A pyramid scheme is bad form, Cloudwork

As some of you might know, or rather, should, Integration is my middle name - you might even call me a one-trick pony and I'd take that as a compliment. So, when I saw that Cloudwork offers unprecedented integration (cough), I signed up immediately! I was even so enthusiastic, I even forgot to use a fake identity - and very much regret that now

Cloudwork didn't have me sign up. No, Cloudwork baited me into giving away my email address, so they could decide themselves when to send me that valuable invite to their beta:

Resource identification is not a REST invention

An article on programmable web - pointed out to me by Fred Verheul (thanks Fred!) - gave me an adrenaline rush.
It was so full of bollox that I almost started to hyperventilate - which is a pun on the abundant use of the word hypermedia in that same post

Let me just quote one part of the post:

This subtle shift in the source of application control information makes it possible for the same client code to recognize and execute new features as they appear over time without the need for patches or downloads

The post contains more nonsense like this. Let me quote yet another brilliant piece, and be done with quoting:

How pubsub works - and always has, and will

[Image by RIA Novosti]

Brenda Michelson triggered me into a small conversation on pubsub - of course I did a quick search and analysis via my Twitter search tools and learned that it's been mentioned 91 times in the past week, the vast majority of which seem to be treating the word sub as in sandwich (colloquial American) - I guess that answers Brenda's question

Yet, I went to check out the state of (Information Technology) pubsub, an extremely well-proven mechanism in our daily world, aka IRL, where we all subscribe to ye olde snail mail (the post office) to retrieve anything that gets published towards us

Oh, is that not it? Maybe, maybe not - but let me explain why pubsub undeservedly is dead on Twitter

TIBCO Transform - it says it all

I attended TIBCO's Transform event in London.
Located at the Westminster Bridge Park Plaza hotel, around 600 people were there. Kicked off by Raj Verma, Senior VP of worldwide Marketing, a 2 hour session started that never bored for a minute. Very smoothly Raj led us through a full history of TIBCO, showing impressive figures like a 21% CAGR over the last 15 years, reaching almost a billion dollars in revenue with currently 3,000 employees

Having spent $130 million in R&D last year, the total R&D sum over the years accounted to $1 billion - a huge amount that proves how serious TIBCO is about innovation and fulfilling their goal of "making this world a better place"

SAP Integration? Not what I had in mind

I couldn't attend nor even follow the stream at Sapphirenow, but I picked up a few tweets on Integration. Well actually, Seb pointed one out to me.
As much as I detest it, I'll have to base this post on the limited info I retrieved - although I did browse the usual placeholders for SAP news of course.
If you read my latest post on SAP and Integration, you might presume I was a little overexcited about what was going to be announced

Well, the excitement wore off. Really off

Avoid dashes and fancy quotes in blog titles

John Reed pointed me to a post by Jeremiah Owyang, which I failed to retrieve on my phone:

Coping With Twitter’s Unfollow Bug bit.ly/H6rUUz - by @jowyang (via @jonerp) #ensw
— Jon Reed (@jonerpnewsfeed) maart 31, 2012

Ironic as it may seem, this is due to another bug which doesn't have clear ownership: let's call it the character translation bug (sorry non-IT folks)

80-20: the deadly cause of IT project failure

There seems to be a rush of IT failure topics these days, all trying to find the Holy Grail of project failure. While I hold that this is a world of AND and AND, not OR and OR, I do see a major cause for project failure for the last decade: shifting from serial processing (waterfall) to parallel (Agile, Scrum, and so on)

Apart from the fact that Agile is solely focused on delivering a project rather than a product, this is not an Agile-bashing post: it is intended to show a very weak spot of contemporary IT projects

Apple margin per device - expressed in Chinese

[Image by Sven Teschke]

An article in the New York Times published 2 days ago suddenly gained a lot of traction and got discussed, reposted and reblogged today: Apple making money off of the United States, while directly employing "only" twice as many employees in the US than overseas - but indirectly more than ten times those combined, none of which in the US

I've published on Apple's revenue and profit a few times now, last of which was two months ago. A historical year for Apple: it surpassed Google on profit per employee - operating profit so before taxes, by the way

SAP meets Cloud: something needs to vaporise first

[Photo by John Kerstholt]

I have been comfortably following SAP Influencer Summit 2011 from my chair, and reading up on the various posts and vids released throughout the process. It won't surprise anyone that yesterday's keywords were cloud, ByD, business, SAPonDemand and sales - thank you, you 350 participants who produced 1,500 tweets during the last day

Many people ask the question: with such a traditional on-premise company, will these extremes form a perfect match that complements and makes for combined strength, or will it just be a very unhappy marriage?

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

Integration is the new Operation - this decade and next

I gave a presentation the other day that is a very short version of my Integration book. As usual, that forced me to compact thoughts and ideas, and craft a new visual - see above.
I've used that already in a post the other day, but that didn't pay proper attention to it

I'm a bit tired of all the use of the word integrated and integration over the last few weeks and months. I would like to say: "You keep using that word. I think it does not mean what you think it means"

The project versus product dilemma in Enterprise IT

[Image via Dave Spicer]

I've often run into the project-product dilemma over the last decades: a company does business by supplying products and services, which -after it's reached a certain size- can only be implemented with the help of IT. Over time, that "help" turns into "sole reliance on"

Strangely enough, these IT-implementations are project-driven, and have increasingly become so over the years. Scrum, Agile, XP: all software-developments methods of the last decade are single-mindedly focused on how to do a project faster

When the project's completed, the product is deemed to have been delivered and the project team is dismantled, with maintenance and support (to be) handed over to the standing organisation - so the business product gets delivered by an IT project, and then what?

How to queue - that is the question

The other day my attention got drawn by a very large national company that claimed to have a performance problem: sometimes it would take ages for messages to reach their destination, and entire applications would come to a screeching halt.
After a few questions and answers, it was clear that they didn't have a performance problem: they had an architectural problem or, in a nutshell, a very unfortunate design

Queueing has become a much-appreciated message-transport system in the last decades.

Selling licenses to bureaucracies is embarrasingly easy

This is a fictitious post. It's all based on nothing, if any, maybe my dreams or nightmares or who knows what. This isn't real - it's just a dream. Somehow my memory got enriched with this information, and whether it actually did or did not happen, I really can't tell.
Anyway, it's such a bizarre story that I want to share it with you. Here goes

Social CRM. Good riddance. Next: Social ERP?

Paul Greenberg, dubbed by some "the godfather of SCRM" wrote a post on ZDNET about Gartner's 2011 SCRM Magic Quadrant. Paul is not pleased with the 2011 SCRM MQ, and he wasn't with the 2010 either.
I'm with Paul on all his points against Gartner's selection and evaluation process, yet against him on berating Gartner. Although I don't think very highly of Gartner, if they fail to understand your love child, you just didn't do your homework very well

Enterprise Architecture: it's like measuring the coastline

[Capgemini's Integrated Architectural Framework]

I've made the mistake once again: underestimating an enterprise's business and process flow while looking at it from a conceptual or logical point of view, before hitting what we call the physical layer. Call me an idiot please, yes you can

Let me use a few metaphors and make this an easy one to understand. I'll follow the model above

Tibbr, the new OS. Integrating is the new Operating

I just watched the live feed of Tibbr's 3.0 launch. It was impressive and even more so than the 1.0 launch I attended live in February - although that was a revelation, and revolution too

Back a dozen years or so, Larry Ellison dreamed about the network PC as replacing Microsoft's Operating System (OS) - and woke up in a nightmare.
Since, Apple has come back with their OS and stole some marketshare.
Linux was born and stole great marketshare, most of that server side in companies - not in the consumer market

Still, it was oldfashioned OS as we know it - Jim

From product to service: stealing first base?

The other day I read a post about how someone in a poor country is making a living by taking his washing machine across town (rather: slum) and selling it "by the wash", thus turning a product into a service. The rationale in this specific case is cheap washing machines from abroad pushing existing ones down the sales ladder

While I admire the entrepreneurial spirit here, I wonder whether this actually does good or bad. Yes it's a smart move to create a new market when your current one is under pressure, but what if your neighbour does the same with one of them new cheapo laundromats? Even worse, what if one of them cheap labour fellas comes overhere and starts competing with you?

Twitter delegates the monetisation strain to its developers

On the Twitter Development Google Group, Twitter announced today that they'll stop whitelisting. Whitelisting basically lifts an application developer's limitation of 150 Twitter requests per hour, that mere mortals suffer from

Beginning today, Twitter will no longer grant whitelisting requests.
We will continue to allow whitelisting privileges for previously
approved applications; however any unanswered requests recently
submitted to Twitter will not be granted whitelist access

Unfortunately, my TwUniverse will be one of the latter - filed a request twice in the past months now, and never got a response

It's a mobile revolution - not a social media one

Following the dialogue between Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky concerning the events in Tunesia and Egypt, among others, I noticed that both missed a valid point.
The picture above shows"The Art of War" by Sun Tzu in the form of a bamboo book - and I'd like to apply the term "war" to what is happening now

Waging war has always been a classical hierarchically organised business: headquarters making up the strategy, delegating that via generals, who delegate the orders to captains, who delegate it to lieutenants, who delegate it to sergeants, who order the soldiers to move left or right or any other direction

It is technology that changed all this