To Cloud or not to Cloud?

Seems to me the answer is obvious. In order to simplify the question, lets assume a new global business is in place. I trust you can see where I'm leading to. New global businesses, have several required capabilities that almost enforce you to by in the cloud. Capabilities like scalability from infrastructure point of view and economic point of view (pay as you grow), integration, multi-X (language, currency etc) and many more. Grown up startups in the cloud providing SaaS solutions for businesses "push" them gently into the cloud, making more and more businesses completely virtual. Some of the good cloud services that can easily replace existing private infrastructure: LaunchRock - Soft launch for new business MailChimp - Mail automation Amazon EC2 - Infrastructure for servers GitHub - Source configuration management for software source code sharing Atlassian Suite - Knowledge sharing, Issue management and CRM. SalesForce.com - CRM and Sales management Google Apps - Mail, Docs and many others for office management DropBox / Google Drive - File sharing (did anyone say Disk On Key? What is it?) join.me - Meeting online and desktop sharing. There are so many other good cloud services - Please share and comment. Ronen

Time for change

Long time since my last post. I guess I've been busy ;-).
It feels to me that the middleware platforms have gone a nice way in the last 10 years, making them a robust and mature platforms for serving enterprise applications.
Still, there's no one-size-fits-all so there are few options for modeling and deploying business applications and yet, it became a kind of commodity.
In a commodity market, Java and its enterprise platform needs a change. Else, most probably it will loose its place to more innovative solutions.
It might be that these platforms will eventually evolve to the next generation platforms of 4th generation languages, allowing BPM and Advanced Case Management be the development platforms for the future.
IBM BPM 7.5 with its extensive support for BPMN (coming mainly, but not only, from Lombardi) provides such a direction.
IBM Advanced Case Management (ACM) bring another layer of application templating, which seems an even more innovative programming concept.
Yet, I wonder who will survive...

Lessons learned from World Cup 2010

It's been a while since my last post.
So I'm a proud father of a new baby girl, Maya, sister of Nadav and Yuval who seem to adopt her to their heart. Makes me a real proud father.

Passed month was World cup month. I tried not to miss the late rounds games.
I've tried to analyze if there's a lesson one can learn from what we've seen in the world cup this year, from the soccer point of view, and maybe for other disciplines.
So, what did we have there? Practically, teams who went up the hill like Germany, Holland, Spain etc. played elegant soccer, very good defense and sometime good offence (mainly Germany).
Still, is there a common dominator for all? I think it is their EFFICIENCY. They managed to create few score opportunities, but managed to successfully score with high ratio of opportunities to scores.
This makes me think about our sales organization these days with the new (still?) world economic situation, we must be more efficient.
Sure we all want to sell in every opportunity we work on, yet, we are not alone...
But being more efficient means working internally on the sales opportunities and placing more efforts on existing opportunities in order to enlarge our ability to win these, instead of working on opening many more opportunities that will follow the statistics of opportunities to closed sales.
It requires different tactics ofcourse, but I think that this is an important lesson we can learn from others.
It did work for Spain ;-)....

Go Go Amazon!

No, I'm not a Christmas shopping fan, though most probably I miss some good deals as I write... But Amazon is not only a book store, it's a large cloud computing resource provider with its EC2 initiative.
But, I assume this is not new to many of the readers.
The newly interesting offerings Amazon has are the big deal (IMHO).
The Turk thing, which allows recruiting human workforce for computer-based missions that can be distributed over the net.
Maybe even more interesting, one can find the ability to bid for cloud resources in Spot Instances offering.
I find this offering innovative and different from other cloud offerings as it is the first to allow discrete and manageable resources to be consumed virtually. I would expect such an initiative to become part of an enterprise cloud as well.

A look into the future - SixthSense

In most cases, our imagination can't take us far enough, to lead us into new and revolutionary ideas. This nice fellow takes 5 minutes of your time, but not only he provides a nice show, he also allows us to imagine. Worth watching!. Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Video on TED.com

SaaS - Between Service and Software

Trends drive our business. In the last couple of years there's a trend around services. Ofcourse there's the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) but not only.
Web services, Software as a Service etc.
It is so trendy to discuss about services, that I read and hear people discuss SaaS and mix it with some other trends like cloud computing, on demand computing etc.
I'd like to explain my view of SaaS, which is totally a business perspective.
One of the main challenges IT has in the last couple of years is to show solid ROI, reduce costs and allow business flexibility and agility.
SaaS provides a way for IT to purchase "software licenses" from its OPEX budget and not from CAPEX. In most firms, this is a dramatic change, allowing a much flexible budget planning and accounting wise brings other values to the firm.
Note, this has nothing to do ofcourse with the software features nor service over the web or not.
Cloud computing takes the software and places it in a remote datacenter, hosted on the web, allowing IT not to deal with purchasing and maintaining this hardware and underlying software. In most cases, cloud computing based software is sold as a service.
On demand is the ability to consume additional licenses / hardware with no extra effort of upgrading or ad-hoc business engagement. This allows flexibility in consuming extra computing power during pick periods.

Sun, Oracle and all others

I thought of writing about it the minute I heard. This is certainly not a common PR.
Yet, I held myself, counted to ten. Now I'm ready to elaborate my opinion.
First of all, Oracle and mainly Larry are magicians. They keep doing one of the most important keys to success in business - which is taking your future in your hands. Be active and not passive. Larry keeps acting on every field he believes there's value for its shareholders. Meanwhile he certainly does right.

Now, many predict on the different line of products of Sun and its future.
So, generally speaking Sun has few important intellectual property - Hardware, Unix operating system, Java community ownership, SOA platforms (mostly open sourced) and couple more packages (like Identity management and others).

So, the most interesting stuff for Oracle would be the green fields - Hardware, Unix and Java community ownership. Not that others are not important, but they overlap.

For Oracle, they made it to the one-stop-shop league, just like the big ones HP, IBM.
Yet, Oracle is different - they have infrastructure, but also packages.
This might lead HP/IBM to think differently about packages... So maybe SAP is under the hood?
Whats with the SOA platforms and Java world? I think it is a mystery and we'll have to wait for Oracle with that. Too much power is in their hands now in the Java zone. It might break the long partnership of all non-MS big vendors.
SOA? I believe Sun was not a major player in the SOA world, and therefore Oracle will benefit from some of the technology intellectual property and integrate it into its portfolio, but nothing more than that. Here, certainly the BEA acquisition was much more important for Oracle.
And yet, having said all that, Oracle buys so many companies, many of these acquisitions fail and loose their value.
Whats with the competition? I'm probably not the only one who thinks so, but IBM and SAP could have been better without this deal... Still, time will tell if it threats IBM, HP and SAP more than Oracle and Sun did so as separated companies.