
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 I’ll start bottom-up, from […]

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

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. I do have to say that “which is widely listed online” is an exaggeration for sure, as it’s only to be found on […]

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 […]

Why API’s suck, and what they lack
The Social Media Movement is slowly moving towards monetisation. Social Business, yes even Social Enterprise, is neigh. 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 […]

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 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 […]

Do We Need A Standardization Around Amazon APIs?
Today there was a debate among the #clouderati about whether OpenStack should standardize their APIs around AWS APIs. Even though two years back I had an opinion that standardizing around AWS API will be good because of interoperability advantages, I have since changed my position and I now feel that it is too early to […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Big Data needs Big Collection and Big Execution
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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The myth of standardisation
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 […]