Services, Mashups & Cloud: Puma

Imagine for a moment that Olympics took place in China – and all the world came out to watch. You’re with a shoe company called Puma, who for many years hid in the shadow of branding giant Nike. But this Olympics you made some interesting bets, including a big bet on a Jamaican sprinter named Usain Bolt. This distinguished athlete proceeds to win the gold and to destroy the world record – and to your delight holds up a pair of your shoes. What a dream.

For a brief period you own the consumer. Search engines are bombarded with “Usain Bolt” and even “Puma runner”. Your online store is blasted with orders but now every outlet that carries ‘hot tickets’ wants to resell the Usain Bolt Limited Edition shoes. Orders are coming in from channels you’ve never even heard of. New channels, new orders, new customers are abound and new demands are being placed on your I.T. environment.

The world of API’s (or services), mashups and cloud computing are all upon us. As many businesses continue cut costs and hunker down for a ‘wanna-be’ recession, others are innovating and driving new sustainable revenue sources.

Services, Mashups and Cloud drive business opportunities for those who seek a competitive advantage.

Services, Mashups & Cloud: Photosynth

Imagine for a moment that a Microsoft research group finished a beta version of a project that they had dubbed ‘Photosynth’. Their pet project was to allow users to create panoramic virtual environments by using regular 2-D digital cameras. Users would merely take lots of adjacent pictures where the edges of one photo would overlap with the next. The photos would then be submitted online to a set of computers that would use artificial intelligence to transform the individual digital pictures into a panoramic viewing environment that could be witnessed by anyone who had the Internet and a browser.

For this to be interesting a few things would be needed. First, we would need lots of people who could contribute pictures (user generated content). Second, we’d need a whole bunch of computers to act as one to crunch on digital image matching algorithms. Third, we’d need the ability to host the image online and allow the proud publishers to pass around copies of their new site's URL to all of their friends, encouraging them to become publishers as well. Imagine now, that the this happened and that the traffic to the site increased by 140,000% in just 7 days. Imagine that.

The world of API’s (or services), mashups and cloud computing are all upon us. As many businesses continue cut costs and hunker down for a ‘wanna-be’ recession, others are innovating and driving new sustainable revenue sources.

Services, Mashups and Cloud drive business opportunities for those who seek a competitive advantage.

Services, Mashups & Cloud: Shelfari

Imagine for a moment that an online ‘virtual book store’, called Shelfari, created a widget that displayed pictures and descriptions of the widget owners favorite books. These widgets could then be embedded inside of blogs and social networks so that people could see what their friends or influencers were reading. We’d have to assume that the widget was viral in nature, allowing consumers to copy the widget and republish it with their own content at their own site. And like all things viral, the network of users grew at an exponential rate. The widget became so successful that Amazon.com decided it was time to acquire the company. The press related to the activity drove additional traffic to the Shelfari site to the point where response times were so long that new users couldn’t even sign up.

What if – what if widgets drove traffic and viral widgets drove huge traffic? What if personalization drove conversion rates and Web API’s enabled financial transactions? What if we could mashup content and community to drive commerce? What if the hardware automatically scaled to meet the needs of the user community?

The world of API’s (or services), mashups and cloud computing are all upon us. As many businesses continue cut costs and hunker down for a ‘wanna-be’ recession, others are innovating and driving new sustainable revenue sources.

Services, Mashups and Cloud drive business opportunities for those who seek a competitive advantage.

Joe McKendrick 2.0

Joe McKendrick is one of my favorite bloggers over at ZDNet. However, I've found some of his stuff to be a bit hum drum. That is, until I found his 'secret' posting site...

Joe 2.0 (like Jeff 2.0), is spending much more time thinking, writing and talking about all of the reasons that you did SOA in the first place. Want to check out some good reading?

Mashups: So Easy a Caveman Can Write Them?

and

Managing Data in the Clouds

Fundamentally, SOA has progressed from debating about ESB's, governance styles, REST vs. SOAP, etc. to a discussion on how to use the services to create new business functionality through mashups, while delivering on low cost platforms (cloud and PaaS). Joe 2.0 gets it.

Are you 2.0?

Amazon Sends Death Blow to I.T. Data Center

The time of death for the corporate data center was pronounced at 11:03EST, August 21st of 2008. Forensic pathologists continue to investigate the death, however, it is known that the patient had stability issues, persistent hemorrhaging and had been considered terminal.

Thousands of companies have mortally wounded data centers. Unfortunately, CIO's lacked a viable replacement for this archaic agility anchor. In essence, they've been forced to keep them on life-support. Billions of dollars have been pumped into various unsuccessful attempts to heal the patient. Billions more have been spent on 'Data Center Hospice'. Jeff Schneider, MomentumSI CEO commented, "When it becomes it was clear that the patient will die, corporations shift their thinking to 'reducing the pain'. This largely involves moving labor intensive data center tasks to low-cost offshore facilities."

Although some debate remains if the data center is actually dead. Schneider stated , "Yes, the data center has a heart beat, however the beat coincides with the I.T. family beating on the heart with their fists, insisting that the patient isn't dead."

Congratulations to Amazon on delivering the last critical element of their Elastic Cloud Computing offering.

The 7 Dirty Words of SOA

I recently had a conversation with one of my good friends at IBM. He had mentioned that IBM is doing a better job of differentiating between "Business SOA" and "I.T. SOA". Interesting... what did he mean? After drilling him with questions it came down to this:

- I.T SOA is about running a more efficient Information Technology group

- Business SOA is about creating new information products and capabilities

This resonated with me. It sounded very similar to the conversations I've had with people at SAP. They have positioned SOA as a technology enabler to their large suite of business applications. They sell business solutions. And as one SAP insider put, "... and of course those solutions are Service Oriented... it's 2008!"

These conversations were music to my ears. IBM and SAP are both back to attacking business problems and are making the assumption that SOA is in place and acts as the enabler.

In Business SOA we need to think about a new set of "Business SOA Patterns":

- How do we deliver new business products through new channels?

- How do we deliver more/better information to our distributors, retailers and consumers?

- How will consolidated/shared information lead to a tighter supply chain?

It's been too many years of people talking about ESB's and other I.T. focused trivia. With that said, the 7 Dirty Words of SOA are:

1. Loose Coupling


2. Abstraction


3. Reuse


4. Autonomous


5. Discoverability


6. Composability


7. Interoperability

Yes, it's time to move past "I.T. SOA"...

New CEO at StrikeIron

I just noticed that Richard Holcomb is new CEO at StrikeIron, see:
http://www.strikeiron.com/company/management.aspx

StrikeIron has been pioneers in the 'Data as a Service' space for some time. Congratulations!