Marcus from Stefan's team blogs about this new research note from Merrill Lynch: "by 2011 the volume of cloud computing market opportunity would amount to $160bn, including $95bn in business and productivity apps (email, office, CRM, etc) and $65bn in online advertising".
Since I am someone that does not get a good sense of scale from a single absolute number, I looked up some studies on the enterprise application integration and middleware market size: from this sum up at ZDNet back in 2005: "Worldwise application integration, middleware and portal license revenue totalled $6.7 mil in 2004, a 5.8% increase from 2003 revenue of $6.3bn, according to Gartner".
mmm... interesting!
In the last 12 months, I did a lot more business planning and management than creating architectural IP. I learnt many new things from my team, and I thank them for their patience and support - such a previlege to work with this team of extremely talented and committed individuals: Michael, Shane, Nick, Jorke (and Scott). Thank you!
The list of achievement from the team is just amazing: ReMIX, Design led Innovation, ABC Silverlight Player, Big Brother 2008 Live Streaming, Server Launch, defining RIA... and just generally being mercurial, iconoclastic, and fab celebs.
So, "it's the end of the enterprise as we know it", there is "consumerisation of IT" that we need to figure out how to deal with. The use of some sort of cloud service is inevitable.
One thing for sure is that some sort of cloud integration services will be essential to make this new world of software plus services work across the enterprise boundaries and cloud services boundaries.
What about the hard core activity of designing and developing software components in this new world? what about the distributed computing principles that we about, the ACID transactions, the parallelism issues - would it all still work the same way when we build application spanning across the enterprise and services boundaries? To what extent does what we know about the architectural practices of doing enterprise application integration apply to this new world?
There is so much work to be done here, by the architects, by the researchers, by the practitioners looking at early adoptions... I see Pat Helland is already talking about how the way we build applications need to change in his wonderful presentation on "The Irresistable Forces Meet the Moveable Objects" presentation - love your work Pat!
Stacey blogged about the 10 Reasons Enterprise Aren't Ready to Trust the Cloud. Immediately, the conservative enterprise architect in me couldn't have agreed more.
I then picked the brains of my esteemed architect colleagues Nigel and Greg, and it sounds like they're also making the same observation from the community of Enterprise Architects that they engage with in Sydney and in Melbourne, Nigel even wrote me this great summary:
"From the Software plus Service architect councils late last year 1,2,8.9.10 all touched on in various forms in the sessions. In addition:
Enterprise:
How do we integrate with our internal systems. Particularly auth and single-sign on. Perception was that security integration is very difficult
How do we ensure compliance/privacy requirements are met.
Public Sector:
Nope. Never going to cloud-enable citizen data – data custodianship and geo-location issues present major issues (i.e. where are the data centres?)
National security: somewhat related to the above – never going to convince PS agencies to expose sensitive info to outsiders.
But.. .internal public cloud configs (i.e. WOG shared services) probably very likely.
And... hybrid models might be acceptable – i.e. non-sensitive data externalised, sensitive internalised."
Then, I remembered my blog entry a while back "It's the End of the Enterprise as We Know It", and I can't help but think that - cloud computing and services isn't really about just solving our existing enterprise IT challenges, it is not an evolution, but it is the beginning of a revolution, and this time, the revolution will not necessarily be led by the IT department, but by the individual workers/contractors that as a collective act both as the IT service provider as well as the consumer. 'Consumerisation of IT' is only the beginning.
The first start up with the not yet thought of business model, and the not yet thought of user experience, and the not yet thought of relationships enablement will win this brave new world of software plus services.
ok, here's to FY09, wish me luck - my new financial year resolution is to once again blog regularly, documenting my learnings on this journey...
FITT is running the IWD luncheon again - but sadly we missed out - as it was a booked out event way in advance - I think we'll need to lobby for a bigger venue in the future...
in any case, a bunch of us got together for lunch today to celebrate - Bronwen even flew in from Brisbane! - and Spider reminded us to wear suffragettes colours - purple/green/white, and sent us these links: History of International Womens Day, Women for Women international, to remind us what International Women Day stood for exactly 100 years ago.
Very happy to see my IWD 2008 Banner flying proudly in Martin Place today in glorious purple and green.
I feel like a luddite to admit this - but I've only just registered on Facebook today!
Despite the various invitations from friends - Gavin's even thrown a photo of me from Spain in there - I've resisted because: I'm a working mother of 2 toddlers - I don't even have enough time to sort through my inbox or watch the daily news, I simply cannot afford to be addicted to Facebook!
Until my husband comes home one day to tell me he's now on facebook - and has had numerous pokes (mostly from his ex-girlfriends).
Mmm... registered.
I wonder if many happily married/busy/time-poor enterprise architect sorts like me would join in Facebook for similar reasons. Will college students (probably with more spare time for fun social networking than me) eventually enter the workforce - and succumb to the traditional way of email, or will the next generation of workforce bring in the new way of social interaction to the workplace to revolutionise the way we collaborate and communicate?
Anyway, at least now I'm not missing out on cool parties like this one for GeekGirls in Sydney.
I know, in this web 2.0 age, books seem to be incredibly old fashioned! I must admit I succumb to wikipaedia a lot more nowadays than the good old library... but every now and then, I get a gem!
Nick has already picked up one recent addition - this is a great present from Greg. Half way through it already, it looks like I need to buy the team free food a bit more often :-) seriously though, I love chapter 5 - I find the list of competencies there to be a great checklist for my own career development as a Geek (rather than as a manager)!
And this pleasant surprise from Vittorio - long awaited book to guide you through understanding the concepts and challenges of managing online digital identities - watch this space for a review soon - I know what I'll be reading this weekend!
To get a peek into what current R&D are happening around the online geo-information area, here is the list of research topics by the 10 Virtual Earth research award receipients:
Techniques for Rendering Effective Tourist Maps Semantic Enrichment of Street Side Imagery City Capture Enhancement of Photographs Using Virtual Earth Efficient Image Correspondence and Indexing Methods for Urban Scene and Object Recognition Local Search for Hotel and Restaurants Using Econometrics Spatial Data and Image Classification Integrating Online Maps with Aerial Imagery A New View on NEWS Towards Reconstructing the World from Photos on the Internet On Testing Non-Testable Information Retrieval Systems with Geographic Components on the Web Note the Australian recipients!
RIA brings about many benefits over the traditional simple web applications - richer user interface/experience, better responsiveness through asynchronous client-server communication, network efficiency, etc, it is no wonder RIA is getting so much interest in the industry.
However, with the more sophisticated software architecture of RIA, it also brings additional complexities when we want to analyse the typical architecture qualities (performance, scalability, reliability, etc) in addition to the obvious tougher requirements on development and testing tools.
Take 'performance measurement' for example.
It is more challenging to get a measure of the performance/scalability behaviour of a RIA. The asynchronous communication architecture of RIA fundamentally makes the measurement, prediction, and isolation of performance and performance hotspots challenging. Traditional methods of measuring response times from the client tier simply no longer works well in the RIA architecture - since the messages no longer move synchronous across client and server components, but instead has decoupled asynchronous communication behaviours built into the architecture itself.
Scott has already identified the need for the role of 'RIA Architects' - for the purpose of better leveraging the design and develop capabilities of a team, I couldn't agree more, and I suspect there is also ample research opportunities in developing better performance evaluation/prediction tools amongst a few other potentially fruitful research topics around RIA.
Simon tells me that the Architecture Journal Reader is coming soon:
In his own words:
"At the Strategic Architect Forum (SAF) this week we released the new Architecture Journal Reader. Based on the WPF NewsReader SDK, the Architecture Journal Reader delivers an visually exciting, immersive, and searchable reading experience for all issues of the Journal, available in 4 languages. In addition, the Architecture Journal Reader automatically synchronizes with new updates, enables readers to mark annotations, compile a reading list of favorite articles, and even offer feedback on articles through MSDN Forums...
it will be available on the Architecture Journal website in the next couple of weeks.
"
Bronwen, Catherine and the team have been working on this exciting project - GeekGirlBlogs. Check it out! and let us know if you're also a GeekGirlBlogger - I'm sure Bronwen would be happy to add you onto the list.
Jorke is our newest member of the team, and is our deeply technical 'hosting geek'. He's been busy with preparing for this training course - all about Windows Server 2008 and IIS for hosting. Get in early - seats are limited!
I popped into the CRCSI conference on Monday. There were some very interesting Global Big Issues being presented and discussed.
What opened my eyes and got me excited was this intersting set of observation, as well as the view into the future presented by Dr Vincent Tao (who is also presenting at NICTA in Melbourne as I blog):
- We typically search with 'local intent', think of 'GPS Phones', taking pictures, and many other daily activities are location based. Now with the conusumerisation of spatial information online, there is an abundance of technology/research potentials as well as business opportunities.
- with the current information and data indexed on the web, think of the amazing possibilities of using the location dimension, as well as the time dimension as the index, and what interesting usage scenarios/patterns that could create
- A new term for me - "L-Commerce": the Longtail of business and advertising is about local
- the evolution of online mapping technology and its usage patterms:
Map and Directions - where is the dentist office? to...
Map and search - what is the phone number for the dentist office? to...
local search - who is the best dentist around here? to...
local services - make my appointment with the dentist (with direct integration from my phone/Outlook to the dentist's booking system)
Now, this must be sufficient research direction/startup ideas for the day - for you all to get out there and create the next greatest startup based on an online mapping service like Virtual Earth!
Bronwen is doing some cool stuff for the Live developer community! Go and be part of it!
