In the pursuit of collaborative intelligence...

Feisty?

2007-04-20T00:53:00Z

Mark Shuttleworth launched the Ubuntu Foundation on July 1, 2005 following the first release of Ubuntu, a Debian-based operating system in October 2004. Today the latest version of this has been released known as "Feisty Fawn".

It's quite a journey to observe and for the last couple of months I've been getting my hands dirty with the Fawn as it finished the final stages of testing and in the process have been learning what is Mark's Ubuntu.

In today's world of software it is more than apparent that it's not what you know, as it is often commoditized knowledge but what you do with what you know. Leaders in business and beyond often talk of empowerment - how empowerment of the employee/manager enables their business to grow and out-perform.

If this empowerment were taken for granted what could one expect - I often find myself sharing one particular thought in conversation these days - "it's about the wisdom of the crowds in the age of participation".

My first glimpse at Linux was when I got my P3 Vaio dual-booting Suse in '2000 and it lead me to believe that from an enthusiast's perspective it was fun but in relation to desktop computing Microsoft gave me all I needed and a whole heap of support as well as an established, synergistic community of solution providers, all thanks to Microsoft's partner strategies and user community initiatives. Today, thanks to the Ubuntu community and Mark's team at Canonical this has been replicated for me in the Ubuntu community.

I pondered briefly on discussing the fact that this is all 'free' to me as is much of what Microsoft provides but I don't want to highlight the significantly lower costs a community model incurs to deliver services than one which must fund all contributions - what I'd prefer to focus on is what the advantages of the community model are and how these can compete with the existing one as delivered by Microsoft. This in itself is another blog post but for a taster you really need to read this.

Having first-hand witnessed the methods and processes that support the Ubuntu community I believe this distribution has a very promising future ahead of it. There are lots of blogs appearing from people who have decided to do a thorough investigation of moving from Windows to Ubuntu and we appear to be coming to similar conclusions.

Computing just got fun again and more so, the rules have changed once again in the IT industry as demonstrated by the success of Ubuntu as an operating system, community and organisation.

Perhaps Microsoft's missed opportunity and its Achilles heel will always be that today we know so much more about the value of community, the power it possesses and the desire to belong to what I believe identifies who we are - like our brand choices.

PS. The next version of Ubuntu is in 6 months - and the next release (v4) of KDE - the desktop environment I 'chose' to run on Ubuntu will be including the Nepomuk project - so I finally get what I've been waiting for which is a semantic desktop computing experience; I had hoped this would be possible with Longhorn's WinFS architecture as promised by Microsoft during the PDC in 2003 but I gave up waiting in 2006 when it was evident that with the new branding from Longhorn to Vista that restructuring was afoot and further delay was inevitable.
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Multimedia-assisted requirements analysis can bring a spotlight on healthcare in UKs

2007-04-12T10:54:00Z

Last night I attended a very interesting talk at the British Computer Society on open source technology and health care. Here's some links that were shared during the talk.

So why multimedia-assisted requirements analysis you may ask - well during the Q&A I was keen to highlight that there currently does not exist a means for the technical community (open or otherwise) to actually 'get at' the requirements of general practices (GP) for software solutions. As part of this exercise it became apparent to me that one technique for requirements gathering would be to use multimedia i.e. a handheld video recorder to capture the 'working practices' at a GP.

This approach I believe has merit as one of the common issues we face, as architects/developers, is translating working practices into requirements - by 'shooting' videos, doing some packaging with tools such as Celtx (i.e. you might wish to blur confidential information) and sharing these on sites such as YouTube would enable the technically illiterate to actually prepare content at zero-cost (plus their time of course) that we could use to derive and model solutions that were fit-for-purpose.

It would also bring an intense spotlight on the actual issues GPs face with the current tools they use to get their work done. Does it really make sense for digital patient records to be printed out onto paper and re-entered into the exact same system when patients transfer from one GP to another - ludicrous is one thought coming to mind.

It came as no surprise that the speaker was flabbergasted at the continued cycle of broken promises relating to software projects that are never deployed due to the politics and ineptitude of the people in charge to deliver this work - how long does one wait? 10+ years is the average it seems and still no service.

What is perhaps the most depressing symptom of this poor performance is a totally disenfranchised community of NHS managers who are absolutely fearful of getting their hands dirty on an IT project because of the career risks it creates - no one wants to be known for losing £2.5m (value for example only) of budget on a failed IT project - and there have been many in the NHS yet a few people have continued to profit from this fiasco.

Today, we face an uphill struggle in trying to convince our government of the new era in software evolution - we have a pressing need to innovate around the indemnification challenge when someone like Mr. Granger wishes to ensure that when he engages with a provider that they assume liability - where this applies to software that is 'open' there seems to be an awful disconnect that is fueled by marketing spin - the problem is that this is costing taxpayers millions of pounds but no one listens because the debate is stuck in the realms of 'technical choices' as opposed to that of 'insightful strategy'.

For the entrepreneurs amongst you there is an opportunity to create a brokerage that provides indemnification for local open source providers targeting healthcare providers in their region that supports many more players, enriching and delivering choice to GPs, than those with the might and budget going after the bigger deals.

Comments welcomed, especially any links that corroborate or contradict these opinions

Pros and cons of software selling model "cheap product, expensive support"

2007-02-02T14:45:00Z

I came across this LinkedIn Answer post today:

"Can anyone suggest a good set (or source) of pros and cons of "sell cheap/free, support for money" approach? Like Oracle do, for example. The software i'm talking about is for financial services industry, and quite expensive. I'm sure there is a lot of experts in selling strategies - would love to hear opinions, thanks."

Here's my thoughts on this...

At both a macro and micro level of software architecture i.e. a business-ready solution that leverages operating systems, messaging and storage platforms, upon which a variety of applications exist to an individual software component perhaps on a chip; the issue is one of 'software that just works' and 'software that needs help'.

Whatever software you use you make choices at what point you enter the architecture and how you build upon and beneath the various intermingling layers, it's more a 3D ecosystem than a vertical 2D stack nowadays.

At each juncture where one software depends on another the risks involved are based on maintainability, resilience, security, scalability, interoperability and its measure of being fit-for-purpose.

Around these arguments one would be able to align a business strategy that compliments the resource required to achieve a successful solution - such requirements will involve capacity, expertise and knowledge.

Knowledge is fast becoming a commodity, open standards are driving integration. What is not a commodity is 'time' - so the pros/cons of selling cheap/free software and raising revenue through a support model must meet the value of 'time' the approach brings to the customer.

If your solution costs less time to develop, deploy, manage, integrate, evolve and the overall lifecycle cost is competitive - then the proposition is able to stand up against any other proposition - at this point the customer should have a clear understanding of the cost/requirements & benefit/deliverables and be able to identify the value that can be created/saved through implementation.

The most compelling aspect of using free and open source software is the speed of evolution - software is released more frequently, more often - successful open source projects have thousands of expert developers participating to test, use and improve usability, functionality, design etc..

Already open source projects on both proprietary and non-proprietary operating systems have free automated testing tools that have improved software development lifecycles which means more people are writing better software - as well as the impact of free peer-group knowledge sharing that is taking place on the internet.

Moving your value proposition from product to service will mean you will need to be aware of all these aspects in order to provide a solution that competes with the rest of the marketplace - therefore smaller open source projects are at risk of being inferior to proprietary solutions and would be dangerous to rely upon.

A blended approach is to build proprietary expert tools that leverage and integrate with open source and proprietary software that are faster, better and superior to any current software available - a variety of business models exist to facilitate how this can be executed.

Update:

Check out this product from Sourcefire which is an example of a blended proposition.

Java set free

2006-11-13T12:48:00Z

This is quite a milestone for the IT industry and community as a whole. Big pay-off too for those who have been betting on this move.

After countless pressure from various quarters - notably IBM - SUN will now fulfil its promise made by their new CEO, Jonathan Schwarz - to release Java under GPL.

One thing I've not yet checked is whether the JVM is also being released under GPL - that would be icing on the cake for many eager software engineers out there!

More here.

I wonder if Mono will maintain an interest in the community now that this has occurred.

What will IBM do now that they've got what they wanted?

Who else cares?

Above are some of the thoughts going through my head right now.

UPDATE 18/5/07:

Does Sun's open-sourcing of Java have an impact on the way Google views Java as a development platform?

"It doesn't change how we're looking at it, but it does increase the utility of Java for us. So before they had released Java as GPL, we had signed a source code agreement with them where we could give them patches and bugs and all this other stuff—because we have a lot of fairly advanced Java development going on at the company. We have folks like Joshua Bloch working for us and he's a very prominent Java developer and he's involved in the Java Community Process very heavily.

So we always had a way of getting patches in and some features developed. So that was fine for us. But with it being open source, it's actually better for us in a lot of ways, because we can access certain parts of the code in ways we couldn't before. And we can fix them and offer those fixes up without as much ceremony around submitting those patches and features. We can say, OK, it's an open-source project so we can just release this stuff. That's incredibly freeing for us. So we were very happy to see them go GPL there."

Mueller's "No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union" now available

2006-06-08T12:57:00Z

Florian Mueller, the founder of the award-winning NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has published his memoir-style book, "No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union", on the Internet.

On 377 pages, Mueller tells the story of the legislative process that ended in July last year with a landslide vote of the European Parliament against a proposal for a software patent directive.

This is an excerpt from the introduciton to the book by Florian Mueller, chronicling the events leading up to one of the most siginificant legislative decisions in European law this decade and of immense impact to our industry.

"On July 6, 2005, the world of politics turned upside down. Big money was dealt a blow.

The European Parliament threw out legislation that the world's largest IT companies badly wanted. Under the pretext of protecting inventors against plagiarists, it would have handed those giants sweeping powers over Europe's high-tech markets. An electronic roll-call vote thwarted the wicked plan in a matter of seconds, but that decision was preceded by years of intense fighting."

Readers of this blog will be aware I follow this - I'll never forget that later that day following my post to the blog we suffered the london bomb attack and lost Colin Morley.

Anyhow, I highly recommend you read this book.

Inspirations on Singularity and opportunities with Empathy

2006-06-07T13:40:00Z

One of the areas that has kept my interest and curiousity in recent years is that of collective consciousness. Having seen the power of online portals and how they improve collaboration it was fascinating to see how these web presences evolved - document sharing, forums, text chat rooms, blogs, wikis for example becoming mainstream and accessible to the online community / global village through proprietary, free and open source software.

During this phase of portal evolution the value of search emerged - then came the revolution in participation architectures and tagging - otherwise known as folksonomy.

Recently Ray Kurzweil was featured in the news regarding the concept of the singularity. If you're not familiar with the Singularity then this link should help. Until such time as artificial intelligence develops powerful empathy there may be a growing requirement for a collective human consciousness in the community, geographic and non-geographic regions, societies, organisations and associations.

Leveraging the thought-leadership of George Por's community-intelligence I'd like to see a standard emerge for exchanging 'consciousness' between Communities of Practice.

My ideas have meandered over the years (please note I no longer participate with this organisation) but I'd like to see some sort of working group, at OpenBC for instance, establishing open standards around this type of thinking. OpenBC is slowly acquiring the participation of some of Europe's most promising entrepreneurs and technologists who would be fundamental to achieving a European Collective Consciousness.

Once that has been achieved then we could look to see how that could scale to a peer to peer model of consciousness between communities of practice. A model that would follow would be of an organisation's various CoPs creating a shared consciousness and in turn this consciousness would be accessible via strategic partners.

OpenBC, itself, could be that organisation, so could Google, Microsoft and others.

This is not another expert system, nor a search engine, portal or social network, nor is it an attempt to usurp RSS and/or RDF, the driver of much integration and interaction between disparate data on the web, in fact I'd anticipate it would create vocabularies of RDF though. What this would be is a modular real-time mind that would be integral to decision making and deliver significant risk mitigation and impact awareness during the process of decisioning connecting the tangible with the intangible - powering automated decisioning with collective empathy - something that would help e-Government govern better for example.

What follows from this, for the commercially minded, is micro-transactions and their inherent value: how would you easily and comprehensively value transactions of consciousness? Once again the theme of taming complexity emerges from this requirement.

I'd love to hear your views on this, learn about groups you'd think would be worth checking out and also links to any content you feel would support these enquiries.

Bruce Sterling in London

2006-05-24T01:03:00Z

I recently had the fortune to attend a talk by Bruce Sterling, here in London hosted by the New Statesman. It was thanks to Dave Green, who publicised the event at NTK, that this came to my attention.

With the kind help of the New Statesman's online manager, Kathryn Corrick, I was sent an invite to join them at The Grouse and Claret, a charming pub that served Fursty Ferret: a fine ale and highly recommended ;-)

Bruce Sterling is rather well known although I must confess I'd only just discovered Bruce last year when Jonathan, the chairman of one of my projects remarked that something we'd discussed was very 'Bruce Sterling'. I looked at him dumbfounded. Jonathan enquired if I read for pleasure to which I replied "only on holidays, I don't have time" so he suggested I ought to take a break from my research and thrust his copy of Bruce Sterling's book Heavy Weather into my hands. I'll never forget as I was reaching the climax of the book a certain hurricane took a 90 degree turn and headed for New Orleans, spooky.

Arriving early I managed to get in a pint of the Ferret before taking my place in the room while the New Statesman team prepared for Bruce's talk. I can't tell you how lucky I felt when Bruce and friends decided to sit with me and that's when I got my chance to take a photo of the famous chap reading the article about Paul Wolfowitz in the latest edition of the New Statesman.

I guess I'll be frank about the talk and say I was more than au-fait with what Bruce spoke about so there were no 'ahh' moments for me. That said, there's nothing better than capturing an expert wordsmith's soundbites that I felt were worth noting down:

"They [Business] don't talk benefits" + "PR people talk about benefits" + "only to consumers"

In relation to Wikipedia-type communities and their architecture of pariticipation:
"Free labour" + "Radical de-centralisation" + "Mass servicing of micro-markets"

Bruce was comfortable using the term "Web 2.0" and gave a great deal of respect to Tim O'Reilly for coining the phrase. He remarked that a web 2.0 site had "minimum content to support the brand" and the focus is "You" the visitor, again remarking about 'free labour' in the context of the way tagging is carried out by the visitor using Flickr as a specific example.

Another good point about web 2.0 sites and while obvious as a key indicator of a successful web 2.0 company is that as it gets bigger it gets better, i.e. web 2.0 sites must be able to grow i.e. increase in membership and pariticipation and those that do provide even more value than those that don't.

He noted that Google will probably have a service as a real-estate broking platform following the recent acquisition of Sketchup.

Here are some of Bruce's web n.0 trends / change drivers:

Socially generated internet knowledge (which compliments my stance of knowledge commoditisation)
Interactive chips - RFID technology (one of my current fascinations)
Real-time locative systems - Geo-location mapping etc.
Traceable objects
New search tools
Cradle-to-cradle recycling
3D Virtual objects / modelling - such as Google's Sketchup
Rapid prototyping

There were also some lovely words that followed this such as 'spyme', 'metaverse', 'benevolent magic elves', 'ambient findability' and my favourite: 'fractal shape of the internet' which Bruce linked to intrinsic benefits.

This all resonates with much of my research so I had a wry smile on my face when he was talking to the audience.

I even got to ask Bruce a question about what his hopes and fears would be as we emerge towards a collective consciousness. I felt he did not answer my question as well as I would have hoped but I guess too many people have played that one out already in sci-fi literature - it is however one of my key interests and certainly in relation to communities of pracitice, peer2peer technologies and facilitating a P2P3C: {CoP.Col.Con.0 : CoP.Col.Con.n} ;-)

Fortunately, if this has whet your appetite there's a podcast of the talk (45mins) and Q&A, courtesy of the New Statesman team, available here.

Lee's logo-fest of Web 2.0

2006-02-27T03:47:00Z

Lee Wilkins of Podcast.com has kindly put together this Web 2.0 logo montage - couldn't resist borrowing it!

Do you know what each of them does? You ought to!

My favourite is Podzinger who license some smart voice technology to deliver their offering.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Jason Moon for his recommendation of this link: web2logo. At the site they've got a nice tag cloud to help you contextually navigate the logos according to the theme of the business behind the logo, simple yet smart :-).

Patent headaches

2006-02-23T15:32:00Z

I've just caught sight of an article over at the Inquirer that is rather alarming, extract here:

"Balthaser Online says getting the patent means that it can license nearly any rich-media Internet application across a broad range of devices and networks.

It means that anyone who wants to use Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML could face a licensing fee from Balthaser when their site goes up."

Yikes!

AfterMail acquired by Quest Software

2006-01-06T08:51:00Z

"Quest Software has acquired AfterMail Limited. The quality of the AfterMail team as well as the depth and completeness of the AfterMail product were key factors in our decision to proceed with this acquisition. Quest is a mature, rapidly growing, worldwide company, with a broad range of products that can help you improve the performance and productivity of your enterprise IT.

The AfterMail development and support team remains intact and will be complemented by Quest’s global support organization.

David Waugh Vice President of Product Management
Infrastructure Management Solutions"

http://www.quest.com/news/show.aspx?ContentId=2726

Well done Rod, Mike, Geoff, Tim and the rest of the AfterMail team - it's amazing to think we sat in front of Rod only two years ago discussing strategy for creating a footprint in mainland UK and the rest of Europe - we're delighted to have supported and made possible along with several other AfterMail commercial partners a viable and exciting proposition that has now lead to the acquisition of the AfterMail business by Quest Software.

If you've been reading this blog for sometime you'll remember one of the criticisms voiced was the viability of AfterMail considering the size and time in business of the organisation, now with the backing of Quest those reservations are no longer valid :-)

Good luck Peter

2006-01-05T01:21:00Z

Peter Quinn recently resigned as CIO of Massachusetts citing the following in a memo to his staffers dated Dec. 24, he wrote, "Many of these events have been very disruptive and harmful to my personal well-being, my family and many of my closest friends. This is a burden I will no longer carry."

Many of us have been spectators to this saga and I've followed it closely, even blogging about it back in November as the issue started to heat-up and my words were proved true about "all being fair in love and war" when the Boston Globe was duped into smearing this poor fellow's name.

There can be seldom few things more insulting, demoralising and damn right embarassing than to be accused of a professional misdemeanour when you are trying to do your best; the best for your employer, the best for your team and the best to raise the bar of your own abilities.

Many years ago I suffered a similar attack when I was accused of seducing somebody's wife by an employee of a partner organisation with which my employer conducted extensive business during a global trade congress & exhibition hosted in the UK .

It was a terrible moment in my career - on return to the office after the congress I was asked to see the MD. I entered his office expecting to be congratulated on an excellent and effective marketing campaign and exhibition project, based on feedback from several colleagues, that had significantly enhanced the brand and reputation of the organisation with which I was working. I did, for the first few minutes, get that recognition but for the rest of our meeting I had, instead, to listen to an irate and furious MD, for which I had eminent respect, take me to task on my alleged conduct during the 3 day event.

I stood my ground - I told him it was a lie, I told him to call the lady and check, I also told him to verify with a colleague that I had got proof from the lady in question verbally in front of a fellow colleague that nothing underhand had occurred - having got wind of the rumour circulating while at the event - however, it did no good; the MD was furious and the damage had been done. Fortunately I was single and did not need to worry about further hurt being caused to loved ones but here in lies the point in why I share this with you all...

When somebody is out to crap on you they will, and no matter what you do the crap will stick to you if they're bigger and more influential - in my case the rumour monger was the son of the owner of the company we did extensive business with and the rumour was fed back to my MD via this man even though I had got the rumour squashed during the congress.

I have to say that being a victim of this type of behaviour makes me the sort of guy that fights for people like Peter Quinn, it also makes me wonder why I would support an organisation that allows this type of behaviour to go on - the European commisioner who recently highlighted the double-standards of several organisations is probably more likely than not to be the next target of this type of harassment - it's the modern day capitalist version of a shogun's assassin's poisons and it reminds us all to take care in how we live our lives, the choices we make and to ensure that we are always accountable first to ourselves so that should any crap fly about at least we have the paperwork/digital audit (herein lies a personal argument for auditability and accountability) in place to wipe it off - although the smell will probably stay for a while.

Peter Quinn conducted himself honourably and bravely from where I stand as an outsider looking in - I'm sad he's had to leave but I entirely understand his reasons cited above - perhaps he'll end up working for the good guys - they'll certainly appreciate his input, and perhaps for those of you who'd like to know who the good guys are then follow the work of the Medinge Organisation with which I am associated - it's a high level international think-tank on branding that seeks out "brands with a conscience".

Eco-responsibility and Niagara

2005-12-13T13:42:00Z

Last week I attended the SUN launch of their latest SPARC processor, Niagara. Considering this blog is .NET focused you might all ask what am I doing straying into this territory. The answer is need-to-know. So what did I learn...

Background: when I attended the Information Age luncheon the roundtable discussion on datacenters did not spend a lof of time talking about anything else other than space, power consumption and heat. This is a serious and very relevant issue for the datacenter players - they're realising that demand is not slowing down at all, rather it is increasing rapidly. The technology innovations such as blade servers were, perhaps, very much a short-sighted quick fix to a simpe set of issues with complex ramifications; for example the heat from blade servers is so much that the cost of deployment means extensive cooling and space is necessary. If that is not enough of an issue then perhaps this is - power has to be generated and consumed for both the servers and the cooling of them, this is not a non-issue by any means - I've been tracking the peak oil debate and read an interesting book from a leading geologist on the matter; my conclusion was clear - we, as an industry (US specific report here), will be ever more responsible for our contribution to the demand for more energy and its impact on our environment.

I know that many of us in the industry have a passion for the world we live in, we're open minded, multi-cultural and care deeply about our environment. So when a new technology comes along that can make our impact significantly less I'm all for it!

Niagara is cool, not in trendy terms but in real terms - the team at SUN led by Fred DeSantis have done a superb job with Niagara - this processor and the ensuing family have been designed to significantly cut back on resource demands and heat dissipation. To add to this the processors are exceptionally fast employing multiple cores and threads - they've used R&D from BI solutions as well to optimise the design to complement these processor intensive applications.

If you're running a datacenter this is the bottom line:

With Niagara you get more capacity in terms of processor power and space usage with lower energy bills for both running the servers and cooling them. Unless I'm mistaken it's a no-brainer!? Oh yeah, before I forget - they cost less than the competition. (NB: I asked Fred DeSantis that "if demand outstripped supply would SUN alter their pricing?" - Fred's answer was direct and honest - he'd love to increase the margins but that is not SUN's goal, they're going for growth and we can be assured the pricing will remain the same).

In the first iteration of Niagara there has been a design compromise relating to floating point calculations - this is addressed in Niagara 2 (45nm), ready next quarter, where each core will have its own FP unit, twice as many pipelines and multi-socket capabilities. They're also moving to serialised memory access instead of the current technique of parallel IO which will give 50GB/s read and 40GB/s write - that's big huh!? On the processor are 2 x 10GB ethernet, 1 PCI-e, 25 Cyphers and 64x SMP - that's a lot of fun too!

But the biggest surprise was when Jonathan Schwartz announced they're opening the design up to the community - wonders never cease but what is clear is SUN Microsystems is no longer just pitching great technology, it's pitching responsible computing.

Niagara is not OS-specific - Windows datacenters can benefit as well! Let's hope our friends at Microsoft, who've got the bug for super computing, will optimise Windows OSes for this chipset being as the knowledge to do so is now out in the open.

Waking up to Solaris

2005-12-05T17:11:00Z

I've been at odds for sometime as to what I should write about following the rather exciting few months we've had recently. It all began back in August when I asked members of the SalePlane network for a few words about their optimism with regard to their own businesses following my concern at the reality fast approaching the software industry.

Patience has been a wise course of action as all manner of things descended on the software markets and the greater information technology industry. So with all this discussion on the buzz side what's been happening on the ground? Here are a few sound bites of opinion and experiences that might echo what you're facing right now...

"One of the trends we're seeing is the increasing use of new media by non-IT-literate departments of companies such as sales, marketing, PR etc, or at least they seem to have more responsibility for new media projects that would previously have belonged to IT. The result is that we now target our marketing effort at a significantly different sector than before. Often there is no internal development resource so these people are outsourcing all the development and are trying to project manage it....

...There seems to be a belief that 'The Internet is easy' now that it's ubiquitous, but the technical complexity and potential difficulties are the same as ever, and will get even more complex as people expect to access web-based applications via mobile devices." - Steve Green, TestPartners, UK

This shows an emerging trend that Gartner has been looking at with regard to the transformation of IT companies to business process companies dealing with specific business units of the integrated organisation - TestPartners are well on the way to evolving in parallel with the trend as they are already positioned as a service proposition that can fit into program management seamlessly.

From the strategic corporate perspective Robin Talbot, IT Director at Sanlam Financial Services - London, had these words to share:

"this is budget time when I’m looking at what we will be planning for next year within the company and reviewing the projects that are completing successfully this year. Without exception, our business heads within the Group are optimistic and single minded in building their businesses with greater awareness of offering services that are customised to the individuals needs which is impossible to do on scale without tightly focused IT solutions.

Servicing the IT for a company as innovative and high growth as ours, creates interesting dynamics as we ensure that the rock solid foundations that underpin the innovation remain solid as it scales. The coming year sees us continuing to practice good corporate governance as we complete our comprehensive Information Security Program based on best practice from the ISF http://www.securityforum.org and obtaining ISO17799.

We continue to innovate on the way we supply our IT services and 2006 will see us continuing the success in using a blend of internal and external resources to give us the mix of stability, expertise and flexibility which allow us to meet the needs of the business in an environment of faster change. These are just some of the areas at the top of my mind at the moment and although not everything we are doing is on the glamorous side of IT, getting the basics right is fundamentally important for growth"

I think it's fair to highlight here that Robin is seeing the growth in complexity at the basic level of operation which for him needs a well thought out strategy if it is to be able to respond to business change - re-location, expansion and acquisition are common themes yet there is much more to a resilient and high-performing network and that is the knowledge or messaging architecture of the organisation. The optimisation and agility of this level of services in the stack, where two or more entities will converge on a process through messages, provide a key to advanced application development via messaging leading to a theme of the message is the software.

It is a significant tactic to meet many requirements of business change and the evolution of proprietary players like Sonic Software and open source collaborations such as Petals can provide nimble but dramatic advantages to an organisation like Robin's which is embracing agility in the enterprise.

However, the action that has caught my attention more than anything else has been from an all together different source, no pun intended. When SUN decided to open source Solaris, their flagship operating system I immediately paid attention. Since then the announcements have been coming thick and fast with a culmination in the Financial Times reporting about SUN re-inventing itself. It's a strange statement as I'm not sure that SUN is re-inventing itself, instead I believe they're actually playing one of the best chess games we've seen yet in the industry to use an opaque analogy.

SUN Microsystems recently lowered the barrier of participation by offering for free their enterprise development tools Java Studio Enterprise v8 and Java Creator to users happy to sign up to their Sun Developer Network. Bridging 3 common platforms Windows, Solaris and Linux these tools provide an excellent opportunity to enjoy using the tools of professionals while avoiding licensing costs. There are some great collaboration features in JSEv8 as well as further support for UML based development - find out more here. Eclipse is another development environment tool which is open source, gaining ground in the development community and it's worth taking a glance to see whether you might want to work in that environment as well with a variety of plug-ins from PHP to Mono. On the subject of Mono there are some quite nifty tools now such as MonoDevelop and SharpDevelop to assist there.

Yet what does this all mean!? What it means is that many more developers are able to participate using open standards and community projects to evolve sophisticated solutions in an efficient and productive manner. The building blocks of the server projects and the application resources at the source code directories such as FreshMeat and SourceForge provide a rich ground in which developers can participate and experience new ideas with no barrier to entry.

There has been an encouraging upswing in optimism once again in the industry as internet media and ideas gather more attention and eyeballs. Open systems thinking is prevailing and driving opportunity. One of the technologies helping this trend is a new iteration in web human interfaces that has been capturing hearts and minds in the form of Ajax - and it's appearing in quite a few new FOSS offerings such as http://www.zimbra.com. Another space that's been getting some attention has been document management with the arrival of Al Fresco - an open source Java alternative to SharePoint managed by an impressive team.

My optimism comes from witnessing and influencing changes taking place in our industry. As the behemoths jostle for position a clear message converges - one that the great dotcoms Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo are all too familiar with - and that is the value and creativity that comes from open systems and giving away power so that developers can enrich and evolve useful services. Enabling any developer to leverage their platforms to create a multitude of diverse offerings has never before been possible in the retail world, sure the concept of franchising has existed for many years but not at zero cost and with such numbers and distribution - this is nothing new although it has so far contained itself to those users who can afford the technology and the bandwidth. Yet in the world of users with a modest budget the time has never been better to be an end-user of a software and more likely a user of software tools. What is helping this drive is that developers have become less concerned about upgrade paths and become more focused on writing the software non-technical people need.

Meanwhile, many people wondered why eBay paid so much for Skype and the analysis of the eBay power of 3 did not sit well with many commentators - it's good to see the recent announcement between Six Apart and Skype as an example of the partnerships now forming in the multimedia space.

Whether you're a developer or a knowledge/information worker the choice of tools available is getting better and better, have you tried FreeMind lately? The cost of upgrade and integration has been greatly reduced because of the proliferation of open systems that share knowledge and open source code which is updated by a community of practice for free for the benefit of the community and it's wider user base, in this community a Darwinian concept is embraced and diversity runs free. This is what SUN sees as well.

When they started with Solaris many observers speculated whether this would continue and many of us have been delighted by the news as SUN continues to open up more and more of its intellectual property and empower the open source development communities. Of course a few spectators have not understood and this is entirely understandable given the FUD those, whose business it is to sell software, are publishing even to the extent of politicising the concept.

Luckily rather than rely on my words for your wisdom Jonathan Schwartz has answered the critics and spelt it out for you and any other business who cares to listen! I have to agree and having conveyed this message already to open source .NET developers at a conference in Italy that the market is no longer product and now services means many businesses who choose to will no longer be locked in, they will have their support team either in or out-sourced who can either rely on their own expertise and/or work with the necessary support contracts knowing they can be responsive and agile, tweak and tune without waiting for the next upgrade of a proprietary vendor's solution (what is known in the industry as vendor-lock-in that also came with a support contract known as maintenance).

Tomorrow I get to see SUN talk chips, really fast chips and I'll update the post with my impressions thereafter. Hopefully it will take my mind off developers, developers, developers - because being a .NET fan I'm sad to say that it's pretty damn tough for Microsoft to compete against this step change and I get the feeling checkmate is round the corner.

Goodbye John

2005-11-30T18:58:00Z

Martin Fowler kindly posted the sad news that John Vlissides has passed away.

John was a member of the 'Gang of Four' who have irreversibly influenced the way software is now written using the concept of patterns inspired by Christopher Alexander.

Thank you John for your contribution to the industry and art of software - you will be sorely missed.

It's a long way to ODF for Massachusetts

2005-11-01T22:11:00Z

The politics of business practice is starting to become transparent as web commentary continues in real time. For those following the Massachusetts saga this recent soundbite might be worth considering:

A notable part of the discussion came when Linda Hamel, the ITD's general counsel, was asked why she thought the Citizens Against Government Waste have taken a position against the decision, and called it anti-competitive.

"I think that with the exception of the disability organizations, almost all of the organizations that have come out against ODF have been funded by Microsoft," she stated.

When pressed to clarify whether the organizations are subsidiaries of Microsoft, Hamel said, "I am saying that they have been influenced."

What is of significant concern is that this case has now become a millstone around the neck of key politicians' ambitions and their careers placing unquantifiable pressure on Peter Quinn which reminds me of a well know phrase that "all is fair in love and war".

UPDATE: Microsoft Offers Office Document Formats to Ecma International for Open Standardization Company to work with other industry leaders in standards body to foster interoperability and unleash power of billions of documents worldwide. So ODF will have to compete with another open standard.