A new way to gain awareness through Gartner’s MQs?

I just read in Network World about a law suit by ZL Technologies against Gartner, concerning ZL’s placement by Gartner as niche player in an MQ report. The law suit was dismissed by the judge on all accounts, but he gave ZL 30 days to come up with more arguments – an opportunity which, they announced, they were going to take advantage of.

I asked myself what might be the motivation for a company, of which I have so far never heard of, to engage in a legal battle that it has very probably no chance of winning? And on the ground that they objectively rate a better positioning in the report? Why go through the cost and hassle? Unless, the exposure obtained via this method of communication is much more cost effective than other exposure alternatives…

Indeed, I doubt that they would have gotten this kind of exposure in NetworkWorld and Google as a result of their mere Gartner MQ presence. And what if they would invest in sponsoring one of Gartner’s relevant events? I did that a few times at great expense, but did not rate a Google alert and NetworkWorld coverage. What if  this law suit costs significantly less than alternative ways of achieving Gartner related visibility? In such a case it would pay further dividends to go for another round in the court and get another round of media attention.

Even though the business climate remains challenging, I sincerely hope that this phenomenon remains an exception and that companies focus on bringing more added value with their offerings rather than try to gain advantage by picking upon distortions and weak spots in our system.

Keeping the Cloud worries in perspective

I just read on ebizQ that “the head of Air New Zealand is reported to have branded IBM “amateur” for its handling of a data center outage”. I think that one should consider such incidents in perspective.

Take the airline industry – flying is statistically much safer than other transportation such as automobiles, yet a flight accident gets worldwide attention while most car accidents go unnoticed (except for the victims). The same goes for hosting and Cloud operations, in many aspects – security, outages, performance – to take a few.

Frankly, the typical company’s data centre is significantly less secure and frequently poorly monitored, to a point that users often are not even aware they were hacked. So I would not lose sleep worrying about outages at IBM – much more likely about outages of my own data centre.

Producing water from thin air – dream or reality?

I recently became acquainted with a new technology that is truely amazing – producing water from the air. I’d like to share more about that.

The extraction of air humidity as alternative water source is a solution that was primitively used since biblical times . In the last 15 years several attempts were invested using modern technologies for this process, but none was able to operate reliably over an extended period of time at acceptable costs.

The ideal solution is to affordably produce plenty of H2O (pure water). And voila – it is now possible to get large amounts of drinking-grade water in places where water is limited or unavailable with minimal environmental impacts and at a reasonable price!  This goal is achieved using an innovative patented technology from the Israeli company EWA Technologies Ltd., to obtain atmospheric water in most climatic conditions, air quality, time and place.

The EWA technology provides humanity with a new water source, which could easily answer necessities almost everywhere on the globe. The EWA technology can be considered as a rain substitute – without its erratic unavailability.

Some facts about water in the air
There is more than enough water in the air. The air volume of a big room (75-100 cubic meters) contains almost two liters of water. In atmospheric terms, a volume of 1 cubic km contains 10,000 to 40,000 cubic meter of water – enough to supply water for thousands of families.

The EWA 3rd generation technology
EWA-III is a reliable product for water supply, incorporating a novel breakthrough and cost effective processes to supply remarkable quantities of water from the atmosphere. Leaving behind the traditional condensation concepts that were used so far to extract water from air, EWA-III utilizes a multi-stage, dry, chemically based concept that is unaffected by air pollution and suits most climatic conditions. EWA-III also breaks the cost barriers of equivalent technologies thanks to sophisticated heat exchange and energy management, to the point of generating carbon credits.
Practically, only the power consumed by the blowers and some incremental heat is needed, since EWA-III reuses 90% of the energy through heat transfers and innovative optimization. In biomass terms, the basic EWA-III/10 model consumes 5kg of biomass (or 5 litres of diesel fuel) to produce 1,000 litres of fresh water. The energetic efficiency increases upon scaling up to higher capacity models, reducing the cost to $0.50 per 1,000 litres of water at the efficient end.

The environmental impact
Water desalination technologies produce waste that negatively impact the environment, and generate carbon emission debits. The new technology requires moderate heat energy, can use natural and/or residual heat sources, and a little electricity. It does not use chemicals and does not produce any wastes or residues. Moreover, upon consuming heat energy from renewable energy sources, it actually produces carbon credits. Furthermore, this creates new fresh liquid water (transformation process) that is added to the water cycle.

In his paper about the combat against desertification , Professor Marc Bied-Charreton describes the causes and effects of desertification, and highlights the point that modifications of vegetation and land conditions have an impact on the climate; that soil denudation increases evaporation and reduces water storage; and that the increase of barren land areas has also an impact on the production/suspension of aerosols, contributing to climate mechanisms alterations. With enough water to develop vegetation in desert areas, desertification could be reversed and the effects of climate change mitigated.

The Rural Concept developed by EWA addresses the water – vegetation – waste – energy cycle, and makes use of agricultural wastes as an energy source for EWA’s water apparatus. EWA’s water apparatuses are able to utilize all types of energy, but mainly use moderate heat (a small amount of electricity is required to blow the air through the absorption chamber). Agricultural wastes are composed of organic matter that enables to produce heat without causing air pollution.

By using agriculture/municipal organic wastes to produce energy, it is possible to supply water for both domestic and agricultural purposes at a significantly lower cost than alternative water sources.

WEB 2.0 and Cloud Computing for the Enterprise

Today I came across a post by Yoni Barel that I liked very much – The business of cloud computing. Yoni works for ActionBase, and has actually crossed over from the Consumer oriented Internet to the Enterprise side.

Yoni’s assessment of the Enterprise attitude to technology is very relevant in a (virtual) world where the trends are set by attic designs and exploratory stints. Some of these are very cool and attractive, but not always usable and reliable enough for the Enterprise. In this respect, ActionBase walks a fine line, taking the ubiquitous Chat paradigm into the constrained and compliant Enterprise to deliver a cool collaborative experience.

 This pours more water onto the mill of what Enterprise 2.0 is about and Enterprise RIA. Ofer Spiegel published recently a highly recommended paper about Building a User Interface to Deliver Optimal User Experience  - making very useful distinctions between Rich User Interface and Rich User Experience, in particular when it comes to Enterprise Applications.

Yoni also discusses the pertinence of Cloud Computing as the principal computing platform for a business, touching upon the controversy that McKenzie raised a few months ago. The bottom line according to both, is that at present Cloud based infrastructure such as Amazon EC2 is great for temporary and overflow needs, but wholly owned infrastructure (on-premise or hosted) is still more suitable for the basic core infrastructure.

Why should BI be considered in isolation?

There’s an evolving conversation at ebizQ about BI, questioning if BI is forward or backward looking (is it like driving while looking at the rear-view mirror?).

I’d say that driving without a look at the rear mirror can be quite dangerous. Rather than being holistic, we should consider BI as one technology which contributes to better management, rather than as an isolated panacea.

If you can apply BI to on-going data in order to make near real-time decisions, then you are not just looking backwards. Say that you approach traffic lights, and the green blinks announcing that it would soon turn to red. Should you hit the accelerator or the breaks? If your BI can give this answer, taking into account past behaviour and data as well as present data (speed, location, …) – then you have a good implementation.

We see this kind of implementation more and more. In the context of Process Management, one of the fast growing products (Appian) actually stems from BI and applies this technology to many facets of their product. Other BPM vendors do similar things. BI is also increasingly integrated in the Office environment with add-on products such as Panorama.

To conclude with a broader perspective, let’s not underestimate the relevance of history. History is part of our present and certainly impacts our future, and those who have a good understanding and insight of history usually are able to better interpret the present and make sound decisions about the future. I thing that this is what BI helps us do.

About application developers, platform licensing and bananas.

I took the time yesterday evening to catch up with my reading, and came across some great posts about Application Platforms. Forrester’s Mike Gualtieri was inspired by Michael Jackson’s “Man in the mirror” and posted “Do Application Developers Need To Change Their Ways?”. He makes four recommendations to application developers – “Understand the business in your bones”, “Be a developer not a coder”, “Use new technologies, but only when they make a difference”, and “Become Architects again”. As someone who evangelizes the abstraction of technological issues as a way to facilitate quality application development with a focus on the business solution, I am fully in agreement with Mike’s post. My recent post about A broader perspective on Google’s CHROME OS is very much along the same lines.

Another entry that I found highly relevant is John Rymer’s “Developers Want Unrestricted Downloads” (also on the Forrester blog). John relates to the recent work he did with Mike on CEP platforms, and forwards the argument that Platform vendors should offer unrestricted downloads for developers, in order to encourage them to adopt the platform and use it in production projects. And as far as survival goes, those vendors would collect revenue “as serious shops come back for deployment support including paid licenses”. We have the same passionate discussion time and again at Magic Software, in each licensing and pricing policy meeting. It is much easier said than done, in particular when your core product is the Platform. Megavendors such as Microsoft or IBM can and do promote much of their development technologies as lost leaders, compensating the freebies via (sometimes hefty) licenses on other parts of their technology that are required to complement the application environment. Most pure play vendors cannot afford that luxury, and in order to continue and innovate and support their operations they need to get revenue from almost any value added activity they perform. And when it comes to Open Source, the harsh reality is that there are very few vendors in this space who manage to survive independently for an extended period – most flare and then are either acquired or just fade away.

Let’s take both posts together – after all, it’s all about application development and John and Mike jointly report about it. Paraphrasing on Jackson’s song, Mike asks “What if application development professionals look in the mirror? What changes would you make to develop better applications?”. They also report that “Developers consistently tell us they want unrestricted platform downloads — no time bombs, no forced contacts with the vendor’s sales staff, no limited-function versions”. Let me take this reasoning boldly further. In other words, those developers who want unrestricted free platform downloads should be willing to do their own development work for free – hoping that their employer would find their work useful enough to pay them for subsequent support! Or maybe they should look in the mirror, and apply the same criteria they’d like for themselves to their fellow developers who develop platforms.

There’s also something to be learned from the banana merchants and the Max Havelaar foundation (incidently, the original story is related to Java – the island…). The foundation promotes fair trade and pay, and certifies that a minimal fair portion of the revenue from agricultural products from developing countries reaches the farmers who produced it. In the supermarket, Max Havelaar branded bananas are a bit more expensive than the non certified ones, yet they are very popular and sell well.

Would you rather buy Max Havelaar bananas? How about seriously evaluating a non-production version of an application platform that supports Mike’s recommendations?

More action in the Cloud with VMWare+SpringSource – and ISV’s getting encouraging results

The proliferation of “everything-as-a-service” acronyms is often confusing, and merits an explanation and simplification. The VMware acquisition of SpringSource is an excellent illustration of the architecture. At the infrastructure level we find Operating System resources, which VMware encapsulates and virtualizes, offering shared hardware multitenancy but very limited elasticity. In order to increase the resource elasticity – which is the key factor of cost savings – virtualization needs to extend to the application level. That is the next layer, and I would expect that a tight integration of SpringSource with VMware would in fact provide this for Java based applications.

 This evolution has a lot of similarities to Microsoft’s move with Azure. Whereas Azure offers Cloud enablement for .NET applications, VMware+SpringSource would do the same for Java applications. However, in both cases this applies rather to newly developed applications – existing applications need to be redesigned in order to take advantage of the virtualization and resource abstraction features.

As I have noted in other posts, ISV’s who want to extend their portfolio and take advantage of the growing demand for SaaS need to work across multiple deployment models, where development and maintenance costs can double if they need to create the same application in more than one format.

 So the main challenge for most ISV’s is to manage an extended solution portfolio, continuing to service their current customer base with current deployment models while driving growth through Cloud Based deployment. VMware+SpringSource will facilitate this for Java oriented ISV’s, as the announcement states support for both traditional JEE deployments as well as Cloud based deployments.

 An alternative to the bottom-up approach of system infrastructure vendors such as VMware or Microsoft, comes from some Application Infrastructure vendors such as SalesForce.com or Magic Software. These vendors provide for some time already PaaS and SaaS/Cloud Enabled Application Platforms (SEAP), which deal with virtualization and elasticity by abstracting system resources from the applications, so that XaaS can be achieved at conventional data centres.

 Today I came across an account of a UK based ISV whose been there and done that – successfully, even in the present economy climate. Take a look at the story of FactoryMaster and how they manage take advantage of the new platforms.

More about Enterprise RIA in practice

In a previous post (Enterprise 2.0 Applications actually deliver their promised value) I wrote about an actual project that put into practice Enterprise RIA and multi-channel user experience. I received this week access credentials to the solution, and I must say that it truly illustrates the claims and rational that I have been promoting. I took some screen shots, and in the picture below you can see the two channels – the upper part is the Web Based RIA Client access for Power Users of the Logistics System, and the lower part is the Consumer Access to a Web Booking application (which is in fact driven by the same system).

 

Even through the blurred picture, you can realize the complexity and richness of the logistics application, with multiple linked windows, 9 tabs in the dependent window and hundreds of fields. Imagine what it would take to implement such an experience using a Client-tier RIA platform. With an Ajax implementation, adequate interactive performance would be a virtually impossible challenge. And in terms of the development effort, tying together the Client Tier with the Server Tier would be quite significant. What I was told by the implementers, was that using Magic Software’s uniPaaS they developed and implemented the solution at the cost of about 300 hours! That’s really impressive, and I recommend to anyone considering to improve their business agility and to lower their IT costs to closely look at this technology.

Green IT from a different angle

I just returned from a few days of hiking in the Swiss National Park. Leaving behind the daily comforts and making do with whatever you can fit into the backpack is something I enjoy doing infrequently, yet this time IT just would not let us go. To start with, as we approached the park, we passed through Saas (no kidding – that’s a real village).

Stopping at the Park’s visitors’ center for a last update, we were offered the WebPark SNP (that is the device in the picture). As you can see, besides the basic trekking map and GPS you can also enable an attractions service, which alerts you to points of interest, plants and animals as you walk in their proximity. It can also alert you to specific conditions if such arise. As you can expect, payment is via a daily fee – a very tangible and pragmatic WaaS (widget as a service…).

Web Park is a European project focused on providing visitors of protected and recreation areas with location-aware services. These services can enhance the quality of the user experience and facilitate the protection of habitats and natural resources by better informing users on their surroundings. It offers a combination of pull and push services, multiple location technologies and multiple data sources.

Back in the office, it continues to provide food for thought – a good way to transition back from vacation.

A broader perspective on Google’s CHROME OS

Following the Chrome OS announcement by Google and the hype it generated, I was asked be several people to comment on it. If you lean back and take a certain perspective, it is fascinating to realize how well it fits into the long term technology lifecycle evolution. Having hated History classes as a student, I’m becoming increasingly impressed by the insights it can provide as years go by…

What we see in computing technology is that initially, new features and products are delivered as independent products. Features that become successful and ubiquitous evolve in functionality and become more generic, often ending up as an infrastructure or Operating System option. One of the most dramatic examples that I experienced was the Image Viewer (that is today part of Windows) for TIFF images. In the early 90’s, when Document Imaging was introduced, you could only scan and view documents using specialized hardware accelerators (a dominant vendor was Kofax). The extra cost to support TIFF viewing on a PC was close to $2000, plus an expensive monitor. Many Document Imaging companies (mine included) made a lot of revenue developing and selling Software viewers, reducing user costs by half. Finally (about 8 years later), Microsoft purchased the TIFF viewer that Wang developed and incorporated it for free within Windows.

The evolving Internet now brings about Cloud Computing, and many new features and products are gaining wide adoption (I refer to this in my “living in SOA” post). The Browser was very material in making that happen. The Browser can be considered as a window to the internet. But as more and more users expect to use net-native applications and devices, the Browser is clearly outdated and underperforming. After all, it was designed to display information – not to contain and execute business logic.

What users want now is a door to the internet – designed for bi-directional exchange and more, not just for browsing. Some vendors with extensive web application experience already understood that, and have come up with alternatives to the Browser that support Rich Internet Applications – such as Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight or Magic Software uniPaaS RIA. These are very compact engines (the uniPaaS RIA Client is only 2MB) that are designed to execute net-native applications, where the application code resides “in the cloud” (like portals) yet the user gets a rich interactive desktop experience (unlike portals). As I describe in “A battle royale for RIA market” however, developing applications for most of these “new doors” is pretty complex. A handful of vendors started addressing this hurdle, led by Magic Software with uniPaaS and maybe followed by Microsoft with ‘Alexandria’

Google Chrome OS seems to be right in the same evolutionary line. From the scant information I was able to get, it is trying to move all those hurdles down into the OS level and abstract them from users, so that users and application developers would be able to once again focus most of their effort on business logic and user experience rather than on underlying technologies. But we have to be patient and wait for it to become available. And then wait a few years for it to mature.

In the meantime, why not go ahead and use what’s available? After all, history also shows us that those companies who used the early Document Imaging products and systems did gain competitive advantages and developed their business, independently of what became possible later.