I personally have seen very few videos in H.264 on the web that were *not* played back in Flash. Since Flash (as well as other plugins) will of course still be supported in Chrome there is always that option (with the notable exception of Apple’s iDevices of course since none of those support Flash or indeed other browser plugins).

Adobe have already publicly committed to supporting WebM in Flash, and joined Google alongside many other companies on the WebM project. A notable exception on that list is of course Apple, an avid supporter of H.264. But it remains to be seen if Google’s decision has any real implications in the short term. Things would look differently if YouTube was to stop encoding videos to H.264 and ‘force’ anyone wanting to play back new videos using a platform or browser that supports WebM.

Another party not to be pleased is undoubtedly MPEG-LA, the organisation responsible for setting and collecting licensing fees for H.264. Let’s not forget: despite what Apple would like you to believe, H.264 is neither open nor free, and many companies including Adobe pay huge sums (millions I assume) to MPEG-LA in order to be able to add the H.264 decoder to Flash Player and other tools. And as John Dowdell confirmed, “when I’ve asked, I’ve heard ‘millions’ quoted for redistribution licensing as well.” No small change then.

What does this mean for Flash? It could solidify its position as the safe bet for video playback on the web. There is little chance of Adobe removing support for H.264, and they are definitely adding WebM.

In the long run I’m not sure if Flash will remain the primary choice for video playback on the web. But as long as the rest of the landscape is in such a mess I cannot see it going away anytime soon. My prediction is that we will still see a lot of Flash based video being deployed in 10 years from now.

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The event that needs to be focused on is not the former Goldman employee’s stealing habits or the answer to the question on whether it is ok to steal open source code. The astounding news item here is that Goldman is also using open source code which obviously has raised quite a few eyebrows. The reason why I say this is because it is known for a long time now that financial institutions are laggards when it comes to using open source codes due to apparent reasons related to security issues, no accountability, it didn’t give one institution and inherent advantage over another.

It can also be understood that it is not just Goldman which is the only financial institution using open source. The recent period of recession has caused quite a bit of damage to the IT budgets of several corporate organizations and majorly the banking and financial sector, thus forcing them to cut costs.

In view of this objective, financial institutions have taken to open source usage be it Linux, Apache or MySQL. Let me assure you that there is nothing wrong in financial firms using open source, however they are better off sticking to proprietary software systems that guarantee benefits like security, accountability, etc.

In verity many security appliances that are protecting these banks use open source technologies and the end user license agreements dealt with detailing the open source contained on these appliances and warranties that it was used pursuant to license. In addition to this, these firms also built and developed on these open source software and fabricated their own in-house applications. Recession is long gone, albeit the banking sector it seems, has dicovered a new find in open source for the purpose of manufacturing better banking and financial software applications.

Though there was not much noise made about it, the truth remains that financial institutions just like the IT companies have slowly but steadily opened up to the open source fraternity and continue using them for a long time. Sergey Aleynikov, the apparent news making ex-employee of Goldma Sachs, however did not gain any respite as he received punishment of jail-time since not all of the codes that he stole were open source. In the meanwhile, this latest news development has brought into the open that ‘Open Source is not Closed for anyone’.

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“This independent study validates the industry notion that enterprises want customizable cloud solutions that go beyond the application level and comprehensively address requirements such as security and service levels,” said Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer at Savvis.

The study found that IT usually identifies projects and areas that could benefit from cloud and informs the business. However, 23 percent of respondents reported that business leaders sometimes bypass IT and purchase solutions on their own.

Other highlights from the survey include:

*60 percent consider it extremely or very challenging to find the right cloud computing solution for their companies.

*69 percent perceive cloud computing solutions as offering greater flexibility.

*64 percent expect spending on hosted, on-demand and/or cloud-based software at their companies to increase over the next year.

*62 percent rate security as a critical factor when evaluating cloud solutions.

When it was first announced and through-out the year, our sister site WebProNews reported on this promising new Google service as a new way to collaborate, how it works, how it could shape the way businesses interacted interanally, and a year-end-review. All in all, it looked to be promising, disruptive paradigm for real-time collaboration, but with the lack of mutual colleagues on the service, because it was invite-only, and the fact that Google controlled all the data, in the end, proved to be too big of an obstacle for business users to get through. Although the idea behind Google Wave was sound, its cloud-based implementation kept the service from being fully utilized. Now, with the recent announcement by Google that they are going to shut down the Google Wave service at the end of 2010, many developers clamored for Google to open up the source, and release a stand-alone version of Google Wave. The result is Wave in a Box. A internally hosted Google Wave system removes the roadblocks to adoption and risks that the cloud version produced.

Google had earlier open-sourced the Wave protocol, but now most of the framework will be open-sourced in the future on the Wave in a Box website, and many Wave APIs should be release as well as evidenced by the Robots API announcement and the Google Code page for the Robots API. Novell had also recently unveiled Pulse, as discussed on CIOProNews. Pulse is a cloud-based collaboration tool, with added security, that was built on top of Google Wave, and while Novell has said they intend to release a version that can be hosted internally, it has yet to be seen. Wave in a Box might just be the collaboration tool’s opportunity to be truly disruptive.

For our understanding let us take an excerpt from his explanation and comprehend what NuPack can actually do.

NuPack is a free open source package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use .NET libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including, but not limited to, both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC). NuPack enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, RhinoMocks, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable.

Since Microsoft does not specialize in the fabrication of open source software products and services, it comes as quite a surprise that it has chosen open source software to run one of its resources. The idea is for Microsoft’s developers to blend both the open and closed software worlds by writing the open source software and running it under the closed source Windows operating system, wherein the OS is using the proprietary languages and tools. This shall mean that Microsoft can readily sell expensive software to its developer-users and consumers.

The ultimate goal is to make sure that Nupack is seen as an essential element for .Net and is integrated within .Net libraries and projects in the simplest and easiest ways possible with very little complications; in a manner that is supported by all versions of the Visual Studio. A shrewd yet good business sense like always prevails in the Microsoft team enabling more .Net developers to use open source libraries.

There will be a beta launch of the first edition of ASP.Net MVC 3, following the preview of ASP.Net MVC 3. Necessary upgrades have been made to the preview version wherein the Razor engine options shall be improvised, thereby enabling a better MVC integration and best helper methods. In addition to this, there will also be the release of Microsoft’s Webmatrix Beta 2 which caters to the webpage enhancement needs and also improves templates along with facilitating Nupack integration. It is basically used in the development of websites and Windows systems.

All in all, a good and smart move made by Microsoft and this could be one of those occasions whereby a proprietary software maker is using an open software solution to better its products & services and sell them at a luxurious cost.

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The report indicated that though most enterprises have long-term plans to continue using Office, alternative productivity tools will remain in the mix by leveraging the tools employees access for do-it-yourself technologies, such as those through mobile devices and the cloud. These evolving productivity tools will help enterprises transform to a fit-to-purpose approach to productivity, establishing the foundation for the next wave of productivity that’s focused on aligning tools with employee needs. In the words of the report, “The next wave of productivity will see today’s innovations dissolve into expected features, creating integrated touch points for content-related activities tailored to fit a business purpose or workforce segment.”

They pointed out that the recent recession has driven interest in free or low-cost alternatives to Microsoft Office and has slowed upgrade plans. In the past year OpenOffice.org has seen a modest uptake by enterprises and is now supported by nearly 10% of the organizations Forrester surveyed. Similarly, cloud-based email from providers like Google is finding traction as a lower-cost alternative to Exchange. I covered the email wars recently (see: Email Wars Heat Up in the Cloud). Google’e move caused Microsoft to drop its prices.

Another factor is the growing interest business process integration and automation, another topic I have discussed here (see for example: Building Enterprise 2.0 into the Product Development Process). As enterprises increasingly use collaboration platforms like SharePoint and the best of breed players, they will (or should) increasingly seek to integrate business content and processes in an effort to move from simple content storage to content workflows. I see this as what needs to be done to really make use of the enterprise 2.0 approach and tools. In a similar way, the only successful KM efforts were aligned to work processes.

There is much more in the report and I found it very useful.  For example, the majority of people surveyed as a background for the report viewed alternatives to Microsoft Office as complementary, rather than replacements. In this light, many tools, including Microsoft Office 2010, are adding social computing capabilities. Other tools such as those from Google, IBM, and Novell are moving in the same direction. 

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The pre-selection of project management programs started by focusing on some of the most famous web-based ones, excluding the following (for the following reasons):

• Kforge, Project HQ, ProjectPier because maintained by a small group;
• Collabtive, Feng Project, because too young (less than 3 years old);

Launchpad, and Trac were eventually added to the final list of candidates (Read more at SOS Open Source.).

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First off, I’m going to assume you already have Java installed and on your path and I’m going to assume you have a Unix-like command line (so this is more for Mac / Linux users – but there is a lein.bat script available for Windows users on the Leiningen site… see below).

The easiest way to get Clojure running is to use the de facto standard build tool for Clojure called Leiningen. So we’ll start by installing Leiningen:

You get Leiningen from github at this URL: http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen

Follow the instructions there to download the lein script and make it executable. Add it to your path (I put it in a bin folder in my user home directory since that’s on my path).

Then get Leiningen to install the bits and pieces it needs to run:

lein self-install

Now you can create a Clojure project, called hello, to play with:

lein new hello

cd hello

lein deps

lein test

You’ll see a single testcase which deliberately fails:

Testing hello.core-test

FAIL in (replace-me) (core_test.clj:6)

expected: false

  actual: false

Ran 1 tests containing 1 assertions.

1 failures, 0 errors.

Great! Clojure is installed in this project and working!

We’ll come back to the project in a bit. To get a feel for Clojure, let’s try out some basic stuff by starting a script console:

lein repl

You’ll see:

Closure 1.1.0

user=>

Type (println “Hello World!”) and press return. You should get:

Hello World!

nil

user=>

Now let’s define a function that does that:

(defn greet[] (println "Hello World!"))

The console will respond:

#'user/greet

user=>

Run the function: (greet)

You’ll get:

Hello World!

nil

user=>

It prints Hello World! and returns no result (nil). Let’s redefine it so it takes an argument:

(defn greet[who] (println "Hello" who "!"))

And now let’s run that:

(greet "Sean")

You should get Hello Sean ! You can type control-D to exit the console.

Now we’ll work on the project we created above.

In your favorite text editor, edit src/hello/core.clj – this is the basic source skeleton that Leiningen created for you above. We’ll add our greet function to it and call it, so core.clj reads:

(ns hello.core)

(defn greet[who] (println "Hello" who "!"))

(greet "Sean")

The (ns hello.core) line declares the namespace (think Java package) in which the code lives.

We can run this via Leiningen:

lein repl src/hello/core.clj

You’ll get the same warning about repl not honoring project.clj options that you saw when you ran lein repl above but you’ll also get your script output.

Now let’s modify our script so we can compile it and run it via Java. First we’ll update the namespace declaration to tell Clojure we want to generate a (Java) class file and we’ll add a main method so Java can call it:

(ns hello.core

        (:gen-class))

(defn greet[who] (println "Hello" who "!"))

(defn -main[who] (greet who))

Note the – in front of the name of the main method. That’s how you declare Java-compatible methods in Clojure.

We also need to tell Leiningen about our new main class. Edit project.clj and add a :main declaration so it looks like this:

(defproject hello "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"

  :description "FIXME: write"

  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.1.0"]

                 [org.clojure/clojure-contrib "1.1.0"]]

  :main hello.core)

Don’t worry about the rest of it – that’s part of the Leiningen / Maven magic used to ensure the right libraries are available.

Now tell Leiningen to compile your script and create a JAR that we can execute via Java:

lein uberjar

If you look in the current directory, you’ll see hello.jar and hello-standalone.jar and it’s the second one we’ll use:

java -cp hello-standalone.jar hello.core Sean

Congratulations! You have a standalone compiled Java version of your Clojure script!

You can read more about Clojure on the Clojure website and the Clojure mailing list. Since the language is still evolving pretty fast, being on the mailing list is pretty much a requirement

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ITIL continues to be the pre-eminent driver for enterprise interest in CMDB, but even without ITIL, CMDBs would exist. It is a natural human response to create systems to cope with complexity, and the large IT environment (tens of thousands of servers, thousands of applications, billions of dollars) is complex. It is a major consumer of capital, source of enterprise risk, and driver of business opportunity, and manifests dynamics clearly akin to better-understood manufacturing supply chains.

The CMDB’s clearest analog in the manufacturing world is the Bill of Materials concept (commonly abbreviated BOM). Bills of material are routine in the product world. The MacBook Air I am writing this on had a complex Bill of Materials  including its case, screen, CPU, keyboard, trackpad, and so forth. Bill of Materials data is critical to plan materials acquisition, processing, and delivery in manufacturing supply chains; the entire discipline of MRP (Materials Requirements Planning, or Manufacturing Resource Planning in its later incarnation) is based on the foundation of BOM management. 

Just as BOM data is essential in manufacturing, so it is essential in IT service management. If we consider transactions as akin to manufactured products, then the IT service BOM is conceptually similar  to its manufacturing cousin; both are templates supporting high volume production of value – goods in the one case, services in the other.

So how do we map BOM concepts onto the world of IT management?

Part of the problem lies in comparing manufacturing to transaction processing: each part in a manufacturing BOM typically implies a supply chain. That is to say, a screw in an assembly must be individually sourced, and if we are manufacturing 5000 assemblies, we need 5000 screws.

On the other hand, the IT service Bill of Materials is partly intangible. A complete Bill of Materials for a production application service would include:

• Training
• Functional Support
• Technical Support
• Operational Monitoring
• Application Code
• Middleware & Utility Services (transaction/data mgmt, messaging, backup, batch scheduling, etc)
• Operating System
• Computing hardware
• Network services
• Network hardware
• Rack hardware
• Power and cooling

There are both “good” and “service” aspects to all of those elements, which complicates understanding the BOM. The hardware is a physical, storable asset, but can only play a role in the BOM if it is powered on and delivering necessary services. (The use of the term “service” in the preceding sentence may even be controversial; in a subsequent post I intend to take a detailed look at the semantics of IT Service.) The software can be delivered as a storable good, but is only part of the service when executing on a supporting platform.

And at the top of the hierarchy, the customer is not taking delivery of anything physical, but rather an intangible representing all the subordinate component contributions.

As it turns out, there is another concept from manufacturing that is a better fit: while reading Steve Bell’s excellent Lean Enterprise Systems I came across the lesser known idea of the Bill of Resources. Bills of Resources are a capacity planning concept, representing the available throughput of the various tools and work centers supporting the manufacturing line. The current Wikipedia definition appears consistent with Bell:

A bill of resources (BOR) describes a list of resources, such as labor, needed to complete a saleable product. It is used in capacity planning to prioritize and schedule work in manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) by highlighting critical resources. Critical resources are resources that are in short supply or that have long lead times.^[1]

The bill of resources complements the bill of materials (BOM), which lists physical sub-components of a product. Like a bill of materials, BORs are hierarchical with the top level representing the finished product or sub-assembly.

I take the view that enterprise information technology is essentially a factory producing transactions, which are the value added end state sought by the customer of the IT service. (More on this idea.) A transaction represents a repeatable logical state change on a computing machine. In that sense, one can see the computing infrastructure more as Resource – it is akin to the machine tools and work centers that physical products pass through.

If this analogy is useful, why does IT service BOM/BOR management (i.e. CMDB & related practices) lag manufacturing practice? And why is it at all controversial?

One possible reason: According to Steve Bell, MRP practices stipulate that BOM data needs to be 99% accurate, and this is a high data quality bar for CMDBs which are still early in their maturity. Other ideas?

Conclusion: the CMDB is an Operational Data Store primarily concerned with managing the IT Bill of Resources.

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In this post I will focus on roadmaps.  Whether you are building a roadmap for you overall architecture, for a portfolio of projects within a given domain of your architecture, or for reengineering business processes, roadmapping can be a challenge because of large amounts of legacy systems and ingrained behavior.  Many roadmapping exercises start with a long process of capturing the current state.  Often this leads to analysis paralysis and lots of time and money is spent while nobody is building the future state.

WWSD?

What would a startup do?  Well, a startup’s current state is that they have a blank sheet of paper and an opportunity to build the best possible solution with no legacy constraints.  Hmm, doesn’t that sound attractive?  I wrote a post back in 2007 called Getting to Future State where I recommended designing the future state first and then capture the current state later.  The reason is simple, if you start with the current state you immediately constrain the innovation process for future state.  Why not start with the perfect world and work back instead of starting with an imperfect world and adding to it?

Starting with current state can create undesirable results

Starting with future state can increase your chances for a desirable outcome

WWSD?  A good startup would map out what it wants to be when it grows up first and then work towards that goal while carefully managing its precious resources and capital.  A startup will also deliver early and often because it has to generate revenue, customer interest, and investor enthusiasm before it goes broke.  That is exactly what a corporation should do!  Deliver early and often making incremental improvements and proving its value to the executives (corporate equivalent of investors).

I have seen and been involved in too many promising projects where the next new technology, process, or organizational change was going to solve all of the world’s problems.  Each time these initiatives fell short of expectations and each time these new solutions were just another layer on top of the last solution.  Each layer added a new layer of complexity and legacy on top of the previous layer.  The reason for this is these teams started with what existed and figured out how to “wire in” the next technology, instead of figuring out how to move off or abstract parts of the legacy systems in order to take advantage of the newer technologies.

So the next time you have a roadmapping exercise, don’t start by analyzing what exists.  Start with a blank sheet of paper and ask “If we were a startup and were starting business today, what would the future state look like?”  Once you define what the perfect world looks like, then figure out how to get there.  You will likely find that you will have to make some sacrifices here and there but at least your innovative thinking was unconstrained when you envisioned the future state!

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