Telematique, water and fire.

Return of the Prodigal Blogger

I realize that I haven't been adding posts to the blog for quite a while. It's not that I haven't been working and certainly not that I haven't been writing.

Running a startup is time consuming, but I can now say that we're at the "next phase" of the company, in which everyone is not required to take responsibility for every function. With the enlargement of our engineering group and the establishment of a crack product management team, I actually find myself with time to think about strategy and actions with a time horizon greater than two weeks.

Among my other resolutions, I'll start to post more.

Clone? Split Personality? Confusion.

Over the course of the past week, I've noticed references to Rich Miller about topics I'm likely to write about, but don't remember having posted.  The first thought... Have I been blogging in my sleep?  Am I leaving my short-term memory at the door?

No.  It's an inevitable result of having a common name.  It's happened before, and will certainly happen again.  This time it's Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge.  Rich is a noted technology journalist who's had the good judgement to be interested in the next generation data center.  I've only recently found his site, and enjoy reading it.   It will go on my site's blogroll in the next day or so.


Technorati Tags: utility computing, data center

More on Utility Computing Standards

The conversation about which I wrote has been getting appropriate attention and more people with credentials weighing in.

James Urquhart points to utility computing market's need for "a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers."

To which I say: Amen. He then (correctly, IMHO) questions the ability of the virtual appliance concept by itself to be the answer. I got on a soapbox yesterday regarding a standard representation or description of VM assemblages. Were that available, it would go quite a distance to addressing the problem James points out.

For added goodness, Bert and Simon have commented on the post, summarizing their respective points of view. Simon's comment succinctly sets the context by stating that the creation of a non-proprietary standard and encouraging its adoption through open source availability is "...based upon the assumption that you have an engine with allows for portability between one CSP (common service provider) and another." This is the precondition I wish I'd stated as well as he has.

To return to my point: The engine to which he refers will require an accepted standard of description or, perhaps, of prescription. What's needed is a uniformly understood representation of VM assemblages: the application level components (VMs or physical servers), the network's components and the connections that lash them together as a functioning system. A standard limited only to VM description and representation of individual active units is necessary but not sufficient to meet the goal.

Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: utility computing

Recently, I have been telling anyone who will listen that this nascent utility computing market is still searching for a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers. I like the concept of a virtual appliance, but we need a (non-proprietary) standard, or we need another portability mechanism besides VMs.

Technorati Tags: utility computing, virtualization, standards

Technorati Tags: Standards, Utility computing, virtualization

Email and the Five Conversations

Isabel Wang has an interesting post on her blog in response to Google's announcement of their Postini acquisition.  (BTW: Congrats again, Tim!)  In it, Isabel makes the point that email (like many of the newly arrived interpersonal and group messaging technologies) is a means to an end.  She then references Matt Howard's (and SMBLive's) concept of the 5 Conversations, of which I wasn't aware until now. 

Worth the read and the follow up to 5 Conversations.

isabel wang's blog: Email is not a killer app!

...But email is NOT a killer app (let alone THE killer app)! Instead, what SMBs really want is a coherent, 360 degree solution for managing their front- and back-office operations. As SMBLive CEO Matt Howard puts it, running a business is all about maintaining 5 conversations: you use office productivity apps to organize your own ideas, collaboration platforms to share information with colleagues and partners, transaction and contact management tools to keep track of current vendors and customers, sales/marketing/networking services to connect with new ones...

While email can play a role in these interactions, it's a means rather than an end. A means whose usefulness may one day end. As Dennis Howlett writes on ZDNet: "I see a combination of Twitter and Facebook as having the potential to replace 90% of the email I receive while improving my personal productivity." ...

The Symbiosis of SaaS and Soft Appliances

Phil Wainewright starts out characterizing the packaged software appliance as a competitive offer to SaaS.  But, toward the end of the piece, he opens up the argument to say that "... SaaS vendors shouldn't see software appliances as competition.  Indeed ... managed appliances will probably become part of most SaaS vendor's infrastructure, deployed where it makes sense to handle certain operations on customer sites or otherwise outside of the vendor’s own data centers." 

While this is true, Phil's missed an important point:  SaaS vendors are the direct beneficiaries of "soft appliances", since they are an excellent means of implementing and deploying SaaS on a "virtual data center."  That is, the SaaS provider will employ infrastructure on demand, packaging their multi-tenant offers as soft appliances that can be provisioned as customer demand warrants.  Companies such as 3Tera make a strong case for (and hopefully a good business from) precisely this scenario. 

The bottom line is that SaaS has much to gain from embracing packaged software appliances, as both an infrastructure for on-demand service and as an on-site adjunct to their network-resident services.

» SaaS and the packaged software appliance | Software as Services | ZDNet.com

... Put all of these considerations together and you can see that appliance packaging — especially of open-source platform components — is a way of eliminating a lot of the problems associated with conventional software; but without moving entirely to a vendor-hosted SaaS model. “This is independent of the delivery model,” says Dietzen. “This is about cutting the cost of owning and running the software.”

So there’s a sense in which appliances are not so much a part of the SaaS model as competition for it. The appliance model provides many of the benefits of SaaS without forcing customers to store and access their data outside of the firewall. With a product like Zimbra, where the most intensive use is within the organization in any case, and where integration to other on-premise facilities such as telephony equipment is often important, it is often very difficult to argue for off-premise deployment anyway because that simply adds unnecessary cost and network latency. ...

On the other hand, there are many more applications that run much better off-premise because they involve a lot of interactions beyond the firewall anyway. So I think SaaS vendors shouldn’t see software appliances as competition. Indeed, as I hinted at the outset of this article, managed appliances will probably become a part of most SaaS vendors’ infrastructure, deployed where it makes sense to handle certain operations on customer sites or otherwise outside of the vendor’s own data centers. This assertion is especially credible if you count client-side platforms such as Silverlight, Apollo, Google Gears and so on as part of the managed appliance spectrum.

Technorati Tags: software appliance

Haskell's time has come.

A post in O'Reilly Radar pointed me to the kick-off of an "open book" project regarding Haskell, one of the more notable functional programming (or data flow programming) languages.  My recent conversations with Tim Oren have renewed my interest in data flow / functional programming in support of complex modeling applications.  (Truth be told -- my role as an advisor to Vextec also plays a big part in that renewed interest.)

Real-World Haskell » Blog Archive » Real-world Haskell: it’s time!

Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen are pleased, and frankly, very excited to announce that we’re developing a new book for O’Reilly, on practical Haskell programming. The working title is “Real-World Haskell”. The plan is to cover the major techniques used to write serious, real-world Haskell code, so that programmers can just get to work in the language.

Technorati Tags: Haskell, functional programming, data flow

Safe Data Sharing

If there's been a noticeable lull in the number of posts to this 'blog over the past month, I have a particularly good excuse.

In August I left Univa, where I've been since co-founding it in early 2004, and returned to the Bay Area full time. After two months of mutual due diligence, I have joined Safe Data Sharing Inc. as CEO. SDSi is a startup located here in Silicon Valley, which has operated in "stealth mode" for a little over a year. I am pleased and honored to have Tim Oren join me as the company's CTO, and can't speak highly enough of Arturo Bejar and Scott Loftesness, the other members of the Board.

The company's technologies allow the enterprise to share its sensitive data in ways that eliminate the risks of exposure - inadvertent or intentional. Using multiple patent-pending technologies, SDSi puts data owners in control of how sensitive information is shared, combined, analyzed, or released. At the same time, SDSi datashare technology protects the data such that there is no risk of exposure or breach. We have an incredible basis on which to start and have every reason to believe that the initial pilots of the technology will start before the end of the year.

You'll notice that the fledgeling website includes a blog, which a number of us will be populating with observations and discussion. I encourage you to visit as the company and the website take shape. It's also my intent to continue blogging here at Telematique.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneur

Translucency and Selective Disclosure

Jon Udell has been discussing data and database translucency and selective disclosure in a series of blog posts. He's also been getting a number of interesting responses.

Technorati Tags: Data Protection, Security, Security Incentives

You need to feed the critics.

Friend Tom sent a message over the holiday weekend which referenced the text of a speech given by Bruce Sterling earlier this year. I went back to read it again, since I remembered enjoying it so much the first time. The post is a multi-front assault on the problem of "the Internet of Things", the importance of language (or, rather, the vocabulary used, what what it invokes and what it evokes), and Bruce's take on the timeline that moves us from ThingLinks, through blogjects, to spimes. (No... you go read it for yourself. I can't possibly do it justice.)

It was a better read this time! But what caught me is a sentiment / statement of principle / credo that really resonates as I consider my next endeavors.

...
It's morally wrong to avoid controversies just because you don't want anybody confronting you over what you are doing. There's something snotty about an author who expects only good reviews for his books. The author of an emergent technology is in the same boat. If nobody is dismissing you as hype, then you are not being loud enough. If nobody thinks what you are doing is dangerous, you are doing something that has no power to change the world. You'd better fight it out with words before you fight with laws. You're gonna be in no position to think straight when you suddenly get hauled in front of Congress and confronted for being "evil." You need to feed the critics. Don't feed the crazy ones, but a loyal opposition is hugely valuable.
...

Technorati Tags: blogjects, blogjects, RFID, spimes

Esthr's Blog

It's very nice to see that Esther Dyson has initiated her Release 0.9 blog on ZDNet.