Persistent Social Business Apps

A recap of videos covering the emergence of ubiquitous, persistent online identity, social graph, feeds and open APIs. Fundamentally these are transforming individuals behavior, expectations and experience across the Web.

Clara Shih, HCI graduate Stanford CS, creator of the first business app on Facebook, talks about her app and what the World Wide Web of people means for interaction, relationships and enterprise software design.



Alex Payne of Twitter talks about properly designing open APIs for interaction derived from simplicity, "explorability" and consistency.



The Gillmor Gang discuss social development derivative technologies location based APIs and predict 5-7 years of reckless innovation in Social productivity apps before they all come crashing down (APIs levering, API web services)



Fix Bayonets!

Larry Ellison Live

Larry Ellison.... Live and unscripted in conversation with Ed Zander at The Churchill Club, San Jose Sept 21, 2009.

Ed Zander choose Larry for the tonight’s gig, because he's still in the hunt, he started Oracle on $2000. Hit the wall in 1980's recovered and competed fiercely with Microsoft for leadership on SQL Relational Database performance. After consolidating the ERP applications space (PeopleSoft, Seibel, 30+ more) Oracle is now the 2nd largest software company in the world (an amazing record).

I learned Larry was head of engineering from day one and 32 years later, he’s still head of Engineering at Oracle today. From time to times he’s run other functions, but only until he found the right leaders to head up other functions. Under his leadership Oracle is now the World’s second largest ERP applications company. But as I learned at last week’s SAP World Day 2009 conference in same room in the same Fairmont, ERP has fallen off Moore’s Law.

SAP looked pretty much the same 10 years ago. The biggest innovation seemed to be Timeless Software, the ability of SAP version 7 to accept upgrade packs without ripping out and replacing the complete system. Exact Software’s SMB ERP apps have had Timeless Software for years (Arco van Nieuwland ACM 2005)

Meanwhile Google and the iPhone doing innovation in the consumer space have rapidly brought new innovations in productivity to people doing business bypassing the corp IT police. For example 8 major technology companies including Microsoft, Samsung, and Nokia are in the process of opening up App Stores to entice app development on their platforms. Roger McNamee a prominent Silicon Valley investor helped steer Palm to develop the Palm Pre identified as mega shift to the wearable PC mobility experience, and now business apps are running in the Cloud.

Knowing Larry Ellison’s passion for competitiveness, evidenced in his reputation for driving the top performing relational DB, the Americas Cup and Oracles ferocious reputation. Why does Larry buy SUN at this time in his career?

Yes - I was attending, to get insight into how Larry intends to steer Oracle to the kind of growth Google and Apple have experienced. Must be his goal - right!

Larry made the claim that Oracle regularly beats SAP but mostly admires Tom Watsons IBM. That after beating IBM at Software wants SUN to complete with IBM on hardware. He played both ends of the Cloud calling VC on Sandhill Road nitwits for not gripping that Cloud companies run like Google run on hardware and awesome engineering. That many visions for ERP in the Cloud are vapor; he ribbed Salesforce.com, saying there latest technology invention was Fuchsia. Also that Oracle can provision ERP on demand today – (in the Cloud, if you like).

I gathered than many people at the event also wanted to know why Oracle wants to acquire SUN. Based on the conversation with Larry and people at the dinner table, the reason is clear. To get ERP back on to Moore’s law by quietly making adjusts to the SUN technology stack and Java in particular (many of Oracle’s ERP apps, are Java apps).

For all the megalomaniac bravado and careful posturing, I don’t believe Larry said more than he needed to say. Further Larry announced Oracle just did a 5 year plan, and he will continue to head up engineering. My conjecture Oracle has 30-40 Java ERP apps many routed in Client Server d architecture, how better to move these apps to the next major architrecture more efficiently than by nurturing the Java / SUN technology stack.

I asked Larry an audience question about opening up the ERP BOM in the same way Google has opened up Google docs. He gave a sales marketing answer. That Oracle can server up ERP on demand today. Afterwards, I asked Ed Zander (Larry departed smartly). Ed said Larry was not going to publically answer my question. He needs to sell ERP licenses today. I think Oracle buying SUN starts a 5 year race. Who can transform ERP from flatline growth to Moores Law growth.

My conjecture is before Larry passes then baton, Oracle comes out with a transformational ERP suite in the Cloud.

Check back in 5 years?

Buchheit at Facebook

BLIP.fm DJ Search

O'Reilly Inside Mobile Conference Recap

Aadjemonkeyrock.com re-tweeted Trends: Why Cloud Computing is the Future of Mobile -

Daily I observe these trends playing out in ordinary human computer interactions. Many office buildings emptied out over the past few years, people now working at home, visit customers, or spend time embedded at suppliers (yeah - the economy emptied out some offices). Visit a Starbucks during the day time, popular locations are often full of people meeting on business or working their email inboxes. By empirical observation –the trend is crystal clear. People are now doing more work connected in real-time to their company databases via Mobile Apps. They stay connected to the popular corporate information services like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office, Exact Synergy and emerging apps easily deployed via Cloud Computing, so IT can provision access to People who are Mobile.

Mobile is so simple its convenience over sophistication. Simplicity over complexity.

O’Reilly Inside Mobile Conference Recap

Client Server Wine in Web App Bottles?

Our CEO recently hosted results for the financial analyst community. An answer that customers deployment tastes often change after a major recessionary downturn, struck me to inventory patterns in SMB app deployment patterns. Notice the 10 year period of app innovation seems coincident with the recovery troughs. It seems our industry is synchronised, also we keep coming back to simple after incorporating new technologies.

Typical small-to-midsize biz app suite evolution recap:

1982-1992: New Accounting / MRP apps modules programmed in Basic for DOS on PC
Server is file data storage only. App progs sit in a folder C:\Progs.

1992-2002: New Financial / ERP app suites programmed in C++ / VB for Windows on Pentium
Server is SQL data storage, centralized installer to updates client complex PCs. App programs install in C:\Windows\Progs\Apps and Windows Registry

2002-2012: New point apps CRM/SCM/Doc Mgmt written in ASP.NET for Windows IIS Web Server. Data is SQL storage. Web services added for customizations, web mash ups.

2002-2012: Prior Windows suites move to central deployment, installs move to 'Windows Citrix servers' for central management / hosting. biz logic layer, separated from the user interface, options increase customization via biz layer and potential scalability for app server.

2012-2022: Rich mobile apps capture field functions. Desktop Apps move to Rich Internet Apps. Simple Web Apps move to Rich Apps. Servers move into SaaS hosting centers.

During each 10 year period we've added new client devices through the LAN, the Web, WiFi and Wireless. Is the underlying trend always really a move back to Client Server patterns, the simplest deployment and development solutions to support multiple client devices?

Same wine, more bottles?

Hadoop redundancy mgmt for Web Services

Today I was stumpedby a question, why is there a such focus on developing no FAIL web services, when by definition any highly distributed computing model is inherently unreliable.

Examples of talks on reliability in the Ruby camp How Not To FAIL At Web Services in the Microsoft camp, when services do FAIL how to debug

The issue of reliability seems likely to increase, StikeIron now has 50 webservices StrikeIron Services List We know we can expect many more services to emerge. How will we handle in a scalable simple way like Hadoop?



Consider a conceptual analogy Hadoop provides redundancy for data storage by providing software to manage stripping of data across multiple commodity data servers, known as sharding. The expensive forerunner was a single beefy server equiped with a hardware based raid array.

Now consider the options for redundant Web Services in Microsoft architected solution. The recommended recourse is to use a single instance of SQL Server with the SQL Server Service Broker to manage queues and re-queuing for failed webservices.

But the characteristics of a single instance of SQL server match those of hardware raid. Unplug the power supply and the system FAILS. Whereas Hadoop is designed for server failures. If a PSU a disk drive or complete server goes out, Hadoops software reassigns one of the 2 sharded data stripes as the new primary stripe and automatically handles data replication to at least 3 servers.

What would a software based solution for managing web services failures look like? Lets assume redundancy features similar to Hadoop. 3 message web services queues are maintained. If queue 1 blows, switch to queue 2, and replicate the lost queue. The solution can alos learn the pattern of availability through statistical trail and error, and react by calleing web services at reliable times of day. The management of web services can simply retry, skip, queue, re-queue or email the administrator like Hadoop does.

Microsoft is no sleeper and the .NET Services Bus, part of Azure includes message handing and for sure over time mechanisms for handing failed Webservices via Azure will emerge. But what about business architects who wish to implement independent redundancy of web services now.

Do you know of an Hadoop like mgmt infrastructure project or product for managing queues to external Web Services?

Some brain storm ideas
The .NET Service Bus provides Frictionless connectivity across applications via Azure. “Web services are redundant as we know them - Juval Lowy”

Friendfeed. Adding indexes to a database with more than 10 – 20 million rows completely locks the database for hours at a time. After some deliberation, FriendFeed decided to implement a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system. how-friendfeed-uses-mysql-to-store-schema-less-data Deploys Memchached