Community involvement or free labor?

I’ve been following Andrew McAfee’s blog for a couple of weeks now, as a result of someone twittering a link to one of his blog entries. In his latest blog post, “Three Mantras“, McAfee discusses something many of the tech industry will recognize, self support systems. McAfee nicely summarizes the business opportunity to build around online communities as support subsystems.

I posted some of my thoughts on the topic in comments, namely the question of recognition and reward, not for participating, but for those that stay on and continue to participate. Initial participation is often self rewarding, we go look for help, experience or education in order to achieve some work related task. Need to get some help using a particular programming language or API – as Apple could have said “there’s a community forum for that!”

What makes McAfees blog interesting is his recognition of this phenomena, and his translation of it in to business terms and impact. For Dell, the guys that are part of the TechCenter have been doing a great job recently of creating knowledge and sharing it. They’ve recently run a number of demo and tech sessions on some of our key management technologies. You can find the Dell TechCenter here. It provides links into a wiki, Discussion Forums(just like the ones discussed by McAfee, the techcenter forum currently has some 34,000 topics) and the increasingly popular TechTuesday chats.

As I said in a comment to McAfee’s blog, this isn’t a new phenomena, as long ago as the late 1970’s I was first introduced to VMSHARE. A User run online bulletinboard/time sharing system aka forum to support and help users of IBM’s VM/370 operating system. While today there are many, many more forums, technologies and places to go for help, you can gain as much value from them today as I did then, because, and thats especially true for the Dell Techcenter, the people who participate are knowledgeable, dedicated and passionate about what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

Profiles in, err, courage

Back in March I caught an early morning bus on Saturday to downtown Austin to attend Bar Camp IV, suffice to say it’s mostly not a bar, and doesn’t involve camping(anymore).

I attend a few interesting sessions, I learned a few things about Windows 7, mobile development and attended a session on airships and blimps that I assumed was some kind of coded language for a session on clouds, but it wasn’t it WAS about airships and blimps and more.

Big-up to @whurley @sarad and @linearb for organising and to the various sponsors which included not only free attendance, but also free lunch and libations.

I was on my way out when I bumped into Texas Social Media Awards finalist and local tech analyst and sometime contact, Michael Cote from Redmonk. We passed the time of day, and he asked me if I wanted to be interviewed for a podcast, why not?

I learned a ton about Cote from the interview, mostly that he doesn’t forget anything. We’ve met probably 5-6 times in the past and he seemed to pull 1x question from each discussion. I mostly laughed the whole way through, I thought it was going to be a tech discussion, and we did touch on a few topics, but it was just a fun way to spend 10-mins. You can hear the podcast and read the liner notes here on Redmonk Radio Episode 55. – And no, I have no idea why the series was called “profiles in courage”, why I was selected, a why I giggled all the way through. It’s been a while since I did my press training, I don’t remember them telling us about giggling as a technique!

Is SOA dead?

There has been a lot of fuss since the start of the new year around the theme “SOA is dead”. Much of this has been attributed to Anne Thomas Manes blog entry on the Burton Groups blog, here.

Infoworlds Paul Krill jumper on the bandwagon with a SOA obituary, qouting Annes work and say “SOA is dead but services will live on”. A quick fire response came on a number of fronts, like this one from Duane Nickull at Adobe, and then this from James Governor at Redmonk, where he charismatically claims, “everything is dead”.

First up, many times in my career, and James touches on a few of the key ones, since we were there together, or rather, I took advantage of his newness and thirst for knowledge as a junior reporter, to explain to him how mainframes worked, and what the software could be made to do. I knew from 10-years before I met James that evangelists and those with an agenda, would often claim something was “dead”. It came from the early 1980’s mainframe “wars” – yes, before there was a PC, we were having our own internal battles, this was dead, that was dead, etc.

What I learned from that experience, is that technical people form crowds. Just like the public hangings in the middle ages, they are all too quick to stand around and shout “hang-him”. These days it’s a bit more complex, first off there’s Slashdot, then we have the modern equivalent of speakers corner, aka blogs, where often those who shout loudest and most frequently, get heard more often. However, what most people want is not a one sided rant, but to understand the issues. Claiming anything is dead often gives the claimer the right not to understand the thing that is supposedly “dead” but to just give reasons why that must be so and move on to give advice on what you should do instead. It was similar debate last year that motivated me to document my “evangelsim” years on the about page on my blog.

The first time I heard SOA is dead, wasn’t Annes blog, it wasn’t even as John Willis, aka botchagalupe on twitter, claims in his cloud drop #38 him and Michael Cote of Redmonk last year. No sir, it was back in June 2007, when theregister.co.uk reprinted a Clive Longbottom, Head of Research at Quocirca, under the headline SOA – Dead or Alive?

Clive got closest to the real reasons of why SOA came about, in my opinion, and thus why SOA will prevail, despite rumours of its’ demise. It is not just services, from my perspective, it is about truly transactional services, which are often part of a workflow process.

Not that I’m about to claim that IBM invited SOA, or that my role in either the IBM SWG SOA initiative, or the IBM STG services initiative was anything other than as a team player rather than as a lead. However, I did spend much of 2003/4 working across both divisions, trying to explain the differences and similarities between the two, and why one needed the other, or at least its relationships. And then IBM marketed the heck out of SOA.

One of the things we wanted to do was to unite the different server types around a common messaging and event architecture. There was  almost no requirement for this to be syncronous and a lot of reasons for it to be services based. Many of us had just come from the evolution of object technology inside IBM and from working on making Java efficient within our servers. Thus, as services based approach seemed for many reasons the best one. 

However, when you looked at the types of messages and events that would be sent between systems, many of them could be cruicial to effective and efficient running of the infrastructure, they had in effect, transactional charateristics. That is, given Event-a could initiate actions A, then b, then c and finally d. While action-d could be started before action-c, it couldn’t be started until action-b was completed, and this was dependent on action-a. Importantally, none of these actions should be performed more than once for each instance of an event.

Think failure of a database or transactional server. Create new virtual server, boot os, start application/database server, rollback incomplete transactions, take over network etc. Or similar.

Around the same time, inside IBM, Beth Hutchison and others at IBM Hursley, along with smart people like Steve Graham, now at EMC, and Mandy Chessell also of IBM Hursley were trying to solve similar trascational type problems over http and using web services.

While the Server group folks headed down the Grid, Grid Services and ultimately Web Service Resource  Framework, inside IBM we came to the same conclusion, incompatible messages, incompatible systems, different architectures, legacy systems etc. need to interoperate and for that you need a framework and set of guidelines. Build this out from an infrastructure layer, to an application level; add in customer applications and that framework; and then scale it in any meaningful, that need more than a few programmers working concurrently on the same code, or on the same set of services, and what you needed was a services oriented architecture.

Now, I completely get the REST style of implementation and programming. There is no doubt that it could take over the world. From the perspective of those frantically building web mashups and cloud designs, already has. In none of the “SOA is dead” articles has anyone effectively discussed syncronous transactions, in fact apart from Clive Longbottoms piece, no real discussion was given to workflow, let alone the atomic transaction.

I’m not in denial here of what Amazon and Google are doing. Sure both do transactions, both were built from the ground-up around a services based architecture. Now, many of those who argue that “SOA is dead” are often those who want to move onto the emporers new clothes. However, as fast as applications are being moved to the cloud, many businesses are nowhere in sight moving or exploiting the cloud. To help them get there, they’ll need to know how to do it and for that they’ll need a roadmap, a framework and set of guidelines, and if it includes their legacy applications and systems, how they get there, For that, they’ll likely need more than a strategy, they’ll need a services “oriented” architecture.

So, I guess we’ve arrived at the end, the same conclusion that many others have come to. But for me it is always about context.

I have to run now, literally. My weekly long run is Sunday afternoon and my running buddy @mstoonces will show up any minute. Also, given I’m starting my new job, I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to respond to your comments, but I welcome the discussion!

Clouds and the governor

I’ve been meaning to respond to Monkchips speculation over IBM and Amazon from last year his follow-up why Amazon don’t need IBM. James and I met-up briefly before Christmas, the day I resigned from IBM UK but we ran out of time to discuss that. I wrote and posted a draft and never got around to finishing it, I was missing context. Then yesterday James published a blog entry entitled “15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing”.

The straw that broke the camels back was today, on chinposin Friday, James was clearly hustling for a bite when he tweeted “amazed i didn’t get more play for cloud computing blog”.

Well here you go James. Your analysis and simple list of 15-reasons why it is not a cloud is entertaining, but it’s not analysis, it’s cheerleading.

I’m not going to trawl through the list and dissect it one by one, I’ll just go with the first entry and then revert to discussing the bigger issue. James says “If you peel back the label and its says “Grid” or “OGSA” underneath… its not a cloud.” – Why is that James? How do you advocate organizations build clouds?

IBM’s new Enterprise Data Center vision

IBM announced today our new Enterprise Data Center vision. There are lots of links from the new ibm.com/datacenter web page which split out into their various constituencies Virtualization, Energy Efficiency, Security, Business resiliency and IT service delivery.

To net it out from my perspective though, there is a lot of good technology behind this, and an interesting direction summarized nicely starting on page-10 on the POV paper linked from the new data center page or here.

What it lays out are the three main stages of adoption for the new data center, simplified, shared and dynamic. The Clabby analytics paper, also linked from the new data center page or here, puts the three stages in a more consumable practical tabular format.

They are really not new, many of our customers will have discussed these with us many times before. In fact, there’s no coincidence that the new Enterprise Data Center vision was launched the same day as the new IBM Z10 mainframe. We started discussing and talking about these these when I worked for Enterprise Systems in 1999, and we formally laid the groundwork in the on demand strategy in 2003. In fact, I see the Clabby paper has used the on demand operating environment block architecture to illustrate the service patterns. Who’d have guessed.

Simplify: reduce costs for infrastructure, operations and management

Share: for rapid deployment of infrastructure, at any scale

Dynamic: respond to new business requests across the company and beyond

However, the new Enterprise Data Center isn’t based on a mainframe, Z10 or otherwise. It’s about a style of computing, how to build, migrate and exploit a modern data center. Power Systems has some unique functions in both the Share and Dynamic stages, like partition mobility, with lots more to come.

For some further insight into the new data center vision, take a look at the presentation linked off my On a Clear day post from December.

A trapped animal is always dangerous

I initially wrote the following a version of this as a comment to John Meyers blog entry over on sun.com – Somewhere between starting the comment on his blog and finishing it, comments were closed and it didn’t get accepted.

A number of people over the past few weeks having been egging me on to respond to John’s blog entries comparing SUN and POWER offerings. It’s great being an evangelist, being the ultimate believer in a product, technology, cleaning equipment or life saving gadget, you can’t fail, the world is your oyster, your vision is world domination and your business allows you to do it, better still, they encourage you. I’m certainly not going to do a line by line analysis and deconstruction of his writings, it’s just unproductive. He has an opinion, and he is entitled to it.

Over the next few weeks though I will post some thoughts on the general assertions. Here though, is the response I originally wrote to this blog post.

John, it’s been fun reading your POWER and virtualization analysis, you are obviously passionate about your position and the technology at SUN. SUN have clearly done a good job at filling some gaps in their product portfolio over the past few years, some in response to competitive pressure from IBM and others, and some as industry leadership.

There is no doubt that SUN have done some things that have meant IBM has had to respond. However, what you seem to have glossed over, in direct comparison to POWER Systems, rather than IBM Virtualization in general, is the real need for some of the features, and their real usability, rather than just the technical implementation. Hey, but thats life through “rose-tinted spectacles”. Oh yes, this isn’t “hubris”, I didn’t create logical partitioning, but I did contribute to it as well as a number of other important virtualization technologies.

Matais, I assume you mean CTSS which was developed at MIT to run on an IBM 709 computer between 1959-1961.

One of the programmers on that project, Bob Creasey, went on to become the project lead for CP40 the first ever IBM Virtualization implementation. CTSS was really more of a time sharing system, rather than “virtualization.”

Gene Amdahl, then Chief Architect for the S/360 product line at IBM, visited MIT a number of times and had meetings with the Professor and the CTSS team with a view to making enhancements to the hardware architecture. It is reported that they didn’t see eye-to-eye over a number of things.

There is a written history and more of this than you’d ever want to know at: http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/25paper.pdf

The concept of “domains” and logical partitions isn’t included in the above. It would not be correct though to state that Amdahl created LPARS. He actually lead a company that created a firmware/hardware implementation of multiple domains. IBM’s implementation of logical partitions differed significantly although used a similar basic premiss. Further discussion with revisions, corrections and updates probably belongs elsewhere, where it can be maintained, and not a reply to a blog post where it cannot.

There are number of companion documents that show the roll of other important users and customers which helped IBM improve its’ virtualization offerings.

Regards.

For the record I also wrote comments on the Solaris/Linux/AIX conspiracy theory here

The loves and life of an evangelist – no, not me!

Sasha asks in her personal and IBM internal blog about the rate of attrition in her sphere and what the problem is?