EnjoyTech

Yesterday, Amazon announced a new orchestration service called Simple Workflow Service . I would encourage you to read the announcement on Werner's blog  where he explains the need, rationale, and architecture. The people I spoke to had mixed reactions. One set of people described this as a great idea and were excited that the developers can now focus on writing domain-specific code as opposed to writing plumbing code to orchestrate their actual code. The other set of people felt that this service creates a new cloud lock-in making it difficult for the developers to switch from one cloud to another as well as being able to interoperate at the orchestration level. I believe this is a brilliant idea for a variety of reasons. Orchestration has always been painful. Ask the developers who have been involved in managing task execution across a cluster that required them to code for load balancing, handling exceptions, restarting hung processes, tracking progress etc. This is not a core c...

I find it ridiculous that people are blaming Apple for job creation in China  as opposed to in the US. People are also debating how US might in-source some of these manufacturing jobs to compete with China who has sophisticated manufacturing abilities and large skilled labor force supporting these operations. They are all missing the point. This is a wrong debate. The US lost manufacturing jobs to other countries a long time ago. I find it amusing that people expect the high-tech companies such as Apple to create manufacturing jobs in the US. If Apple were to even consider this option we would not have seen the tremendous success of Apple as a company and its products. What Apple created is an ecosystem of people and companies that are doing amazing things with their platform and their devices. It's a different kind of ecosystem and America should focus on that innovation as opposed to bringing those manufacturing jobs back. On one side we are whining about the loss of manufacturin...

A lot has been said and discussed about RIM's downfall: indecisive leadership, inability to innovate at fast pace, and no clear path to recovery. I don't disagree at all with the analysis and the interpretation of the situation, but I do disagree with the conclusion that many people are drawing and vehemently disagree with their advice to RIM to keep trying to regain the smartphone market share. That train has left the station and RIM doesn't have a chance to catch up, even if they do everything that they could. But RIM may have stumbled upon something that they probably least expected. It's the BlackBerry Messaging, popularly known as BBM. We got to see the power of BBM during the London riots . During my recent trip to India, I firsthand witnessed how much of people's lives depend on BBM. These people were sad, upset, and depressed due to a RIM infrastructure outage. This is a phenomenal success. The recipe behind this success is quite simple: provide free messagi...

The Beatles are timeless and so is music and enterprise software. There's been an ongoing innovation in the music services. iTunes with iPods disrupted the traditional CD business model and in the ever connected cloud world Pandora, Spotify and countless others are challenging the very concept of "owning" music. Spotify gives you access to a wide range of music on all their clients as long as you're a paid subscriber. This is like Netlfix model for music except that there's no ad-supported free Netflix (Spotify is rumored to cap the free version after six months of usage). Pandora also has a similar model but it's a "radio" service. You can't tell Pandora what exactly to play but give preferences and it will find, play, and tune music based on your preference. Pandora is serendipitous and Spotify is spontaneous. One of the challenges with these services is that you only have access to music as long as you pay for it. When you stop using it you do...

A few months back, I was helping a very large customer of ours to help simplify as well as automate their process of trading financial instruments. During one of my many visits to their office, I met a person who was trying to explain to me his job in supporting the people that are involved in this super complex process. I always ask a lot of questions — until they're totally annoyed and ready to kick me out of the room — to get a complete understanding of the business rationale behind whatever they're thriving for and their personal motivation behind it. Something unusual happened at this meeting. Instead of getting into the gory technical details of how they get things done, he chose to tell me a short and simple story. "You know, um.. there's this early morning meeting everyday that Peter goes to with a bunch of other people. They all gather around a large table in a dimly lit conference room with a bunch of printed spreadsheets, a laptop, and a large calculator. Pe...

Photo credit: String Theory by Michael Krigsman The endless succession of failed projects forces one to question why success is elusive, with an extraordinary number of projects tangling themselves in knots. These projects are like a child’s string game run amok: a large, tangled mess that becomes more convoluted and complex by the minute. IT projects fail all the time. Business blames IT, IT blames the system integrator (SI), who then blames the software vendor. After all this blaming and shaming, everyone goes back to work on another project without examining the project management methods and processes that caused the failure. And, so, they fail again. There’s no one definition of design thinking. It’s a mindset and set of values that applies both analytical and creative thinking towards solving a specific problem. Design thinking is about how you think and not what you know; it is about the journey and not the destination. Having followed Michael Krigsman ’s analysis of IT project ...

Netflix similarity map Yesterday, I moderated a couple of panels at the Big Data Cloud event . I have been a keynote speaker, panelist, moderator, and participant for many conferences in the last few years. It has always been a pleasure to see the cloud and big data becoming more and more mainstream. Here are my quick observations and insights from the event: Private cloud getting momentum: As a public cloud proponent I thought I would never have to write this. But lately I have seen more and more interest in private cloud; new start-ups, established cloud vendors, and large legacy vendors are designing private or hybrid cloud solutions. Vendors have recognized that prospects and customers have started to take cloud very seriously but they still have the same concerns what they had few years back: security, moving data to public cloud, and giving up control. I am not interested in the private/public debate (though I do love to mess with fellow clouderati on Twitter on this topic). My ...