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

Android? Car mode? Speakerphone auto-on? Bluetooth volume fail? Micro-USB design-flaw!

[Disclaimer: this information is provided 'as is' without warranty of any kind. Use at your own risk]

Are you -that is, your phone- suffering from the following symptoms?

• weeks or even months ago, "car mode" started to seemingly randomly get enabled
• ever since, that seemed to happen more often
• at some point, when you made or received a call, the speakerphone would sometimes be automatically turned on
• since a while, when you make or receive a call, the speakerphone is always automatically turned on
• since then, when connected via Bluetooth to a speakerset, you can change the volume on your phone up or down but that won't have any effect
• it drives you crazy

SAP may be betting on the right horses, but how about the jockeys?

Mark Finnern welcomed the new Sap mentors today, 20 experienced people with some ties to SAP. As Matthias Steiner says, everyone can nominate one, selection process is "top secret".
If I'd get to single out one addition that pleases me most, it'd be Fred Verheul. Congratulations, Fred!

A whole conversation unfolded after I asked Jamie Oswald about the little HANA, Cloud and Integration expertise among the newcomers. Summing up all reactions, there was HANA experience among a dozen, and Jamie assured me that

@vijayasankarv @martijnlinssen Important to remember that Mentors aren't for marketing - big part of job is helping existing implementations
— Jamie Oswald (@oswaldxxl) September 25, 2012

I decided to take a look at the whole group of 110, and see how they could help existing implementations. In plain English: how does their expertise add up to the latter?

Twitter is NOT where the party is at

You couldn't possible have missed the messy story around NBC and Twitter, resulting in suspension of Guy Adams' Twitter account. Guy's latest reaction on that is here, and contains the concise version.

Update July 31st 21:15 GMT+2: Guy Adam's account has been unsuspended:

Oh. My Twitter account appears to have been un-suspended. Did I miss much while I was away?
— Guy Adams (@guyadams) July 31, 2012

I do have to say that "which is widely listed online" is an exaggeration for sure, as it's only to be found on one site

I remember that it was also in a comment to a 2008 post on that same site, but can't possibly find that anymore now the web has been littered with Gary Zenkel's email address. In an action that started 10 hours ago, people have been tweeting and blogging the email address and since then it's been mentioned over a thousand times on Twitter, and if you Google for it you'll currently get close to ten thousand results

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

Why API's suck, and what they lack

The Social Media Movement is slowly moving towards monetisation. Social Business, yes even Social Enterprise, is nigh.
Infographics bite the dust in an ever-increasing frenzy to prove that social is here to stay, to rule, to conquer the world!
And as yet another evidence of that, API's are brought forward - by the hundreds, no the thousands - to prove that the Brave New Open World has finally (yeah, really finally this time, right?) come

Well, I don't think so. API's suck - big time

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

Will SaaS kill ERP? No, but it should

It's been a busy few days. First a post on ZDNet by Eric Lai invented a few problems for Cloud, or rather SaaS, and especially multi-tenancy: inflexible, less secure, less powerfull and maybe more costly - is what Eric claims multi-tenancy SaaS to be.
Thomas Wailgum neatly nailed that via a counterpost, as did Frank Scavo, to whose post Eric commented, and back again

The circle of Inspiration? Yes, it evolves hardest and finest on Twitter. And here are my thoughts: we need to grow up

SAP, Integration and Star Trek: the future is now

I commented ranted on an SDN post yesterday. Submitting it failed, and I lost the +/- 500 words. A bit more miffed after that, I wrote the comment anew in Notepad, and copy/pasted that - it worked.
I got a few reactions, some of which inviting me to post on the topic on SDN via a blog post in stead of just a (lengthy) comment. While I appreciate the invite, I'll just do it here for now

tibbr 3.5 turns the world into interactive post-its

Tibbr released version 3.5 to the public today in Palo Alto California, 9 AM Pacific time. I got a solo preview yesterday and I was impressed by it - as usual I'd say.
"In twelve months since launch, tibbr has been deployed to hundreds of thousands of employees across global enterprises, who can now use tibbr to unify people, data and businesses processes to get work done"

A clear message: ...to get work done. In my opinion, tibbr dramatically reduces unnecessary human intervention in the workplace, thereby making work less unpleasant while freeing up resources for the really interesting work.
Not the greatest nor shortest sales pitch - but then I'm not selling anything here

The Law of the Handicap of a Headstart

In discussions about SAP's new stealth weapon, HANA, I have come to become a wee weary. At SAP Inside Track NL we joked about it:

@jonerp @dahowlett @ragtag @applebyj like we said at #sitNL "When lost for words, just end your sentence with HANA and you'll be fine"

What is HANA? In short, it uses SSD storage combined with a lot of in-memory to speed up results. SAP's claim is 3600 times faster results achieved with SAP HANA 1.0 with one 4-way, 8 core server (2.27 GHz clock speed) with 0.5 TB of Main Memory, 2 TB of SSD storage, 1Gb Ethernet running on an open source operating system.

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

Why I'm using fake identities to sign up

That is, from now on I will. It is not only getting harder to sign up, it is also getting harder to sign in, and out. Let me explain please as this story has a few sides to it.
But first, let me make my point: I'm going to use fake identities to sign up for new services. If I like the new service, I'll abandon the fake identity and sign up with a real one

Will that mean I'll be lying when accepting most ToS?

Telotecture - architecture's complement

Architecture - as I took 4 years of Greek it's always meant the same word to me: that what stands at the beginning of construction, "ἀρχι-τέκτων". Tekton is a builder / carpenter, and I was sure there was a verb tektein, but after looking for hours I'm afraid that this is it. At least arche doesn't mean leader, it's the Greek word for beginning - so don't get fooled by online etymology sites or even wikipedia

Anyway.
Now, I'm not so sure. An architect used to be a sort of foreman overseeing and instructing the builders as well. Comparing that to IT, I think we've had almost 2 decades now of Architecture that were moderately successful.
Moderately, because initially a lot of people floated their way up into the architectural layer due to a lack of weight. Now we have various certifications, of which TOGAF is a reasonably good one, and quality has significantly increased - but there are other issues now

One of them is the decreased size of projects, and the increased distance between the Architect and the Workers - and you know what happens when the cat's away.

The myth of standardisation

[Image by  Someregger]

After reading the ERP paradox by Kailash Awati, I had that "Oh yes" feeling of recognition: someone was hitting the nail right on the head here.
Standardisation is a myth, especially when you go global. There are two simple reasons for that: customer demand and business supply

Ask a CEO what makes his business so special, and he'll start with "We distinguish ourselves from our competitors by..." and there you have it; let me translate that for you: "We do the exact same business as half the globe, but support more exceptions to the rules"

Social silos adding to enterprise silos? Not with proper Integration

Laurie Buzcek called out for Integration as a solution for the failure of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business - which she equates to each other - and I couldn't help but think of Tibbr when reading her post
Dion Hinchcliffe responded with a post in which he also stresses the integration of social media with enterprise tools, albeit he's careful to stress that pure technology can't be the answer - apparently we're really beyond E2.0 now

Dion claims OpenSocial 2.0 is the answer but I fail to see how that will help us further: although an impressive amount of work, it is purely technical and relying on the fact that

Developers can create applications, using standard JavaScript and HTML, that run on social websites that have implemented the OpenSocial APIs

and I don't see that happen any time soon - the only successful 2.0 Social Tools are those that are 1.0 in nature: confined

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

Comments make your code alive. Otherwise, it's dead

[Image by W.Rebel]

I had a small discussion about code and comments with Bob MacNeal. Bob thinks that

Commented out code is the same as a comment - Litter. Don't litter.

I strongly disagree, although we had a nice conversation. It turned out that

@MartijnLinssen I'm an average coder at best, but I like clean code. I've made a living copying code from others. I dig good, clean shit.

That is the crux right there

The thick clueless layer of Fedex

(How FedEx FeXed me)

The picture is very appropriate: it is the cube grenade I ordered at Hugh MacLeod's @gapingvoid gallery
It shows company hierarchy as we know it: sociopaths on top, losers at the bottom, and a thick layer of clueless in between to protect the upper layer from the bottom one

I bought it because it will remind me of the division of powers, and I will hang it in the master bedroom, which also serves as my home office

Little could I have known that I'd encounter a multitude of cluelessness on getting the pic from there (US) to here (NL). This is its tale:

The apprentice- master model

Jon Reed made the following statement on Twitter:

Marin accused Deloitte of using project as "a trial-and-error training ground" for junior consultants. Panelists: please react #focuserprt

My answer: very common

Growth. How do you grow people from skill A to skill B? The eternal question. For we are struggling with that question in our personal lives as well: how do I grow myself from this stage onto the next? How do I become a superstar?
I'll leave the obvious pointers to those answers for now, if you're a regular visitor to this blog then you know where it's at