Development Process Evolution for Cloud Developers April 3, 2009

When I read about Cloud Computing, I hear so much about all the services that are “moving” to the cloud. While there are several examples about how using IaaS , PaaS and SaaS have helped companies, I have wondered about the development side of the house for IT applications 

• What is the impact on development process / software development lifecycle?
• When are cloud services being considered as a viable alternative to traditional in-house components?
• How is IT operations reacting to supporting applications based on a paradigm where some components are not on-premise?

These decision points could have an impact on the way development is done.   How is the software development process evolving as cloud services are becoming more mainstream. Would love to hear opinions on this topic.. either on the blog or twitter.

Yahoo! Core Competency Revealed March 22, 2009

Today’s column by Chris O’Brien  in the Mercury News – Three ways Yahoo! could become great again struck an cord and reminded me of  one of my Professors  Frank Schultz. Frank teaches Strategy at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley and one of the things he emphasizes is that  often organizations have several things going for them. However the most important decision that a leader can make is to decide what NOT to do. In other words, truly understanding what are the company’s assets, their culture and the processes they follow to drive the long term strategy. 

Interestingly, Chris makes that point very convincingly  from a strategy prespective- Given the various assets that Yah00! has around enabling collaboration and social media, Yahoo should sell the search business, and refocus on making Yahoo! more like Facebook. I actually agree with this idea – Yahoo! does have several assets already with a robust user base, so why not leverage the strengths. Applying a basic framework like Porters value chain can yield the same conclusions like Chris.

Now all we need is a non ad based revenue model !!

Enterprise Cloud adoption: Lessons learnt from the SOA journey March 2, 2009

I have been really intrigued about the buzz around Cloud Computing – especially as it relates to enterprises. It is hard to come by almost any publication without some reference to the Cloud and its relevance to the enterprise. Recently, I was listening to David Linthicum’s Cloud podcast – Cloud Computing at IBM Pulse and Avoiding Cloud Mistakes  and David is spot on about trying to figure out the business requirements before jumping on the cloud bandwagon. After listening, it reminded about the SOA hype cycle. Having been in this area for some time, I believe there are some important lessons to remember from the SOA  journey

• Business Value First: While proponents of cloud computing will  cite the benefits of optimizing operating expenses, the real question to ask is how will this increase profits for the company. If the company does not care about its HR systems running fast, cost optimization may not be a worthwhile indicator. On the other hand if there are users who you are serving that will pay money for a service, the elasticity and the flexible payment options will be more attractive.

 

•  Organizational Dynamics: Most established  enterprises have organizations with people have their own aspirations and motives. While folks may not articulate them, the reality is change and the rate of  change can rub a lot of people the wrong way. From the SOA world, I have heard of instances where a vendor consistently tried to educate the organization about adoption of SOA, however the people involved were more interested in being social butterflies and spent most of the post implementation training sessions fiddling with their crackberry. If the organization is not ready for change, no technology can help make that change. 

 

• Management Support: This is one of the key indicators of the long term success of a transformational project like SOA or Cloud. There are times that the adoption of the technology begins at project level. Unfortunately, senior management support is vital to the broad based adoption of the technology. Why is broad based adoption required- well enterprises are enterprises because their business model is based on economies of scale. If the senior management is not convinced that a particular technology can scale, chances are that it will be a science project. 

 

• Clear Understanding of  Infrastructure: While working with several companies that started with the SOA Journey, I was constantly surprised at the scale of legacy systems.Life would be great if enterprises had the luxury of doing greenfield development but the reality is that legacy infrastructure is here to stay. Most modern apps have to interact with legacy applications. The real question to ask is that while your cloud based application can scale easily, will the interactions with legacy systems be the bottle neck? While there is no one answer, having a clear understanding of the existing infrastructure is important. 

 

• Operational Maturity: Most applications transition through a life-cycle spending almost 80% of their total lifetime in production. In production, the people who developed the applications will be different than the ones responsible for keeping the lights on. The ultimate success of the cloud will be determined not only the development organization to produce a cloud aware application but also the preparedness of the IT operations team and how the existing processes have been transformed for world on on demand computing.  Having clear process laid out that works with new world of cloud will require clear introspection and objective thinking as there are not enough deployments to borrow best practises from.

The promise of cloud for enterprises is immense. However without leveraging the learning of SOA adoption, the challenges faced during SOA adoption may be repeated – once again.

I like your new face August 10, 2008

Recently, I logged into facebook and found that they have a new layout. In the old layout, I never liked the idea of scrolling miles and miles to get to my applications.  While these changes have evoked mixed reactions from the community, I actually really like them both from an usability as well as the business point of views.

From the usability perspective, there is definitely a good focus on “reaching” applications quickly. I like the option of adding the applications as “tabs” in the layout. The new layout also takes advantage of the widescreen screens that most new computers have. This new layout can potentially provide some additional privacy controls. For example, I may want to group some applications and be able to control their visibility at the group level easily.

The new layout allows more ads to displayed and refreshed as users navigate through the tabs. This is probably a good mechanism to increase ad placements - helping facebook take another step towards monetizing the platform better. Unfortunately, I have to say that I am consistently disappointed in the “quality” of ads. The displayed ads rarely pique my interest. When I compare the potential matches with google ads or the ads in the widgets, there seems to be some personalization parameters missing in the facebook ad engine.

While I really like your new face -Facebook, I think the in addition to the usability a lot more could be done with the ad engine, so that we as users not get “ads” but recommendations that our friends would normally  give us as being aware of our interests and be able to place them in the right context from our current conversations.

I have joined the party … very late!! October 28, 2007

After my last post on the number of social networking sites, I have finally joined facebook. First, there was the flurry of Facebook related news with Microsoft investing and then all the new stuff about the company seeking more funding. Then, I got some more invitations and finally, I gave in. I have to say that I have enjoyed my time in facebook so far. Apart from connecting with my friends, I really liked the idea of applications. One of the nice things was the application to extract and add my linkedin profile. Now, only if I could import information from other social networking sites, it would make me a regular facebook user.

So while, I have joined the facebook party late, I have actually enjoyed my time in the site… lets see how the weeks go by.

Meetup October 16, 2007

Sometime back, I stumbled on a nice group called meetup. Meetup allows users to form groups so that members can meet in the real world.  I joined a group called “The SiliconValley New Tech Meetup Group“. This group focuses on companies that work with new technologies like Web2.0. So far, they have had an impressive line of speakers. I hope to attend the next meetup on Nov 6th 2007. It is a wonderful way to meet real people that share a common interest.

In addition, I have started getting a lot of invitations from friends using Facebook. I have been a dedicated linkedin user for the longest time. Then one day some of closest friends started inviting me on Hi5. Then my family members invited me on Geni. Next, it was doostang, and now Facebook. While I have gone and diligently created profiles on almost all of these social networking sites, I would really like to get a dashboard from which I can view my network on any social networking site. Its just that, creating new profiles and keeping them up to date is time consuming. I want something that lets me keep in touch without having to remember all these user-name/passwords and also remembering the match between friends and social networking sites. 

Tags and more September 9, 2007

I am back from India. Although, I had planned to post to update on the wonderful traffic situation in Bangalore[pic: Bangalore Traffic], it was really hectic. Despite my traffic woes and the attempts of the driver to take shortcuts[pic:Shortcut to the office - to avoid traffic], i was still spending too much time spent on traffic. Nevertheless, it was a very fruitful trip. I have been working virtually in global teams for a long time now, but it is always so nice to do face-to-face meetings – you just get so much done. One of the other things was that I got talking to this gentleman who works in business process software segment. We got into a discussion about the impact of Web 2.0 and started discussing the use of tagging.

 For me, it was a interesting revelation to see how technologies get misused ( at least according to me) so quickly. For instance, tagging is great for user generated content. The reason it is great is because most user generated content – blog postings, photos, comments are generally unstructured. Tags provide the user to define some level of “structure” to unstructured information. I still do not believe that structured information( that is stored in XML or databases) necessarily need extra tags. Perhaps there is the odd need to add notes or some comments but tags- I dont know. In any case, would love to hear from folks who think they have a good scenario for letting user define tags for structured information like invoice/purchase order line items. 

Upgrading to Web 2.0 August 21, 2007

Its been a while since I posted – I have been out to South Africa and Lesotho, and next week I will be in India. The time between these trips has been hectic to say the least. To top it all, my MBA classes start at UC Berkeley this week. Recently, I had the opportunity to work on Web 2.0 project that aimed to increase awareness for a particular line of products. As I worked through the project, I realized that companies that have web 1.0 sites have an uphill battle especially if they want to radically transform using Web 2.0 concepts.

While the awareness of what needs to be done is sometimes not clear – there are buzz words galore -tags, social networking, personalization, collaboration, aggregation/feeds etc etc. Sometimes the effectiveness of these buzz words and solving the real problem at hand are hard to align especially in non-consumer segments. If anyone has good examples of web 2.0 concepts being used in B2B or enterprise settings please post a comment. 

The other challenge is how to migrate or transform all the information. Things like tagging work well as new information gets created, but how does one go about effectively tag existing information. Linuxinsider has a great article titled IT Managers and Web 2.0 Challenges

Now its time to pack my bags and get ready for the delicious United “rubber chicken”.

Show me a picture Mr.Search Engine July 15, 2007

I have always been a fan of visually looking information. Information represented in a visual map conveys the big picture succinctly by displaying core ideas and related ideas in a single pane view. Although I use google regularly, I wanted to explore some visual search engines. Searching on google and ask, I found several but the following three intrigued me the most.

• KartOO 
• Quintura map example
• LivePlasma ( only for music and movies) map example

The actual results were acceptable. I used similar keywords to search at google and ask – I got similar results to Quintura and KartOO.  From the usability perspective, I like the information representation of LivePlasma and Quintura. The KartOO user interface seemed a tad bit colorful and visual maps had way too much color for me to make meaningful refinements to my search criteria. 

Live Plasma makes recommendations for music and movies and presents the results in a map. I liked this user interface the best. The search results seemed accurate and the map was very easy to navigate.

All in all, I do think that this technology has some way to go but the sites mentioned have do have a head start.

Photos for Powerpoints July 3, 2007

Every so often, I need to create powerpoint presentations that are for extremely specific purposes or for a special audience. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words and I do my searches for different images. In the past, I have considered using  getty images - the images are professional quality, the photos are tagged in a meaningful way and the search seems to work reliably. There is one problem- the images are way too expensive for the presentations I give for my MBA class projects and non-profit work. I considered using Flickr, but I can never quite tune the search to get images quickly. In addition, the picture quality in terms of composition etc is not always good.

A couple of months back, I attended the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco and discovered this site called Lucky Oliver. A site where users can buy stock photographs for a reasonable price – Under $5. In fact, once I got started with the free promo tokens, I have found most photos to be less than a one dollar. The search works and the best part it makes recommendations. Lucky Oliver also has a notion of community as a classic Web 2.0 site. Here are some samples
wild summer cottage weekend
water drops

As a registered user, you can even submit some pictures and if they select it, you can make some money. I dont think my photography skills quite cut the mustard, but I will most certainly try submitting the three samples:).  Bryan from Lucky Oliver will be talking at the Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup. To get more details about Lucky Oliver check out their blog.