Early Win Required for Partner-Friendly, Post-Acquisition Platform Computing
Further to the LinkedIn discussion on the relatively recent acquisition of Platfom by IBM, I just posted:
Platform CEO and Founder Songnian Zhou has this to say regarding the kernel of this discussion:
“IBM expects Platform to operate as a coherent business unit within its Systems and Technology Group. We got some promises from folks at IBM. We will accelerate our investments and growth. We will deliver on our product roadmaps. We will continue to provide our industry-best support and services. We will work even harder to add value to our partners, including IBM’s competitors. We want to make new friends while keeping the old, for one is silver while the other is gold. We might even get to keep our brand name. After all, distributed computing needs a platform, and there is only one Platform Computing. We are an optimistic bunch. We want to deliver to you the best of both worlds – you know what I mean. Give us a chance to show you what we can do for you tomorrow. Our customers and partners have journeyed with Platform all these years and have not regretted it. We are grateful to them eternally.”
Unsurprisingly upbeat, Zhou, Platform and IBM, really do require that customers and partners give them a chance to prove themselves under the new business arrangement. As noted in my previous comment in this discussion, this’ll require some seriously skillful stickhandling to skirt around challenging issues such as IP (Intellectual Property) – a challenge that is particularly exacerbated by the demands of the tightly coupled integrations required to deliver tangible value in the HPC context.
How might IBM-acquired Platform best demonstrate that it’s true to its collective word:
“Give us a chance to show you what we can do for you tomorrow.”
Certainly one way, is to strike an early win with a partner that demonstrates that they (Zhou, Platform and IBM) are true to their collective word. Aspects of this demonstration should likely include:
- IP handling disclosures. Post-acquisition Platform and the partner should be as forthcoming as possible with respect to IP (Intellectual Property) handling – i.e., they should collectively communicate how business and technical IP challenges were handled in practice.
- Customer validation. Self-explicit, such a demonstration has negligible value without validation by a customer willing to publicly state why they are willing to adopt the corresponding solution.
- HPC depth. This demonstration has to be comprised of a whole lot more than merely porting a Platform product to a partner’s platform that would be traditionally viewed as a competitive to IBM. As stated previously, herein lies the conundrum: “To deliver a value-rich solution in the HPC context, Platform has to work (extremely) closely with the ‘system vendor’. In many cases, this closeness requires that Intellectual Property (IP) of a technical and/or business nature be communicated …”
Thus, as the fullness of time shifts to post-acquisition Platform, trust becomes the watchword for continued success – particularly in HPC.
For without trust, there will be no opportunity for demonstrations such as the early win outlined here.
How else might Platform-acquired IBM demonstrate that it’s business-better-than-usual?
Feel free to add your $0.02.
Targeting Public Speaking Skills via Virtual Environments
Recently I shared an a-ha! moment on the use of virtual environments for confronting the fear of public speaking.
The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to claim that the real value of such technology is in targeted skills development.
Once again, I’ll use myself as an example here to make my point.
If I think back to my earliest attempts at public speaking as a graduate student, I’d claim that I did a reasonable job of delivering my presentation. And given that the content of my presentation was likely vetted with my research peers (fellow graduate students) and supervisor ahead of time, this left me with a targeted opportunity for improvement: The Q&A session.
Countless times I can recall having a brilliant answer to a question long after my presentation was finished – e.g., on my way home from the event. Not very useful … and exceedingly frustrating.
I would also assert that this lag, between question and appropriate answer, had a whole lot less to do with my expertise in a particular discipline, and a whole lot more to do with my degree nervousness – how else can I explain the ability to fashion perfect answers on the way home!
Over time, I like to think that I’ve approved my ability to deliver better-quality answers in real time. How have I improved? Experience. I would credit my experience teaching science to non-scientists at York, as well as my public-sector experience as a vendor representative at industry events, as particularly edifying in this regard.
Rather than submit to such baptisms of fire, and because hindsight is 20/20, I would’ve definitely appreciated the opportunity to develop my Q&A skills in virtual environments such as Nortel web.alive. Why? Such environments can easily facilitate the focused effort I required to target the development of my Q&A skills. And, of course, as my skills improve, so can the challenges brought to bear via the virtual environment.
All speculation at this point … Reasonable speculation that needs to be validated …
If you were to embrace such a virtual environment for the development of your public-speaking skills, which skills would you target? And how might you make use of the virtual environment to do so?
Confronting the Fear of Public Speaking via Virtual Environments
Confession: In the past, I’ve been extremely quick to dismiss the value of Second Life in the context of teaching and learning.
Even worse, my dismissal was not fact-based … and, if truth be told, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid opportunities to ‘gather the facts’ by attending presentations at conferences, conducting my own research online, speaking with my colleagues, etc.
So I, dear reader, am as surprised as any of you to have had an egg-on-my-face epiphany this morning …
Please allow me to elaborate:
- Yesterday, I witnessed a demonstration of Nortel web.alive (dubbed by some as ‘Second Life for business’)
- This morning I was brainstorming content with a colleague for an upcoming presentation on computing resources available for researchers at York
It was at some point during this morning’s brainstorming session that the egg hit me squarely in the face:
Why not use Nortel web.alive to prepare graduate students for presenting their research?
Often feared more than death and taxes, public speaking is an essential aspect of academic research – regardless of the discipline.
Enter Nortel web.alive with its virtual environment of a large lecture hall – complete with a podium, projection screen for sharing slides, and most importantly an audience!
As a former graduate student, I could easily ‘see’ myself in this environment with increasingly realistic audiences comprised of friends, family and/or pets, fellow graduate students, my research supervisor, my supervisory committee, etc. Because Nortel web.alive only requires a Web browser, my audience isn’t geographically constrained. This geographical freedom is important as it allows for participation – e.g., between graduate students at York in Toronto and their supervisor who just happens to be on sabbatical in the UK. (Trust me, this happens!)
As the manager of Network Operations at York, I’m always keen to encourage novel use of our campus network. The public-speaking use case I’ve described here has the potential to make innovative use of our campus network, regional network (GTAnet), provincial network (ORION), and even national network (CANARIE) that would ultimately allow for global connectivity.
While I busy myself scraping the egg off my face, please chime in with your feedback. Does this sound useful? Are you aware of other efforts to use virtual environments to confront the fear of public speaking? Are there related applications that come to mind for you? (As someone who’s taught classes of about 300 students in large lecture halls, a little bit of a priori experimentation in a virtual environment would’ve been greatly appreciated!)
Update (November 13, 2009): I just Google’d the title of this article and came up with a few, relevant hits; further research is required.
Cyberinfrastructure: Worth the Slog?
If what I’ve been reading over the past few days has any validity to it at all, there will continue to be increasing interest in cyberinfrastructure (CI). Moreover, this interest will come from an increasingly broader demographic.
At this point, you might be asking yourself what, exactly, is cyberinfrastructure. The Atkins Report defines CI this way:
The term infrastructure has been used since the 1920s to refer collectively to the roads, power grids, telephone systems, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy to function. … The newer term cyberinfrastructure refers to infrastructure based upon distributed computer, information, and communication technology. If infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then we could say that cyberinfrastructure is required for a knowledge economy. [p. 5]
[Cyberinfrastructure] can serve individuals, teams and organizations in ways that revolutionize what they can do, how they do it, and who participates. [p. 17]
If this definition leaves you wanting, don’t feel too bad, as anyone whom I’ve ever spoken to on the topic feels the same way. What doesn’t help is that the Atkins Report, and others I’ve referred to below, also bandy about terms like e-Science, Grid Computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), etc. Add to these newer terms such as Cooperative Computing, Network-Enabled Platforms plus Cell Computing and it’s clear that the opportunity for obfuscation is about all that’s being guaranteed.
Consensus on the inadequacy of the terminology aside, there is also consensus that this is a very exciting time with very interesting possibilities.
So where, pragmatically, does this leave us?
Until we collectively sort out the terminology, my suggestion is that the time is ripe for immediate immersion in what cyberinfrastructure and the like might feel like or are. In other words, I highly recommend reviewing the sources cited below in order:
- The Wikipedia entry for cyberinfrastructure – A great starting point with a number of references that is, of course, constantly updated.
- The Atkins Report – The NSF’s original CI document.
- Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery – A slightly more concrete update from the NSF as of March 2007.
- Community-specific content – There is content emerging on the intersection between CI and specific communities, disciplines, etc. These frontiers are helping to better define the transformative aspects and possibilities for CI in a much-more concrete way.
Frankly, it’s a bit of a slog to wade through all of this content for a variety of reasons …
Ultimately, however, I believe it’s worth the undertaking at the present time as the possibilities are very exciting.
CANARIE’s Network-Enabled Platforms Workshop: Follow Up
I spent a few days in Ottawa last week participating in CANARIE’s Network-Enabled Platforms Workshop.
As the pre-workshop agenda indicated, there’s a fair amount of activity in this area already, and much of it originates from within Canada.
Now that the workshop is over, most of the presentations are available online.
In my case, I’ve made available a discussion document entitled “Evolving Semantic Frameworks into Network-Enabled Semantic Platforms”. This document is very much a work in progress and feedback is welcome here (as comments to this blog post), to me personally (via email to ian AT yorku DOT ca), or via CANARIE’s wiki.
Although a draft of the CANARIE RFP funding opportunity was provided in hard-copy format, there was no soft-copy version made available. If this is of interest, I’d suggest you keep checking the CANARIE site.
Finally, a few shots I took of Ottawa are available online …
On the Use of Informal Ontologies in the Delivery of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs)
In Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology and Design, author Thomas Erl frames ontologies (section 10.2) in a top-down strategy for the delivery of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) .
As the first step, in a multistep process, what starts with ontologies ultimately results in a Contemporary SOA (Erl, section 3.2.20):
Contemporary SOA represents an open, extensible, federated, composable architecture that promotes service-orientation and is comprised of autonomous, QoS-capable, vendor diverse, interoperable, discoverable, and potentially reuable services, implemented as Web services.
SOA can establish an abstraction of business logic and technology, resulting in a loose coupling between these domains.
SOA is an evolution of past platforms, preserving successful characteristics of traditional architectures, and bringing with it distinct principles that foster service-orientation in support of a service-oriented enterprise.
SOA is ideally standardized throughout an enterprise, but achieving this state requires a planned transition and the support of a still evolving technology set.
In the same chapter, Erl also provides an abridged Contemporary SOA definition:
SOA is a form of technology architecture that adheres to the principles of service-orientation. When realized through the Web services technology platform, SOA establishes the potential to support and promote these principles throughout the business process and automation domains of an enterprise.
In other words, buying into the top-down strategy can ultimately result in a Contemporary SOA and this is a big deal.
Erl also discusses the bottom-up strategy for delivering a SOA (section 10.2).
In striking contrast to the top-down strategy, and as Erl describes it, the bottom-up strategy does not incorporate ontologies. Despite the fact that “… the majority of organizations that are currently building Web services apply the bottom-up approach …” (Erl, pg. 368):
The bottom-up strategy is really not a strategy at all. Nor is it a valid approach to achieving a contemporary SOA. This is a realization that will hit many organizations as they begin to take service-orientation, as an architectural model, more seriously. Although the bottom-up design allows for the creation of Web services as required by applications, implementing an SOA at a later point can result in a great deal of retro-fitting and even the introduction of new standardized service layers positioned over the top of the non-standardized services produced by this approach.
After reading this chapter, one is left with the impression that Erl favors the agile strategy (Erl, section 10.4) as it attempts “… to find an acceptable balance between incorporating service-oriented design principles into business analysis environments without having to wait before introducing Web services technologies into technical environments.”
I would be willing to accept all of this on spec if it weren’t for the fact that it’s possible to create informal ontologies, in non-SOA contexts, during bottom-up processes.
And if this is possible in non-SOA contexts, then it’s reasonable that informal ontologies could be incorporated into the bottom-up strategy for SOA delivery.
I believe this is worth exploring because use of informal ontologies in a bottom-up strategy for SOA delivery may improve the potential for ultimately achieving a Contemporary SOA. (An outcome, you’ll recall from above, Erl stated wasn’t otherwise acheiveable.)
I also believe this is worth exploring as, as Erl states, most organizations are attempting to gravitate towards SOAs from the bottom up.
Because the agile strategy (ideally) combines the best of both the top-down and bottom-up approaches, I also believe it’s worth exploring the potential for informal ontologies in this case as well.
Although further research is required, the figure below extends Erl’s Figure 10.3 (pg. 367) with a first-blush suggestion of how informal ontologies might be incorporated into the bottom-up strategy for SOA delivery.
It’s important to note that Erl’s original figure illustrates a five-step process that culminates with “Deploy services”.
Based on work I’ve done elsewhere, in this first-blush depiction, I believe the steps required to make use of informal ontologies would need to include:
- “Extract service relationships” – In the work I’ve done elsewhere, this extraction has been achieved by Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL). GRDDL extracts relationships and represents them in RDF from XML via XSLT.
- “Generate informal ontology” – These days, ontologies are often expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is a semantically richer and more-expressive variation of XML than is XML. Much like the previous step, the generated informal ontology is expressed in OWL via processing that would likely make use of XSLT. This step might also involve the need to incorporate annotations.
- “Integrate informal ontologies” – Because each act of modeling through deploying application services will result in an informal ontology, there will eventually be a pressing need a integrate these informal ontologies. This ontology integration, which may also involve top-down or formal ontologies, will provide the best possibilities for ultimately realizing a Contemporary SOA.
Even at this early stage, the use of informal ontologies in the delivery of a SOA appears promising and worth investigating.
