The Roadmap to 'Hadoop in the Cloud'

The Twitter ball started rolling again just now. Matt Asay posed an interesting question about Forrester suggesting Hadoop isn't a great fit for the cloud. (Even) without context Vijay Vijayasankar and I started firing off questions and answers which inevitable led to my promise of writing down the transition plan for it

Here it is

A pyramid scheme is bad form, Cloudwork

As some of you might know, or rather, should, Integration is my middle name - you might even call me a one-trick pony and I'd take that as a compliment. So, when I saw that Cloudwork offers unprecedented integration (cough), I signed up immediately! I was even so enthusiastic, I even forgot to use a fake identity - and very much regret that now

Cloudwork didn't have me sign up. No, Cloudwork baited me into giving away my email address, so they could decide themselves when to send me that valuable invite to their beta:

TIBCO's Silver Fabric - a golden lining

I attended TIBCO's PaaS workshop, where they showed and demoed Silver Fabric - the product that has come forth from the DataSynapse acquisition in September 2009. Erik Hageman, Mario Invernizzi and Steven van der Kroft lead the session.
The location was the Radisson Blu near Schiphol, a fine location with excellent service and food & drinks. After we had those, the session started at 1 PM

Silver Fabric is a middle layer between the OS and application. It sits right in between, so it can allow for upgrades, scale up or down, and failover and failback - without human intervention (hold your horses please)

GoDaddy... Go... Gone

Tonight the Godaddy servers have been hit by a simple DDOS - a distributed denial of service involving a few dozen clients or servers that fire off hundreds or even thousands of requests a second at their servers. It's a simple attack, and very effective. It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, standing in the middle of the classroom and getting all those toddler questions fired off at him. The inevitable result: he breaks down

Google Drive breaks Google Docs?

Starting yesterday, I've been receiving requests from people to share some of the content I have on Google Docs. Yesterday I also shared a link with a friend of mine, and he couldn't access it. That puzzled me

I checked the last link myself, signed out, and tried again - I got a log-on. What? My publicly shared link wasn't publicly shared anymore?
I checked a few other links that I've been publicly sharing for years without problems - I couldn't access them, period

No Custom Code, No Customization, No Requirements. And No Integration

The title comes from a conversation between Ron Tolido and me in which we perused the joys and challenges of SaaS. Ron has a very sharp mind and an even sharper tongue, although he somehow magically manages to give people the idea of adressing them in their comfort zone - I never said I was done learning

Ron still works for Capgemini although he's not the lipservice-paying kind of guy, I freely float in space. I'll jot down my thoughts on what SaaS means to the world - read: IT vendors and system integrators - and of course am very interested to see what he has to say about the same

SAP Integration? Not what I had in mind

I couldn't attend nor even follow the stream at Sapphirenow, but I picked up a few tweets on Integration. Well actually, Seb pointed one out to me.
As much as I detest it, I'll have to base this post on the limited info I retrieved - although I did browse the usual placeholders for SAP news of course.
If you read my latest post on SAP and Integration, you might presume I was a little overexcited about what was going to be announced

Well, the excitement wore off. Really off

Oh Google, why did you stop being sexy?

[Image by Exey Panteleev]

Born out of a tweet from Tom Raftery, who pointed me to Google's Terms of Services concerning their latest love child: Google Drive

I waved at Google Wave, Buzz didn't thrill me other than enabling the opt-out in Google Mail, and I jumped onto Google+ as soon as I could but the effort I put into it (and the goodies I got from it) went downhill fairly soon after.
I skipped Google Drive. I have a fully mirrored NAS meaning I don't care if a disk breaks, I can access it from anywhere in the world and the fast-moving docs I have on my laptop and phone as well, as I have to be able to work offline anywhere, for any duration

So, I didn't read their Terms of Service - but someone else did, and it looks awful

Why SAP will be single-tenant at start

There's an interesting discussion going on about multi-tenancy and SAP.
Let me be clear on one thing: SaaS can't be anything else but multi-tenant and opt-out, meaning that there is a single code base for all customers, with regular upgrades for everyone at the same time

But what is only natural for SaaS "pure players" will be impossible to realise for SAP - a small step for one can be a giant leap for others

Where will the social developers code? And what?

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a very interesting piece, and I missed it. But thanks to John Rymer I picked it up.
John shared an interesting question indeed:

Client gives up on enterprise PaaS deal with #Salesforce.com, asks me for options. Focus is "systems of engagement." Interesting question.
— John Rymer (@johnrrymer) February 16, 2012

We had a small conversation on that and I read Dion's post.
While I disagree with some statements like

Pervasive's Integration World Europe 2012

I was at Integration World Europe 2012 today, organised by Pervasive at the Cumberland hotel in London.
A nice environment and a party of a hundred plus, today's topics were Big Data, Data Integration, Cloud and Strategic Business Solutions.
Clear divisions were made on Cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and public, private, community and hybrid

Shawn Rogers from Enterprise Management Associates showed an extensive amount of tips and tricks on how to make sure you get the Cloud solution you need, being honest about the small print. The 50-page report he squeezed into one presentation showed many insights, and I'll certainly study it

SAP meets Cloud: something needs to vaporise first

[Photo by John Kerstholt]

I have been comfortably following SAP Influencer Summit 2011 from my chair, and reading up on the various posts and vids released throughout the process. It won't surprise anyone that yesterday's keywords were cloud, ByD, business, SAPonDemand and sales - thank you, you 350 participants who produced 1,500 tweets during the last day

Many people ask the question: with such a traditional on-premise company, will these extremes form a perfect match that complements and makes for combined strength, or will it just be a very unhappy marriage?

Big Data needs Big Collection and Big Execution

[Image by John M. Kennedy T]


Big Data is the new buzz it seems, and I must say I have been sceptic of it since I first saw the very word - or phrase, what is it?
As an IT architect, I've always equaled data to databases, and information to applications - and knowledge to the people on top of these

For one, I think you can very easily handle the perceived issue when dropping the data, and acting on the information instead. Since when did databases contain useful information?

Vijay Vijayasankar wrote a good post on it, and I'd like to add to that from another point of view

My first anniversary

Today, it's been exactly one year since I became self-employed.
I've loved almost every second of it - while the start was hard, the middle and end were absolutely great

The market is still going up and down so I've had quite a few days without paid work, but used those to work on my business, network, future clients and assignments, and the apps and websites I'm working on

After one year, I've made a few times what I used to earn so the future looks bright. I treated our family to our most expensive vacation ever as successes have got to be celebrated, and conveniently that concluded my first year

Open Source and Cloud, Mobile, Data: what goes where?

After an interesting question from Matt Asay I gave a few answers, then decided that Twitter's not always suited for long conversations (ahem)

I'm working on the theme for OSBC2012. I want to highlight the connection btwn cloud/mobile/data. Can someone help me express that?

My first reaction was that these words are big, and could mean a lot of different things to different people. I don't like to talk about Cloud as it's a blanket term for three different main streams in general: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (infra, operating system and software).
Mobile? Pretty much the same thing. Mobile has operating systems and software, and is useless without that special infrastructure called Connectivity: a connection to the Web

Cloud API's don't exist, but become costlier over time

I had a discussion with George Reese on Cloud and API's, starting with me saying I'd support a maximum of 3 different API versions, and off went the discussion.
His "Max 3 versions? Do you hate your ecosystem?", "What do you mean there's no such thing as a public cloud API?" and "When you cease to support a version of your API, you kill your ecosystem." were puzzling, and he ended with "The bottom line is this: If you decide to change your API, who should bear the costs of that change? You or your ecosystem?"

Let me try to explain here what Cloud is, what API's are, and what cost is

The SI is dead. Long live the Supplier Integrator

Have we reached peak SI is a splendid post by Peter Evans Greenwood about the changing IT world.
On one side of the boxing ring there is the traditional system integrator, on the other side there is a multitude of change agents:

• Business taking back budget for IT spend from local IT
• On-demand and on-time (i.e. small) projects rather than "strategic" million-dollar ones
• SaaS for a quick proof of concept over old-fashioned PoCs
• Standardisation over customisation (what I call "Shop and Stop")
• Consumerism outperforming enterprise shop offering
• Overall decimation of the traditional SI Time & Material model

Skype - the mysterious money bubble

This morning I wrote this post already in one tweet:

2003: Skype founded. 2005: bought by eBay $2.5B (60m users). 2009: sold by eBay $2.8B (450m users). 2011: bought by MSFT $8B (700m users)

That was after a very quick 5 minute analysis of a few tweets, posts and web sites. Now I've finally found the time and want to dig in there a bit deeper - the graph in my head is so crooked that I have to get it out

The emperor is dressed in fluffy Clouds

After reading too many tweets, tweetups, events, papers and products about Cloud Integration, I decided to rant blog on this phenomenon. In my very first post on this blog, How Cloud computing will drive Enterprise Integration, I talked about a similar thing, and fortunately that was May 2009 but now applications are appearing and it's time to put an end to it, especially after I released my Perfect Integration eBook last week

Here's what I said back then:

So, I think it's good news. The real EDI experts are somewhat left alone in solving this riddle, unlike SOA where people claimed to have 20 years experience in something that was invented only months before

Free Chatter: all your data are belong to us?

A pun on an Internet meme that I first saw as a hack to World of Warcraft, this is the first thing that crossed my mind when I read the Terms of Service (TOS) of the now free Chatter, released January 31st

First, I briefly used Chatter and it looks like an old version of Yammer. Access via one single email domain, and People, Groups, Files: been there done that. Maybe I should play around a bit more but I'm being a bit careful - after reading this post, you'll understand why

I have a few posts on Chatter, but suffices to say the price per user was aimed at $50 a month before and during development, and lowered to $15 at introduction. A little while later, Chatter became free for existing salesforce.com users, and now it's free for everyone in the world.
Clever move, desperate move, anything in between? I can only guesstimate the motive(s)

A few quotes from the TOS:

"Your Data" means all electronic data or information submitted by You to the Chatter.com Service.

That doesn't leave out anything, agreed? ALL you submit, is referred to by "Your Data"