Guest Posts
The New Economics of Technology Startups?
I have recently been reading the book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” by Chris Anderson. Well I am not actually reading it as I find I do not have time for reading books any more. These days I do all of my “book reading” using audio books from Audible.com. I find that by [...]
Here Is My Hammer. Show Me Your Screw!
Well I have been traveling out of the country a lot these past few weeks so its been a while since I posted. I will try and do better in the future. During my travels I had a lot of interesting discussions with people about a wide range of technology issues, solutions, and technology acquisitions [...]
What Do You Know About Project Management 2.0?
Project Management 2.0 is becoming a popular term, but many people are still not quite sure what it is. Some of you may know that this term has something to do with Web 2.0 and technologies like blogs, wikis and social networks. Others have heard that Project Management 2.0 is a new, innovative approach to [...]
Why a Business Process Modeling (BPM) Approach to SOA Usually Fails
I was having a Twitter conversation with Brenda Michelson (@bmichelson) and Todd Biske (@toddbiske) about the tight coupling in peoples minds between BPM and SOA, and why I find that when people take a BPM centric approach to SOA, it usually ends up not delivering the goods. So today’s post is about how to properly [...]
The Agile Origins of Project Management 2.0
In my previous post I brought up the topic of enterprise agility. My conclusion was: to be agile and adapt quickly to the ever-changing business environment, you need to be able to blend top-down control with bottom-up agility in a “Ying and Yang” style. I also mentioned the latest research, showing that teams that foster [...]
Enterprise 2.0 Needs To Stop Being So Naive
You know I really struggle to get excited about Enterprise 2.0. Not because I don’t think IT needs to undergo change, but because I feel that Enterprise 2.0 as we seem to be defining it, and covering it in the press and the blogosphere just doesn’t seem to be solving the key issues that either [...]
The Need For Speed
Image via Wikipedia Yesterday was a busy day for me. It started at 4:30 AM when I had to do an interview with a reporter from Bloomberg who covers the European Stock Exchanges. There was then coverage of the goings on with some of my clients in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and many [...]
At Age 35 Mozart Was Dead
The title of this blog is a quote from Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital during a Fireside Chat with Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technologies, Paul Graham of YCombinator and Mike at the Revenue Bootcamp held last July. If your an entrepreneur and haven’t watched the video for this, I encourage you to watch it, as [...]
What’s in a Cloud (or Not)
I read a lot of articles on technology and it always amazes me the degree of heated debate that goes on in the blogosphere, social media and elsewhere over simple definitions. What caught my attention today was the number of posts and comments on Twitter about what was or was not Cloud. So the question [...]
How To Build an SOA Based, High Performance, Scalable and Reliable Twitter on Steroids
Over the past few days I have been having some issues with my Twitter account. Beyond the well known pauses in the service, outages, etc there are some less known but more annoying problems with twitter search. It turns out that many accounts don’t show up in search at all. Therefore, if you are one [...]
The Evolution Of Reliability and High Availability
Over the last few decades, the technologies we used and the approaches we took to make our systems reliable have undergone a steady evolution. In some cases the technology has just gotten more reliable through quality control at the hardware level (consider an Intel Blade today compared to my 1986 Zenith 8088 that I wrote [...]
The Challenge of Offline Saas Revisited
Paul Michaud wrote a post here a couple of days ago on the challenge of allowing offline usage in a Saas based system. In his comprehensive discussion, he used the example of a Saas based contact management system and the complexities involved in allowing users to take their data, manipulate it offline, and then synchronise [...]
High Availability Series: Series Outline
With all of the talk about reliability, or lack thereof, of SaaS and Cloud based applications, I thought I would write a series on designing applications to be Resilient and Highly Available. The series sort of started with this post “It’s Inadequate Design That Lets Systems Fail, Not Whether They Are SaaS or Deployed in [...]
It’s Inadequate Design That Lets Systems Fail, Not Whether They Are SaaS or Deployed in The Cloud
There have been many high profile outages lately which have caught peoples attention. These failures are being used as an argument for why critical systems should remain internal and not be deployed as SaaS or in the Cloud. Some of these outages included Google App Engine’s performance issues in early July , Rackspace’s loss of [...]
The Challenges of Allowing Offline Usage in a SaaS Based System
So I was reading an article recently about the latest Google Reader and how it still can’t be used offline with full features. In particular the article focuses on its inability to allow you to read articles offline and then flag those articles as already read, such that when you get back online Google Reader [...]
