Month: September 2008

Wall Street Crisis, Enterprise Technology and Cloud Computing

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I just read a great overview on "The Tech Fallout from the Wall Street Crisis" posted by Rich Miller at the Data Center Knowledge site.   Here are four of the six key points Rich makes:

  • North American financial companies will slash their IT spending
    27.3 percent to $17.6 billion next year, down from $24.2 billion in
    2007, according to updated projectionsfrom
    the Tabb Group, which tracks technology on Wall Street. The vast
    majority of that decline will be spending reductions due to the
    failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill
    Lynch, Tabb predicted.

Read the rest of this entry »

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Cloud, collaboration, Computer Security, CTO, Cyber War, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, Google, Gourley, microsoft, Social Computing, Sun Ray, Technology Leadership, The Future of Technology, Thin Client, Verizon, Vision, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Weblogs.

Thin Client Laptops: Functionality, Security, Mobility

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For the past few weeks I've been using a unique device — a totally stateless laptop. 

It is the Tadpole M1400 Ultra-Thin Client Wireless Sun Ray.  

Here are some things this device can enable for enterprise users:

– Enhanced security.  If the laptop is lost/stolen/attacked no data is lost.  The data is never in the laptop, it remains in your enterprise.

– Enhanced functionality. All users everywhere can get upgrades to the latest software instantly. Upgrades happen in the server room, not by downloading apps to every device.  And multiple domains can be presented to one laptop.

– Enhanced flexibility.  All users everywhere can get access to presentations of operating system environments they need.  Depending on what the enterprise chooses, users can be presented with MS Windows, Mac OS, Solaris or Linux desktops. 

– Enhanced mobility.  Like any other laptop, this device is designed to be mobile.  It can connect to the grid over WiFi, 3G card, or if you desire, an Ethernet cable. I've tested it using WiFi at home and on the road and the performance is great. 

Concerning speed and 3G: I tested the Tadpole thin client using 3G (using a Qualcomm 3G CDMA card on the Verizon Broadband Access network).  When you have to use it, 3G delivers ok performance, but just like with fat client laptops or iPhones, 3G speeds can leave you wanting more (faster networks are coming quickly, see: How fast is 3G and what is 3.5G and when will 4G be here? ).  

If you are a CTO/CIO/enterprise technologist you can probably already understand the power and potential of the "stateless laptop."  Having one in my hands just brings that home to me. This is a way to deliver significantly enhanced security and enterprise-class functionality/power to mobile users.  And since it can be done in a way that reduces cost it makes this a compelling approach.

I wonder, what could the role of this new device be in the federal government's Cyber Initiative (see Protecting Federal Networks Against Cyber Attack) ?  Or what the role might be in reducing cyber crime?   I'll leave those for topics of future posts.

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Cloud, Cyber Initiative, Enterprise, Sun, Sun Ray, Thin Client, Verizon.

Android: Disruptive? Not enough info to say

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Google and T-Mobile just announced the arrival of the G1 device today.  This is the first cell phone to use Google's new open "Android" operating system.   Android will almost certainly change the mobile computing fabric.  It is the first open and free mobile platform and since it is backed by Google it is not going to be a flash-in-the-pan.  But, now the question is, how disruptive will it be?  There are over 3.3 Billion active cell phone subscribers in the globe.  How many of those will eventually be on Android? 

I'd appreciate any of your thoughts on that.  For now, check out some of Android's features below.  Looks pretty cool.

We still don't know when these will be in the local phone stores. But then again, we don't know when the Blackberry Bold will be here either.   Anyway, I plan on evaluating an Android phone as soon as possible to see if it is for me. 

More later.

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Cloud, CTO, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, General Musings, Google, innovation, Open Source, R&D, Web 2.0.

Android: Disruptive? Not enough info to say

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Google and T-Mobile just announced the arrival of the G1 device today.  This is the first cell phone to use Google's new open "Android" operating system.   Android will almost certainly change the mobile computing fabric.  It is the first open and free mobile platform and since it is backed by Google it is not going to be a flash-in-the-pan.  But, now the question is, how disruptive will it be?  There are over 3.3 Billion active cell phone subscribers in the globe.  How many of those will eventually be on Android? 

I'd appreciate any of your thoughts on that.  For now, check out some of Android's features below.  Looks pretty cool.

We still don't know when these will be in the local phone stores. But then again, we don't know when the Blackberry Bold will be here either.   Anyway, I plan on evaluating an Android phone as soon as possible to see if it is for me. 

More later.

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Cloud, CTO, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, General Musings, Google, innovation, Open Source, R&D, Web 2.0.

Is Your CTO Making You Stupid?

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Nicholas Carr writes in ways that makes people think.  I really enjoyed reading his latest in the Atlantic titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"  This article covers some rather significant trends that IT is pushing into the global social fabric.  The changes he talks about are disturbing.  They are infecting people like a fast spreading disease. 

There is a chance you are suffering some of these symptoms yourself, so by all means read the article. 

Or if your attention span is going, here is how Nicholas Carr describes the symptoms : 

" Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. "

I hope you dive deep into the Carr article for more details, but if you have the disease yourself you might not.  So here is a gist of key points:

  • Google and others have made research simple and fast and easy.

  • Almost all data can come into your head via your browser.

  • People read fewer (or no) books.

  • People are loosing the ability to read and retain info from long articles.

  • The Internet, through your browser, is the medium of choice.  Newspapers and print are on the out.  TV is heading out fast.

  • We also write through the web, and that is changing the way we think.

  • We too frequently are relying on computers to mediate our understanding of the world.

What do we do with this cautionary info?  One immediate think all of us should do is remember to carve out time in the day, every day, to read, write and think.

But if you are an enterprise technologist you should also consider what this means for you and your organization.  Some ideas:

  • The systems you are designing, developing and fielding to your workforce may serve your workforce better if their interfaces are more intuitive and less textual.  People will want to interface with enterprise systems they way they interface with the Internet (present your applications through browsers and summarize results and seek rapid human feedback on what they like or don't like about the results).

  • To the greatest extent possible, build systems that present fast results.

  • And present information in ways that let humans interact with it.

  • And present information in ways that ensure the humans are in charge of the process and in charge of assessing the relevance of results.

  • Don't stop innovating. 

  • Stay on the net yourself so you can track where it is going.

  • Get engaged in social media (if you are not already).  That means Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Twitter (especially Twitter– it really changes your mind).

  • Translate those many lessons into the enterprise technology you field.

If you can do that and if you can stay focused on the mission all your users will thank you, and in many ways I think you will be helping make your organization smarter.  If you don't do that then the odds are great that you will just be part of the noise.   You may even be contributing to making your organzation stupid. 

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions on that topic?

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Cloud, collaboration, Connect, CTO, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, Google, Gourley, innovation, knowledge, LinkedIn, Mashup, Moore's Law, R&D, Ray Kurzweil, SOA, Social Computing, standards, The Future of Technology, Twitter, virtual world, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Yahoo.

Collaborate and Deliver With More Cowbell

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Participants in this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference, hosted by the ODNI's ICES group and the CIA's WIRe team, were treated to a shared experience that is hard to capture in a blog post.   So I won't try.  But I will say this, we all had some great collaboration and coordination lessons and context, and we were able to participate in creating that ourselves because the conference organizers established a great ambiance and gave us access to wiki's, blogs, twitters and WiFI that knitted that all together.  I really appreciated being there.

One lesson I'd like to note now was underscored by Fred Hassani.  Fred found a great way to make us all think about the variety of collaboration tools at our disposal.  In a musical analogy he underscored how hard it can be to make music with instruments that don't traditionally play well together.  But in a sign that the spirit of the community is strong, we all saw how a cowbell can make really really great music if you put your heart into it.   And we the community of professionals can make use of any tools we are provided to collaborate, even if they are not our favorites.  We will always make due and will always overcome.   One way we will overcome is through mashups.  Just like in music you can mashup piano's and cowbells, in IT you can mashup imagery data and SIGINT data and analytical data etc.

Which brings us to a great video that underscores this point– not from thte WIReICES conference, but from a group of spirited collaborators from SNL who many of us in the community look up to.  

So please check this out and as you do please think of the IT tools in your enterprise.  I guess the point made for CTOs is that we need an enterprise that allows mashups of all tools and all data.  You never know when the maestro will call for more cowbell.

This entry was posted in CIA, collaboration, CTO, DIA, Disruptive IT, DNI, DoDIIS, endeca, General Musings, Gourley, Mashup, Technology Leadership.

Another government IT program succeeds beyond all expectations!

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2002 congress passed the E-Government Act.  It mandated that the approximately 300 federal entities that can make rules expose those rules in a modernized way and also specified that regulations in draft will be exposed so comments can be solicited.

The government's response: OMB and CIO's from throughout the government established an eRulemaking solution that required extensive IT planning, engineering and the fielding of a new IT system.  The eRulemaking Initiative's Federal Docket Management System (FDMS) was created to provide an online public docket and comment system which expands public access to read and comment on Federal Agency rulemaking. Although it is a centralized system, agencies were given an ability to manage content and workflow related to their own regulations. Scalable web-based solutions that enable users in government and also citizens to find and read proposed legislation and supporting documents was provided.  

And they did this in a way that was way under budget and delivered on time.  And its functionality exceeded all expectations.  Which is GREAT!

As an IT professional, this is the really neat part that bears repeating.  This project, which is very complex and IT intensive, was delivered under budget and on time.  Additionally, its capabilities far
exceeded the expectations of everyone involved.

If you haven't heard of FDMS, maybe it is because it was widely successful.  To frequently the only programs that make news are those that don't deliver on expectations.  That means IT heros, like Pat Micielli of EPA who led this program, frequently don't get the recognition they deserve for the great things they do.

I hope I've gotten your curiosity up a bit on what Pat accomplished. If you are a citizen of the US you should be very proud of this one.  So check out http://regulations.gov for a first hand look.  You will see a single interface into approximately 1.5 million documents.  Don't worry, there is a way you can navigate through these without looking at each individual record.  Just dive in and give it a try.  Search for a term like "data center energy"and view the results or narrow them down by agency.  Or click on those in the range of comment period you are interested in.  which ever selection you pick, notice how all the other facets of the search change as you do.   See how you can guide through the results and how the results keep giving you options for refining results?  After you try it this way, can you imagine doing it any other way?

Government users are giving more access (there are nearly 4 million records accessible only by federal agency users on FDMS.gov).

Overall, as a CTO and an admirer of technologists at the large agencies, I enjoy pointing this out and really admire what these folks have done.   Great Job!  And as a citizen– Thanks!

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Compliance, CTO, endeca, FDCC, innovation, OMB, Web 2.0, Web Services.

The greatest new technologies (and great drama too!)

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I like technology and I like drama.   These are two of the greatest of human creations.  And they can be even more interesting when combined.

There
has been some real drama in the West Coast tech scene the past few
weeks, heating up to a boil in the last few days, and about to come to
a head tomorrow.

The story is this:

– Two great expos for high tech startups are the DEMO conference and the TechCrunch50.

– DEMOfall08 will be in San Diego.   According to their website, Chris
Shipley has been around the globe gathering info on the best new
technologies and has brought them into one place for this conference. 
72 new digital technology products from 11 countries will be
introduced.  A record crowd of over 800 have registered already.   This
looks like an awesome conference and I can't wait to read about the
presentations and study the companies.  I'm sure I'll find candidates
for my own list of top disruptive technologies from what I read from
this conference. For more info see:   http://demo.com

– TechCrunch50 is Sep 8-10 in San Francisco.   It has a goal of
bringing the best start-ups and launching them in front influential VC,
corporations and the press.  Many companies also give demos.  It seems
to be about twice the size as the Demo conference, about 1700
attendees are expected.   Between the two conferences this appears to
be the one with more VC and big company attendance, but I am only
basing that on a review of the website.   The website, by the way,
shows an incredible panel of experts.  These are really the greats in
the community.  Experts judging at TechCrunch include Marc Andreessen,
Marc Benioff, Dan Farber, Bradley Horowitz, Joi Ito, Tim O'Reilly, and
Robert Scoble, to name a few.   Here too, I'm sure I'll find companies
that need to be on my early warning screen of disruptive IT.   For more
on TechCrunch, see:  http://techcrunch50.com

So now you see the drama?  How could these two great conferences end up being held at exactly the same time? 

The way this started, as far as I can tell, was captured in an April blog post from Henry Blodgete.  He said, I quote:

Now that TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis have scheduled their
TechCrunch50 start-up celebration conference at the same time as IDG's
DEMO start-up celebration conference, the allegations are flying:
Who moved whose conference to kill who.
Who ripped off who.
Who's screwing who.
Who's greedy, mercenary, abusive…
Etc.

The drama really heated up a few weeks ago when the long running
tension was written about by the New York Times.   An article by Brad Stone put it this way:

Demo, a 17-year-old conference franchise owned by the technology
publisher IDG, has served as the springboard for hit products like the
Palm Pilot and the TiVo digital video recorder. In San Diego during the
second week of September, 70 start-ups will pay $18,500 each to make a
six-minute presentation to a crowd of investors, journalists and
others. To Michael Arrington, the elbow-throwing, supercilious founder of
the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, Demo’s business model
amounts to “payola.”

From that article, leaders and associates of both Demo and TechCrunch began exchanging heated posts and interviews.  

Here is one from Michael Arrington titled "Everyone Needs To Calm Down" 
Mr. Arrington asks folks to chill, but calls the Demo conference
unethical.   I guess I like the way he says what he thinks.  But I
don't think his post will calm anything down!

Here is one from Chris Shipley who says she has had it with the shoddy
reporting, invective and arrogance that has attended most of the
commentary.  The following are some quotes from her post at: http://guidewiregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/shoddy-reporting-invective-and-arrogance-yeah-i-want-some-of-that/

QUOTE:

When in a twitter I bemoaned the lack of original reporting (only one
reporter (cnet) and exactly zero bloggers writing this week about this
silly DEMO v TechCrunch episode actually contacted me), the infamous
blogger Robert Scoble suggested that if I'd blog my opinion, he'd link
to it. Does that mean that a perspective only exists or matters if it's
expressed in a blog post? Or that Robert's just moving too fast to do
any investigation outside his narrow medium?

Scoble's not the only guy living in the rarefied air of the
echo-chamber. Sarah Lacy, who works for the much-respected
Businessweek.com, conducted a five-minute video interview with TC50's
Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis, during which the two leveled the
usual slander. Did Lacy fire one tough question at the two? Did this
journalist call me or the DEMO organization to get a response to
serious accusations? Um, the answer to that would be "no."

In fact, a few weeks ago, when Mike Arrington wrote an
assumption-based and error-filled story that demanded an apology from
the DEMO organization for a comment that was clearly not made by or on
behalf of anyone at DEMO, Lacy picked up the story and wrote with
righteous indignation that slander was the highest insult that could be
leveled against a journalist. Did she call me or DEMO before posting
her story? Again no.

UNQUOTE

So, what's my take on all that?

It is my intent to follow, from afar, both conferences, and review all
I can read out of both.  I'll make my own assessments on which hot new
technologies are of interest to me, and I'll try hard to help my
associates, friends and readers know my opinion by updating my blog
here.  Stay tuned to my list of disruptive IT:  http://www.ctovision.com/disruptive-technology-list.html

And I'll also keep tracking the drama.  

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Cloud, collaboration, Computer Security, CTO, Current Affairs, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, General Musings, Google, Great CTOs, innovation, knowledge, R&D, Social Computing, Technology Leadership, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web Services, Weblogs, Yahoo.