Marc wrote about how this practice makes sense for more efficient use of services inside the enterprise and I agree. He also noted that today’s collaborative tool sets can facilitate these internal marketplaces. Enterprises would have to modify their cost structure and accounting to facilitate these exchanges but that should not be too hard.

However, making people aware of the services and arranging for micro-efforts and the associated micro-accounting would have potentially difficult with older technologies. However, just as on the Web with Web 2.0 sites, the transparency within enterprise 2.0 platforms can also make these internal micro-markets for service exchange more accessible.

Now that the right tools are available the remaining factor to make this work is the ability to understand the value of these exchanges and the vision to implement them. In a market where employees are asked to continuously do more with less, an internal services market for under-utilized resources should appeal to most executives. Thanks to Marc for making the suggestion. You should check out his blog as there are a lot of other good ideas there. 

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A hearing was conducted concerning the Cyber Security Act of 2009, where various aspects of the Act were discussed. The main conclusion from the talks is that nearly every aspect of our lives are potentially in danger, from our ATM accounts to the electrical grid we rely heavily upon.

Scott Borg, chief economist at the nonprofit U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit puts emphasis on the problem, “Cyberattacks are already damaging the American economy much more than is generally recognized”, concluding, “The loss is greater than losses due to identity theft and credit card fraud.”

It’s because of these sort of attacks that IT management is more important now than ever. Not just hiring more IT employees, but making sure they stay educated on the latest information concerning the sector. One boon to come out of the Cyber Security Act of 2009 is increased spending with grant and scholarship programs.

An example of increased education can befound in this story; showing an initiative for getting females in the Appalachian region interested in technology careers. According to the article, since 1980 the percentage of women in the IT sector has dropped from 39 percent to 13 in 2007. This startling statistic shows we need to increase efforts for IT education not just for women but everyone.

The problems concerning the US government encapsulate many areas being hit in the private sector. IT departments around the country are continually dealing with problems concerning network security, and the situation doesn’t look to be improving soon. Keeping informed and hiring the right people is all that can be done to combat the problem. Good luck out there.

Ed Ceaser and Nick Kallen, two engineers at Twitter, constructed a sort of essay titled “The Anatomy of a Whale.”  In it, they discussed diagnosing and correcting a problem that cropped up a few weeks ago.

We’ll only try to describe the broad strokes here (the full post is 2,000 words long), but Ceaser and Kallen stated, “[W]e used a simple strategy that involves proceeding from the most aggregate measures of system as a whole and at each step getting more fine grained, looking at smaller and smaller parts.”

Then, with some rough spots and quirks identified, they focused on the biggest contributor to the problem, and made the software that talks to Memcached more efficient with its requests, eliminating almost half of Memcached calls.

Hopefully Ceaser’s and Kallen’s walkthrough will prove helpful, or at least interesting.  It’s not every day that big companies allow outsiders to have a look at how they handle difficulties.

“Late last year the Java Community Process (JCP) reached a significant milestone when they approved the specification for the next generation of Enterprise Java; JavaTM Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6). We believe that the approval of this specification starts a new chapter in the story of Java and we are proud to have contributed and acted in a leadership role in the formation of this standard which aims to make enterprise Java easier to use and more appealing to more developers, while still maintaining the benefits of open standards.”

Craig Muzilla, Vice President of Middleware at Red Hat picked up on the Java thread and wrote a nice post ahead of Oracle’s roadmap presentation on Wednesday.  While many will be following Apple’s every move on Wednesday, those of us in the Java community will be listening to Oracle’s plans for Sun products, including Java.

“As Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said shortly after the acquisition announcement  in April of last year, Java is “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired.”

We agree with Mr. Ellison’s statement; Java is one of the most important technologies developed and adopted during the past twenty years. It has fostered significant innovation throughout the IT industry and has enabled businesses and governments to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness. Java is larger than any single company; we are all part of Java, customers and vendors alike.

…

We encourage Oracle to fulfill their original proposal and establish an independent governance process for the JCP (Java Community Process). And, finally, we encourage Oracle to continue the tradition of making the technology easily accessible, to vendors and customers alike, to secure its broad adoption and continued strength in the market.”

Craig points out that Oracle was amongst several vendors, including IBM and Red Hat, calling for Sun to make the Java process more open and less susceptible to any one vendor’s influence or control.  While I’d be surprised if Oracle announced an independent governance process for the JCP on Wednesday, I don’t think Oracle will act to damage the Java ecosystem.  Customers and developers have invested too much in Java products over the past decade on the basis of their investment being protected through a multi-vendor community.  The customer backlash would far outstrip any perceived competitive benefit of tightening control over the JCP.  Oracle’s far too smart of a vendor to risk that or encourage non-standard Java usage as we’ve seen with Android.

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This partnership is something that’s supposed to affect lots of companies and people, not just gigantic corporations and scientists who work on the cutting edge.  Also, it’s important to note that this three-year deal is supposed to affect things in the near future, and not a decade or more down the road.

So now for the meat of the matter: as explained in an official blog post, Microsoft and HP intend to “to help customers and partners substantially improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing today’s IT environments, and building next generation cloud applications.”

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, also said in a statement, “Our extended partnership will transform the way large enterprises deliver services to their customers, and help smaller organizations adopt IT to grow their businesses.”

People in the IT industry need to consider how they should adapt to a future with cloud computing.  An investment of $250 million is liable to bring that future here faster than anticipated.

1. The cloud adoption trend will continue, and vendors without real software-as-a-service strategies will be even more challenged to compete.

2. Cloud platforms will allow ISVs to develop, market, and monetize cloud applications at a dramatically faster rate than traditional ISV development.

3. Analytics go mainstream, as the user population expands beyond the traditional base to include marketers, risk managers and call center staff.

4. Structural unemployment cuts of 2009 will not be reversed in 2010 because organizations that have automated processes will not return to manual ones.

5. CRM investment continues in 2010 to help organizations identify and retain profitable customers.

6. More organizations will restrict Facebook and social networking sites that negatively affect productivity while more professional sites, such as LinkedIn, will grow. Twitter falters.

7. As SAP pushes its customers to SAP ERP 6.0 or to pay higher maintenance fees, it opens the door for on-demand ERP solutions and drives a faster decline in SAP revenues.

8. Mobility strategies and budgets will be reviewed in 2010 with netbooks, Blackberries and iPhone apps driving new billing and upgrade models.

9. IT spending is expected to increase slightly in the next year with only moderate upgrades from XP or Vista to Windows 7. Incremental investment will be significant with existing technologies from CRM, ERP and PLM vendors.

10. Despite efforts to monetize online content, consumers will push back on online subscriptions, denying that revenue stream.

Bonus: Google moves toward a monopoly, causing skeptics to wonder why neither the EU nor US governments have taken a closer look.

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What is the role of open source development in telephony?

It is evident as the Open Source Community have significantly contributed  to change the paradigms, not just in the IT-Like world, but, overall in the last 3 years, affecting all the Telecommunication market.
Asterisk opened the way since the early 2004, reaching the 1,5 Million worldwide downloads in 2008.
OpenSER [now OpenSIPS] followed and many other open projects are approaching the Unified Communication market.

Microsoft keeps looking into the unified communication market, what is your vision in this regard?

(Disclosure: two years ago Microsoft Italy asked me to help them to find a VOiP open source vendor interested in put in place interoperability tests with them, and I introduced them to each other).

We appreciated very much your idea Roberto. Playing your “open source hub” role you created indeed a link beetween our open source firm and a proprietary market leader. Since that time we analyzed the possible integrations between the Asterisk market and the Microsoft OCS platform, also thanks to some of the Microsoft team.

We strongly believe in the potential synergies, so we have built a special Xenia Labs at the TopIX data center, where we have interconnected the Open Communication Platforms Asterisk based with the other open tools, for instance Yahoo Zimbra Zimlets, VTiger CRM and the Microsoft OCS Platform. In the unified communication ecosystem the integration among the different tools is really important, especially looking at the end user customer services.

Unified collaboration seems a key component of your present strategy. Are you considerating any other collaboration?

Looking at the unified collaboration world, we are even more open to the synergies with the sector players. We are evaluating right now the Google Wave, XMPP and VXML protocols, testing them and deploying them integrated with our framework in order to create a real value added market proposition.

Thank you Diego, and let me know when your Sip Web Phone Plug-in for WordPress will be available for download.

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Bill Portelli, Collabnet CEO, and Justin Erenkrantz, Apache Software Foundation President, answered few questions aimed at better understanding if and at which extent this is a win-win move. Let’s start from the corporate side.

Bill, how does this move fit into CollabNet’s open source strategy?

CollabNet leverages open source to create business value both for us, and for our customers and partners. For instance, open source

1. enables operational scalability and cost benefits both in our data centers as well as in our customers’ on-site deployments (e.g., one of our deployment options is LAMP based);
2. provides CollabNet’s users with ease of adoption benefits (e.g., all of the desktop tool integrations into CollabNet Team Forge such as our Eclipse and Visual Studio desktops are open source; and of course, the primary SCM we support is Subversion (among other SCMs);
3. amplifies CollabNet development and accelerates innovation by utilizing a highly leveraged and open development model (e.g., we bring our clients into our SW development process – both our proprietary CollabNet Team Forge software, as well as in working with the Subversion community which includes general community members, Subversion users, our business partners, and even our competitors).

Strategically, the transition of Subversion from CollabNet hosted Tigris.org to Apche.org was done principally because CollabNet, the Subversion community, and the Apache community all believed that we could accelerate Subversion innovation (point iii above) by leveraging the synergies between the Subversion and the Apache Community. Synergies exist due to:

i) Community Leverage - Given the large Apache committer base and their semi-annual developer events, Subversion will benefit from the additional outreach and large developer community.

ii) Longstanding affinity between Subversion and Apache projects - Subversion and Apache have a long history together. From a developer perspective, many of the same people founded and continue to work on both projects. From a technology perspective, both projects utilize capabilities and have driven innovation of the other (e.g., core Subversion, the Apache httpd web server and the Apache portable runtime library (APR).

Looking at the whole open source SCM offering, while Subversion code base keeps growing, active contributors are less than Git and Mercurial ones. In this respect joining the Apache foundation seems a smart move to gather more attention and contributors.

What are the direct and collateral benefits CollabNet is expecting?

As stated above, this move to Subversion will accelerate innovation, which in turn will benefit our clients and business partners, and CollabNet. In other words, whatever is good for Subversion is good for CollabNet as a key community member. Subversion has and always will be a community in which the personal and business gains which can be derived is a direct function of the value added development and marketing investment which is made into the community. As it founder, and historical steward, CollabNet will continue to invest, and even increase our Subversion commitments as Subversion’s adoption in the industry grows.

Sharing innovation efforts and reducing software production costs are key here.

Let’s now have a look at the community side.

Talking about the Apache individual-centric approach, I asked Justin if the fact that the incubation relies on an Apache person is a an opportunity or a seatback.

As a long-time contributor to Subversion and a member of the ASF, I’m personally very very excited to be a mentor to Subversion as it joins Apache. In the mentoring process, I’m joined by several other Apache members: Greg Stein, Sander Striker, and Dan Rall. Our responsibility will be to guide Subversion through the ASF processes as it becomes a new Apache project. In addition to the four of us, a number of other Subversion committers are already Apache members and committers to other Apache projects (usually HTTP Server and APR). This overlap of community was a significant reason for Subversion to join Apache - but we realize that not all incoming projects are going to have such familiarity even before the Incubation process begins!

The Apache Incubation model is centered around supporting new projects that our individual members are interested in. As we’ve discussed earlier this year, committers on our various projects (over 70 top-level projects) are elected to be members of the foundation. One of the coolest things that a member of the ASF can do is sponsor and mentor a new project into the foundation. Therefore, as a grassroots individual-centric organization, we are wholly driven by what projects our members want to see. In turn, we hope that the new project participants will eventually become members themselves and help us further expand the foundation. And, again, the mentors are involved (at a social level) in helping the new project learn the “Apache Way” and shepherding them through the Apache processes.

Subversion story is pretty unique and probably incubating existing projects with a background has pros and cons,
can comment on this?

Generally speaking, our incubation processes are focused on two aspects: legal and community. In a project like Subversion, it’s operated under the consensual decision-making processes that are the hallmark of the ASF. It already boasts a diverse range of contributors (over 55 ”full” committers and 20 “partial” committers) from a diverse set of backgrounds and employers. With such a strong community, there is little for Apache to teach about how to run the community.

A while back, the Subversion community created the Subversion Corporation to gather all of the intellectual property around Subversion. Under the Subversion Corporation banner, we collected all of the legal paperwork (in the form of CLAs and CCLAs) required to have a strong provenance for the Subversion code.

But, having this indepedent corporation came at a price: maintaining the corporation took us away from doing what we do best: create Subversion!
So, the Subversion community looked at our options and decided that the ASF represented a natural fit for where we wanted Subversion to reside going forward. We expect very little to change over the long run - but, there will be some short-term pain as we transition our services to apache.org.

–/–

Greg Stein in a interview answering a question about the Subversion ‘Apache-readiness’ status said that ASF letting Subversion bypassed the incubation process would have set a poor precedent. Even if Subversion will likely spend a small time in its incubation stadium, both because of the already existing community culture and because probably little IP clearance is needed, following the same rules for every project is definitely a wise decision.

Last but not least, can you tell something about the Apache mark?

Even though we give our code away under a permissive set of copyright and patent licenses, our community places a very high value on protecting our name. Through the labors of our community, we have established Apache as a well-regarded brand amongst the industry.

Therefore, while we are delighted/encouraged/supportive of anyone taking our code for any use that they can conceive of - we do not sanction use of our name in those endeavors. (Due to the ins/outs of trademark law, there is a concept called “nominative use” which is always permitted.)

We recently published our trademark policy which goes into much more technical detail (including explaining “nominative use” and other basics of trademark!) at: http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/

Thank you both for your answers!

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Azure is Microsoft’s big foray into Cloud Computing, and it is worth paying attention to not because it is novel, but that it leverages the Windows ecosystem and programmers. People will go to AWS or Rack Space because those systems exist already, making Azure a critical must win or at least get decent market share to be considered successful. One of the earliest issues I had with Azure was the lack of open source support for PHP and other systems. The release of language specific SDK’s for PHP, Ruby, Java and Eclipse helps provide support for those companies that have made the investment in something other than dot net.

The SDK’s are libraries that help programs and the back end support services of Azure work with many of the queuing, database, and blob management that happens when dealing with SOAP, REST and some XML files. The image above is from the Microsoft site that specifically discusses how the SDK’s help programmers call and use Azure services from within PHP and other systems code. The site also describes interoperability with Python, but there is no visible SDK for Python on the web site.

The good part is that Microsoft is trying, and while there are some issues in the error reporting process on how to compile in support for the PHP.INI file, and how to modify the file for the build process in Visual Studio this is going to end up being a good thing for interoperability between the various cloud and internal services to a company. There is good consistent support and data on the codeplex.com web site for many of the SDK’s and how to use them. There is also a bug and issue tracker on the site to help the community work out how to prioritize the issues so that the more important ones get fixed quicker. This is not a bad start, and while you still cannot get a Linux OS, you can at least use PHP, Java, and Ruby if you use the SDK’s they provide.

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Did you know that changing your geographic target in your GWT site settings can have an impact on your rankings? The impact can be positive in one regard and negative in the other:

Google explains the Geographic Target setting (more info here):

If your site targets users in a particular location, you can provide us with information that will help determine how your site appears in search results, and also improve our search results for geographic queries. You can only use this feature for sites with a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org. Country-specific domains, such as .ie or .fr, are already associated with a country or region. If you don’t want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted. (Note: If you do this, your site will probably receive less traffic from Google.)

Example #1:  A USA-Based Site Catering to the USA and Canada

If the owner of this website were to set her site’s setting to target users in the United States there is a very real possibility she will be limiting her visibility on Google.ca’s “Pages from Canada” search; where part of her clientele is searching. On the flip side it is quite possible she would increase her foothold on USA-based searches; searches on Google.com. In this scenario it  is best NOT to set her site’s Geographic Target (totally leave it alone) which will mean stiffer competition; a necessary sacrifice since she is targeting two geographic markets.

Example #2: A Canadian-Based Site Catering Exclusively to Canadians

In this scenario the Canadian site owner is targeting Canadians only. As a result, she should set “Canada” in her site’s Geographic Target setting in order to benefit from the possibility of higher rankings on Google for Canadian searches. She could end up having less top rankings on Google.com (vs. Google.ca) but that is not a concern for her so the decision is a simple one.

So What About the Unlisted Setting?

I do not use the Unlisted setting because, in my opinion, it provides unnecessary information to Google. After all, if you just leave the Geographic Target setting alone instead of choosing “Unlisted” the impact should be the same without introducing yet another variable to consider if your rankings falter; the more variables the harder it can be to determine the culprit that triggered a lower ranking.

If you would like more information on the Geographic Target setting here is a video from a Google engineer:

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