How Simple Can Enterprise Software be?

June 26, 2007 at 12:22 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

With all of the fancy, expensive and new software out there, you would think that the ushering in of Enterprise 2.0 began as a call to build bigger software. You’d think it is a call to build software at all.

I wrote this post and posted it on my own weblog because it was so long. Let me know what you think.

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Composite Software tackles the speeds and feeds angle of SOA

June 26, 2007 at 9:11 am · Filed under Enterprise Software, SOA

As the amount of enterprise data explodes, so does the need to access this data from disparate and widely flung sources, increasing the market for data integration and management.

Composite Software this week announced a major release of its Composite Information Server (CIS), as well as a Composite Active Cluster, designed to enable companies to further scale their data services deployments.

Composite Software provides on-demand data integration. Its CIS 4.5 — the first major release since CIS 4.0 was announced last November — and the new Active Cluster will extend capabilities for creating, publishing, and consuming data for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and data virtualization. It is aimed at such data-intensive industries as financial services, pharmaceutical/biotech, e-commerce, telecom, and government.

CIS 4.5 includes:

• An all-new, Web-based server management console that allows administrators to monitor and manage the environment from remote locations.

• Improved security management capabilities that simplify the management and control of large groups of enterprise users.

• A foreign key relationship analyzer, that helps the query optimization engine improve execution of complex, independent queries.

The release also includes enhanced XML data type support, HTTP connectivity pooling, and user/group export and import.

According to Composite Software, Active Cluster improves data virtualization and data reuse capabilities by allowing users to deploy massively scalable, adaptable clusters. It also exploits native “active/active” clustering to help reduce total cost of ownership of the data services layer.

Both CIS 4.5 and Active Cluster will be available by the end of the month. The two will be sold separately and pricing will be based on the number of CPUs.

As we’ve said before, getting your data act together is an important foundation for moving to SOA successfully. The lesson many are learning the hard way is that getting you data act together means addressing both the management from an integration and consolidation perspective — but just as importantly more a volume and load perspective. It’s been a thorny issue for 40 years … making all that data jump through the hoops you want, and at a speed that meets or exceeds the pace of the business tasks at hand.

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Networks Groan Under the “MySpace Effect”

June 25, 2007 at 11:56 am · Filed under Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

Leave it to the network guys to spoil all the fun. But, someone’s got to keep things running down in the engine room while the rest of us are up on deck searching the horizons for new worlds.

Terrible analogy, I know, but it’s a Monday.

Anyway, a new report in Network World warns that the incredible surge of social computing and Enterprise 2.0 activities across enterprises is stretching our networks to the limits.

Images of Scotty come to mind. “She can’t take it anymore, Captain!”

According to Network World, the “MySpace Effect” is putting new strains on already strained networks. The article puts it this way:

“Increasingly popular social-networking sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Facebook are accounting for such huge volumes of DNS queries and bandwidth consumption that carriers, universities and corporations are scrambling to keep pace. The trend is prompting some network operators to upgrade their DNS systems, while others are blocking the sites altogether. Moreover, the “MySpace Effect” is expected to hit many more nets soon, as these network-intensive interactive features migrate from specialty sites to mainstream e-commerce operations and intranets.”

Tom Tovar, president and COO of Nominum, which sells high-end DNS software to carriers and enterprises, says many enterprises are already feeling the pressure:

“One of the things we’re hearing more and more from carriers is that social-networking sites like MySpace and YouTube are contributing to an exponential increase in DNS traffic. A single MySpace page can have anywhere from 200 to 300 DNS lookups, while a normal news site with ads might have 10 to 15 DNS lookups. It’s an exponential increase.”

As the article explains it, “social-networking sites create large volumes of DNS traffic because they pull content from all over the Internet. Most of these sites use content-delivery networks to extend the geographical reach of their content so users can access it closer to home.”

Universities may feel the pinch before everyone else, but some institutions seem to have the problem under control for now. The University of Kansas, for example, already limits how much bandwidth students can consume from dorm rooms. Thus, university servers have been able to handle the load coming from a user population that averages 20,000 per day that frequents sites such as MySpace, FaceBook, and YouTube.

However, as we see more social computing within the enterprise, IT planners will need to prepare their infrastructures with additional bandwidth, additional servers, and, very importantly, additional storage — which has already reached the breaking point thanks to voluminous amounts of data that need to be managed and saved.

The kicker? It all has to be saved and stored somewhere. With the recent spate of mandates and regulations that affect corporate data, the onus is on enterprises to save all transactions and messages that flow through their systems. E-mail and instant messages must be archived, and social computing activities will also fall under this requirement. It’s a good thing disks are so cheap these days.

And remember, Scotty was always keep the warp coil intact with spare parts and know-how.

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Old Media 1, Federated Media 0

June 25, 2007 at 8:57 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing

The kerfluffle over Federated Media’s hamfisted attempt to obscure the line between advertising and editorial is neither trival, as Michael Arrington suggests, or some kind of of noble experiment in bringing advertisers “into the conversation,” as John Batelle would have it in his downright laughable defense of the practice.  All successful news publications, online and off, develop a trust relationship with their readers which is based on those readers’ belief that what they are getting is the publication’s best sense of the facts, unencumbered by deliberately obscured agendas like advertising money.  In this case, Federated Media pushed the line and the writers who agreed to be used in that manner deserve to lose credibility because of it.

That’s why there exists in all trustworthy print publications what is generally referred to as a separation of “church and state.’  And I can assure you that it is strictly enforced.   Over the past 25 years, I have written and/or produced maybe 150 advertorials–those ugly little hybrid mixes of text and advertising–for Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week.  Combined, I suspect they produced more than $100 million in ad revenue.  This would make me a success story in most companies but the truth is I have never met a Forbes or Business Week editor.  I know one editor at Fortune that I haven’t seen or spoken to for 10 years and although some of my most successful “sections” appeared when John Huey was editor there, I met him only a couple of years ago because he rents the apartment next to mine. I’m not sure he even knows I’m one of the mercenary trolls who made him look like a hero although he did admit to another rep I know that there was “a lot of money to made in picking up garbage.” 

In publications that care about editorial integrity and regard it as their most valuable asset, ad salesmen do not speak to editors and vice versa.  They don’t take meetings together; they don’t lunch together; their offices are deliberately separated.  No self-respecting reporter ever set foot in an ad agency unless it was to interview someone for a story.

In print publications, advertorials are required to be clearly labeled “Advertisement” and they are written, produced, and designed  separately from the magazine or newspaper itself.  There are also strict rules for informing advertisers that what they are buying is advertising and not editorial.

This is how it should be or else there is no point in pretending there is something called journalism that can be trusted to put the reader’s interests in truth, fairness and accuracy above all other considerations.  Over time, this becomes a reputation and even, if I may be naive enough to suggest, a positive contribution to society.  It’s why I trust the reporting of the Wall Street Journal, for example, although I wouldn’t have the opinion pages in my outhouse.  It’s why ad agencies don’t lean on great publications to do squirrely things.  It’s why Rupert Murdoch must never, ever be allowed to own the Journal, or the NYT or the Washington Post.

Michael Arrington has to decide whether he wants to be an editor or a publisher because no one can effectively be both.  And, I do know that if you produce a publication that a lot of people trust and want to read, advertisers will come–on your terms, not theirs. 

As for Batelle and his fine line of bullshit about making advertisers part of the conversation, most readers are sophisticated enough to realize that the Microsofts and Ciscos of the world don’t want to have a conversation; they want to sell them stuff,  and that ad agencies like FM are simply doing what marketers do–pimping for their clients and trying to turn trusted writers and sources into endorsement bitches.

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Age of Aquarius

June 25, 2007 at 1:23 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0

It was no coincidence that as consciousness was breaking this morning I recall the playing of Aquarius in my head. “Presumed to occur at the end of the 20th century”, indeed it did.

For those of us who were part of the purple sofa era, the year 2000 list of The Top 100 Interactive Agencies incites an array of memories. While standing as witness to the momentum of a new way of doing business, it belied the shift in direction. The wake-up call came from the larger economy that put these companies in a slide resulting in stock prices below a dollar and buyouts/consolidations throughout the end of 2001. These companies didn’t implode because of a bubble bursting (although there were certainly contributing factors of bad behaviors). The combination of circumstances exacerbated a natural attrition as the cycle of innovation sluffs the chaff.

There are significant signs to suggest we’re back on that growth curve again:

“The much-talked-about tipping point has been reached….
Business is back to 1999 levels, and it’s only going to grow.”

If you were to accept for a moment the health/movement of these companies as the canary of the industry at large, then you have to decide for yourself what the significance is of Microsoft buying one of the top agencies in the industry.

My own take is that what’s about to happen will dwarf the boom of the 90s, by several orders of magnitude. The greatest potential is inside of companies (ala. Enterprise 2.0), but only to the point that they leverage the potential to redefine their business models and focus more on innovating ‘doing’ business and creating whole new markets. Based on the insights gained from Wikinomics the real value of historic brands is to leverage the ‘machine’ of their core competencies to focus on the pursuit of new markets…not new products. This whole model relies on Enterprise 2.0.

While astronomically the Age of Aquarius will not reach its zenith for over 600 years, the real potential lies in the duality between Pisces (yin) and Aquarius (yang). Since the fundamentals of business are already too heavily weighted to the yang, the fundamentals of 2.0 thinking bring needed balance to embrace more yin characteristics. The high adoption of 2.0-related solutions is surely due to an unfilled ‘gap’ to achieve optimal balance, essentially a vacuum.

It was also no coincidence that the song this morning was being performed by The Fifth Dimension. We are making this journey via The Fifth Dimension, where by participation and interaction we fundamentally change who we are and what we can accomplish through active expression and shared experiences. Our potential is achieved through collective emergence.

Gaining knowledge and learning are simply the waste products left behind on the trail.

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