Monday, 2008-06-30, Copenhagen
Launching location-based services have been a big stream for many tekis and academias. We have not seen a good success of LBS since the idea was born. Now, Nokia just said that it has agreed to buy social networking company Plazes which provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record, and share social activities. If Nokia is starting to push this idea, what would the ISPs do? Allowing the protocols or not?
Facebook is coming to China. The big social network site has just launched a mainland Chinese version zh-cn.facebook.com. Well, knowing that there have been quite a lot of facebooking sites within China for the past years (and some of them are very successful), let us cross our fingers and see when Facebook will have the same destiny as Ebay.
Wednesday, 2008-07-02, Copenhagen
We have been dreaming of having mobile phone as the only means of media to use on ANYTHING, such as paying a ticket, buying food, reserve an airline ticket, etc. Now with the ISPs and vendors’ help, this is becoming true. T-systems and Nokia started offering mobile ticketing in Germany. This is especially useful for countries like Germany where people tend to stay outside of what’s happening in the world and only trust what TV says.
Skype has been out of our sight for a while. What’s happening after the company has been acquired by EBay? Well, the CEO recently said that Skype has been receiving full help and support from the parent EBay and both are working on integrating Skype with Paypal. We can see that this is a good idea in terms that people can actually negotiate when they are selling or buying things (like what we did 50 years ago in Bazaars). But, isn’t true that after bundling Skype with Paypal, Skype itself is becoming more-or-less a sub-product in the EBay’s brand and that will change people’s image on Skype that it has been a tool independent of any platforms?
Monday, June 30, 2008
Friday, June 27, 2008
What's new in week 26, 2008
Monday, 2008-06-23, Copenhagen
A very funny news, two Belgian developers designed a video game concept called place-to-pee that relies on players hitting sensors in urinals to control the game play. Apparently the great ideas came from the country with best beers because people there have to spend a lot of time in the bath room. The games are for both man and woman. Now bath rooms will be more filled up….
We have seen that Google is challenging MS on collaboration to suites. Now another player joined the game, Adobe. Adobe has recently formally launched its free online collaboration tool suite which includes work processing, file sharing and web conferencing tools. Let’s wait and see how Adobe and get the market already occupied by Google and MS.
Where to receive if you have a BI report to wait while traveling with your mobile? In most cases, if you have BO, MicroStrategy, or Cognos tools in the company, these tools are integrated with Blackberry very well. There are also other possibilities, such as the Windows smart phones, given that your company also uses Microsoft BI tool suites. Another BI vendor Information Builder actually can work with any mobile devices with browser support. It seems that Blackberry is indeed a tool well-integrated with the business world. It will take a very long time for MS to enter the same market with their smart phones.
Tuesday, 2008-06-24, Copenhagen
Is SOA the ultimate way to go for all enterprises? Well, it depends pretty much how you work with services. Sometimes services can be very difficult to design and package. If you package basic functionalities into services, they do not have any business meanings such that it makes the re-usability no sense. If you try to package things into more business oriented services, then it is very possible that many services have overlaps with each other, meaning that they utilizes similar basic functionalities which may bring ripple effects when the performance is tuned according to one specific needs or changes are made to the basic functionalities. Especially in legacy systems, packing legacy applications into services are making the picture more complicated. One can hardly find easy ways to separate hard-coded functionalities according to different business needs.
So, is SOA the right way to go?
Which is the best way to grow for social networking sites like Facebook? Well, open source can be the answer. Facebook has been opening its application development extensions to all developers around the world and people are adding new applications to Facebook more than 100 pieces per day. It is just like there are always a lot of parties or other fun stuff coming up every day. How can facebook lose its audience? Never! Well, Google is also looking at the same initiative and starts to open-sourcing its social network protocols for developers. We’ll wait and see what’s going on the next.
Friday, 2008-06-27, Copenhagen
Here is a news about cloud computing. Data center operator Terremark just launched its “Enterprise Cloud” platform which is a complete managed platform for full-time operation of online business infrastructure. As we can see from this news, hardware and system providers are now thinking of platforms that can support global cloud computing. We can see that there are not only one computing center as the main server, but quite a few centers located globally such that 24/7 cloud computing is definitely not a hardware problem.
A very funny news, two Belgian developers designed a video game concept called place-to-pee that relies on players hitting sensors in urinals to control the game play. Apparently the great ideas came from the country with best beers because people there have to spend a lot of time in the bath room. The games are for both man and woman. Now bath rooms will be more filled up….
We have seen that Google is challenging MS on collaboration to suites. Now another player joined the game, Adobe. Adobe has recently formally launched its free online collaboration tool suite which includes work processing, file sharing and web conferencing tools. Let’s wait and see how Adobe and get the market already occupied by Google and MS.
Where to receive if you have a BI report to wait while traveling with your mobile? In most cases, if you have BO, MicroStrategy, or Cognos tools in the company, these tools are integrated with Blackberry very well. There are also other possibilities, such as the Windows smart phones, given that your company also uses Microsoft BI tool suites. Another BI vendor Information Builder actually can work with any mobile devices with browser support. It seems that Blackberry is indeed a tool well-integrated with the business world. It will take a very long time for MS to enter the same market with their smart phones.
Tuesday, 2008-06-24, Copenhagen
Is SOA the ultimate way to go for all enterprises? Well, it depends pretty much how you work with services. Sometimes services can be very difficult to design and package. If you package basic functionalities into services, they do not have any business meanings such that it makes the re-usability no sense. If you try to package things into more business oriented services, then it is very possible that many services have overlaps with each other, meaning that they utilizes similar basic functionalities which may bring ripple effects when the performance is tuned according to one specific needs or changes are made to the basic functionalities. Especially in legacy systems, packing legacy applications into services are making the picture more complicated. One can hardly find easy ways to separate hard-coded functionalities according to different business needs.
So, is SOA the right way to go?
Which is the best way to grow for social networking sites like Facebook? Well, open source can be the answer. Facebook has been opening its application development extensions to all developers around the world and people are adding new applications to Facebook more than 100 pieces per day. It is just like there are always a lot of parties or other fun stuff coming up every day. How can facebook lose its audience? Never! Well, Google is also looking at the same initiative and starts to open-sourcing its social network protocols for developers. We’ll wait and see what’s going on the next.
Friday, 2008-06-27, Copenhagen
Here is a news about cloud computing. Data center operator Terremark just launched its “Enterprise Cloud” platform which is a complete managed platform for full-time operation of online business infrastructure. As we can see from this news, hardware and system providers are now thinking of platforms that can support global cloud computing. We can see that there are not only one computing center as the main server, but quite a few centers located globally such that 24/7 cloud computing is definitely not a hardware problem.
Friday, June 20, 2008
What's new in week 25, 2008
Friday, 2008-06-20, Copenhagen
Allen System Group, ASG, is in negotiations to have another major acquisition. ASG is one of the largest privately owned software companies in this world. It is no doubt that this acquisition will lead to an improvement in its business process management technology flagship in the market.
High performance computing is definitely a continuously-growing market in the enterprise world. Just like an IDC expert said recently, the HPC market has over 10 billion usd market nowadays and it is still growing over 10 percent per year. One interesting observation is that Microsoft is also having over 1000 developers working at its HPC lab. So even the current market leaders are HP and IBM, or perhaps Sun. Other vendors are eagerly joining the competition.
More enterprise vendors are looking into how their products can have a Google version. For example, BI vendor Panorama has been launching its BI tools on top of Google spreadsheet applications. It seems that Google is also becoming a name of a certain kind of OS.
Allen System Group, ASG, is in negotiations to have another major acquisition. ASG is one of the largest privately owned software companies in this world. It is no doubt that this acquisition will lead to an improvement in its business process management technology flagship in the market.
High performance computing is definitely a continuously-growing market in the enterprise world. Just like an IDC expert said recently, the HPC market has over 10 billion usd market nowadays and it is still growing over 10 percent per year. One interesting observation is that Microsoft is also having over 1000 developers working at its HPC lab. So even the current market leaders are HP and IBM, or perhaps Sun. Other vendors are eagerly joining the competition.
More enterprise vendors are looking into how their products can have a Google version. For example, BI vendor Panorama has been launching its BI tools on top of Google spreadsheet applications. It seems that Google is also becoming a name of a certain kind of OS.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Notes for Chp. 4 of "Beyond Software Architecture"
Chapter 4. Business and License Model Symbiosis
Software vendors normally have one or more license models on each of their products.Why do we need a license? Because software is different from solid objects. You cannot stop people from copying it, redistribute it, and even reverse-engineering it. License is a legal way of protecting people from abusing the product while still enjoying not only the product but also the services around the product.
There are several common software business models. For example, users can by access or use of application for a period of time, or they can be charged at a percentage of their cost saved from using the software (enterprises tend to be resistant to this model), or they can be charged per transaction, or the vendors can be more precise by metering the users accesses on different resources(for example, the amount of concurrent users). Users can also be charged on the hardware that runs on the software instead of the software itself. Another way is used by the open source tool vendors.An open source tool is free. But if you want specialized services on top of the tool, it comes with price.
I have two reflections on the pricing models.
First, modern software tends to provide more features with online access. One example being the anti-virus software which normally needs to updates its virus library regularly. By using the Internet,one can find certain ways of protecting the software from abuse. In fact, in the architecture design process, one must try to include this business model in the technical design.
Second, software vendors must think of their architecture to have specialized support of more precise pricing models, such as the metering. Not all software can be priced by the metering way. But it is preferred by some customers.
There can be different rights and restrictions (most of them are very technical) associated with each type of business models. Again, the tarchitecture is very important in embedding such rights and restrictions in the technical design.
So, how can tarchitecture help the business model? I am sure that may technical architects have quite a lot of ideas in their mind. There are following things that one should always be careful with.
1. The most important thing is to capture the necessary data for the business pricing. This has to happen within the architecture.
2. Give the necessary report so that both the vendors and customers can be aware of the details of the cost.
3. Put something there to enforce the business model in case the license is violated.
4. Sometimes, the price can also be linked with those "-ility" such as scalability and reliability. The architecture should be able to support it.
5. Successful tarchitecture must also try to help customers to save their budget on other things such as the hardware investment.
6. Vendors should regularly adjust the parameters used in the pricing models. Everything changes over the time,especially in the IT world.
There are many ways of enforcing the licensing models. One can always try to link the architecture with online access to ensure that people are serious when using and paying the software. However,up to now, I have not heard any 100 percent secure licensing model if there is no law to protect the copyright of software.
Finishing on the tarchitecture, let us get back to the marchitecture. In fact, in the beginning of specific software market, vendors can make the business models very simple so that customers can easily understand and decide to buy. The idea is of course to occupy the market first.
The maturity of the market decides on the business model, indeed.
Software vendors normally have one or more license models on each of their products.Why do we need a license? Because software is different from solid objects. You cannot stop people from copying it, redistribute it, and even reverse-engineering it. License is a legal way of protecting people from abusing the product while still enjoying not only the product but also the services around the product.
There are several common software business models. For example, users can by access or use of application for a period of time, or they can be charged at a percentage of their cost saved from using the software (enterprises tend to be resistant to this model), or they can be charged per transaction, or the vendors can be more precise by metering the users accesses on different resources(for example, the amount of concurrent users). Users can also be charged on the hardware that runs on the software instead of the software itself. Another way is used by the open source tool vendors.An open source tool is free. But if you want specialized services on top of the tool, it comes with price.
I have two reflections on the pricing models.
First, modern software tends to provide more features with online access. One example being the anti-virus software which normally needs to updates its virus library regularly. By using the Internet,one can find certain ways of protecting the software from abuse. In fact, in the architecture design process, one must try to include this business model in the technical design.
Second, software vendors must think of their architecture to have specialized support of more precise pricing models, such as the metering. Not all software can be priced by the metering way. But it is preferred by some customers.
There can be different rights and restrictions (most of them are very technical) associated with each type of business models. Again, the tarchitecture is very important in embedding such rights and restrictions in the technical design.
So, how can tarchitecture help the business model? I am sure that may technical architects have quite a lot of ideas in their mind. There are following things that one should always be careful with.
1. The most important thing is to capture the necessary data for the business pricing. This has to happen within the architecture.
2. Give the necessary report so that both the vendors and customers can be aware of the details of the cost.
3. Put something there to enforce the business model in case the license is violated.
4. Sometimes, the price can also be linked with those "-ility" such as scalability and reliability. The architecture should be able to support it.
5. Successful tarchitecture must also try to help customers to save their budget on other things such as the hardware investment.
6. Vendors should regularly adjust the parameters used in the pricing models. Everything changes over the time,especially in the IT world.
There are many ways of enforcing the licensing models. One can always try to link the architecture with online access to ensure that people are serious when using and paying the software. However,up to now, I have not heard any 100 percent secure licensing model if there is no law to protect the copyright of software.
Finishing on the tarchitecture, let us get back to the marchitecture. In fact, in the beginning of specific software market, vendors can make the business models very simple so that customers can easily understand and decide to buy. The idea is of course to occupy the market first.
The maturity of the market decides on the business model, indeed.
Monday, June 16, 2008
What's new in week 24, 2008
Thursday, 2008-06-12, Copenhagen
Another high-performance, parallel processing database? Aster Data Systems, started up three years ago with three Stanford students, is now coming into a period of growing up their business with the brilliant product. One of their well-known customers is MySpace. The parallel processing database has incorporated quite a few new innovations like data partitioning algorithm POD. We will see how this database engines goes if one of giant database players has the intention to acquire it. So Teradata may not always be the leading players in parallel databases.
Google has recently announced the availability of a new Google application, called Google Sites, which let users create own web pages with a WYSIWYG style. This is another cloud computing application from Google. Seems that Google will attract quite a lot of SoHos’ attention.
Another high-performance, parallel processing database? Aster Data Systems, started up three years ago with three Stanford students, is now coming into a period of growing up their business with the brilliant product. One of their well-known customers is MySpace. The parallel processing database has incorporated quite a few new innovations like data partitioning algorithm POD. We will see how this database engines goes if one of giant database players has the intention to acquire it. So Teradata may not always be the leading players in parallel databases.
Google has recently announced the availability of a new Google application, called Google Sites, which let users create own web pages with a WYSIWYG style. This is another cloud computing application from Google. Seems that Google will attract quite a lot of SoHos’ attention.
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