Archives for January 2011

In-brief: Conversation with Jeff Wootton on Event Processing at Sybase, SAP Company

January 27, 2011 By brenda michelson

Ever since SAP announced its acquisition of Sybase last May, I’ve been curious as to the future of Sybase’s event processing assets. At the time of the acquisition, it appeared as though CEP was a footnote to Sybase’s database and mobile offerings:

“Both SAP and Sybase will benefit from synergies across product lines and markets. SAP will accelerate the reach of its solutions across mobile platforms and drive forward the realization of its in-memory computing vision. This will drive higher user adoption of SAP software and unlock significant business value out of existing customer investments. In addition, Sybase’s innovative mobile platform can connect all applications and data (SAP and non-SAP) and enable them on mobile devices. SAP, Sybase and their customers will be able to tap into Sybase’s messaging network to reach 4 billion mobile subscribers through 850+ operator relationships worldwide and engage their consumers via alerts, transactions and promotions on their mobile devices.

For Sybase, SAP in-memory technology will provide the opportunity for dramatic performance improvements to its analytic processing capabilities. Sybase will also be able to bring its complex event processing and analytics expertise, which was built in the financial sector, to customers in other industries, markets and product areas in which SAP has a complementary, strong presence. Finally, Sybase’s core database business will be enhanced by SAP in-memory technology to deliver integrated transactional and analytical capabilities. At the same time, SAP reinforced its dedication to customer choice by stating that it will continue its commitment to supporting leading database vendors.

The synergies between the two companies will also expand opportunities for the SAP and Sybase ecosystems. Software and implementation partners can capture new opportunities by innovating on Sybase’s market-leading mobile platform, which will make it easier to create, deliver and securely manage mobile enterprise applications across major device types.”

Recently, as a result of an inquiry from a SAP-curious client of mine, I’ve had the opportunity to get involved with SAP’s blogger program. [Non-compensated outreach program]. In discussing my interests with SAP, I emphasized event processing and inquired about the fate of not only Sybase’s RAP, but also the assets of “CorAleri“.

Sidenote [corrected*]: In March of 2009, two of the original independent CEP companies products, Aleri and Coral8, merged came together under the Aleri brand, as the result of an asset sale. Less than a year later, in February 2010, Sybase purchased the assets of Aleri, retaining hiring key players and supporting the product development direction to combine the best of Aleri and Coral8 products. A few months later, SAP purchased Sybase, leaving many of us to wonder what would happen with Aleri and Coral8.

Last week, I had the opportunity to connect with Jeff Wootton of Sybase, formerly Aleri, who is responsible for Sybase CEP and RAP. In addition to chatting about the ever widening applicability of event processing, Jeff answered my questions on product direction and market positioning.

Jeff began by sharing that CEP (event processing) is viewed as a strategic growth technology within Sybase. Currently, CEP is offered on its own (Sybase Aleri Streaming Platform) and as part of Sybase RAP.

While heavily utilized in financial services, Jeff spoke of adoption in other industry verticals, including telecommunications and healthcare.

Event processing isn’t limited to the Sybase product line. SAP’s new BusinessObjects Event Insight product embeds the Aleri engine to provide the complex event processing capability:

“SAP BusinessObjects Event Insight is a new EIM solution that enables business users to discover and understand the business impact of events in real-time by delivering:

A unique intelligent event grid (patent-pending) that distributes the processing and monitoring of events in real-time from multiple data sources across a distributed network

A complex event processing (CEP) engine that processes event streams ( in excess of 500K per record) to identify complex patterns that may represent business opportunities or threats

Integration with the semantic layer in SAP BusinessObjects BI platform, which supports queries on top of event streams, correlation of event data with transactional data, alerts to business users, and delivery of information to BI tools, such as SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and SAP Crystal Reports

An administrative UI enabling you to set up event agents on multiple data sources (e.g. data warehouses, applications, sensors, message-driven middleware) to monitor structured or unstructured data without programming”

Embedding the Aleri engine within BusinessObjects reminded me of my very first CEP product briefing, in early 2006, with Terry Cunningham, founder of both Crystal Decisions (Crystal Reports) and Coral8. Cunningham’s vision for CEP engines followed the path set by Crystal Reports, a CEP engine embedded in every business application. It has taken awhile, but we are on the way.

Lastly, Jeff spoke to product development. Sybase’s acquisition of Aleri significantly increased engineering resources and investment. As a result, a major release is underway, planned for August. And yes, this release begins delivery on the plan to combine the best of the Aleri and Coral8 product lines. Jeff shared some details, but alas, I’m not at liberty to share at this time.

The bottom line: CEP and event processing is alive and well at Sybase and expanding into SAP. I plan to keep an eye on these developments. You might want to as well.

*Note: After I posted this, Colin Clark shared via Twitter that Aleri-Coral8 and Sybase-Aleri weren’t mergers, but asset sales. Thanks Colin!

Weekly Finds – Link Post (weekly)

January 23, 2011 By brenda michelson

Think bigger | Vinnie Mirchandani | Innovation in the enterprise

“But if innovation is simply a matter of learning about more technologies, why do organisations find it so hard? One reason, says Mirchandani, is the fact that people are encouraged to specialise in their careers. “During the Renaissance, people were encouraged to be good at many things,” he says. “Today, that’s a dying breed. Even in business, we encourage people to be very siloed.”

That specialisation happens at an organisational level too. The IT department, Mirchandani says, has been typecast in a particularly narrow role. “IT was sent into the woods at some point in the late 1990s; we had Y2K overruns, we had ERP overruns, we had e-business which was overhyped. In the early 2000s, therefore, a lot of CIOs started reporting to the CFO and what the CFO wants is compliance and control.”

This puts IT departments, and the executives who run them, in a difficult position when it comes to innovation. On the one hand, Mirchandani says, “they have a 30-year lead in terms of deployment of technology, understanding its cost and how to deal with technology suppliers.” This means that “CIOs are extremely well positioned as we move into a world of more compound innovation.” But Mirchandani argues that innovating while serving the ‘compliance and control’ agenda is beyond even the most polymathic of IT executives. “You can’t expect the same person to do both – they are mirror opposites.” “

tags: innovation Mirchandani
Todd Biske: Outside the Box » Blog Archive » Be an Enterprise Activist, not Archivist

The genesis of Enterprise Activist, captured by Todd Biske.

“Chris asked the question, “Are Enterprise Architects really Enterprise Archivists?” Brenda responded that we really need Enterprise Activists focused on action, delivery, ideation, and evangelism.”

tags: todd_biske entarch enterprise_activist chris_bird
The Atlantic Tech Canon – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic

“Nearly every topic has a canon, a set of classics that you need to know. These works are recognized as key touchpoints of analysis and understanding. Technology, though, seems to resist that sort of thing. We think of it as something that is changing too fast for anything to remain relevant for long.”

..”The great themes of technological art and literature are represented: the control of nature, the control of electrons, cyborgs, artificial intelligence, network building, Gutenberg, the rise of the digital. Read these books. They are worthwhile.

If there is one thing that stands out to me looking at the entire tech canon, it’s that history matters in technology because history is how the world got to be the way that it is. (There are two books in the top ten with the word old in their titles.) We might be inventing the future, but it’s out of the rags, riches and remainders of the past. We can’t escape history, even by making new things.

And why try? It is how people use and shape technology — where we intersect with our machines — that determines what the world’s possibilities become. If we left out all we humans already know and have made and bring to newly created things, we’d only know half the story. Our bodies and our brains and our ideas and our laws matter.

We are the software that runs the world’s hardware.”

tags: tech classics atlantic
Gary Hamel: Who are the Most Innovative Companies? – Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 – WSJ

“Fourth are the cyborgs, companies like Google, Amazon and Apple that have been purpose-built to achieve super-human feats of innovation. You won’t find much industrial age DNA in these organizations. These companies have been built around principles like freedom, meritocracy, transparency and experimentation. They are so endlessly inventive and strategically flexible they seem to have come from another solar system—one where accountants are treated as servants rather than gods.”

tags: innovation hamel wsj
Use A Zone Architecture Model To Encourage Business Innovation – Forrester Research

Forrester report on creating Architecture Innovation Zones to encourage business innovation. Speaks of risk management over risk mitigation, enterprise architects embracing (rather than stifling) innovation and need to ready to operationalize innovation zone technology.

“Architects have long struggled to find the correct balance between innovation and standardization. Over the past few years the scale has been more heavily weighted on the standardization side. The economic downturn put pressure on operating budgets increasing the pressure to reduce costs, while CIOs put pressure on EA organizations to prove their value. These pressures have encouraged EAs to focus more on cost savings than strategy realization, and standardization is their No. 1 tool to manage cost. This shift hasn’t stifled innovation so much as it has moved it even further into the business – and farther away from IT’s influence. When architects don’t fully embrace and support innovation, they fundamentally cut themselves out of the innovation process.”

tags: forrester entarch innovation

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Hans Rosling Joy of Stats Addendum: Making Data Dance

January 21, 2011 By brenda michelson

In December, I posted Hans Rosling’s Joy of Stats video in which Rosling “tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers – in just four minutes.”

The video is a terrific example of combining statistics, data visualization and story telling to simplify the delivery, and therefore absorption, of an important, data rich message.

This afternoon, as I was flipping through the latest Economist Technology Quarterly, I ran across the perfect addendum to the Joy of Stats video. An article on Rosling’s work entitled Making Data Dance.

The piece starts by describing Rosling’s primary work:

“The realities that Dr Rosling is trying to highlight have been gleaned from decades of studying statistics. They sound simple enough: that it no longer makes sense to consider the world as divided between developing and industrialised countries; and that people everywhere respond similarly to increasing levels of wealth and health, with higher material aspirations and smaller families. “There is no such thing as a ‘we’ and a ‘they’, with a gap in between,” Dr Rosling says. “The majority of people are living in the middle—although the distance from the very poorest to very richest is wider than ever.” The best measure of political stability of a country, he believes, is whether fertility rates are falling, because that indicates that women are being educated and basic health services are being provided. “The only way to reach sustainable population levels is to improve public health,” he says. “Child survival is the new green.””

Then moves to his embrace of infographics:

“Communicating these realities to students in his international-development classes at Uppsala University proved problematic, however. “I used to make huge photocopied sheets of Unicef statistics for the students on income, life expectancy and fertility rates around the planet. But it didn’t change their world view, it didn’t create another mindset. They still insisted that we were different, that all the Chinese cannot all have a car,” says Dr Rosling. He needed a new way to present his conclusions—a way to turn dusty figures into convincing illustrations.

Innovation in infographics has always been driven by the need to explain difficult things, Dr Rosling points out. “Florence Nightingale is known as a nurse, but she also made a new kind of pie chart showing how many soldiers in the Crimean war died from military action and how many from disease.” Nightingale’s famous “coxcomb” chart from 1858 demonstrated that improving hygiene in British military hospitals slashed mortality rates. She said its design was intended “to affect thro’ the eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.””

Next, the article uncovers a bit of the how:

“With the help of his son and daughter-in-law, Dr Rosling then developed Trendalyzer software (now called Gapminder) to animate the bubbles.

“It was a conscious intent to make the data look alive,” he explains. “My son invented the trails, like patterns in the snow, so you can see how countries have changed. And we could overlay countries historically so that it’s clear that, for example, China today is like Sweden in 1948 and people in Vietnam now have the same life expectancy as Americans did in 1985. Every country has a graphical path that describes its development.””

And (news to me), Gapminder software is available via Google, as Google Motion Chart:

“The software was a hit, first with his classes in Sweden, then worldwide after a video of his 2006 TED lecture was posted online. Dr Rosling was soon helping Al Gore polish up his climate-change presentations and talking about Gapminder with the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. “I could see in their eyes how excited they were, how my software fitted with their ideas about making organised information generally available,” he recalls. “We started collaborating and quickly reached the conclusion that it was more rational that Google acquire our technology and the team behind it.” Within a year Google had bought Gapminder, and a version of the bubble-graph software is now available free online under the name Google Motion Chart.”

Lastly, the article describes the very real problem of making data public, and Rosling’s work to “become the Robin Hood for free data”.

Check out the full article.

If you create any interesting visualizations with Google Motion Chart, please do share.

Cloud Farms for the Farmer (really)

January 17, 2011 By brenda michelson

The WSJ published an interesting article on commercial farming advances in Japan. According to the article, “The aim is to bring the concepts of lean manufacturing and continual improvement, or kaizen, to farming.”

The farmers are employing sensors, analytics, real-time location information and cloud computing to optimize planting time, crop rotation, worker productivity and threat (infection) detection.

“…Now the head of a commercial farm in the southern Japanese prefecture of Miyazaki, Mr. Shinpuku is back manning a desk with his eyes glued to a Web browser tracking every movement of his workers who handle 60 different fruits and vegetables across its 100 hectares.

"I don’t want to do this. My eyes will get bad," said Mr. Shinpuku, the 58-year-old president of his commercial farm Shinpuku Seika, which is comprised of 300 different plots of land. "I put up with it, because the benefits are obvious. Without this computer, I can’t do my job."

Shinpuku Seika is among the first farms to implement a Web-based "cloud computing" service developed by Japanese technology firm Fujitsu Ltd. Cloud computing is a loosely defined business term in which companies rent computing power from remote data centers via the Internet instead of buying machines to run software in house.

Shinpuku Seika has placed sensors out in its fields to collect readings on temperature, soil and moisture levels. Fujitsu’s computers then crunch the data and recommend when to start planting or what crops may be well-suited to a specific field.

In the past, farmers would make those decisions based on experience, but Mr. Shinpuku says a data-driven approach prevents younger, less experienced staff from making mistakes that could cost the bottom line.”

The pay-off? Measured in cabbage of course:

“The system is already paying off for Shinpuku Seika, which generates about 1.5 billion yen ($18 million) in annual revenue. Last year, it doubled the size of its carrot harvest and raised its cabbage output by 12%.”

Read the full article.