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.
IBM-Acquired Platform: Plan for Sustained, Partner-Friendly HPC Innovation Required
Over on LinkedIn, there’s an interesting discussion taking place in the “High Performance & Super Computing” group on the recently announced acquisition of Markham-based Platform Computing by IBM. My comment (below) was stimulated by concerns regarding the implications of this acquisition for IBM’s traditional competitors (i.e., other system vendors such as Cray, Dell, HP, etc.):
It could be argued:
“IBM groks vendor-neutral software and services (e.g., IBM Global Services), and therefore coopetition.”
At face value then, it’ll be business-as-usual for IBM-acquired Platform – and therefore its pre-acquisition partners and customers.
While business-as-usual plausibly applies to porting Platform products to offerings from IBM’s traditional competitors, I believe the sensitivity to the new business relationship (Platform as an IBM business unit) escalates rapidly for any solution that has value in HPC.
Why?
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 – often well before solutions are introduced to the marketplace and made available for purchase. Thus Platform’s new status as an IBM entity, has the potential to seriously complicate matters regarding risk, trust, etc., relating to the exchange of IP.
Although it’s been stated elsewhere that IBM will allow Platform measures of post-acquisition independence, I doubt that this’ll provide sufficient comfort for matters relating to IP. While NDAs specific to the new (and independent) Platform business unit within IBM may offer some measure of additional comfort, I believe that technically oriented approaches offer the greatest promise for mitigating concerns relating to risk, trust, etc., in the exchange of IP.
In principle, one possibility is the adoption of open standards by all stakeholders. Such standards hold the promise of allowing for the integration between products via documented interfaces and protocols, while allowing (proprietary) implementation specifics to remain opaque. Although this may sound appealing, the availability of such standards remains elusive – despite various, well-intended efforts (by HPC, Grid, Cloud, etc., communities).
While Platform’s traditional competitors predictably and understandably gorge themselves sharing FUD, it obviously behooves both Platform and IBM to expend some effort allaying the concerns of their customers and partner ecosystem.
I’d be interested to hear of others’ suggestions as to how this new business relationship might allow for sustained innovation in the HPC context from IBM-acquired Platform.
Disclaimer: Although I do not have a vested financial interest in this acquisition, I did work for Platform from 1998-2005.
To reiterate here then:
How can this new business relationship allow for sustained, partner-friendly innovation in the HPC context from IBM-acquired Platform?
Please feel free to share your thoughts on this via comments to this post.
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.
Earth and Space Science Informatics at the 2007 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union
In a previous post, I referred to Earth Science Informatics as a discipline-in-the-making.
To support this claim, I cited a number of data points. And of these data points, the 2006 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) stands out as a key enabler.
With 22 sessions posted, the 2007 Fall Meeting of the AGU is well primed to further enable the development of this discipline.
Because I’m a passionate advocate of this intersection between the Earth Sciences and Informatics, I’m involved in convening three of the 22 Earth and Space Science Informatics sessions:
- Ontology Integration: A Pressing Challenge for Earth and Space Science Informatics
- Grid Technologies and Associated Infrastructures
- Putting Ontologies to Work: Real-World Applications in the Earth and Space Sciences
I encourage you to take a moment to review the calls for participation for these three, as well as the other 19, sessions in Earth and Space Science Informatics at the 2007 Fall Meeting of the AGU.
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 …
York’s Grid Contribution
From a recent York bulletin:
In just over a month, the York University Research team on the World Community Grid has exceeded 200 members, placing York in the top 70 of more than 14,000 teams on the grid worldwide.
Annotation Paper Submitted to HPCS 2007 Event
I’ve blogged and presented recently (locally and at an international scientific event) on the topic of annotation and knowledge representation.
Working with co-authors Jerusha Lederman, Jim Freemantle and Keith Aldridge, a written version of the recent AGU presentation has been prepared and submitted to the HPCS 2007 event. The abstract is as follows:
Semantically Enabling the Global Geodynamics Project:
Incorporating Feature-Based Annotations via XML Pointer Language (XPointer)Earth Science Markup Language (ESML) is efficient and effective in representing scientific data in an XML-based formalism. However, features of the data being represented are not accounted for in ESML. Such features might derive from events, identifications, or some other source. In order to account for features in an ESML context, they are considered from the perspective of annotation. Although it is possible to extend ESML to incorporate feature-based annotations internally, there are complicating factors identified that apply to ESML and most XML dialects. Rather than pursue the ESML-extension approach, an external representation for feature-based annotations via XML Pointer Language (XPointer) is developed. In previous work, it has been shown that it is possible to extract relationships from ESML-based representations, and capture the results in the Resource Description Format (RDF). Application of this same requirement to XPointer-based annotations of ESML representations results in a revised semantic framework for the Global Geodynamics Project (GGP).
Once the paper is accepted, I’ll make a pre-submission version available online.
Because the AGU session I participated in has also issued a call for papers, I’ll be extending the HPCS 2007 submission in various interesting ways.
And finally, thoughts are starting to gel on how annotations may be worked into the emerging notions I’ve been having on knowledge-based heuristics.
Stay tuned.
Cooperative Computing Program Operating in Stealth Mode
Normally I don’t like to bandy about words like ‘cool’. It bespeaks narrative laziness. However, in this post I will purposely make an exception.
While at Platform, one of the coolest projects I worked on was one of curriculum development.
Working with a team of faculty, administrators and industry representatives, a curriculum was developed for the Michingan Jewish Institute’s (MJI) degree program in Cooperative Computing.
What is Cooperative Computing? We defined it this way:
Cooperative Computing is the facilitated interchange of information between willing participants for individual or mutual gain.
Specifically:
- Facilitated implies use of a enabling environment (e.g., .NET, J2EE, etc.), along with its associated data (e.g., XML with related standards and technologies) and programming models (e.g., C/C++, Java)
- Interchange emphasizes the (e.g., XML-)detailed interaction that is mediated via standards-based protocols and interfaces (e.g., SOAP plus Grid-enabled Web services)
- Information is the payload of the interchange – and note that it’s information purposely, instead of data. Why? Information is “data that has been interpreted, translated, or transformed to reveal the underlying meaning”. (Use of a lingua franca like XML ensures that this is the case.)
- Willingness implies that the interaction is agreed upon – in fact, it’s most likely negotiated
- Participants may be one or more people, but might also be other concrete entities (e.g., the environment) or even abstract entities (e.g., software and/or hardware components like agents, machines, robots, etc.)
- Gain conveys the individual and/or mutual benefit derived from the interaction – e.g., the provision of service, a step in a business process, etc.
Use of this definition was consistent with MJI’s desire to use Cooperative Computing as an umbrella that could encompass Grid Computing, Web Services, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), and so on.
Although the curriculum was laid out almost-exactly two years ago, it took MJI a little bit of time to do the real work of developing the content.
When I recently connected with marketing director Dov Stein, he indicated that the first cohort of students has almost completed the program.
If you open http://mji.edu/inside.asp?id=99929 and search for “Cooperative Computing” you can have a closer look at the curriculum. (Well, I said they were operating in stealth mode!)
