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Social Networks and Revenues

The big news in the IT industry came from Facebook a couple of days ago: the social network giant announced that after five years of existence, it has  managed to generate enough cash to cover its day-to-day operations and costs without any outside investment. Adding its 300 millions users, Facebook has put itself in line for a future public offering.

Value Add in the Cloud

Until now Salesforce, Amazon and Google (App Engine) have all been focusing on selling their cloud platform services directly to the consumer.

A recent announcement from Salesforce details their new Value Added Reseller program.  The program is aimed at leveraging the relationships between consulting firms, local IT providers and their various customers.

This development in the way cloud is taken to market shows a keen understanding on the part of Salesforce.  Many organisations are still wary about moving to the cloud.  They don’t know who these new players are, don’t recognise their expertise in this new area and often don’t have the capacity to develop for the cloud in house.

By using the relationships already developed over years by local IT providers and consultants Salesforce has found a route to market that captures the tentative and unsure customer through the trust they put in the professionals that have helped them in the past.
 
Critically this also allows organisations who don’t have the expertise of creating applications for the cloud in house to start realising the potential cost savings and efficiencies offered by the cloud. It could also create another avenue for Salesforce's leading offerings in SaaS.

By allowing third party resellers to develop for other organisations, Salesforce is ensuring it spreads its net far and wide as momentum in the cloud marketplace picks up, whilst also growing their core business.

IT and the Credit Crunch

I think that we can all agree that nearly everyone is being affected by the credit crunch, but how is the credit crunch effecting the IT industry?

According to a recent article  the recession will 'destroy 40,000 UK IT services jobs'. They think that this 40,000 will go during this year and the following year, but will start to pick up in 2011. However it does not suggest exactly which areas in IT will where the cuts will be.

Another article which surveyed CIOs stated that 'renegotiating contracts with suppliers and headcount reduction (both staff and contactors)' was the main focus on reducing costs across IT. It also suggests that due to the recession IT budgets are being reduced by on average 4.7%. However the same article suggests that although conditions are the same in Europe and America, Latin America is experiencing a 4% rise in budgets at the moment. And thinks that late 2010/early 2011 will signal the rising of budgets again.

So times may look a little gloomy at the moment, but things are expected to pick up in about a years time. Every sector will be affected by the credit crunch, since each has a knock on effect on the rest, and IT as an industry is certainly not immune to the credit crunch.

What do you think? Will the recovery come quicker than this? Will certain areas prosper and others decline as a result?

Complex Event Processing and Enterprise

What is complex event processing? For the uninitiated let me start by scratching the surface of some theoretical computer science as an introduction. The solvability of computationally complex programmable algorithms in software design is governed by the ability to benchmark them against non-deterministic polynomial (NP) time, polynomial (P) time, or the grey fuzzy cloud of the unknown complexity known as NP-Complete. This school of thought, however, is well known and there’s even a prize of one-million-dollars for the person who can derive a proof providing evidence to show that solvable problems in complexity class P are equal to those in class NP – i.e. P = NP. But what has this got to do with a corporate enterprise? And what has computational complexity got to do with complex event processing?

Let’s consider the current state of the economic downturn as an example. The repercussions of the subprime mortgage crisis across the Atlantic come through in short bursts, we’d typically experience ripples which were for the most part predictable – such as those coming through the conservatorship of the Federal National Mortgage Association (you’ll probably know of them as ‘Fannie Mae’) and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (again, commonly known as ‘Freddie Mac’). But as the big corporate names started to fall – such as AIG (acquired by US Federal Government), Lehman Brothers (bankruptcy), and Merrill Lynch (acquired by Bank of America) – the ripples were coming through stronger and at an accelerated pace. Now as we are in the midst of a global recession, the volatility and shear unpredictability of the economy means for business to stay afloat they must remain competitive in preparation for the upturn. In order to do so, enterprises must operate with an agility to respond proactively to oscillations in the economy, helping them to address the challenges in a rapidly evolving economy.

Fundamentally, tackling unpredictable events – such as rapid changes during a recession – is about quantifying the impact of such an event and thus being able to derive a weighted approaching to prioritising the processing of events in the least disruptive manner. A common approach to this is to conceptualise an event, more specifically to recognise the hallmarks of an event and to better understand what the repercussions could be. This forms the basis of complex event processing. More formally complex event processing can be explained as “a technique that helps discover complex, inferred events by analysing and correlating other events”.

So how does complex event processing relate to IT within the corporate enterprise? With corporate software architecture developing into a service-oriented architecture, and that coupled with the rapid adoption of radio frequency identification, event processing is well suited to fit in enterprise information systems in terms of facilitation of event aggregation into high-level actionable information, and improving the responsiveness. And as you can see, complexity in IT isn’t just about overcoming the challenges of building complex software systems by designing efficient algorithms – it’s also about understanding what happens when minor ‘events’ come together to cause a major complex event, and how best to tackle these in a methodical order.

I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts on this, and to hear of any examples of complex event processing occurring at your workplace.

Monetising the Viewstream

Two things got me thinking recently...

1. As broadband TV/internet TV/IPTV, whichever name is the flavour of the month, becomes increasingly popular it is evident that commercial TV companies are struggling to find a model that will generate revenue from their made for the tube shows online. 

WOA a top 10 strategic technology! SOA dead! What’s going on?

I recently stumbled across Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009.

WOA (Web Oriented Architecture) was on the list.  SOA on the other hand has been declared deceased. 

I asked myself, "how can SOA be dead and WOA still survive?"

As explained in SOAs "obituary" it’s the acronym that leaves a bad taste in the mouth not the benefits SOA can deliver or the methods used to achieve these benefits.  The term SOA has just fallen out of favour.

Web Oriented Architecture on the other hand has a feeling of the new and fresh around it, like you may catch some of the Web2.0 bug if you implement it.

So what's the difference between SOA and WOA?

I believe that WOA is a subset of the PHILOSOPHY of SOA, a chapter from the book if you will. Both SOA and WOA aim to satisfy the same end result, scalable, loosely coupled services that enable an enterprise to react to rapidly changing business environments.  One just does it with different tools than the other. WOA uses web services such as http and Representational State Transfer (REST) while SOA has a wider selection of technology to choose from.

The key here is the shared focus of SOA and WOA.  Both are looking to make improvements to how the business operates, to this end the business architecture (the why) must recieve as much attention as the technical architecture (the how) of an SOA/WOA adoption.

Service based architectures must be integrated with the way an enterprise carries out its business and the architects must understand WHY the business needs SOA or WOA.  SOA/WOA has to be developed in close quarters with the business and not just give a nod to it, it must span organisational silos where neccesary and not be constrained by the traditional thinking of "1 system to do this, 1 system to do that".  This ensures fit for purpose services are created on top of a well designed platform. 

SOA is also key to the development of few of the other technologies in Gartner's Top 10.  Cloud Computing and Enterprise Mashups have been made possible by the technical concepts of SOA.  WOA will invariably make the adoption mashups and the cloud in the enterprise easier due to web standards...but only if the business has been prepared for their arrival.

So to answer my question; SOA is not dead. If it goes we lose SaaS, The Cloud, Mashups and WOA along with it all of which have a bright future ahead of them.