mail, Calendar, Contact, Map, Docs, Photo, Social Networking, Video sharing, Voice, RSS Reader, News etc. Yes, I do know, what others DO as well:

• MS does not believe in Web but and been a follower all along.
• Yahoo and Facebook don’t focus on mobile market much.
• Apple, Nokia and Palm don’t have it or equivalent to none.

Google is sure front runner in providing integrated experience in all these services, all the more, more on the way from their fancy labs. Now MORE to add to that list, an OS, a Browser and a Mobile platform. Becoming …. More Power-packed!!!

Yes, I am infatuated with Google’s center philosophy of  Web. I am always been a server guy who prefer one installation (at server) and unlimited views (through Browser’s eye).

Nexus One - Tattooed

Apple with its iPhone Platform, touch Tech and app Store have certainly revolutionized the Super(Dead)Phone market and given a boost to its cult followings, as well. But its closed hardware/software approach raises doubts about its continuity of future dominance. With recent Admob vs iAd saga, it shows that Fruits are trying to catch up with Rings in advertising revenue war, but will they slice it right, it is all of us to see. Patterns is that Apples will morph to look a like rings (Google’s). Another thing which I hate about Apple’s approach is its Application vs Google’s Web orientation.  Retrospectively, we all are witness of browser murdering PC Applications orientation.

Enough of fruits/rings talk, lets talk my favs at Nexus:

• Contact – Through Gmail contact; integrates Facebook very well.
• Photo -  Seamlessly with Picasa
• Map – Brings Latitude and Contact.
• Voice to Text & vice-versa – Done via Web (not application)
• Goggles and Shopper – Click and Find
• Buzz – Google’s FB/TW but way to go
• Voice Dialer – Even invokes application
• Voice – Bye bye Skype
• Listen – Live Podcasting with great search
• YouTube, WordPress,  Reader, Earth etc.

And … my wishlist:

• Direct Photo sync with other photo sharing websites
• Cut and Paste functionality
• Email – Attachment from file system (it is possible other way round)
  
• Task killer and File System Explorer (Have 3rd party, but like to have Android based)
• Accessories – Keyboard via Bluetooth
• Last … reducing price on accessories :-/
• Turn By Turn Driving directions for India via Gmaps

Nokia has lost this game by failing to bring a comprehensive web ecosystem around its phone.  I think Nokia should stick to what it does best “Being a provider of high fashion sturdy handset “. In my opinion, only way up for Nokia is:

• Either bring out groundbreaking intelligent sensor-ed phone with its new baby MaeMo.
• Or become just handset vendor, just like PC vendors – Dell or HP, and support all famous mobile platforms.

I cant argue with any iPhone fanatic but I think G has matched up to A. Google has better chances to win this battle than Apple, who has not shed enough sweat & blood on frontier, called “The Web”.

NEXt(US) ONE, pleezzz…

Fascinating mobile world is changing ever faster than we can comprehend. My take on majors of handset arena:

Microsoft plays from its software background and keeps on unleashing new software one after another.  WinMo world has got more of same, but  their approach couldn’t fascinate consumers to cut deep.

Apple builds from its strength of innovation in ground breaking user experience, beating previous each time. i(nventive)Phone, Apple cult has only grown larger, just for others to envy.

Nokia keeps the pace with its beautiful wide range of handset designs to bring more wow factor. They did all to woo developers toward its OS (Symbian), but lost the big game of Web.

Motorola, father of all mobiles, amazed world with its slim-n-trim devices early on. They were the only handset vendor to keep up with all mobile platforms, but same  approach backfired making them headless-chicken-going-nowhere.

Google has kept web as center for all its offering and strengthen their position better to greater. Android has filled the missing piece in jigsaw and Nexus One connected all well. But their unique web strength is main driver and there is no match to it.

Who will be the winner of all the battle, it is yet to be known. But my heart goes out to Nokia for loyalty sake, but mind say it is “Nexus One”.  Hope to get hold of my NEXt(US) One, soon …

Smarter Cloud – Formulation of an answer

IBM, Oracle, SAP and MS all are gunning big for piece of enterprise cloud computing marketplace. But questions remained open “Why should one go for it?”. Virginia Sharma, Director @ IBM, attempted to answer in an impressive keynote speech during SOA India 2009. Here are my pickups:

IBM launched “Smarter Planet” marketing campaign last year to align its technology and consulting offerings with next generation solutions to revolutionize every aspect of life.  The main idea was to present smarter organization by Instrumentation, Interconnection and Intelligence to realize its meaning “Achieve more with less”. Her talk was not about SOA or Cloud, but about wider concept of synergies between business, technology and people. She mentioned three major aspects of a smarter organization with her case studies.

• Business can evolve better to adopt and respond to dynamics by smarter supply chain management, analytics systems and asset optimization mechanism.
• People can collaborate better to maximizing effectiveness by smarter collaboration system, resource allocation mechanism and product development environment.
• Technology can enable better to flexibility to meet business need by smarter network systems, business applications and production planning management.

In this session, she laid a foundation for decision makers to embrace cloud with their “Smart” offerings.

In another session, IBM folks presented “Cloud In A Box”, a packaged Websphere on to a server box to enable, control and manage a private cloud. Call it “IBM Websphere Cloudburst” , a cloud infrastructure solution under Smarter Cloud program. In offline discussions during conference, many participants were not voting for private cloud as it is against the pure cloud concept and its benefits.

Snap from SOA 2009 Conf.

SOA enables Platform As A Service

Platform providers has unique opportunity to adopt SOA as business model by opening up their platform as web service and allowing developers and partners to build applications. Platform owners can leverage new avenue to monetize the API usage, share revenue for each transaction and sell advertisement as well.

It is win-win situation for all, it is hay days not just for platform builders but also for stakeholders like entrepreneurs, developers, aggregator, end users and marketplace. Their way of cutting gold is by affiliations and partnerships, revenue sharing, advertisements and subscription.

Platform owner needs to formulates their SOA strategy to open-up platform using Web API analogous to Web Services.  Also needs to create environment for platform adaptation and creation of ecosystem around platform for easy entry.  In all this most challenging aspect of this offering is to address heterogeneous users and developers.

Marketing strategy is highly important to give you edge in this PAAS game.

• Expand footprint of platform
• Drive traffic
• Innovation (Feature development)
• Support new business model
• Content acquisition (user-generated)
• Co-branding

Designing the Web API(Web service) is an art and critical to success.  These API needs to support heterogeneous technologies and best way to adopt is is going for open standards like XML/SOAP.  Platform API should be architected with homogeneous and conceptual coherence like WS/REST. Also these must follow underlying domain semantics and should be easy to learn.

API need to have right granularity to offer comprehensive tools for app building. Meshup apps wants to control noun object and composite apps want access for verb actions. Fine grained API address coverage for noun object (Domain Objects) like Order/Customer etc as well as verb objects through coarse grained APIs.

After hammering API next come technology choices.

• Transport Protocol – SOAP vs REST
• Service Standards – WS *
• Data Structure Exchange – XML/JSON
• Standard – OASIS/W3C

How to solve evolving standard problems? Answer lies in Model Driven Development approach.

Snap from SOA 2009

MS Azure – SOA India 2009

Sachin V. Rathi talked about Microsoft’s offering toward cloud computing. Personally, I don’t use any MS offerings except my 6 year old XP and a XP marked key chain from Microsoft 2001 seminar. Anyways, I must admit that Microsoft has transformed all its products towards cloud computing in applaud-able manner.

MS Azure Services are very comprehensive stack for cloud transformation. Some of the notes from presentation about it.

Sachin also presented few case studies of their recent work in cloud computing services. What was interesting  for me their approach toward case studies. All of them presented in following fashion.

Build > Run > Consume > Monetize

Few of Cloud services build on Azure are:

• PhotoSynth: A cloud based 3D image processing application to recognize and synthesize picture of same object/location.
• Eve Online: A cloud based multilayered networking platform where server maintains the state of game for each player and notify intelligent client about state change of other players.
• eBooks - British Library: A cloud based eBook library which allows user to view and read British library book with windows 7 gesture technology.

Liked two of his suggestions for enterprise and architects:

• Enterprise needs to have clear emphasis on Web 2.0 to retain knowledge bank of their employee and let the intellectual juice flow through out organization.
• Devices are becoming powerful and enterprise needs to find innovative usage to use these in enterprise. Just like radio frequency emitter tag called RFID has found place in shipment and others services.

In another session, Ramkumar Kothandraman, from Microsoft, has talked about MS emphasis on interoperability since they received mail from Mr. Gate four years back. But their claim of interoperability has always seen with skepticism. Surely, Interop must be true for their own products but how well they operate with others has raised question marks in past. Mr Ramkumar claimed that they has a Vendor Partner Alliance to work on integration with many partners, open source and even competitor products but past experience has proved that their integration approach is to hamper the integrated product capability to the extend that the real essence of that product is lost and you land up replacing it with offerings. Their JVM version is a great example of it.

Snap from SOA 2009 conf.

Cloud is for REST of the World

IT industry is always been hyped with ever-growing buzzwords and its excessive usage. New entrant, Cloud Computing has been buzzing in Enterprise world and every IT company is try to get on to this bandwagon by positioning themselves with feature differentiators.

But I have tried to find the mean of cloud computing for myself. I went to find out from an Architect view-point for 5-W questions – What/Why/How/When/Where.

Lets find out what is the problem with current model?

A business owners can’t anticipate the growth of their business and to choose an infrastructure scheme/architecture, they just have to rely on historical data or gut feeling. Later point, they meet with reality to realize that initial calculations were well below/above the reality mark  and forced to choose another scheme/architecture.  And it goes on.

But with advent of Cloud, above problem has been address to certain extend for time being.  Now their focus is just application not infrastructure or application/middleware server capabilities. Cloud will take care of these.  Enterprise can focus on application and can choose to go either conservatively or aggressively. This  allows them the flexibility of change depending upon response and requirements.

Cloud Computing is an IT Infrastructure utility model of  “Pay As You Go”. Till today, cloud has comes in many shapes. E.g

• Service Oriented Architecture
• Software As A Service
• Software + Service
• Rich Internet Applications

All these are certainly applications to use cloud as a base. Lets go to fundamental components of Cloud architecture.

Roles: In two-tier system architecture,  Web Layer and Business Layer are mapped to corresponding roles in Cloud architecture.

• Web Roles – Web Interface to system
• Worker Role – Business Logic implemented using Cloud APIs

Storage: All the data system generates and uses needs to be stored and keep it available all the time.

• Table/Blob/Relational – System data in many forms

Messaging: Asynchronous communication is the glue between Web and Worker roles to keep system connected as well as decoupled.

• Queue – Queue is preferred choice of communication between Web and Worker.

Technology: There are many competing technologies trying to provide “Right” solution, but my choice goes to RESTful Architecture.

Patterns: Recurring problems brings patterns of solutions. According to architect of cloud, there are five problem space in cloud.

Now, lets discuss about application designing in cloud.

Cloud Computation:

A system which require heavy data crunching on continuous basis. E.g. search engine indexing. MapReduce has been the solution to do this in grids but throws a challenge of managing grid’s growth.

Cloud Solution: Cloud provider will take the responsibility to managing Grids.

Cloud Storage:

A system where data keeps growing, storage longevity becomes critical factor and data type can range from Blobs, Tables to Relational.  It also throws another issue of tight affinity between logical data and actual hardware storage.  To add to more complication, architect assess distance of Data Access Layer(DAL) between client and server.

• Code Near – Data is controlled by Client’s DAL and generally has large data upload. E.g. offline data
• Code Far – Data is controlled by server DAL and generally smaller chunk of contiguous data. E.g. Browser, Chat.

Cloud Solution: Data in cloud is logical entity defined in URL style. Cloud uses REST data modeling to address any type of data. This releives Cloud Infrastructure Provider to manage affinity of storage and hardware independently. REST lets designer define the a logical business data expressed in terms of URL. Client Applications can perform CRUD operations directly through these URL.

Cloud Communication:

A system which requires to talk to multiple external systems to perform their operations in coördination. But this poses the of negotiation on infrastructure and security and protocol. Preferred choice is HTTP but custom solution needs to be implemented.

Cloud Solution: Cloud wraps REST service over messaging solution to provide uniform communication between multiple parties without any overhead or responsibility on either parties.

Cloud Scalability:

A system where user base is very large and traffic load is not uniform. To bear the burden of heavy loads, Network Load Balancers are called in service but still either does not fit the required bill and keep both architect and Sys Admin on toe all across.

Cloud Solution: Cloud provides will manage it with elastic computing and storage capacity depending on load dynamically.

Cloud Multi-Tenancy:

A system which provides services to multiple business partners. E.g B2B model. In this each partner demands its own data schema and UI customization on their choice. Providing this service from one setup is not advisable but it can be done with proper design consideration.

Cloud Solution: Cloud provider can provide multiple entry point to this system, but design and identity consideration needs to be looked carefully  by system architect.

Software Development by Rational enabled team

>Rational has a superb collection of tools to manage complete software product development lifecycle. It is amazing vision to automate whole process. Yes, it is a learning from other matured engineering branches like automobile.

Rational Composer:

• Role: Business Analyst 
  
• Purpose: Defining and composing requirement

Rational RequisitePro:

• Role: Project Manager
  
• Purpose: Managing requirement with project lifecycle.

Rational Software Architect: 

• Role: Architect and Designer  
  
• Purpose: Once requirements are defined, that is where Architect jumps in with

Rational Software Analyzer:

• Role: Developer/QA Engineer 
• Purpose: Static Code Analysis and Code review 
  

Rational Purify: 

• Role: System Analyst 
• Purpose: System Performance Matrices  
  

Rational Tester: 

• Role: QA Engineer 
• Purpose: This tools help QA engineers to do regression testing. 

Rational Team Concert:

• Role: Team 
• Purpose: Team collaboration tool for Agile development

Rational Quality Manager: 

• Role: Quality Manager 
• Purpose: Test planning, workflow control, tracking and metrics reporting 

Jazz is the Rational program to bring collaboration to this diverse and comprehensive tool kit. It is an attempt to bring all above in one umberalla. If that happenes, IT development will be just like GM Car plant where car gets manufactured without human hand touch. In IT, it will be without bothering keyboard of developers.

With this vision, I think developer’s days are numbered.

Open Source to CMS

>Few years back I used OS Commerce to build a NGO website to sell handicraft works. Recently, I came across a presentation about other open source Content Management Systems which are widely used across industry as well as small business. Here I share my learning from it.

Content Management Systems
Content Management Systems (CMS) are designed to allow non-tech users to create, maintain and publish their website without knowledge of underlying technology. It provides main service of publishing document/information about dept, corp, product, services etc without any admistrative help. It also provides  document management system (DMS) capability to manage versioning of documents. Its usage has reached to Blog and Web 2.0 applications as well as to very large corporations and gov organization. There are three major CMS system with open source flavor.

• Joomla 
• Drupal
• WordPress

All of these are based on LAMP(Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) technology stack. Three years back, I, myself, used WordPress platform to build and manage self-hosted Blog service for myself. It was fantastic experience but decided to give away my blog management to The Boss “WordPress”.

When we talk about CMS we can’t forget to talk about Reporting tool. Here are few of them.

JasperReport:

A XML based great Business Intelligence tool. With Java interface, it has become almost de-fecto standard of report implementation for Java developers.
iReport: 
A visual tool interface to JasperReport technology base. Its WYSIWYS editor brings fantastic edge in report development for JasperReport. This allows user to do everything from dragging a image to change a font, or bring anything they wish.
JFree Report: 
It can be used to create chart of variety of kind from simple pie chart to Gantt and parato charts. Java based.
Pentaho: 
This CMS has been the most famous amongst all. It is for enterprise reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining, workflow and ETL capabilities for Business Intelligence (BI) needs. Pentaho uses a subscription-based customer model. The developer community involved in the project comprises around 8,000 members. Pentaho generates revenue via technical support and management services for enterprise customers. Good part is that it can access data from a variety of Data source like OLAP, XML, RDBMS etc.
Liferay:
It is a professional open-source company that provides free documentation and paid professional service to users of its software.

Most of above makes money by support activities or extension development.  But who makes money even in this. Microsoft!!! They also have their foot in this space with a closed paid product called Microsoft Sharepoint System (MOSS).