R&D

See Inside a Google Data Center and a Google Server

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Google has recently provided some unprecedented views into their data center operations and have even revealed current details of their server board.  In the past they have only released information on old designs (like the 80 PC rack given to the computer history museum). It seems like every time photos would pop up of server parts it would end up being of a previous generation of equipment.  For the most part, folks like me have only dreamed of being able to see inside a real Google data center and seeing real operational, current generation Google equipment.   Read the rest of this entry »

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, CTO, Google, innovation, Network Security, R&D.

Federal Government Technology Directions and the Fed CTO

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Technologists in and out of government have been very excited about the work of the Obama transition team, especially the work of their technologists.   A group known as the TIGR (Technology, Innovation and Government Reform) Team has brought some of the best and brightest minds together to strategize and impact the action plans of the federal government.

We have now been treated to an insider’s view into the workings of this team.  The Change.gov website posted a 4 minute video introducing these thinkers and showing us some of the dialog underway.  See it below:

The video shows glimpses of the entire team, but features :

  • Vivek Kundra, CTO of Washington DC
  • Beth Noveck, Author and idea generator who has written on topics like “Wiki-Government”
  • Andrew McLaughlin, head of global policy and government for Google.
  • Dan Chenok, a former IT executive and Obama advisor.
  • Blair Levin, Telecom analyst and former FCC executive.

Watch the video to see them in action!  Listen for the term “mashups.”  And a good definition of cloud computing relevant to the federal enterprise.

For those who have made it a hobby to speculate on who Obama’s CTO will be, I think the answer now is that it almost doesn’t matter which of the nation’s great tech leaders will be selected.  We know whoever it is will stand on the shoulders of giants and will be served with a group of advisors who have mapped out a vision and an action plan for success (whoever it is, I just hope to have dinner with periodically to pick his or her brain and see how I can serve from the outside- I sure want to see them succeed).

Now things are about to get exciting!  Time for all of us to do what we can to ensure the visions of this group become reality.

This entry was posted in Apps for Democracy, chief technology officer, Cloud, collaboration, Computer Security, CTO, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, Google, Great CTOs, innovation, Mashup, R&D, Social Computing, standards, Technology Leadership, The Future of Technology, Vivek Kundra, Web 2.0, Web/Tech and tagged , , , , , .

CTOs, Global Cyberwar and Our Collective Future

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Ccis
If you are a technologist, please take a moment to download the PDF of the report by the U.S. Commission on Cybersecurity.  This report, titled Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency, is the best proclamation of the challenges of cyber I have read.  It is also a roadmap that will help any trying to navigate these very tough issues.

I've been involved in things cyber for a long time.  My deepest
involvement began in December 1998, almost 10 years ago to the day.  
In all that time I've seen lots of studies and lots of papers and many
treatments of the issues.  But I've never seen one that captures the
complexities and the need for specific actions as well as this one. 

I'd really recommend you read every word, if you want to be considered literate in this field.   But if it will be a little while till you get to it, here are some key points:

The three major findings are:  1) Cybersecurity is now a major national security problem for the U.S., 2) Decisions and actins must respect privacy and civil liberties, and 3) only a comprehensive national security strategy that embraces both the domestic and international  aspects of cybersecurity will make us more secure.

The report makes a few points about the Bush Administration's Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI).  In general the give credit to that initiative, and call it good.  I agree, it is a great activity I've previously written about that is led by one of the most effective people in government today and has done great work.  But as the comission points out, the work of the CNCI is good but not sufficient. 

The biggest shock for me in this study:  The amount of funding on R&D for cyber security.  I have been looking into the many activities underway, and maybe that look made me deceive myself into thinking it was a well funded effort.  According to the comission, however, they estimate that the total R&D funding in the federal government for cybersecurity is about $300million.  Less than two-tenths of one percent of the total federal R&D.

The report has a great section on identity manangement. 

I am convinced the organizational approaches outlined in the study are the right ones as well.  There is only one place in our government where we can lead solutions to this challenge.  Where is that?  Hey read the report!

What else do I recommend CTOs do besides read the report?  I think one way we can all help the cybersecurity effort is to think through which standards bodies are the most important to engage with regarding security.   A few are here:
http://www.ctovision.com/2008/05/standards-organizations-ctos-should-track.html

This entry was posted in AFCEA, Barak Obama, CCSA, CERT, chief technology officer, Computer Security, CTO, Cyber Initiative, Cyber War, CyberTrust, CyLab, DHS, DIA, Disruptive IT, DNI, DOD, Enterprise, FDCC, Hathaway, Identity Management, knowledge, microsoft, Network Security, ODNI, OMB, Open Source, R&D, standards, Sun, Sun Ray, Technology Leadership, Thin Client.

Update on Federal Cloud Computing

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My last several briefings, including one yesterday at the FIAC, have addressed some of the dramatic changes underway in the IT world.   That briefing is attached here: Download FIACGourleyBrief.pdf

The conference had a focus on information assurance, computer security, network security and Chief Information Assurance Officers (CISO) in the federal space.   So I not only updated my briefing with the latest tech trends but changed it to focus on lessons learned from industry on compliance monitoring and automation of remediation and related topics.

Read the rest of this entry »

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Cloud, collaboration, Computer Security, CTO, Cyber Initiative, DHS, Disruptive IT, DNI, DOD, Enterprise, Facebook, FDCC, General Musings, Great CTOs, Identity Management, Network Security, R&D, Social Computing, Technology Leadership, The Future of Technology, Thin Client, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech.

The Future of Cyberspace Security: The Law of The Rodeo

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This is an update of my now annual assessment of the future of technology associated with good and evil in cyberspace which was first posted here.

Predictions
of the future of technology are increasingly starting to sound like
science fiction, with powerful computing grids giving incredible computational power to users and with autonomous robots becoming closer and closer to being in our daily lives vice just in computer science departments. Infotech, nanotech and biotech are fueling each other and each of those three dominate fields are generating more and more benefits that impact the other, propelling us even faster into a new world.   Depending on your point of view the increasing pace of science and technology can be good or
bad.  As for me, I'm an optimist, and I know we humans will find a way
to ensure technology serves our best interests.   

Read the rest of this entry »

This entry was posted in AFCEA, CCSA, CERT, chief technology officer, Cloud, collaboration, Compliance, Computer Security, CTO, CTO Principles, Cyber Initiative, Cyber War, CyberTrust, Disruptive IT, DOD, DoDIIS, Enterprise, Great CTOs, Identity Management, Information Warfare, innovation, microsoft, Moore's Law, Network Security, ODNI, Open Source, R&D, Ray Kurzweil, Robots, Social Computing, The Future of Technology, Thin Client, Triumfant, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Yahoo.

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.

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.

How fast is 3G and what is 3.5G and when will 4G be here?

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Most enterprise CTOs are very interested in the "cloud" and ways to tap
into cloud-based resources.   An interesting aspect of this discussion
has been how to access the cloud while on the move.   Today's cellular
networks support that access today, and future enhancements are making
that support even better and much much faster. 

How much faster? I'll try to put that in context in this post.

Early 3G network to had a download speed of 384kbits per second and an
upload speed of 192Kbits per second.  The wireless router you might
have in your home, by contrast, might have a speed of 54Mbits per
second.  So, about 140 times faster.  

But the 3G networks in place today use new transmission algorithms that
enable much faster throughput.  Here is a little more context from
vendor pages:. 

Verizon asserts their broadband access, based on CDMA2000 1x EVDO (Code
Division Multiple Access Evolution-Data Only) provides download speeds
of up to 1.4Mbits/s and uploads of up to 800kbits/s.

AT&T is leveraging its GPRS technology called EDGE to deliver
higher speeds that Verizon's.  AT&T's EDGE delivers speeds of
around 1.7Mbits/s and upload of around 1.2Mbits/s.

Sprint asserts that its broadband cards delivery 350-500kbps but then say you might get a peak of 3.1Mbps.  I wonder if or how often that happens. 

What's coming next:

A key emerging protocol is HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access).  HSDPA is
sometimes called 3.5G.  This protocol is in the HSPA (High Speed Packet
Access) family and allows download of up to 14.4Mbits/s download and
5.8Mbits/s upload.   Now this is getting interesting.  

HSPA+ allows speeds of up to 42Mbits/s.  This is almost what you would
expect to see in your home wireless LAN.  The next step is a project
called Long Term Evolution.  This LTE will start with providing
150Mbits/s to handheld devices and soon thereafter expect protocols and
algorithms to increase that upto 1gig of bits per second to your mobile
device. 

When will these new protocols and speeds be available to consumers? 
The answer is, the best roadmaps I have seen are all tightly held insider
views, but if you look at what is being rolled out right now we should
expect a continuing stream of announcements that brings the timing of
these new protocols more into focus.   Public information show many
vendors moving to the first version of LTE by 2011.  Indications I'm
getting are that it
will be accelerated into 2009.

So, brace yourself for the innovation that will drive in the devices that connect to the cloud through cellular.

This entry was posted in Cloud, collaboration, CTO, Disruptive IT, innovation, R&D, The Future of Technology, Thin Client, Verizon, Vision.