Friday Dec 21, 2007

Predictions for 2008 using my del.icio.us tag cloud

By Nick Hortovanyi

Its that time of year, when writing about your predictions for 2008 is all the rage. I've been tagging some by others on del.icio.us with prediction2008.

I've included my current del.licio.us tags in descending order of importance. It highlights the areas that I have had an active interest in either for current work or for research of future activities. So i've used them as the subjects for my predictions for 2008.

del.icio.us my del.icio.us tags

SaaS

Software as a Service will continue to become mainstream , as skilled resources become harder to find, internet connectivity latency decreases with the corresponding increase in bandwidth capacity. Wall Street will be even more attracted to the SaaS recurring pricing models, such that it will provide a higher potential exit price for Venture Capital backed organisations. Thus driving high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation in the SaaS sector then in comparison to traditional on-premise software delivery companies.

Business

Will continue to see their core Information Technology assets as a cost of doing business and will treat it as a commodity component. IT Consultants will find new ways to work with business, that is more closely aligned to business innovation within their specific industry. Nothing that new here, but internal IT skills will become less IT technical and more analytics driven. Marketing departments will take on more responsibility for analytics and data warehousing to improve marketing ROI.

Local markets in the developed world will continue to become a deeper shade of "red", as competition increases, driving exploration of new markets for growth through volume and innovation in delivery and execution. 

Web2.0

Is a technical label, that has been assigned to represent a change of thinking regarding memes around a social and networked world. It has signaled the rise of the long tail, being that of the boutique network connected micro-economy. Organisations in 2008, will reevaluate their methods of engaging with the market, and the micro-economy, as the number of larger and mid tiered firms dissipate through M&As.

IBM

IBM will embrace cloud computing (eg blue cloud) but have difficulties in engaging with customers in this area; whilst it is still perceived internally as a hardware and people services company. Margins for resellers, will continue to dwindle (hardware and software) as IBM software sales, outside of SMB, finally exceed hardware sales and thus moves focus from hardware. IBM will continue to work on, but won't formulate wining strategies in 2008, to take market spend from Microsoft in the SMB software area. IBM's sales force in 2008, focused on on-premise engagement will have difficulties with the off-premise SaaS nature of cloud computing. In 2008, there will be some high profile success stories publicized for Blue Cloud.

SOA

Service Oriented Architecture will continue to drive new systems and rationalisation of existing within the larger enterprises. Adoption of the SOA Architecture Style within enterprises will increase. However, unless machine generated, WS-* style service adoption will decrease. Skilled IT Architects capable of service decomposition  between business services and technical services will be in short supply for 2008.

SOA will continue to drive the demand for new on-premise middleware products. A number of new products will emerge in 2008, possible based on SCA/SDO, that allow utilisation of multiple programming languages and development paradigms.

via:aqualung

Thanks Ric :) lots of great material. Think more will come, including lots of great riffs and conversations. In 2008, I predict Ric will be writing more blog entries. 

Development

The Art of Developing computer systems will start to influence education in the area of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Iterative agile development processes will continue to be favored over waterfall methodologies. Some procurement departments will explore contracts that allow iterative development methodologies, but this will still not be the norm in 2008. This disconnect between what developers do and what contracts state will continue.

There will be increased interest in scripting languages such as Python and Ruby and further exploration of languages or changes to existing languages to support parallel computing. Functional languages such as ErLang, Haskell and OCaml will gain more of the spotlight.

Google 

Google will continue to influence developers through its Google Code. Google SaaS based services will influence development approaches and continue to play havoc with administrators who favor closed firewalls and block external high use URLs. Google will utilise more personal profile data to improve search results and at the same time use it to increase Ad revenue from targeted advertising.

Smaller SMBs will gain trust in Google and really start to question the value/cost of maintaining on-premise infrastructure.

Collaboration

Social software will gain some traction in more forward thinking organisations but it will still be an enathma to command and control based management. New products will be developed that utilise analytics in conjunction with project management methodologies to form groups/teams for delivery of specific deliverables based on a continuously moving project plan (isn't this what we do anyway manually?).

Innovation


Business will seek innovation to be internally driven and not from vendors, but will struggle with out outside influence. Australia will invest heavily in building infrastructure to support exporting of innovation overseas.

 

Microsoft

Will recover the market position lost with WindowsVista . SaaS (or as they call it Software plus Services) will continue to attract media spotlight as Microsoft seeks to gain new revenue streams and move focus from on-premise software. Huge internal debates over this will continue with little leakages, every now and then, to the market over the 2008 year. Headlines may move from Google vs Microsoft to IBM vs Microsoft, if Blue Cloud is a success.

Architecture

IT architecture will be important in organisations, as an enabler of structure. Many more titles containing the term Architecture will evolve in the 2008 year. IT Architects (of whatever title) will continue to find new ways of explaining the value of this abstract thinking to business and further consolidation of this knowledge will occur on the internet, such as at IASA.

 

Blog

PR agencies will learn how to influence the blogosphere. The informal citizen journalist will continue to eat into the revenues of traditional print media. Blogging in conjunction with bookmarking will become the preferred means over google to find "trusted" content and advice.

Java 

This is the pinnacle year for Java, the programming language, in the enterprise world. As concurrent computing needs are accelerated through the multi-core focus of CPU vendors, it may be perceived that the effort to modify the Java language specifications is higher then the benefits gained by using other programming languages. SOA standards, such as SCA and SDO, are evolving to be language neutral, this will reduce the reliance on Java in enterprise middleware products.

 

Lotus Connections

This is an interesting product, that shows the possibilities of internet based software behind the firewall. The 2007 year saw, too many new products evolve from IBM in my view, thus there may be in 2008, a consolidation of products to compete against Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services in the SMB space. My blog receives a large number of hits for "sharepoint vs websphere portal" searches on google, so it wouldn't surprise me if Lotus Connections is rolled into WebSphere Portal Express for the SMB market.

Open Source

Will still be here at the end of 2008. Microsoft will continue to push new standards based around its technology stack. The next killer app may emerge if usability and visual issues can be addressed. Has Windows Vista opened the door for the Linux desktops? We'll see this time next year.


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Tuesday Dec 18, 2007

Our 2008 styled web site

By Nick Hortovanyi

We've finally done it and released the new web site http://www.toasttechnology.com.au . This is our new one page design that I talked about in a previous entry - Trends for 2008 corporate web sites. We have put key messages about our company on that page and included cool things from the MooTools tool kit and stuff from Google Code like the Google AJAX Feed API so its got a strong Web 2.0 focus.

Now we have tried to take into account those corporate users that don't have Flash (yes, they do exist)  by having a fall back image  for them. The page does take a little longer to load then our previous front page but the number of dial up users accessing our old site is minimal.

Many thanks to Alex, Ric and Claire for their valuable help with this exercise ;) .

One key thing we have done, is linked in a wiki server at http://wiki.toasttechnology.com.au . The wiki is open to any person who registers to read/write pages. As such we are going to actively seek for organisations that we work with and partner with to update content directly. I think this is going to be the real challenge!

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Friday May 11, 2007

Google Gadgets for WebSphere Portal have arrived

By Nick Hortovanyi

Found this article, Enhancing your portal using Google Gadgets with WebSphere Portal V6.0 ,on developerWorks.

This article addresses my previous concerns regarding what type of Google Gadgets are going to be made available and how they are to be provisioned through WebSphere Portal. I believe the Desktop Google Gadgets are not being made available.

I'll need to give it a whirl shortly and will write another blog entry with the results of the experiment. This integration is very exciting as it is bringing previously Internet only type technology back through the firewall into the corporation.

What I have noticed is that the preferences for the Customization node are stored in the standard portlet preferences.

One thing that I have not seen as yet is the ability to do inter-portlet communication through the property broker to enable wiring between other JSR-168 portlets and the IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets. Why would you want to do this? Well to do effective mashups you need to be able to communicate between portlets/gadgets. For example, you receive a customer inquiry with an address, click on the address and the user should be able see the corresponding map on the Google Map Gadget on the same page. Would be good if someone from IBM or Google can tell us how to do this?

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Monday Apr 23, 2007

Using Google Apps for Your Domain

By Nick Hortovanyi

In my continuing quest to find a replacement for IBM Workplace Collaboration Services, I thought I'd give Google Apps for Your Domain a go.

I happened to have a spare domain name sitting around soasuccessplus-DOT-com that I hadn't put to good use as yet. So I went through the configuration process and updated the DNS server appropriately. I have enabled all capabilities within Google Apps for Your domain - Standard Edition, to see what it can do.

Standard Edition has a few options that aren't available in the Premier Edition and the Education Edition  (wonder if any educational  institutions would use this due to security concerns?). On a side note, the term "Standard Edition" gives a better sense of importance I think then the term "Express", used by some other vendors. So after reviewing the differences between the Standard and Premier Editions, I decided for my purposes at the moment that Standard Edition would be adequate.

To enable your email etc under a domain, you can either let google provide you DNS services, host your own DNS or use a hosted DNS services through netregistry etc. I host my own DNS servers so I followed the instructions and activated all the services appropriately in the DNS - you will have to add google specific information to prove that you are the administrator of the domain. If you know how to configure your DNS, this process will take about half an hour.

Having modified the DNS to have certain A names resolve to google servers, I was hoping that all interaction would be using URLs suffixed with soasuccessplus.com. Like the start page, try it out http://start.soasuccessplus.com, you end up at http://partnerpage.google.com/soasuccessplus.com. This is the page that all users of the domain would log in from, so the google guys must still be having some issues with mangling urls, as it quite clearly shows google.com? The same thing happens for mail, calendar etc. One would hope in the future that google addresses these issues.

Now the Google Apps that I am using mail, calendar and page creator appear to work well. I used the page creator to setup a simplepage at http://www.soasuccessplus.com, but more work is required here. I've been using the Google Calender over the last couple of weeks. Its quite easy to use - haven't tried exposing calendar entries public as yet... One little gripe that I have is the integration between Google Desktop and Google Calendar when you have multiple identities on google.com, it is retrieving my calendar entries ok from my soasuccesplus.com identity, but when I create a new event, it does so as my gmail identity. Am sure at some point this will be fixed.

I'm only tinkering around with my mail address nick.hortovanyi-AT-soasuccessplus.com, as if I used it for my main email address, I think I'd use up 2GB per mail box pretty quickly. On this machine that I'm using, my inbox under Thunderbird has now reached 10400 messages and I've managed to send some 5000 emails my self. No wonder some people are happy that I'm using http://del.icio.us/hortovanyi and blogging now.

I should really review the google Ts&Cs a bit better as well. Still not certain if this is the final solution yet in my quest, but its certainly looking good for a small number of users, if you can allow them to manage their own email. One concern that I have is that there is no Audit of the email interactions, so for larger organisations this could be a show stopper!

What has your experiences been with Google Apps? Let me know.. Would you be happy to switch completely over?

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Thursday Mar 15, 2007

WebSphere Portal & Google Gadgets with a Linux desktop

By Nick Hortovanyi

Have been reading about how WebSphere Portal will be supporting Google Gadgets. eWeek has written a great article on it - IBM Links Google Gadgets to WebSphere Portal.

I know its a bit early but I started to investigate what does this mean.

According to Google Code, there are two types of Gadgets:

Google Desktop only works on Microsoft Windows. I'd love it to work on my Linux desktop as well. Does anyone know if this is going to happen? SuSe Linux Enterprise Desktop supports .NET through Project Mono.

Thus if the Google Desktop Gadgets are to be made available through WebSphere Portal they will not work on my Linux Desktop. Someone correct me here if I'm wrong! Google Desktop Gadgets are written in JavaScript, C, C++, C#, and/or VB.Net . Google why can't we use Java, Python, Ruby etc? Is this a sign of Google being Evil?

Now I know Google Univeral Gadgets will work on linux, because i've tried them, so I'd be confident in saying that these would work through WebSphere Portal on my linux desktop.

Can anyone from IBM or Google add some colour here?

Will I finally be able to decomission all my Windows desktops or not?

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