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

Color E-paper Coming Soon, but Will It be Greener??

I was reading IEEE Computer and they had an article E-paper Soon to be in Living Color; based on the description we should have commercial products by 2010.

So far the Amazon Kindle and the Sony book reader are based on a foundation of technology that only produces a black-and-white image. E Ink, a leading company in the e-paper space has been refining the ingredients, the electronics, and the mechanics of their existing products. In recent months the company has developed ultra-bright inks that reflect 47 percent of ambient light, a significant improvement over the 35 to 40 percent in existing E Ink black-and-white displays. Higher reflectivity versions should go into commercial products in about two years. At that point color filters can be added and the pixels will still be visible.

E-paper has the advantage over normal computer displays in that they only require power during the transition from one image to another and the ability to work well in direct sunlight - like paper. Their downfall is in their ability to display moving images.

With wireless techniques, a more mobile workforce and an ever increasing stream of content to the enterprise, it does make me wonder what role this technology can play in business. If we think of it having the permanence of a computer display, it should be a greener solution than the printed report. But under what circumstances would I use it? I have a phone or a computer display with me almost all the time, so I'm not sure the case is there for personal use.

In fixed locations for advertisements and other solutions with relatively little change, that can be consumed by the public, I can see advantages, environmentally and otherwise. I could also see e-paper solutions used when the overhead of a general purpose computer would be overkill.

Innovation or innovation

Recently, there was a blog entry about patents, and oftentimes, innovation and patents are used in the same sentence. I want to reflect on some notion regarding innovation. There are two ways to look at innovation: the breakthrough-type of ideas that create new markets, and the incremental improvement of existing. We refer to the first one as "Innovation" (upper case and the latter one as "innovation" (lower case).

Now that begs the questions: are we currently in an age of Innovation or an age of innovation in Information Technology (IT)? The answer, as a consultant would say, is "It depends."

So, what does it depend on? First of all, it depends on the maturity of the specific technology, and second, it depends on the specific stage of interest in the consumers of the technology. Let's look at the first item: the maturity of the technology. As we all concur, technologies in the mainframe, midrange, and software area in general are very mature technologies and at this point in time, most of the enhancements are in the "innovation" category. As an example, virtualization as a server technology has been around in the mainframe space since the introduction of logical partitions (LPAR) around 1990.  For newer developments in the IT space such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the maturity is at different levels, and there is still a mix between "Innovation" and "innovation".  Specifically, several key concepts are present, acceptance is growing, and some implementation- and deployment-specific technologies are maturing.

Overall, it seems that we are in an age of "innovation" for IT, as we are in the process of maturing several key concepts into fully deployable technologies.

Is there better power out there? What role will IT play?

Energy is the lifeblood of the economy and the British Thermal Unit (BTU) is the standard measure for the energy we use to heat our homes, travel to work, run our factories, power communications, produce foods, and power our computers. Information technology (IT) plays an ever increasing role relating to energy, whether it is helping to locate, develop, produce, transport, or even consume energy.

Current BTU's

According to the Energy Information Administration, energy from all renewable sources represented only about 9% of the nearly 100 quadrillion btu's consumed in the U.S. in 2006 (the latest year for which we have statistics). Add another 8% for nuclear and that leaves 83% from fossil fuel sources.  Not all fossil fuels impact the environment equally.  CO₂ emissions for direct consumption by each of the major sources are:

Natural Gas ~118 Lbs per million BTU

Fuel Oil ~190 Lbs. per million BTU

Coal ~210 Lbs. per million BTU

And consuming this energy in the form of electricity generated from fossil fuels creates substantially more CO₂ due to conversion and transmission inefficiencies.

Electricity from natural gas = ~388 Lbs. per million BTU

Electricity from oil = ~628 Lbs. per million BTU

Electricity from coal = ~694 Lbs. per million BTU

One problem facing the energy industry is that the cleaner fuels are ever more difficult to locate and produce. Information technology in the form of seismic analysis, visualization, modeling and simulation play a critical role in finding the deeper pockets of cleaner natural gas. And information technology is instrumental to economically producing the "alternative fossil fuels" such as oil shale and tar sands. Because fossil fuel will play a key role in powering the world, information technology plays a key role in bringing relatively cleaner BTU's to the market.

Better BTU's

Expansion beyond the 9% of energy from renewable sources and 8% from nuclear must take place if we are to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Biofuels generated from organic matter will play a key role in our mobile energy picture. Electricity from wind, solar, surf, tides, geothermal, hydro and other renewable sources will all play an expanded role in our energy future. These renewable sources also require copious amounts of information technology for research and development, modeling and simulation, citing, production management and integration. IT for "Better BTU's" will accelerate our use of renewable energy and power our path to ecologically sound energy independence.

Best BTU's

The best BTU is the one you never use. Energy loss due to conversion inefficiency, heat and leakage can consume up to 90 percent of the total energy within the resource. For a typical industrial pumping system the losses at each stage of the process goes like this:

Power plant losses - 70%

Transmission and distribution losses - 9%

Motor losses - 10%

Drivetrain losses 2%

Pump losses 25%

Throttle losses 33%

Pipe losses 20%

In this model (similar to what it takes to cool a data center) 100 units of fuel energy in results in 9.5 units of energy out. So when you think backward from downstream to upstream in a typical process, saving one unit of energy in the data centre may result in eliminating 10 units of resource energy. Understanding a business's application portfolio from a number of dimensions (value, cost, power consumed) will be a critical factor in ensuring that energy is used effectively.

There is Better and There is Better...

In reading Ray Kurzweil's article Making the World A Billion Times Better, we need to start asking ourselves: where is technology leading us to. Think about a mobile phone for instance. When the first mobile phone call was made in 1973, the phone weighed in at 2.2 pounds! Now 3 oz is the new norm! At the same time, however, the phones got smaller and smaller, thereby reducing the keypad to sizes that are only useable by teenagers or people with small fingers. This technology advance is an improvement from a size (i.e. weight) perspective, but not necessarily from a size perspective...is better really better?

Now let's consider the data center space. Virtualization is a buzzword that has been around for a while, and we are seeing some very mature technology in this space. Virtualization is good from the perspective that we are getting better utilization out of the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and that we are reducing the overall footprint of that infrastructure. However, through denser components (fueled in part by Moore's Law), there is an increased need for power (measure per square foot) in the data center. This need for power drives data center modernization, upgrade, or even new data center designs. All these changes impact the savings and benefits derived from virtualization to begin with...is better really better?

On a philosophical note...there are two sides to a coin. With that in mind, technological advances at times are made by taking two steps forward and one back.  But overall, there is progress in the right direction. As for the mobile phones, the introduction of virtual key boards and voice recognition ease the issue of keyboard size. As for data centers: new design principles will allow IT organization to more optimally use the latest and greatest technologies in order to integrate business and IT. All in all, better is better...

AI vs. the Expert

Back in the early 90s I used to work in an Artificial Intelligence group within EDS. We used to joke around that if we could actually do the task at hand, it can't be AI. At that point, I was working on a knowledge based tooling design that used geometric orientation and information on car parts to generate welding and clamping solutions. Now that we have significantly more computing power available, many of the activities we could only dream about are becoming a possibility.

I've mentioned before in the blog about the shift in value delivered at the intersection of the context of the individual and the context of the enterprise and how pattern recognition will play an important role.

I was talking with some folks about the use of AI in gaming. We were discussing how whenever a new game claims to be using AI techniques to manipulate game play, it is compared with previous solutions where an expert storyboarder defines behavior ahead of time, via scripts. We weren't talking about the illusion of intelligence in the game AI, but real pattern recognition and cause and effect assessment and action.

It made me wonder about the application of these techniques in business. How much can and should be hard coded vs. what goal oriented/optimized actions can be developed by monitoring the enterprise? Which approach would most organizations prefer?

SOA techniques will provide clear interface points between services, and allow the application of AI techniques, it will require a huge effort and a leap of faith that has troubled the relationship between AI and business. On the other hand there is a huge difference in variation between what a game scripter encounters and what real business needs. AI techniques seem to be ideal, if the key decision points can be understood.

Is the Market Ready for “Green Services”?

At the moment there is a lot of discussion going on around Green IT. In the broadest sense, Green IT can be defined as the practice of deploying and using Information Technology (IT) as efficiently as possible. Based on this definition, the concepts of virtualization, power management, technology refresh, and mobility can all be encompassed under the Green IT umbrella. Even from a data center perspective, the focus is on data center design, maintenance, and operation. As such, the overarching end-to-end data center Green Services solution may be there in practice, but it does not come to the forefront.

However, taking a step back and looking at the Green IT offerings that exist at the moment, we see that all of these solutions are focused on IT resources and the management of these resources. There are hardly any (if any) solutions that focus on Green Services.  These Green Services should encompass an end-to-end lifecycle approach toward the IT services that are provided to the end users, much like the carbon footprint analysis for products and services that is performed in many industry segments. This approach implies that Green Services should include facilities, hardware, software, applications, network, and end user devices.

Even though we are in the relative early stages of Green IT, the question remains: are we ready for Green Services?

Graphene the soul of a new machine???

Earlier this week the Purdue Computer and Electrical Engineering school had their semi-annual meeting in Dallas. At this presentation Professor Jim Cooper of the Birck NanoTechnology Center talked about Graphene.

Graphene is a single layer of Carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal configuration -- like chicken wire. Since carbon is in the same column of the periodic table as Silicon it has many of the same characteristics. Professor Cooper described the work they have done to create Field Effect Transistors (FET) out of Graphene.

Although there are some tremendous hurtles to be overcome before this technology can hit the mainstream there are some significant benefits, since some of the issues that limit the future of Moore's law using Silicon can be delayed by a move to a Carbon based approach. One advantage is that many of the same manufacturing techniques currently used can be applied to a Graphene based approach.

There have been a number of stories recently about work being done with Graphene and new possibilities, like a better surface for solar cells... This article describes one approach to making Graphene. Since had great heat transfer and significant electron velocity  advantages we've only seen the tip of the iceberg for where it can be applied.

Retailers at the Gate…

From a study by comScore, we can conclude that the current social networking society includes visitors that frequent retail site more often than the average Internet user. That brings to bear an interesting point of marketing: could and should these social networking sites adjust themselves and open up for more targeted marketing towards this very interesting market segment (from a marketing and advertising perspective).

Now let's look at some of the social network sites, besides the well-known ones that include Myspace and Facebook in the US. Consider the social networking sites that focus on people with common hobbies or interests, such as Dogster (for dog owners) and LinkedIn (focused on career). The focus is pretty obvious from the mission and as such marketing becomes pretty straight forward for retailers.

On the other hand, consider ZLIO, a website that allows members to "sell" products from a catalog of products that are selected from the sites of several retailers. In essence, ZLIO enables retailers to make their products available to members who earn commissions on product that lead to a sale, similar to the click-through model for advertising. This provides not only opportunities for retailers, but also social network sites.

Even though this type of social network profiling is relatively new, retailers could benefit from considering and including social networks as another channel for lead generation in a much more focused fashion. The only choice to make is which social networks to explore and invest in and commercialize to the extent possible. If done in the right way, this approach may lead to a new wave of viral marketing!

Event Driven Management and Opportunistic Computing

A while back I wrote a blog entry on Opportunistic Computing, what an organization can do with cloud computing that they wouldn't have done before. I just read an entry on the Smart Enough Systems blog that looks at some similar issues but from the perspective of proactive use of IT to increase the value of the business. He wrote that the characteristics of an organization using Event Driven Management are:

• Negative Response Time
• Simulation
• Best Next Action
• Predictive supply chain
• Explicit Decisions
• Event-based and process-centric

These are also the kind of compute-intensive activities that would be difficult to perform without being able to tap into a pool of relatively unlimited computing resources.

We're both saying that the kinds of computing that will take latency out and increase value are here today, just not widely implemented.

Will Physical Media Go the Way of the Dinosaur?

According to EMC's Worldwide Information Growth Tracker, we have created more than 112 exabytes of information so far this year, with an anticipated compounded growth rate of almost 60% between now and 2011.  By contrast, it is estimated that in 2007 the British office workers printed up to 120 billion pages. This amounts to a paper mountain over 8,200 miles high!

When reading Teen Realities, we see that teens are technology rich, use mobile gadgets, work on web pages and blogs, and remix their own songs. In effect, they are creating social media, an evolutionary step in the progression from physical media to digital media. Since teenagers are avid multi-taskers, access to information is critical. If physical media were to be used exclusively, this multi-tasking experience would become cumbersome at best: too much information to be considered. In many ways, we also see this trend progressing through all ages of the workforce.

However, in the digital age, with personalized tagging, this mound of digital information all of a sudden becomes part of a user's experience of life as well as technology. With the ever growing amount of information available, the only hope for being able to manage this information flow is through digitization and assisting technology to manage it. However, as off-the-Internet time still exists (and will continue to do so for the near future), physical images of this digital information will still be needed at times to allow for continued use. With the anticipated increase in digitized information over the next 4 years, the physical media is here to stay for a while longer.

Nano train leaving the station!

NewScientist.com has an article and picture of a nanoscale "monorail" that can move along a nanotube track. It has carried a gold nugget a distance of 0.5 micrometers.  The new device developed by researchers in Europe is made from two nanotubes nested like the parts of a telescope.

The central tube is one micrometer long and acts as a rail for the second, smaller, 200-nanometer nanotube. The outer "monorail carriage" is driven by applying current to the inner rail, and can move in both directions along the rail. It can also rotate around it.

Previous nanomotors could only rotate around one axis. The monorail's greater range of movement provides another mechanism for scientists searching for ways to work with nanoscale components as they would with larger objects in a conventional workshop.

Gaming and Business

In reading "Wargaming, the business", one can imagine that a simulation of a complete enterprise is created that over time can model different scenarios and associated outcomes. If we take a step back and see how teenagers and pre-teenagers are working and interacting with technology (specifically simulation and gaming), we gain an insight on how corporations have to adapt in the future.

In general, these age groups have grown up with technology all around them and they have specific expectations on how technology should work. It has to be intuitive ("Who needs manuals?"), easy to use, functional, interactive, make life easier and enjoyable, as well as "always be connected". A prime example is gaming. In the past, physical games were the only option. Then single-player electronic games came along, only to be replaced by the massive multi-player online games. In essence, the real world is being augmented by virtual world interactions that transcend time zones and countries.

Now extrapolating these functional capabilities to the future workforce, we see a clear trend that enterprises need to be aware of. This future workforce will expect the same type of interaction in the workplace that they experience now in their personal environment; it is no longer an option to be connected and interacting with other people in real-time using different mechanisms of integrated communication methods, rather it has become a necessity. At the same time, the amount of multi-tasking will increase, as is evident by the younger generation's capability to act upon many types of interaction at the same time, while maintaining focus.

The current trend of increased online interactivity and integration of tools will need to continue (and even accelerate), with enterprise adoption moving forward quickly, in order to enable this young generation to become as productive as possible when they enter the workforce.

Gartner list of 10 most disruptive technologies for IT

I always look for articles like this to see what I've missed. This article about Gartner's list echoes many of the posts that have taken place on this blog recently.  I was a bit disappointed, since I was hoping for some new areas to discuss. ;-)

They were:

10. Semantic Technologies

9. Augmented Reality

8. Context-Aware Computing

7. Ubiquitous Computing

6. User Interface

5. Mashups

4. Cloud Computing

3. Enterprise Social Software

2. Virtualization

1. Multicore and Hybrid Servers

Will Cloud Computing solution sing Sweet Caroline?

Last week I saw a demonstration of Project Caroline at Sun. Its main design features are to:

• Enable services to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources.
• Expose resources through high level abstractions, including language level virtual machines, networks, and network accessible file systems and databases.
• Provide a horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources as a single system, providing developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling these resources.

It is essentially hiding the complexities of boxes and OSes from the developer. It's also enabling resources to be dynamically applied to the task and load at hand. They are positioning themselves as a platform as a service provider (cloud computing), so that organizations who have programmatic intellectual property can provide SaaS capabilities. Although the project is relatively immature, it does appear to have significant promise by encapsulating existing code into a services shell.

Sun has a website (that is hosted via Caroline) where you can find document, tools... Since we've recently heard about Google's and Amazon's activities, the cloud computing area is definitely heating up. Sun's approach may be a bit more flexible though.

I've written before about how I think cloud computing will change how value is delivered by IT. These are definitely areas development organizations should be experimenting in, even if the services they offer are not all ready for enterprise class production.

Will Technology Become “Free”?

With Moore's Law still alive and kicking in the processor space, similar trends are taking place in the network space (Gilder's Law) and storage area (areal density law). These three technology laws, if taken at face value, would indicate that a fixed amount of money would provide you with double the amount of storage, processing capability, and network capability within an eighteen month time frame.

Going one step further, and extrapolating over a longer period of time, these technology laws would make all new technologies essentially free. However, I am still waiting for the free laptop!

So, what is happening here? One thought is that people are always willing to pay for something new and exciting, if they see the value of it. Who does not want to have access to the largest disk drive in their latest and fastest laptop? There are always applications (such as games and video rendering) that will benefit from these upgrades.  That leaves us with the back-level technologies. Since they are no longer mainstream, the costs to manage, maintain, and support these offerings will increase as the product set ages. At the same time, these older hardware technologies may not be able to run the latest software versions, thereby limiting end-use functionality that is heavily sought after by these end-users.

With technology adoption reaching new levels with each new young generation of teenagers and pre-teenagers, this trend of "paying for the latest and greatest" will continue to spur the IT hardware, software, and services markets.

Enterprise Mobility?

I finally made some time to go over some of the magazines and articles that were collecting dust. Charlie Bess' blog on the 8 Technologies to Master in '08 combined with recent article published in Asia on the mobility advances productivity, we also have to consider the flipside of this equation. Mobile devices allow us to be "always" connected, making it easier to check email before we go to bed.  And on my travels, I see many passengers (including myself) holding on the mobile device, ready to turn it on as soon as the plane lands. Is this productivity, or insanity?

The second question to ask if how many functions we really need in my multi-function device. Do I need my mobile device to be an alarm clock, watch, camera, rolodex, GPS, video player, and MP3 player. Oh, and maybe even a phone too? This convergence has come to the point where it is moving into substitution: teenagers are no longer using watches and cameras: they are using their mobile phones to perform that function.

This trend seems to imply that we are exchanging quality for productivity: I have yet to see a 10 mega pixel camera built into a commercially available mobile device. However, the convenience of a single device more than offsets this (perceived) lack of picture quality. 

That leads to the question: are we ready for less function-rich and less feature rich mobile devices?

Innovation and Finance - An Oxymoron?

Generally when we connect the world of innovation with the world of finance, we think of phrases like creative accounting. This term has come to be a euphemism for the misrepresentation of a corporation's financial position. It conjures up stories of accounting irregularities at corporations around the world such as Enron and Worldcom. While these financial practices may be novel, they may also be illegal and unethical.

But, is it only in a negative way that we can connect these two worlds? I believe that the finance department is an often ignored partner when companies discuss innovation, both for themselves and their clients, and in fact anyone on their value chain. Didn't we consult with Dad when we decided to build our snowball stand? Didn't we expect more expertise from him than just his seed money?

Too often the finance department is viewed in the opposite light. It is seen as a stifling deterrent, a reactive controller, a staid auditor, an emotional disciplinarian, a ferocious watchdog. Is that how you saw your Dad and his role in your decision making?

Now there is a distinct trend toward the finance function emerging as an enabler, and even a driver, of business innovation. The results of a survey conducted by CFO Research Services and Microsoft, an EDS Agility Alliance Partner, first aired on March 18^th in a webcast entitled, "How the Finance Function Is Emerging as an Enabler of Innovation." This study among senior finance executives examined the contribution finance makes toward enabling business managers to develop business innovations and make well-informed decisions.

Surprisingly, respondents said that their company would benefit the most from a greater collaboration with the finance team in crafting, tuning, and optimizing business models to bring visibility to business complexity and to meet improved performance expectations. That is, companies felt the finance teams should exert more effort working with business managers to find and validate opportunities to improve operating performance; comprehend the revenue, cost, and profit implications of their decisions, and understand competitive dynamics. Overwhelmingly, respondents also indicated that the highest value business innovation came from cross-functional teams.

Now we see the creation of Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, financial intelligence units, and books on financial intelligence. The new, evolving role of finance is described in terms of  financial analytics, finance transformation, and the transformation agenda. Wasn't your Dad your strategic partner, helping you transform your dreams of growth into reality?

Patents: To Accelerate or not to Accelerate?

If you are reading this blog, you are probably interested in innovation and information technology. If so, you've probably crossed paths with software and business method patents. If still true, then you've probably discovered that the US patent office's backlog for our class of patents is 4-5 years.

Well, with the fast pace of technology, it can be argued that most IT and business inventions have a useful life of about 4-5 years. So, does it even make any sense to file a patent?

I have been asked this more than a few times, and it's a good question. Why go through the trouble and expense of filing a software or business method patent, if the underlying solution is obsolete by the time the patent is issued?

In the outset, I must say that I am not providing any legal advice in this blog, and I refer you to your favorite patent attorney if you have any specific questions about patents. Also, I realize a lot of people consider our patent system broken (and they are probably right), but lets set that issue aside and work for a moment within the current framework.

In August 2006, the US patent office introduced the Accelerated Examination procedure, which attempts to reach a decision about patents within 12 months through a process known as "Petition to Make Special". This sounds like wonderful news for us, allowing us to actually obtain a patent within the useful life of an invention, for a fee of just $130. However, some thought must be given to accelerating patents, and the advice of a qualified patent attorney is essential.

Accelerated Examination is not without perils. First, the applicant must do significantly more work up front, and pay extra legal costs that would otherwise be spread out over a period of time (e.g., a more complete patent application, detailed prior art search, supporting documents, and formal drawings). The applicant also gives up certain procedural rights by electing the accelerated examination procedure. Another major risk is what is known as prosecution history estoppels, where the statements made by the applicant could be used to limit the scope of the claims in litigation. An applicant can potentially jeopardize some patent rights by disclosing certain information within the supporting documents required by the accelerated examination procedure. So, this procedure is a double-edged sword, which is why many patent attorneys shy away from it.

On the other hand, there are some benefits of accelerated examination that may offset the perils, such as issuing patents within the useful life of the technology, protecting upcoming products or services that face competition, and enjoying earlier and greater licensing income before the technology fades into history.

The decision to accelerate a patent application with the new procedure requires careful legal analysis and business evaluation. So, don't throw away a patent opportunity just because the normal patent process takes too long; instead, review the invention with a qualified patent attorney and consider the business implications.

A Different Kind of Cloud Computing

In reading through the recent blog on cloud computing, my mind started wandering to this very topic. However, I was not thinking about cloud computing in the "traditional" sense of compute-as-a-service, but in a more controversial fashion.

Let's consider the number of mobile devices across the globe, to be estimated at 2.2 billion (according to the CIA's The World Factbook). Assume that the average mobile phone has 256 MB of memory (conservative estimate, since the new iPhone comes with 8 or 16 GB of flash memory), with 128 MB free for use. That provides us with a data center consisting of over 2 billion processors and more than 250 Petabyte (PB). To put that into comparison: Google processes a "mere" 20 PB of information per day according to Niall Kennedy's Blog.

The traditional http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ project has almost 5.5 million users signed up, contributing more than 21 billion CPU hours. These compute resources are dependent on the devices to be "connected". Since the mobile phones are "always on", the "data center in the cloud" concept can take advantage of this type of capability.

However, these types of resources, if harnessed, can provide compute capabilities that are in the order of a magnitude larger than the ones currently encountered in the "cloud" computing area. These mobile phones may one day become the data center in the cloud.

Will India be still viable option for IT Outsourcing in 10+ years?

India's Information Technology (IT) industry has flourished well since Y2K, with the demand for IT resources in India increasing exponentially over last 8+ years. Remember the time when you could get the services of three or more IT professionals for the cost of one IT professional in the US? Well, that time is over - companies have noticed a considerable change over the last 5 years:

• Jim Olsen's presentation "The Hard Truth about Offshore Testing" at the StarWest 2007 conference stated  "Over last five years, salaries for experienced IT professionals in India has increased 12-20% per year where as the salaries of the experience IT professional in the US has increased 3-5%"
• Over the last 5 years, the value of US dollar has gone done by 20%. You could get Rs. 47.5 Indian Rupees in January 2003 Vs the Rs. 39.5 Indian Rupees you get in January 2008.
• With increased costs and the unfavorable exchange rate, you could maybe utilize two or less IT professionals for the cost of one IT professional in the US.
• Attrition rate for experienced IT professionals in India has increased over 15% or more. There are many cases where you start a project with 10+ members on the team, and at the end of the six months, you have a completely new team!

What happens if India's IT Professional Salaries continue to go up 12-20% compounded per year? What happens if the attrition rate continues to rise?

If these trends continue, work will move from India to other similar low cost countries like Egypt, and China. Is India ready to woes of unemployment like the US?  Are there similar trends for other countries like Brazil and Argentina?

Sensors the Foot Solder of a Revolution

I was looking at the Dallas Morning News this morning a saw a story Sensors may Revolutionize Everyday Life. I've mentioned before about how sensors will start to be in just about everything. I just found it interesting to be in a main stream media paper on a Sunday morning.

I was talking with some folks last week about cloud computing and how sensors are going to change how computing is used. When we have the huge amounts of information coming in that the sensors will provide, we're going to have to display it in a way that people can consume. After all people can't work with petabytes of information flowing in on a daily basis.

I did find it interesting that Nano -Technology wasn't mentioned once during the article, since sensors are a major research area for nano. I would be interesting for the reporter to do a follow-up pulling in some Nano activities from places like UT Dallas.

Is cloud computing vaporware or almost here?

In the past few months, I've been in numerous discussions about cloud computing and when it will get here. Lately there's been discussion even in the bastion of proprietary computing hardware -- the gaming industry moving away from consoles. You can already see today on some of the MMOG, that there is significant backend computing taking place with the console focused on presentation. Many organizations have already looked hard at putting thin client solutions (like the Sunray) on many of the desktops that perform normal office functions. They take less power and they're easier to support. Of course without a network, they are just a brick.

When you think about the number of cores in a chip doubling every year, the amount of computing capabilities that will be available will be staggering. The amount of effort expended to take advantage of all the power will be staggering as well.

I was talking with some folks the other day about this and their response was, "Won't you dedicate cores to specific tasks?", and I immediately thought "you could, but why would you?!?" That would just take the .com era's "one app, one box" mentality down to the core level.  I think we'll use all those cores for radically different functions to take IT value delivery to whole new levels.

On the Science Friday Podcast the other day, they had an entry on Persuasive Technologies, that talked about some of the current relatively simple ways that we could start to use all this computing capability to affect the demand side of the business. Naturally, if it works and there are benefits, market forces will exercise the capability to the fullest.

In the next 12 months, this concept will rain down a whole new set of business models and organizational impact.

Surface breaks the surface

This article in PopSci.com says that the long discussed and demonstrated Microsoft Surface (warning, the attached link as some spiffy Silverlight) is finally seeing the commercial light of day. I saw this device a while back and could see many uses for it, particularly when modeling business processes - two people sit across the table and gesture their way through a business model.

For those that can't wait, here is an article on how to DIY a similar low cost interactive whiteboard using the Wiimote.

Sensors, Sensors, Sensors - Can they really help us get green?

Sensors in bridges, sensors in highways, and sensors in buildings could all help save lives, reduce energy and tell us how to best design and use a structure.

Information technology (IT) has benefited for many years from the use of software agents. These agents sense an event and trigger a response. Like, a file system has reached 90% capacity, notify the engineer to take action. "Intelligent Software Agents" have the ability to adapt. Adaptation implies: sensing the environment and reconfiguring in response. This may be achieved through the discovery of problem solving strategies. Intelligent agents also have ability to learn. Learning may proceed through simulation and the analysis of behaviors and success.

What if we extended this beyond IT? For example, there's an emerging wireless sensor technology that could be deployed in buildings. Through the collection of real time information, these sensors could assist building operators in understanding heat flow within a building, pinpointing areas of heat, pressure and humidity and use this information to optimize the consumption of energy in the building operations. Architects can use the information in the remediation of existing buildings and the future design based on the occupancy and type of business they conduct.

Can the application sensoring technology coupled with intelligent agents increase the efficiency by which buildings use resources - energy, water, and materials - while reducing building impacts on human health and the environment, through better siteing, design, construction, operation, and maintenance?

Let's hear from you.

If sensors interest you, have a look at other applications of the technology: Sensors will revolutionize major construction projects, etc.