Day: May 25, 2005

Networked Communications Predictions

[via Jeff Nolan] CRN has a list of 10 predictions by Hossein Eslambolchi, CTO and CIO of AT&T:

No. 10: Home LANs will proliferate.
No. 9: Knowledge mining will transform the way we do business.
No. 8: Wireless and wired lines will converge — accelerating virtualization.
No. 7: Broadband will be common — leading to the death of locality.
No. 6: e-Collaboration will dominate the workplace — promoting foster next-generation speech recognition.
No. 5: Sensor networks will be everywhere.
No. 4: Wireless Internet will be big — driving mobility.
No. 3: Convergence of communications and applications will become a reality — the network will be the computer.
No. 2: Security is critical.
No. 1: IP will eat up everything.

I like No. 3!

OpenLDAP

[via Jeff Nolan] NewsForge writes that “Mark Taylor [of Sirius IT] believes that OpenLDAP is the catalyst that will finally make open source fully enterprise-ready. And he’s willing to stake his business on it.”

OpenLDAP is the open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, (LDAP), an protocol that programs can use to look up contact information from a server. Taylor asserts that, since businesses are organized around people and resources, OpenLDAP is valuable because it allows open source technology to access those resources and produce useful information.

With OpenLDAP, Taylor believes there will be even closer integration between the different open source projects related to enterprise groupware and utilities. “They will collaborate to ensure the seamless integration between technologies,” Taylor says.

Open Media 100 Nominations

Ross Mayfield has his nominations (which are well-thought out):

The Founding Fathers: industry luminaries who created the vision of open media and continue to shape it.
* Dan Gillmor
* Clay Shirky
* Joi Ito
* Doc Searls
* And yes, Dave Winer

The Tool Smiths: web service entrepreneurs and companies building the open media tools (blogs, social software, wikis, RSS, analytic tools, etc.).
* The Trotts
* Peter Kaminski
* Joshua Schachter
* Stuart Butterfield
* Greg Reinacker

The Trendsetters: the influencers driving and evangelizing the adoption and applications of Open Media.
* Liz Lawley
* John Battelle
* David Weinberger
* Steve Gillmor
* Robert Scoble

The Practitioners: the top bloggers in politics, business, technology, and media.
* Slashdot
* BoingBoing
* Kos
* Jeff Jarvis
* John Battelle

The Enablers: the venture capitalists and investors backing the Open Media Revolution.
* Reid Hoffman
* DFJ
* Omidyar Network
* Venture Blog
* Esther Dyson

Dissolving Business Boundaries

Phil Wainewright writes:

Most of us have a mind’s eye image of businesses as walled citadels, but I recall a discussion with John Seely Brown a while back in which the question was raised, where is the edge of the enterprise? Organizations aren’t like buildings, with walls and roofs. They’re collections of people, many of whom interact with outsiders: legal interacts with attorneys, HR interacts with employment agencies and payroll providers, finance interacts with the bank. Think about that and you realize that the move to SOA is really a matter of computing catching up with where business already is. What SOA does is to make these edge interactions even easier to set up and conduct at all points within the enterprise, dissolving the boundaries in creative new ways.

The other important trend that interlocks with this is the growth in what others call software-as-a-service (and which I prefer to call software-powered services). Consuming other people’s computing becomes much easier and less risky within the context of SOA. But why stop at computing. Why not consume other people’s software-powered business services? As James Governor says, “The more i think about what service oriented architecture means the more i realize loosely coupled has to go beyond lip service. Organizations as much as as architectures must be decoupled, so they can be remixed.” [Thanks to Koranteng for the link and also for so much else to think about].

So the move to SOA is dissolving and reshaping boundaries not only between islands of computing and application functionality, but also between businesses and islands of business activity.

3G Phones Features Wish List

The Mobile Technology Weblog offers inputs form Impaq Groups recently-published MOBILE LIFE 1 research:

1 Mobile coupon redemption
2 Parking meter payment
3 Loyalty cards
4 Season tickets
5 Credit/Debit cards
6 Flight check-in
7 Vending machine payment
8 Retail checkout
9 Marketing communications
10 Using your mobile as a key

For good measure, here is what people do with mobiles today:

1 Voice
2 SMS
3 Switching to silent mode
4 Calculator
5 Taking pictures
6 Surfing WAP sites
7 Using operator portals
8 Mobile search
9 Bluetooth pairing
10 Alert subscriptions

TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Technology Building Blocks

There are a number of building blocks which can be assembled together by ASPs to bootstrap the process of building the SME Services Grid.

1. Applications Grid Infrastructure

ASPs need a centralised computing and storage platform for delivery of applications. This is akin to the Internet OS that Google, Yahoo and MSN have built for enabling them to deliver consumer services, and IBM and Sun are offering to large enterprises for running their applications. This would be built out of commodity server hardware and open-source infrastructure software. It would make it easy to deploy and manage applications as they get deployed on this grid.

Salesforce.com is doing just that with its Multiforce initiative. Tech Beat writes about what Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff calls “the first on-demand operating system.”

Salesforce.com started off as a simple thing. It was software running on the company’s own computers that customers could use to manage their sales forces. By subscribing to Salesforce.com, customers avoided the cost and trouble of buying their own software and computers, setting up a system, and keeping it running. Over the years, Benioff added more capabilities, including tools that clients could use to customize their service and that independent software outfits could use to build related applications. That helped Salesforce.com round up over 13,900 customers with 227,000 individual subscribers.

Multiforce takes things a big step further. The technology, which is to be introduced in June, turns Salesforce.com into a platform upon which customers can run any number of on-demand applications–all of which run on its farm of computers and tap into one gigantic database. Computer users can essentially live their professional lives in the Salesforce.com interface and click back and forth between their most-used programs. This positions Salesforce.com as the counterpart in the online world to the role Microsoft plays in the PC world.

Siebel has lined up its Universal Application Network initiative to counter Multiforce, according to InfoWorld. UAN is the moniker for Siebel’s integration platform, which, according to Keith Raffel, group vice president of products at Siebel CRM OnDemand, does more than just connect applications to the Siebel infrastructure. UAN offers prebuilt connections to applications that can be reused and will speed deployment.

IBM too is working on its own platform. eWeek writes: IBM and a group of ISVs (independent software vendors) including Seibel Systems Inc., Intacct Corp., Concur Technology Inc., Employease Inc., Peopleclick Inc., and Ultimate Software Group Inc., have formed what’s informally referred to as the IBM SaaS (Software as a Service) Partner Council to develop and deploy a model that enables users to pick and chose software that is pre-configured and pre-integrated, and available on demand. IBM’s work with the model boils down to the development of an architecture that provides a common framework for application integration. The pre-configured building blocks from hosted vendors would sit on top of that platform, and users would have the ability to choose capabilities at will, for whatever length of time that capability is needed.

These applications grids are targeted at ISVs in the developed markets and the mid-market enterprises. SMEs in Emerging Markets (SMEEMs) need their own equivalent platform at much more affordable price points.

Tomorrow: Technology Building Blocks (continued)

Continue reading TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Technology Building Blocks