Bling and ignorance - how cloudy thinking will screw up IT

Today it was annouced that Progress Software are going to 'divest' their BPM and SOA technologies and instead are going to focus on cloud technologies that don't really exist yet. This is indicative of a mentality I see around so first lets start with some credentials: 1) I worked with Google around a SaaS partnership in 2007 around Google Apps 2) I delivered an SFDC solution in 2008 3) I've worked with Amazon, VMWare and lots of other cloud based companies So lets be clear I think cloud and SaaS can be extremely useful things, the problem comes when people begin to think they are magic. Lets be clear SaaS is a software package pre-installed and configured that you can pay for on demand - the change isn't the software its the capacity and the charging model Cloud is an infrastructure play to provide old school tin in a virtualised manner in a way that can be quickly provisioned and paid for on demand. That really is it. The problem I see is that people take the new bling and forget the old lessons. So people say 'I'm am using SFDC and it is my customer MDM I don't need anything else'... in the same way that people said that about Siebel in 2000 and found out in 2002 that it wasn't true. They say 'its on the cloud so I don't need to worry about architecting for performance, I'll just scale the hardware' as people did around 'pizza box' architectures in 2000. I hear 'we don't need to worry about integration, its on the cloud'... like people did around SOA/ESB/WS-* in ... 2000. The problem is that the reality is the opposite. The more federation you have the more process and control you need. The more information is federated the more requirements you have for Master Data Management. Cloud solutions are not silver bullets and they are not always simple solutions to integrate with other systems, great on their own but not good with others. Rapidly people are building federated IT estates with federated data and no practice and process around integration which leads to a massive EXTERNAL spaghetti mess, something that makes the EAI problems of the 90s look like a walk in the park. Or to put in another way... isn't it great how people are making more work for those of us in IT.

Why Silicon Valley is bad for Enterprise IT

99% of IT is done outside of Silicon Valley in Enterprises.  I like the valley and San Francisco is my second favourite 'new' city (Sydney comes first, London, Rome and Paris remain... well London, Rome and Paris).  The problem is that 99% of the media about IT is about what happens in Silicon Valley.  This is the equivalent of all coverage of the global car market being about Ferrari.  Its not good for IT for a few reasons.

1. A large proportion of Silicon Valley is hype over reality - remember Transmeta? A company whose coverage dwarfed that of ARM for several years, despite ARM clearly being better
2. It focuses on the 'new' over the 'useful' - Lots of good stuff comes out of Silicon Valley but the focus is always on 'the next new thing' this leads to lots of new 'wheels' for IT but very little in terms of actual progress.  Is Enterprise IT better today than it was 10 years ago? 20 years ago?  Possibly a bit with things like Java, but the focus in Silicon Valley today is to INCREASE language fragmentation thus reducing the benefits.
3. Its technology over practice - we've known for 40+ years that the real issue is in design, Silicon Valley focuses on the coding not the practice
4. Its become a circle-jerk the tech media, tech companies and VCs all running around in their own little hype cycle un-encumbered by reality.

The impact is that even the older vendors in the valley tend to leap on bandwagons like a politician desperate for votes. So rather than fixing existing technologies or providing you with the minor enhancements you get a bunch of shiny new technologies that don't work terribly well to put on top of the  old pieces that have bugs they don't fix.

Lets be clear there are great things that come out of the valley and some real revolutions have been driven from there, but revolutions have happened in other places too, Waldorf, Cambridge (UK and MA), India, CERN and lots of others.  But what really hasn't happened, and Silicon Valley is the biggest criminal in this crime, is a focus on improving the 'dull' part of IT.  Project failure rates remain high, integration is still a technical job and data quality remains poor.

Unfortunately the current set-up is designed only to hype the new rather than improve the infrastructure of IT.  Now some could argue that this is a great example of where capitalism doesn't produce the greatest good for the greatest number as the current approach actually does very little to improve the lot of the majority in IT while enriching a small subset... but I wouldn't say that as capitalism remains the only system that actually works.

The question therefore is how can IT re-orient away from the valley and away from the hype.  I think the rise of India and China will be key to this.  China and India are focusing on 'being good' rather than 'being shiny'.  This focus on improvement and innovation for improvement rather than straight innovation for the brand new.  As these economies grow and their importance to IT grows maybe we'll see a shift in IT away from the new and shiny towards the actually improving.

Lets hope.

(please note in the above I exclude Apple as they appear to live in a bubble disconnected from the valley ;)

Information the next Trade War? Data Privacy v CISPA

Today it was annouced that Progress Software are going to 'divest' their BPM and SOA technologies and instead are going to focus on cloud technologies that don't really exist yet. This is indicative of a mentality I see around so first lets start with some credentials: 1) I worked with Google around a SaaS partnership in 2007 around Google Apps 2) I delivered an SFDC solution in 2008 3) I've worked with Amazon, VMWare and lots of other cloud based companies So lets be clear I think cloud and SaaS can be extremely useful things, the problem comes when people begin to think they are magic. Lets be clear SaaS is a software package pre-installed and configured that you can pay for on demand - the change isn't the software its the capacity and the charging model Cloud is an infrastructure play to provide old school tin in a virtualised manner in a way that can be quickly provisioned and paid for on demand. That really is it. The problem I see is that people take the new bling and forget the old lessons. So people say 'I'm am using SFDC and it is my customer MDM I don't need anything else'... in the same way that people said that about Siebel in 2000 and found out in 2002 that it wasn't true. They say 'its on the cloud so I don't need to worry about architecting for performance, I'll just scale the hardware' as people did around 'pizza box' architectures in 2000. I hear 'we don't need to worry about integration, its on the cloud'... like people did around SOA/ESB/WS-* in ... 2000. The problem is that the reality is the opposite. The more federation you have the more process and control you need. The more information is federated the more requirements you have for Master Data Management. Cloud solutions are not silver bullets and they are not always simple solutions to integrate with other systems, great on their own but not good with others. Rapidly people are building federated IT estates with federated data and no practice and process around integration which leads to a massive EXTERNAL spaghetti mess, something that makes the EAI problems of the 90s look like a walk in the park. Or to put in another way... isn't it great how people are making more work for those of us in IT.