| CIO Blogs
IT Blog Awards |
Subscribe
RSS news feed
Add to Technorati FavoritesRecent Posts
- Wave! You are live and online!
- New Game Changers for the Internet; Opinions differ on value!
- Do Turkeys vote for Slow IT?
- The Internet of Things just got a little closer
- The Washington Template
- Secure ID – gets a work around with support from key vendors
- The Ideality of the Cloud
- Situational Software - The ‘Killer Application’ for Enterprise 2.0?
- Guest post on Sustainability by Colette Lewiner, Global Leader of Energy, Utilities & Chemicals, Capgemini
- Where the work should be put? Time for Phase 2 in the Off Shore debate
Navigate
Search the blog
Open Source
Real Convergence; industry bodies merge to show the way! - Guest post by Sundar Ramanathan
My colleague Sundar Ramanathan drew my attention to the somewhat surprising merger of two well known industry standards bodies in a move that really could make a serious difference by providing a wider and more comprehensive approach that should move the sector forward. It’s not often that you hear such an encouraging story and I asked Sundar to tell us more about this with a blog post. Here it is below.
Regards andy
One of the key elements of change in technology and its use has been the increasing desire of the Industry and its users to get serious about the value created by open Standards. At the same time one of the trends has been towards Mobility, the capability to be connected for work and play with any type of device anywhere. The recent announcement on the collaboration between Telemanagement forum and IPsphere forum on creation of rapid services is a major boost to both activities.
The TM Forum is a significant force as an industry association with over 650 members around the globe representing all parts of the telecoms, cable, media and internet services industries. Its role has been to focus on transforming business processes, operations and systems for managing and monetizing on-line Information, Communications and Entertainment services. It has published the Architecture framework eTOM and also introduced New Generation Operations Systems and Software - NGOSS. The Business Process Framework eTOM (enhanced Telecom Operations Map) is an ongoing TM Forum initiative to provide a business process framework for use by service providers and others within the telecommunications industry. The eTOM Business Process Framework describes all the enterprise processes required by a service provider and analyzes them to different levels of detail according to their significance and priority for the business. NGOSS defines for Service Providers and their suppliers a comprehensive, integrated framework for developing, procuring and deploying operational and business support systems and software. NGOSS is provided as a set of documents that make up a toolkit of industry-agreed specifications and guidelines that cover key business and technical areas, and a defined methodology for use of the tools.
The Open Architecture Community
Well it had to happen didn’t it? If we have more and more emphasis on Open Source Software and on using the Web as a Platform, (albeit that might become Cloud Computing eventually), at some time the thought of architecturally consistency for these environments has to become an issue. So with great interest I went to see what these guys are up to at the Open Architecture Community, and also wondered why I haven’t heard of them before.
Wrong architecture! It’s all about buildings; more particularly it’s all about sharing and reviewing designs, project management tools and even some repositories. However its worth a visit to see a really interesting example of a Web 2.0 community creating value in an area where frankly I would have thought ‘Professionals’ were loathe to share their hard won knowledge.
SAP are Twittering, IBM are teleporting Avatars, and Google are Lively
You know that new things are getting serious when the big names in any market start to take a real interest in adding the new to their current position. It seems that some of the new Web 2.0 technologies have reached that tipping point with some of the biggest names in the IT industry. Overall the most interesting part of this is how they see the new ‘non IT’ Web 2.0 stuff connecting to, and functioning with the existing IT stuff.
First up is SAP, who deservedly, or not, are often thought of as being pretty staid, but are right out there in the forefront of Micro Blogging with Twitter. Actually, SAP are doing pretty well in the use of ‘interactive’ technologies to support their customers, partners and their own staff, and have brought into their in-house team some hot expertise from some well known Web 2.0 leaders. My SAP colleagues are active in this for the simple reason that they tell me it works for them in making ‘sharing’ of information, expertise, etc easier. However Twitter is a long way further on from the now fairly mature use of the basic capabilities that ‘Wiki’ and ‘Blog’ based collaboration provides so to find ESME, Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment, a behind the Firewall version of Twitter running on Netweaver was pretty interesting.
My Laptop, Your Laptop
It’s something I particularly like to do when speaking at Open Source conferences, where the sentiments every now and then just tend a bit too much towards the politically correct. Open Source is Free, Green, Saving the World and – most importantly – helps us to battle the dominance of the You-Know-Who guys. Yeah. Right. In these cases, it always seems appropriate to dedicate a few minutes to the important work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the beginning of the presentation.
Just a bit of warm bonding with an audience. There’s nothing like it.
But admitted, during the recent Go Open conference in Oslo, I saw an excellent example of what the Open Source is donating to the real world. I have written about it before, but the XO ‘100$ laptop’ of the One Laptop Per Child foundation still manages to inspire more and more people. After Håkon Wium Lie, the brain behind the Opera browser and a true IT Rockstar in Norway, had showed a XO during his speech, the podium was swarmed by people that just wanted to touch and feel that small, very green-painted wonder machine.
Although the XO is not an open source community initiative (others are responsible for that), it does run completely on free software, which obviously helps to keep the production price low. The OLPC initiative is extremely relevant, as it aims to educate the children in our world, and I encourage all of you to donate to it and tell it to others.
Sector as a Service with Utilities versus Online Products
I have been struck recently by how many times I have been in conversations about what I think I can best describe as the ‘removal of value’ from products, or at least the failure to create a sustainable business proposition. Most alarmingly most of these stories are connected with new markets and the delivery of products as ‘services’, the very change that the new technologies are being adopted for by the business world. The one that sparked off this Blog piece was an interesting story in the Ecconomist.com about Online Social Networks, with the sub title ‘Social Networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life. That does not mean it is a business’.
The point was that every new ‘service’ even if it pulls in millions of people does not necessarily have a business model, and that advertising cannot be the revenue generator for everything. The comparison point was with mail services, once seen as a key new market with Microsoft buying Hotmail, and various other big names making their own acquisitions, but today nobody has a business model generating revenue from what is still a free service, albeit now enormously upgraded in terms of amounts of storage, etc, to levels that would not have seen feasible five years ago. Why persist with providing it at all? Answer, because it is cheap to operate and keeps the millions of users within the brand and websites of the operators. So to be successful it’s the old rule, something to grab attention, a supermarket might call it a loss leader, and something else to create revenue and profits.
Open Source or View the Source Code
Sometimes it seems really quite big news gets ‘slipped out’ almost as though the large corporation concerned really doesn’t want to let on formally. Maybe it's because there has been so much work done to construct a public position for some time and this new story just doesn’t fit. Microsoft seems to be in the position and I have been meaning to get around to commenting on the informally released news that the Microsoft .NET Framework Library Source code is now available for developers to access.
Yup this is Microsoft, and this is a particularly important piece of news around a pretty important part of their code, and it slipped out in the blog of ScottGU who in a nice low key way describes himself; ‘Scott Guthrie lives in Seattle and builds a few products for Microsoft’. Scott writes an interesting blog on Microsoft technology, and how to use it, getting around 20 to 40 comments on each piece, then comes the blog piece saying; ‘Today I’m happy to announce….’, and the comments roar up to way over 300.
Seems I am not alone in thinking this is pretty important news and begs a series of questions. Well firstly I am not going to repeat ScottGU so I recommend you to got there to look for details on how to download, what you can and cannot do etc. What interests me is the low publicity moves made by vendors who are previously thought to be anti the Open Source model. Sun now have a neat website devoted to making their source code available then there is the Oracle equivalent.
Now what about the questions? Well is this all quite the same as Open Source in the full definition of the meaning? Doesn’t seem to be in terms of the rules controlling the ability to see and use the source code in some of these situations, but that doesn’t mean it's no good. I applaud the pragmatic approach being taken; and the driver for it in my opinion is Web 2.0, and the explosion of originality that it is producing.
Source code has been protected in the past to allow the owner to protect their investment not just for the current version but so they can develop from this investment further versions, or upgrades. A path that will continue as there is still every need for good quality IT solutions with expanded functionality to cope with new requirements. But a good part of those upgrades is going to get driven as support for some really different stuff coming into the enterprise through the Web 2.0 door. So why not start off by encouraging this to happen?
Let the imaginative developers come up with some really off beat new stuff that will appeal to a minority of edge of enterprise users, but encourage them to connect their new stuff to your enterprise stable applications and everyone wins. All in all it’s a pretty good reason to be much more open in allowing developers more visibility of your treasured source code.
Open Source Consultancy – is it possible?
It is fair to say that Open Source has had a major impact on the software industry. If I attempt to take a balanced view then I would say that different circumstances in terms of what we want to use software for, has also played a major part, and has led us to have at least five recognisably different models; Software as a Service or SaaS; Application Service Provider, ASP; Business Process Outsourcing, BPO; Application Maintenance, AM; and traditional license. The quick witted will immediately seize on the principle differences being ownership and maintenance in the way the software is provisioned.
I would also want to point out that we have seen a striking change in why, and who, wants the software, and for how long. An enterprise application is very different from single user collaboration as an example, just as Software to enable an ‘Open Standard’ is very different from software being used for a unique competitive advantage in say Intelligent Enterprises, (one step up from Business Information). At the end of the day for every thing there is a value proposition as to who will pay for what and why, and in the case of Software that’s the big argument still raging between the existing industry giants and the new Open Source providers.
Do Penguins have Long Tails?
Am I part of the Long Tail? I guess so, given the fact that I recently found – after a profound search – a German website on which I could order Schlagende Wetter. This is a long lost CD from 1982 by Kowalski, a band from the industrial Ruhr area that played so loud during concerts that I’m still missing pieces of conversations.
Still at the beginning of the cycle is the writer Philip Pullman. Although he published the first part of his absolutely brilliant His Dark Materials trilogy already in 1996, his real world fame yet has to come. It certainly will, with the filming of the The Golden Compass, due for the end of this year.
Pullman is said to be writing all of his stories in a small wooden shed at the bottom of his garden; a poetical cliché with an intuitive appeal. Perfectly isolated, decoupled from the rest of the world, Pullman apparently gains his best insights, creating this unique universe that underpins his books. It brings us back to a discussion that we already had a few times before: do results really improve if more people work on it? Or – to make it more concrete – in the era of open innovation, open source and web 2.0: can a whole crowd of people collaboratively create a book that will still be ordered twenty-five years from now?
The Long Snout
Let’s iterate a bit on the recent item about the power of collaborating crowds. The management summary of that item: through the Internet, people all over the world can connect, communicate and then create – possibly in big communities – results that were yet unthinkable, both in terms of sheer amount as in terms of quality. Applications that enable this have been coined Web 2.0, equally enthusiastic by marketing and IT people. Successful, obvious examples are Open Source and Wikipedia.
And there’s room for quite a few encores.
For example, would a complex proposal improve if the whole company would be donating to it, rather than this brave, but small bid team that has been specifically put together for the occasion? Would the entire offer stand out more if hundreds of pairs of eyeballs would watch during its incubation, adding small additions and corrections, each from a different area of expertise or experience?
Eyes of the Crowd
What exactly can be achieved through the unbridled power of crowdsourcing? A nice place to find out is the article on this concept on Wikipedia, which - by the way - itself is created through a mild form of crowdsourcing (these are the moments that you feel that good old, recursive programmers heartbeat again). Luckily enough, Wikipedia points us rigidly to potential terminology errors: crowdsourcing is definitely not the same as open source development and the dynamics of a big mass of anonymous contributors cannot be compared to these of a dedicated community of focused individuals. In any case, it is the Power of Many – enabled by the Web 2.0 platform – that makes results and innovations possible that we never thought of before.
The question then is, to what extent. When does the law of large numbers turn against us, when do we find that more collaboration simply does not add value any longer? We know that the quality of software improves with more developers reviewing it. But does that also pertain to knowledge, a proposal or a book? Or even to a transformation program?
Perfect Project in Perfect World
Admitted, Linden Lab makes all the right moves, bringing the software of Second Life to the open source community. Immediately after the long-anticipated announcement, a splendid wiki is launched, which includes a well-elaborated FAQ section (“How can you prevent malicious programmers from finding flaws in the code to exploit security problems?” and far more important “won’t somebody steal my Linden dollars?”). Also, it features a great portal which links to everything there is to know about the system, ranging from the overall architecture to the actual source code and naming conventions. In essence a very useful example of the way the Internet and Web 2.0 nowadays should be used to support any (repeat: any) development project. With thanks to all the lessons that open source has taught us for the last few years.
All the same, it is definitely something else – the rudimentary style of a wiki – compared to what you typically will find in Second Life. Personally, I think we find very different target audiences in these two environments. And that is despite the claim of Linden Lab that the transition to open source will enable the end-users and developers of Second Life to collaborate much more effectively. Playing a role in Second Life won’t particularly attract programmers. Especially not C++ programmers (I only learned today that Second Life is predominantly developed in C++). Actually, I wouldn’t even have the faintest idea what C++ programmers would be looking for in Second Life. It is sort of difficult to envision them polishing for days on the right chin and nose, the most ravishing hairdo, that nice suit for a virtual marriage ceremony or yet another idyllic feng shui garden with flowering paths, meditation cushions and wind chimes.
French Revolution
Let’s be honest, it’s not exactly the storming of the Bastille. But it caused global headlines all the same: the French parliament is dumping Windows on its desktops and is replacing it by Linux and other open source components. We’re talking here about eleven hundred workstations affected, which probably explains one of the comments on the Internet: “this must be a .00000000000000000001% hit on Windows”. And come to think of it, there’s some resemblance to what happened on that revolutionary 14th of July, 1789 after all. No less important in the history of France, the glorious image of courageous French patriots that stormed a towering fortress to free hundreds of oppressed peasants was in practice a bit more prosaic. Actually, there were only seven inmates held in jail at the Bastille (including two madmen) and the defending garrison consisted of eighty invalides: old soldiers that were no longer capable of service in the field.
We should not get caught up in discussing what exactly could be a metaphor for what. Unfortunately.
The Real Java Milestone
I honestly don’t know what to think of it. Sun finally released its Java base code to the open source community. According to Sun’s Executive VP Rich Green this signifies nothing less than a ‘milestone for the whole industry’. That’s definitely one way to put it. Others might add that it is also confirming something we already knew for some time: there is simply no way you can make money with developing and maintaining a programming language.
Anyway. So it’s a milestone. I guess that fits seamlessly in the huge pile of remarkable moments that we have shared with Java in the past ten years or so.
It’s just that I’m still hesitating to determine what exactly are the most impressive milestones.
Maybe it is the appearance of the first applets: these miserable pieces of code that took far too long to load in your browser and then treated you to mannered animations or a laughable attempt to make something resemble like an input dialog. With the advent of applets, the still young principles behind the lightweight browser lost their innocence for good. And judging by the screaming cacophony of non-standardised, yet very arty ‘plug-in’ user-interfaces in the browser of 2006 (thanks to all the enthusiastic followers that brought us ActiveX and Flash), this historic Java moment still echoes every day.