EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

Securing Web Services – NIST’s Perspective

There are a couple of areas related to web services and having a service oriented architecture that seem to come up as concerns again and again, those are governance and security. I’ve written about the governance issue before, but came across the NIST Guide to Secure Web Services.

In the introduction it states:

The security challenges presented by the Web services approach are formidable and unavoidable. Many of the features that make Web services attractive, including greater accessibility of data, dynamic application-to-application connections, and relative autonomy (lack of human intervention) are at odds with traditional security models and controls.”

If you’re in the process of architecting solutions around web services, it appears to be worth a review. It expects a minimal level of understanding of web services, and if nothing else provides a long list of references, risks and definitions in its appendices, to further your understanding.

Nanotechnology – the Congressional Report

I’ve written in the past about nanotechnology and the disruptive nature it will have to change the entire economy. Sometimes I think back on the amount of change that took place in the 20th century and how change accelerated from what was common in the 19th and wonder what will cause that kind of acceleration of change in the 21st century nanotechnology is at the top of the list.

This report: Nanotechnology: The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think is well worth the read. It starts out with an introduction to what nanotechnology is and then rapidly moves into a discussion of the implications. They effectively describe the breadth of change that is enabled by Nanotechnology and how it could move us into an economy based on abundance instead of scarcity, at least in some areas.

Nanotechnology Article – A Good Tutorial

One of my colleagues circulated this link to a good comprehensive nanotechnology article and I thought I would pass it along. The article does a great job of conveying the importance of nanotechnologies in our future as well as some of its potential drawbacks, and it does so in an interesting, straight forward and business oriented way. If you are interested in the future and emerging technologies then reading this article will be time well spent.

For reference purposes, here is the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Study mentioned in the article, "Nanotechnology: The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think.”

Surreptitious Social Networking

What I suppose we can call surreptitious social networking has been quietly evolving over the past few years. I think it started with private sites like Amazon.com. It’s where, based on what a site experiences from users, invisible groups with similar interests are dynamically formed and, based on such a group’s interests, recommendations to individual members are made. Like when Amazon recommends a particular book because other users with similar interests purchased one. With Amazon you are part of the process but remain unaware because it is a byproduct of your normal activities.

The general concept behind this surreptitious social networking is at work in a number of commercial web sites other than Amazon (both Google and Ebay use a form of it), so it’s no surprise that a tool to assist us with our Web browsing choices could be based on the concept as well. A recent article about Garrett Camp and StumbleUpon, a tool that does just that captured my interest. It isn’t completely surreptitious but I like the idea of being proactive in the ongoing construction of my profile. The use of and a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down as a primary selection mechanism seems like the right answer to me.

Could this sort of thing help impose a little context on all that content? Could this be a peek at the future for more than just the Web? What about features in software products, navigation systems and other tools that would benefit from simplified customization?

It’s easy to see a bright future for the evolution of these processes, and though I see nothing nefarious at work today, I worry that the automatic filtering of information may not always be a good thing.

Google Phone Launch Imminent?

Rumors of a Google phone have been around for a while. I even wrote something about it 6 months ago. There have also been a number of supporting stories in the press, over the last several months, like this and this; but nothing as bold as this one that I just read or this one positing a launch in just 2 weeks. While it is tantalizing it seems unlikely that the launch of Google’s first phone would happen within the next two weeks, but I am not ready to rule it out.

With all of the attention Google has been giving to wireless bandwidth auctions and mobile solutions (like mobile Maps, mobile YouTube and mobile Gmail), I think that it is likely that Google phones will begin to show up sooner rather than later. It would be fitting if, after the recent iPhone hype filled extravaganza of a launch, Google managed to pull-it-off hype free; as is its way.

Breaking Up (Applications) Is Hard To Do

In a blog entry earlier on the book Smart (Enough) Systems, it mentioned:

For a long time developers have been talking about separating out the business logic from the user interface. With SOA that has become even more prevalent. As we begin to deploy industry based frameworks and have rules engines and other tools that separate out the decisions from the process flow, we could easily get to a state where there are whole teams of experts leveraged within the enterprise. The skill sets would be made up of the user interface (the domain of the designer), the process (the domain of the developer and process modeler) and the business rules (the domain of business/industry experts) and possibly many more. With Labor Day on the horizon, I thought I’d revisit this implication.

The kind of people that will be required to support this separation will have a different background and perspective than those most organizations have today. Software companies are developing special tools for the designer vs. the developer. I’ve written before about the separation of module coding from assembly and the differences between the tools and expertise needed. If we separate out the business decision logic from the process we’ll see another stratification of specialization and leverage (having its own language and tools). I can see this happening what Microsoft is doing with WF as well as many other vendors.

It will be interesting to see if small businesses will take advantage of this first (via SaaS) or if it will take larger organizations to be able to optimize the workforce in this fashion.

Smart (Enough) Systems

I am in the process of reading Smart (enough) Systems (James Taylor, one of the authors, gave me a copy) and am finding it to reinforce much of my thinking about the role of automation and overcoming the information overload that all organizations will be (are) facing.

The focus of the book is moving from a data or system centric perspective to a decision centric approach. The author’s perspective is that bringing Enterprise Decision Management into the business processes and IT architectures are even more critical as organizations plan on deploying ubiquitous computing techniques and Service Oriented Architectures. The more information we gather, the greater use of automated (facilitated) decision making will be required, if you want to take advantage of all the data and still be agile and reduce latency. This book focuses on turning this rapidly changing environment and massive information flow into a strategic advantage.

They’ve even gone so far as to state what they think organizations need to do, so I’ll add my perspective:

1. Remove decisions from applications – I think I’ll write a whole separate blog entry on what this means to me.
2. Analyze decisions potential for improvement – Once you have them separate you can begin to “play” with them in ways that were just too slow and risky before.
3. Automate key operations decisions – This book points out something that we probably don’t think about; There are many more decisions that could be automated if we wanted to do so.
4. Apply proactive decision analytics – There is an ever increasing amount of metadata being gathered (or derived) that we can incorporate into an automated decision making process.
5. Give business users control – This is one of the areas that fits with (1) above - IMHO. Once you’ve separated the decisions from the code, making improvements is no longer the sole domain of the developers.
6. Keep it simple as “intelligence” increases - Simplicity is key to building context and visibility.
7. Focus on production performance requirements – If automated decision making gets in the way or is slower than the old approach it may not matter how much “better” it is.
8. Manage change and evolve – We live in a world of ever increasing complexity. Automated decision making can’t calcify today’s decisions into the way things have to me; It should make change easier – not harder.

The book goes on to discuss areas that should be maximized (variability, compliance, straight-through processing, unattended operations, self-service, personalization) and minimized (latency, risk) as part of optimizing decisions.

The book’s format is divided into two sections: the first for business and technical readers, the last for technologists.

It also reinforces views I’ve expressed before of the importance of decision making approaches that build context and focus people’s attention on unusual situations will significantly improve an organizations use of its personnel’s insight.

Mesh Architecture For Processor Chips

When it comes to modern processor chips, multicore chips are in. First there were dual cores, then quads and I guess they will keep doubling until they reach the point of diminishing returns. According to this article about a new mesh architecture for multicore chips; the central bus architecture around which current multicore chips are built will hit the point of diminishing returns at 16 cores on a single chip. It appears that the current architecture simply won’t scale. With the industry hoping to double cores per chip every 18 months, and given that quads are already out there, that gives us just one more generation before we hit the wall. As indicated in the above link, Tilera appears to be the first company to ship a mesh architecture multicore chip. With 64 processors it leisurely cruises past the 16 processor central bus wall mentioned above.

When it comes to fabricating massively multicore chips the idea of a mesh architecture isn’t new. Intel even has a mesh based 80-core prototype; one that’s been in the news since February. If only software were as far along as processor hardware, maybe we could actually take advantage of all this massive parallelism. Tilera does recognize the barriers that today’s software design, techniques and tools present for massively parallel computers and takes measures to address those issues for its customers but as we move into more and more parallelism, particularly on personal computers, don’t we need to find a whole new approach to software design and development? Or will the decades of legacy software continue to hold us back?

All the attention to software, as it relates to massive parallelism, is interesting but not new, or breakthrough. While we can certainly benefit from increasing processor cores and slicing and dicing problems into sub-problems (from a software development standpoint), the real leap will come when we have a novel approach to software design and development that lets the developer focus on the problem at hand and not the nuances of engaging parallel processors to solve it.

What is an Application in an SOA Based Enterprise?

I was talking with some folks the other day about an effort to create an enterprise architecture that is SOA based. We were discussing the various services that would be supported within the enterprise and some of the folks kept using the term “application" when they meant service, as well as when they we discussing the end user interface.

I’ve mentioned my thoughts around composite applications (Microsoft folks are generally calling these OBAs). In the current “wild west” approach to composite applications and SOA (in most organizations); I really begin to wonder about using “application” at all. As organizations define a “real” SOA enterprise architecture, much of the value will be delivered by assemblies on top of services, not silo-ed applications. Maybe a software congress or congregation would be a more accurate term – just kidding.

Since I work in a service organization, it’s probably not surprising that I’m thinking about it this way.

There is a shift underway in thinking about how value is delivered, using software. How do you talk with business leaders about this issue and not make their head spin? Since only the outermost layer is what they see, we might be stuck with application, the rest is detail.

What can Business Learn From the Military About Being Network centric?

I was looking at some of the material available around Network Centric Warfare, and found much of the material developed was equally applicable to business. It reminded me of looking at The Art of War and how it was rediscovered by business in the 1990s.

This booklet that seems to have many of the foundational tenets is a good place to start. In the preface of Understanding Information Age Warfare there is a quote that could kick off any strategic planning session in business:

Fortunately, we are not alone. Organizations in every competitive space and individuals in every area of human endeavor are grappling with the relentless demands of our age. In the private sector, Darwinian principles are ruthlessly at work. Organizational genetics are producing mutations that are being mercilessly tested in the marketplace. Evolution is about the adaptation of the species through competitive selection. Individual organisms are not expected to adapt; rather those organisms that survive pass on their proven or adapted genetic material to the next generation.

As organizations think about the use of mobile devices and the redefinition of the edge of the enterprise and the use of the information generated, the tenets described in these articles are applicable:

• Tenet 1: A robustly networked force improves information sharing
• Tenet 2: Information sharing and collaboration enhance the quality of information and shared situational awareness.
• Tenet 3: Shared situational awareness enables self-synchronization
• Tenet 4: These, in turn, dramatically increase mission effectiveness

All of these focus on the concepts of collaboration and shared context. There are some organizational behavior changes that will be required; since much of the benefit of these efforts is based on the concept of Information is Power (not the hording of information, but the sharing of it). We’re not talking about web 2.0 collaboration anymore.

There are also some themes described that need to be thought through as part of the transformation:

• The shift in focus from the platform to the network
• The shift from viewing actors as independent to viewing them as part of a continuously adapting ecosystem
• The importance of making strategic choices to adapt or even survive in such changing ecosystems.

If there was one thing I’d add is: removing people from processes that don’t require their involvement, but I’ve mentioned that one before

The iPhone Gets Ready For Its European Debut

Have I mentioned that I love my iPhone? Having had a number of converged computer/phone devices over the past several years I can honestly say that this is the first one that I enjoy using. I can't put my finger on why, but I use it more often and in more places too. Unlike similar devices I've had, the iPhone has left me angst free.

No one really expected the iPhone to live up to the hype (I think it represented a historical hype high-water mark) but there were also some unexpected blemishes that popped up once it got into the hands of the public. For instance, it bothers me that it doesn’t support Bluetooth stereo headphones and that it can be a little on the slow side when accessing web sites via AT&T's 2.5G Edge; but given how well everything else works those two big issues fade deep into the background for me. Some of the issues that seem important to my colleagues, like the lack of a mobile Outlook client, don’t really matter to me. I consider my iPhone a personal assistant, not a business assistant and, unlike my business assistant, my iPhone is with me 24/7. When it comes right down to it, I really don’t like to mix business and personal things.

So far, the US is the only place that you can get an iPhone but Apple has been negotiating with European carriers in a bid to offer iPhones in Europe later this year. Rumors in the press suggest that, at least initially, three European carriers will offer them. The named carriers and countries are T-Mobile in Germany, O2 in the UK and Orange in France. I don’t know what this means for the rest of Europe but I suspect that other European countries will follow. Since the US launch successfully burst the iPhone hype bubble, it will be interesting to see how much fanfare will accompany the launch in Europe.

Data is Everywhere but Context is Rare

We were doing an exercise this week to look at problems differently. Part of it was to look at current trends and determine what is going to be abundant and what effect that has on our thinking. So for example going out a decade or so, there will be something like 16 times as much compute capacity as we have today (for a similar cost). There should be about 500 times as much storage capacity.

On the other hand, there are some things that will still be rare. I’ve written before about the fixed nature of human attention. Another constraint that is likely to be fixed is the context of the information. With tiny “smart” devices, processors and sensors being imbedded in everything we’ll be wading in information. Having enough context to consume it effectively will always be tough.

Context is made up of the metadata about the data and the result of weaving it together into an effective presentation. This process seems like an area that is under-addressed in the current mania around web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. Looking at a situation from the implications of scarcity and abundance can shift your thinking and hopefully result in some innovative solutions.

The Sky Is Turning Blue Over Open-source

A ruling this past Friday afternoon, in a U.S. District Court, may go a long way toward improving the future fortunes of Linux while SCO may never be quite the same. While open-source advocates rejoiced, SCO quickly lost 72% of its stock value. There are definitely winners and losers in this.

The court asserted that the rightful owner of the UNIX copyright is Novell. Because of Novell’s position as an open-source advocate this clears a partial path through what has lately become a thick open-source legal jungle. Perhaps the elimination of this major lawsuit will mark an increase in the corporate uptake of open-source solutions. While caveats continue to abound, bold moves seem increasingly overdue.

A Whole Earth Photo Alblum

If you could stitch together all of the photographs on the Internet, how much of the world would you be able to view? Several years ago I was thinking about this very topic and what metadata you would need to store with each photo. I came up with latitude, longitude, altitude, heading and angle of elevation. I like to think of it as extended geotagging. Other useful information such as lens specification, date and time are already in place on many photographs. While most of the photographs on the Internet currently lack the detailed location information there are already enough pictures out there to cover popular destinations fairly well.

If you want to see what I mean, check out Google Images. Just type in the name of a popular destination and look at all the pictures that you get. The "Taj Mahal" has about 210,000 images, "Giza Pyramid" has 23,000 and "Café Du Monde" has 310,000. Now think about all of the nearby images not counted here, different points-of-view that were taken in the general vicinity but not tagged as such, and you get an idea of how well covered the area would be. If properly geotagged these images could be geographically connected to the adjacent, more popular, images. Of course, many of those pictures will have unwanted items like people and cars but digital magic could ultimately handle that as well.

While the necessary metadata may be missing from the Internet’s chaotic image collection at this point, that may change as GPS chips and electronic compass chips begin to gain popularity in cell phones and digital cameras. Once we have a large collection of geotagged images we will still have lots of holes, but that’s ok. There will always be places people don’t photograph or don’t go; but the popular places will get filled in fairly quickly. With thorough geotagging as a first step we can move on to the second hurdle.

That second hurtle is the software. The key to successfully putting together a patchwork of photos is scaling, color matching and seamless photo-stitching software. In order to be useful in this grand photo stitching scheme, the solution would also need to be completely automated and operate on-the-fly. I found this article about software that can erase unwanted elements from photos and discovered that it may have many of the inner workings necessary to create a smooth looking photo from such a patchwork collection (although that isn’t exactly its intended purpose). The kinds of techniques used by this software are the kinds of things that could make stitched images look seamless, even when cobbled together from collections of Internet photo snippets. An added bonus is the software’s ability to remove unwanted elements from the resulting image (like cars, buses and recognizable people). In the end you do have to ask how real this cobbled together software enhanced image is, but does that really matter here?

While this Whole Earth Photo Album may seem a little far fetched now, it could happen; and some of your photos could be part of it - sometimes.

The Apple Effect

Apple, Inc., the company responsible for the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, Mac mini and iMac continues to fascinate the computer industry and attract the attention of the press. The press, no doubt, has recent fond memories of the iPhone's extraordinary hype-fest.

Apple's ability to grab hold of the press's attention has evolved over the years as has the company's charisma (which appears to be inexorably linked to Steve Jobs, one of its founders). With a zeal far beyond that which Ron Popeil could muster in a 1970's TV commercial, Jobs is Apple's master pitchman and visionary – he continues to be just what the doctor ordered. Apple's deafening silence during the Jobs-less years (the period when Jobs and Apple were going their separate ways) ended with Jobs' re-emergence as interim CEO at Apple, in 1997. Jobs' value to the company was clearly discernable ten years ago when he put the deal in motion for Microsoft to invest $150 million into re-forming his foundering company. For Apple, life began anew.

Apple's current run-up most noticeably began in January, 2001 with the introduction of iTunes. It was followed shortly, in October 2001, by the iPod. The iPod was an innocent enough toy tossed into an emerging but anemic market. It was not by mistake or coincidence that Apple ultimately was able to expand and dominate that market or that the iPod ultimately became the launch pad for the Apple we know today.

So here we are, looking at an Apple whose stock price has increased by more than a factor of 10 since 2003. Some may argue that a large percentage of that run-up is attributable to the hype of the iPhone, and I would partially agree with them, but I think that the introduction of Apple's newest iMac may be a signal of real growth that Apple has quietly booked over the last couple of years. In its third quarter, Apple sold 634,000 desktop computers for a revenue of almost $1 billion and 1,130,000 portables for a revenue of $1.6 billion. That's not much by Windows PC standards but it is a high growth figure for Apple (over 30% higher than the same quarter last year).

As we move into an age where simplification is becoming a necessity, we shouldn't sell Apple's stylish simplicity and ease of use short. But there's something else about Apple's products of late, something about the way they look and feel; something that quietly says "buy me and take me home" in my neighborhood, newly transitioned Apple households have been popping up like mushrooms, one iMac at a time.

Will the new iMac' lower price and slimmer package continue to win converts and increase sales? I don' know but I sure could use one in my kitchen.

Downturn In Second Life’s Economy

Second Life's crashing economy brings to mind a blog article, "Second Life Hype", that I wrote this past April. The following quote is from that blog article.

...If we want to look at the potential for crime in a virtual world, shouldn't we look at artificial economies; particularly when they have connections to our real economy? In a virtual world, do we need safeguards akin to those used in national monetary and banking systems? Safeguards that protect virtual dollars from real world dangers like insider manipulation, counterfeiting, theft and inflation? What will be the impact on a real participant's real world worth when a virtual economy crashes or the virtual world itself comes to an end? Perhaps Linden Lab should have invited the SEC to have a look at Second Life as well...

My readers have, no doubt, observed that I am not a fan of Second Life; in particular I don't like the hype machine that tends to make a habit of overstating its relevance. Even now I have to wonder whether there is really a growing problem with Second Life’s economy. It rings true enough but consider this, in an environment where even bad publicity is good, could this be just another way to move the needle on the Second Life hype meter? With all the attention I’m giving this, am I too just becoming part of the problem?

Could energy efficiency play an increasing role in large hosting service deals?

Now that the US EPA is stepping in and talking about data centre efficiency, it makes me wonder when this will become an issue in hosting contracts??? Their report to congress shows that the IT industry power consumption is growing at a tremendous rate.

It is estimated that this sector consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006 (1.5 percent of total electricity consumption) for a total electricity cost of about $4.5 billion. This estimated level of electricity consumption is more than the electricity consumed by the nation’s color televisions and similar to the amount of electricity consumed by approximately 5.8 million average U.S. households (or about five percent of the total housing stock). Federal servers and data centers alone account for approximately 6 billion kWh (10 percent) of this electricity use, for a total electricity cost of about $450 million annually.

The article also states:
“If current trends continue, this demand would rise to 12 GW by 2011, which would require an additional 10 power plants.” And this is just for the United States.

With some relatively minor changes in the way current and future servers are used, the EPA estimates that the country could make a big, quick dent in energy usage. In the "best practice" scenario that EPA has defined, if every data center in the country and every server was designed and deployed with the most energy-efficient technologies available today, we might actually get on a declining usage curve, compressing electricity usage to 45 billion kilowatt-hours.

From the EPA Executive Summary Report on Data Centre Efficiency.

Looks like the Greening of IT should and will be a business issue for the consumer and the supplier of IT services.

Operational Automation will Always Win Out in the End

When I think about the current discussion about moving work off-shore I think of it as a cost saving tactic that will happen, but will eventually be overcome by events. The following diagram is how I think about it:

Having an on-site workforce is expensive and will continue to go up over time (inflation). You can find low cost locations. They start out low, but inflationary pressures (supply and demand) will force them up too. Once they pass the price point of another location, those resources will join into the mix as well. The management of this workforce will become more and more complex until a point is reached where the value generated is not worth the communications issues or other complexities and the environment stabilizes.

Automation on the other hand starts out as being very expensive to implement, but its costs continue to lower over time. It should result in higher quality as well. There are inflationary pressures for automation, but they’re offset in larger organizations by being able to leverage the techniques across a wider base for a relatively minor additional investment.

One perspective of this is that when I am saying “I am only human”, I’m really talking about how creative humans are. As an organization implements a more standardized and stable environment (automated), the need for creativity changes to focus on optimization and problem solving for unusual events. We’ll always need people to come up with new ideas and solutions, but it will be a different kind of role than what most individuals in an organization perform today.

I was talking with Randy Mears about this and he agreed that automation eventually will win out in areas that can be effectively automated, but many times the initial attempts are done poorly or for the wrong reasons. A great example of this is interactive voice response (e.g., press 1 for technical support). These can be some of the most frustrating man-machine interfaces we encounter on a regular basis. The drive for a lower costs solution is lowering the customer service bar to the point where this kind of service is almost an expectation. They’ve effectively translated their support costs into taking up our time navigating their bureaucracy – a time honored approach. With that said, IVR can provide me with information (e.g., bank balance) that would be cost prohibitive to provide, compared to almost any other means, on a large scale in a timely fashion.

FCC Says No To Half Of Google’s Wireless Auction Conditions

Over the past couple of weeks I have written about Google looking into getting into the wireless airwaves business. Google’s interest and willingness to spend $4.6 billion to purchase bandwidth in the 700MHz had a catch; four consumer and small-business oriented provisions needed to be included in the auction rules to guarantee Google’s participation. In the final FCC announcement on the topic, released on July 31st, only two of Google’s four provisions were included.

For those of us hoping that this new bandwidth would open the door to real competition in wireless communications, I think we got part of that wish, device and software independence. The provisions that would have opened the door for start-ups to compete with the big communication companies (by forcing the big players to open their networks) didn’t make it, and that’s a real disappointment.

Still, I have to ask, had Google not entered the fray, would the consumer have gotten anything? Just in case I haven’t said this before, I’ll say it now; thank you Google.

Will WiMax finally put the Broadband over Power Line dog to bed?

Now that the spectrum auctions are looming in the US and elsewhere, it looks like WiMAX is finally starting to get some momentum. Sprint is already talking about a 4G network for mobile devices based on WiMAX. It makes me wonder about the future of Broadband over PowerLines.

BPL has a tiny marketshare (0.008% ??) of US Internet access and appears to be declining. WiMax appears to be on the rise. It is aimed at creating Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WIMAX). A technology aimed at providing wireless data over long distances.

It allows a user to browse the Internet on a laptop computer over a wide geographic range, without physically connecting the laptop to a wall jack (a last mile technology). The name WiMAX was created by the WiMAX Forum, which was formed in June 2001 to promote conformance and interoperability of the standard (IEEE 802.16). The WiMAX Forum now lists over 350 WiMAX trials and deployments.

Although WiMAX may not be applicable to all areas, it has a wide coverage area (covering many kilometers) when compared to other wireless technologies (Wi-Fi). This wide coverage and reduced infrastructure requirement will significantly reduce the market for BPL. In fixed applications (using directional antennas, if allowed by the FCC), its range could be quite extensive. WiMAX also does not suffer from the HF spectrum noise problems that some of the BPL installations have caused.