An interesting read this morning!!!

Warren BUFFET, please pass on to Youngsters. "I always knew I was going to be rich. I don't think I ever doubted it for a minute" Warren Buffett

Your Browser in five years

Just happened to read this post recently

http://www.pcworld.com/article/199071/your_web_browser_in_five_years.html?tk=rss_news

I believe the browser applications would go a long way than just as mentioned here in the next five years.

Here are some more that could be possible in the coming years

1. Browser Watch: We already have a watch phone (from LG i guess). But a simple electronic strap with connectivity solutions with customized browser can do wonders than just being a watch on your wrist. Of course it would have its limitations, but certainly it would have its space to score as well.

2. Web Assist: With more of Could Computing, SOA, Web Services, Social Media inputting the internet with loads of information, browser assisting to grab the rite information. Know that we have lots of toolbars, sidewiki's etc plugged into the browser, but a real all in all assistant would be real welcome in this space. Rather than doing a mere search or reading a news or tweeting the status, this assistant would be a good companion to be online, stay online and make use of being online.

3. Browser Tagging: An interesting piece to watch for. Your browser need not just stop at showing you pages, it can go further and send you info to the place you are in the format you want. If for some reason your mobile browser cranks, you can start the browser in your machine through a call/sms/tweet and have it scan the web for the info you want and send it to you by sms/IVRS call. You might wonder if this is something a browser should do. But if you have all the tools / assisting entities tagged to your browser wouldn't this be the next logical step for your browser???

cheerz,

Sadagopan.

Three IT Musketeers of this decade

Cloud Computing, Mobile Applications & Tablets

Mobility of computing with professionals more than ever before, availability of innovative products for supporting that cause shall be the IT order in this decade. Most of the innovations, products and applications shall be centered around this for this decade and if possible more than that (but I believe something more shall take center stage in the later half of the decade, would be too early to predict that given that consumers haven't got hold of the latest technovations that predicted for them yet). Its not troo hard to understand that technovations mean technological innovations.

Through cloud computing the industry shall deliver over the air service that requisite individuals or corporates or SMEs can grab and take advantage of. Mobile applications that are standalone or that which make use of the cloud or a combination of both shall be available more in number as we progress through this decade. Tablets which can act as mini computers strong enough to wield cloud & mobile applications that are for office/individual use shall be available in different forms based on different needs. Thus the availability of a public/private infrastructure thats more or less tailor made and to an extent customizable shall provide more decisive power to the consumer in what he wants to suffice his needs of business.

Locally maintained data centers shall be out of fashion while on demand or hosted data centers shall regain market space. Unlike in the past wherein few providers got together in providing data centers and applications, the order of the future would be lot many providers shall come together on a need basis and accordingly serve the needy. There shall be lot many umbrella providers as well who take pre customized sets from existing set of providers and market them to needy business houses or individuals. Thus the layer of implementation and consultancy shall grow. Though this might look like the customer is distanced from the product company, in reality it won't be. Because customers shall be getting to be more aware of which production house provides what product that could be an advantage to the company's business /individuals requirements. Product companies can still maintain their relationship with the customer.

Product companies can now have more inputs from more sectors unlike customer and customer groups, customer implementation groups would also play a major role in cloud implementation. The range of solutions shall vary based on these inputs. Incidentally there will be limited products that are of one size fits all thing. Instead there would be a variety of size offerings from product company's that could be altered or used as it is by implementation partners.

Another significant thing to note would be whoever gets to know the business info earlier shall be in a position to build a product on that. The earlier design cycles for product development maintained by huge corporate houses shall be altered by this. Companies have to get the product as early as possible when the requirements are found out. Digging out for requirements shall be passe and that customers shall be more knowledgeable in asking for requirements and if companies don't oblige then there would be others to do that. Hence sooner the better.

The cloud shall remain heterogeneous with different applications talking to several different platforms owned by different vendors. Stability and reliability of open source communities shall be tested to the fullest and that there would lot more freelancers in that category whose services corporates, SMEs and individuals shall take advantage of. There is a necessity for Implementation communities to share their knowledge more in this decade which shall eventually happen even if they didn't want to through lot many freelancers. In this decade lot many IT SMEs shall see their light through personal or VC fundings. VC fudnings shall become more diverse and precise in nature during this decade with respect to IT investments.

signing off for now...

cheerz,

Sadagopan.

Cloud Computing (lateral thinking) contd...

Cloud computing will do to businesses what java & linux had done for open source. It will open the gates of a new world that not many had ventured into. And those who had ventured into it haven't seen the best or most of it. Its an untrodden forest if I may call it. Cloud computing shall redefine several business models and there could also be several new business models that could computing can throw open to. Nobody imagined a java based mobile application the day when when java was unleashed to the world. As and when more and more people got to know java, they looked at it in different different perspectives and took it to places it hasn't been dreamed of. And today we have a linux based mobile OS on top which there could java based applications all of which are from open source.  In similar way, Cloud computing shall go places and I wouldn't say "before settling down" because I don't see any place where things like java and cloud computing can settle. Its a constant endeavor in redefining itself.

Cloud computing as I see it shall be embraced by SME's more in the initial stage and by their ability to pace up and adapt more quicker than corporations shall be the guiding force for future evolutions. Interoperability shall be the key for could computing. More and more office, social and communication tools shall emerge (though they could be called by the existing familiar names for relevance sake) which shall inter operate in the cloud thereby reducing the IT infrastructure for individuals and companies altogether. In early days when transport system evolved people used more of their own personal transport facilities. But as and when need arose, public transport system had evolved and had been there to serve the needy. Likewise, when IT had emerged as desktops, it was consumed on need based by individuals and corporates, SMEs. Now it had reached a point wherein most of this IT infrastructure can be made public thereby reducing the burden on individuals & corporates. Business would now have the flexibility of not carrying the data center load for running their businesses. Instead they could source it from an vendor and have their or vendor(s) cloud for managing the software part of their business. This would enable them to focus on their core competency without the loss of technology. And technologies could flourish without the aberration of affecting businesses in real time.

Corporates are looking to have the early mover advantage by moving or up taking could services or providing them. But instead as always it had been, consumer interest will be the driving force of what a business would approach to and shall remain that way. Since many couldn't predict consumer behavior in this spot, people having better knowledge of it shall thrive in it, rest shall thrive based on trial-error funda. Consumers exposure to cloud computing had been limited in one context and considerable in one context. If you look at web based social networking & communication consumer awareness to what they want is remarkable in the cloud computing space. But when it comes to B2B/B2C, their exposure had been limited to few like banking, auctioning, education, etc its limited. But this limitation is shrinking fast as the consumer will be experiencing more and more exposure to these in coming days. Given that exposure, whoever gets to understand it shall be leading the change in cloud computing.

cheerz,

Sadagopan.

Cloud Computing (lateral thinking)

Cloud computing, SOA, SaaS, et al, ok we know about it.

An interesting and most important question for businesses would be

Is your business ready for Cloud Computing, SOA, SaaS?

Does Web services or over the air service (shall detail this term more further in this post) mean anything to your business?

Is your business mature enough to tread a different path?

More questions like this come up to mind as I think more on this.

Before I analyse the back ground to these questions, let me explain over-the-air service

By Over-the-air-Service could be any service that a customer wants can be Requested or Serviced just over the air. Services like Customer Care Call center, SMS based services, Web services all can be considered into this one term. Basically any service that a customer of your business needs should be addressable through Over-the-air-Service.

Over-the-air-Service, whats about it?

With todays technological advancements, there are several ways that a person likes to communicate. With wi-fi and 3G networks gaining ground, there are new avenues for communication. Rather addressing it one by one, businesses need to rethink on the service delivery model considering the various communication modes that the customer prefers to use than the conventional telephonic/email/web request pattern. You should be ready to accept a tweet, wall posting, scrap, cloud requests, automated voice requests.

The essence of SOA or SaaS or Cloud Computing is evolution of the business and its processes, with potential widespread impact across the organization -- even to the point of potential reorganization of personnel resources to receive and deliver the service to customers.Businesses need to rethink on their delivery competencies based on this and have to make changes accordingly. If only your business is ready for this change then can you assume that you can take full advantage of cloud computing. There is lot more to add to this over-the-air-service and lot more to be fine tuned for this approach. But essence of this would be to reach out to the customer in whatever fashion he prefers rather than whatever fashion you can afford. thisis a pragmatic shift in running the business and hence the need for analyzing whether you are ready for it. Of course maintaining a website through or putting a shopping cart can be done through Clouds/SOA, but you won't reap the full potential of this technological advancement.

With little back ground on over the air service, if you look at what and all could be possible by this over-the-air-service, then it is really limitless. You could/would be able to do whatever you wanted to do for your business through IT. Thats the essence of it. If you ask, is Cloud Computing the ultimate solution, then its not. Could computing helps the heterogeneous IT environment much more than any other form of implementation. By this you could cut costs, experiment with your infrastructure more often, thereby expanding your business's IT limits. you can have multiple clouds co-existing with your existing infrastructure much more seamlessly than any other implementation you could have carried out in early days till now.

Further to this there is this new emerging aspect of cloud computing called cloud sourcing. Ypu could read more about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudsourcing

Signing off for now...

cheerz,

Sadagopan.

A thought on Enterprise Application Development Environments

Gone are the days when developers used IDEs.

IDEs are passe, ADEs are in now, but they too aren't complete. There is lot many integration that had happened while moving from IDEs to ADEs, but still there is a sense of incompleteness when it comes to building an application from scratch till delivery and maintenance. If we could split up the s/w application cycle, it essentially revolves around requirements, prototypes, architectural tools, version control system, coding environment, bugzilla/db, patch & release tools, standards checkers, delivery tools. This list isn't exhaustive, but in s/w development life cycle these are essential.

In any s/w application be it based on python, perl, java, flash, C, C++, etc. the above cycle holds good. And in larger ERP or SCM or cloud applications we would have multiple development methodologies and tools co-existing to develop that entire application. In view of that the ADE should be single/multi level collaborative environment integrating all these pieces. As of now we have them as individual IDEs like requirements and prototyping could fall into one category and the product management who would be the prime owners of this space shall have their own methods/processes in documenting the requirements feeding them to development, tracking changes, prototyping the UI, etc. And this input is fed to the development by a selective set of mechanisms and from there development team takes over, creates there own set of documents, queries, technical feasibility studies, architectural guidelines, coding principles, etc in their own set of tools. Once this formalized, a summary of this representation is forwarded to the testing / QA team who then make their own set of documents, use a set of tools, log bugs for identified issues, etc., Further from here the validated QA certified code sect needs to be packaged together and a suitable patch & release testing are done. again there would be a set of different tools that would be used for this purpose. Any issues here, bugs are logged and tracked by development passing through again the QA clutches successfully and again reaches the release stage.

In all these we could see that through out the cycle at each stage a set of tool, documentation and processes/procedures are followed. Presently these stages are so disconnected that the the cycle undergoes a larger time delay in several thousand man hours while building enterprise scale s/w products. If all this are integrated there could be huge benefits that can be leveraged. Following are a few that I could think of at the moment.

• Reduction in Time Delay
• Reduction in Duplicate issues
• Better Communication between stages of development
• Better Traction from any stage to any stage within the cycle.
• Standardized procedures/processes while allowing scope for newbies
• Better visibility in terms of product completion
• Better understanding of impacts due to internal/external changes
• Lower costs of implementation
• Scalability has to be taken care
• Better in terms of replicating the model for multiple product based enterprise class development

A quick thinking on how the integration should be driven. If you could look through the cycle form requirements stage, identify the tools/ processes required for this stage along with the nature of integration it needs to do with the typical next stage in the cycle as well as any possible integrations it may require with other stages of the cycle. Integration should be loosely coupled from the push side, but rather be tightly coupled from the pull side. Alternatively a stage when passes on information / tasks/actions tom another stage should pass on as minimalistic info as possible it is for the target stage's tools and processes to ensure that they pull enough information based on the information passed onto it. This way an initiation from one stage to another can be done easily and the post initiation the next stage can pull in relevant info that it may require. This is applicable for the tools, processes and procedures that may be required for the next stage. This would avoid the infrequent round trips made in conventional methodologies.

Rather than merely packaging whole lot of tools and utilities if we could make the Application Development Environment better in terms of tagging and integrating it by purpose or ability, s/w product development can be lot more measurable & scalable with good quality.

cheerz,

Sadagopan.