Posted by TomRose on February 6, 2010 under EA, Innovation, Virtualization | 
Cloud Computing is starting to mature, and evolve into something that brings tremendous value not only to companies but consumers. Amazon and Google have their offerings, then others like Cloud Foundry extending on Amazon’s cloud easing the deployment of Java, Spring, and Grails based applications.
Regardless of outsourced infrastructure or in-house organizations, Cloud Computing is the model to embrace. Setup, configuration, and deployments have to be compressed from months, weeks, days to hours and minutes. Configuration, utilization, as well as system and application monitoring has to be standardized instead of a one-off for every solution that is deployed. The technology designs that are deployed today are already complex, and making each one do the basics different every time, is just too costly in terms of setup, and ongoing support. So internal private clouds or outsourced private/public are where the world is evolving.
Now up through the infrastructure world, and into software applications. I have never embraced the Ruby, Rails, and now Grails models, as I felt the scripting languages loose typing and constrained development models could only work for a small set of applications, and fell apart on more complex applications. However, after working with Groovy and Grails for about a year now, I have to say I was wrong. Obviously, one can hack around in these dynamic tools and create a mess, but that can be said for just about any software technology. I like the ease of use in development, added capabilities like closures and GORM, and then having all of Java available anytime it’s desired or needed. Maven and Grails together is still a bit cumbersome, but its moving in the right direction.
Because of cloud computing and these new software tools, the complexity of solution development, deployment, and support is coming down significantly, this should give new ideas a quick path to availability. Getting new consumer services to market faster, and more importantly, on the downside, getting them to failure as quick as possible without significant capital expense. Finding out what does not work quickly, then being able to move on to what does at a much faster clip.
Take a good look at Grails and Cloud Foundry, it’s the future unfolding.
http://www.cloudfoundry.com/
http://www.grailspodcast.com/
http://aws.amazon.com/
http://code.google.com/appengine/
Cheers!
Tom
Posted by TomRose on January 2, 2009 under Innovation |
Many times after reading through patents, it would seem the intellectual property actually rest in the ability of patent submitters to make generally known concepts within an industry seem innovative. This behavior is rather frustrating at best, so I was pleasantly surprised last week as I read articles from Forbes about two initiatives that may reduce some of the noise in the patent pipeline:
Patent Vigilantes
Meta Data: ArticleOnePartners.com
http://www.peertopatent.org/
http://www.articleonepartners.com
No opinion on which model will work best, although both are an intriguing start.
Posted by TomRose on August 31, 2006 under EA, Innovation |
Excellent article about the culture at Google by Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek, Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work . So if Google has the formula we all just imitate it, right? Unfortunately, it would just be an imitation, and not the real thing. What we can take away from Google is that their culture of innovation is tailored to attract and most importantly retain a target talent pool that will move the company in the direction of their corporate vision. Every company has a different tempo and vision, so finding the right culture to motivate innovation within those parameters can be difficult. When we are talking about a corporate vision requiring innovation to grow revenue, it requires a much different culture than the vision for an industry that is going through a consolidation phase. As corporations move focus from keeping the lights on to fostering innovation to grow revenues it requires a culture change. Given that fostering innovation may require a different culture, a part of the company may be different from the rest. Guy Kawasaki has some great advice in this area, “Don’t be afraid to polarize people.” Although he is talking about customers, I think the same can be said for internal talent. Having multiple sub-cultures, or changing it everywhere is going to alienate a percentage of the company. However, the alternative is the company stagnates because it can’t migrate to a culture fostering the innovation required for a new vision.
Joel Spolsky talks about some management styles, and The Identity Management Method seems to gel with what Google and Guy are talking about. Another note from James McGovern articulates the attribute of transparency, and I believe this management style depends on transparency. A culture centered on innovation seems best served by this management style.
It’s safe to say that the most successful companies will cycle through different cultures as they grow, and their industry matures. Those companies that cannot make the multiple transitions will disappear.
Posted by TomRose on February 2, 2006 under Innovation, Web 2.0 |
Well lots of activity on this topic. What is Web 2.0? Perhaps just a way to say we are trying yet another way to better utilize a global communication network. Regardless of the term we put on it, I agree that connecting people, their thoughts, and unleashing our vast stores of information we tend to hoard, is where we should be focused. Strangely enough, isn’t that where we started Web 1.0?
Unfortunately, our capitalistic focus took us down a blind alley as we explored a new media, and that was not all bad. I think everyone learned so much from the train wreck we affectionately call the dot.com era. So here we are again, with significantly more technology, all healed from our wounds obtained in the dot.com bust, and ready for another big push.
Web 2.0 is said to be about connecting people, providing a richer user experience, and I also think it’s about unleashing information such as connecting our cars sensory data to the mechanic without having to take it to the repair shop. Location based information feeds, navigation, entertainment, etc. The list goes on forever, however, all have a direct, and do we dare say it…real value to our how we live our lives.
As I said during the dot.com age, and got beaten for it….it’s not eBusiness its just business. Web 2.0 is not eCommunication, eLife, or ePeople, is just life so lets live it and use technology to make it better. If we focus on that, our capitalist nature should take care of itself. Making money by providing a valued service seems to work regardless of what century we are in.
Tom