EnjoyTech

One of the biggest revelations to me from my trip to CES is that the ubiquitous computing, once an academic concept, has finally arrived. The data, voice, device, and display convergence is evident from the products that I saw. There has been wide coverage of CES by many bloggers who track consumer technology. However, as a strategist and an enterprise software blogger, I have keen interest in assessing the impact of this ubiquitous convergence in consumer technology on enterprise software. I believe that the consumers will soon start expecting the ubiquitous experience in everything that they touch and interact with ranging from their coffee cups to the cars and everything in between. This effect is going to be even more pronounced amongst millennial who grew up digitally and are entering into the workforce with an expectation of instant gratification. The mobile phone revolution was consumer-driven at large and Apple made the Smartphone category popular and appealing to non-enterpris...

There are strong synergies between Open Source Software (OSS) and cloud computing. The cloud makes it a great platform on which OSS business models ranging from powering the cloud to offer OSS as SaaS can flourish. There are many issues around licenses and IP indemnification and discussion around commercial open source software strategy to support progressive OSS business models. I do see the cloud computing as a catalyst in innovating OSS business models. Powering the cloud: OSS can power the cloud infrastructure similarly as it has been powering the on-premise infrastructure to let cloud vendors minimize the TCO. Not so discussed benefit of the OSS for cloud is the use of core algorithms such as MapReduce and Google Protocol Buffer that are core to the parallel computing and lightweight data exchange. There are hundreds of other open (source) standards and algorithms that are a perfect fit for powering the cloud. OSS lifecycle management: There is a disconnect between the source...

Nick has a long post about Tim O'Reilly not getting the cloud . He questions Tim's assumptions on Web 2.0, network effects, power laws, and cloud computing . Both of them have good points. O'Reilly comments on the cloud in the context of network effects: "Cloud computing, at least in the sense that Hugh seems to be using the term, as a synonym for the infrastructure level of the cloud as best exemplified by Amazon S3 and EC2, doesn't have this kind of dynamic." Nick argues: "The network effect is indeed an important force shaping business online, and O'Reilly is right to remind us of that fact. But he's wrong to suggest that the network effect is the only or the most powerful means of achieving superior market share or profitability online or that it will be the defining formative factor for cloud computing." Both of them also argue about applying power laws to the cloud computing. I am with Nick on the power laws but strongly disagree with ...

Recently Google published the Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) numbers of their data centers. PUE is defined as a ratio of the total power consumed by a data center to the power consumed by the IT equipments of the facility. Google's data centers' PUE ranges from 1.1 to 1.3 which is quite impressive. Though it is unclear why all the data centers have slightly different PUE. Are they designed differently or are they all not tuned to improve for the energy efficiency? In any case I am glad to see that Google is committed to the Green Grid initiative and is making the measurement data and method publicly available. This should encourage other organizations to improve the energy performance of their data centers. The energy efficiency of a data center can be classified into three main categories: 1. Efficiency of the facility: The PUE is designed to measure this kind of efficiency that is based on how a facility that hosts a data center is designed such as its physical location, la...

Many of you would have read the Google Chrome comic-strip and also would have test driven the browser. I have been following few blog posts that have been discussing the technical and business impact but let's take a moment and look at some of the fundamental architectural design principles behind this browser and its impact on the ecosystem of web developers. Embrace uncertainty and chaos: Google does not expect people to play nice. There are billions of pages with unique code and rendering all of them perfectly is not what Google is after. Instead Chrome puts people in charge of shutting down pages (applications) that do not behave. Empowering people to pick what they want and allow them to filter out the bad experience is a great design approach. Support the journey from pages to applications to the cloud: Google embraced the fact that the web is transitioning from pages to applications. Google took an application-centric approach to design the core architecture of Chrome an...