Delivered Innovation founder and CTO Michael Topalovich will be presenting at the Tech in the Middle conference in Chicago on September 11, and Edward Schlicksup, Director of Sales and Operations, will be leading a workshop following the presentation. Delivered Innovation will also be sponsoring the after parter in the HUB bar following the event. Register today at www.techinthemiddle.com and use the code ‘TECHDI’ to receive a $10 discount.
Who: Michael Topalovich and Edward Schlicksup
What: Tech in the Middle 2010 Chicago
When: Saturday, September 11
Where: Herman Hall at Illinois Institute of Technology
Why: You are a Chicago-area developer, entrepreneur, or technologist looking for insight on cloud computing and mobile trends
http://www.techinthemiddle.com/Register
https://titm.eventbrite.com/
I had an interesting situation last night that threw me back in time to my IT support days many moons ago – I had to be a firefighter, and I didn’t like it one bit. I had discovered that major changes to a web property that we had implemented earlier in the day had reverted back to an earlier state, and since the changes were applied directly to the vendor’s content management system, we had no rollback capabilities. Granted, the total time that could have been lost was only a few hours which is why we didn’t pay much attention to backups or other safeguards, but at a time when this company is going through a significant growth phase, every hour counts.
I was able to get back to the office, locate a cached version of the page in my Chrome browser, and reconstruct the content in about 45 minutes. This is where I came to an important realization about the impact of cloud computing on the IT organization – early in my career, this situation would have given me a huge adrenaline rush and made me feel like a hero. My boss would have praised me for my dedication and my troubleshooting ability. I would have been on a high until the next fire had to be put out. But this is a different time. These 45 minutes came at a significant opportunity cost – missing my son’s baseball practice. They also came on top of an already long and intense day. And in the grand scheme of things, they were 45 minutes that were not value adding.
It gave me a sick feeling in my stomach when I thought about how this 45-minute episode is by no means unique, and happens tens of thousands of times each day, across companies of all sizes. Thousands of hours each day are spent by IT resources feeling like they’re doing a great job putting out fires, but in the end contributing to little more than operational overhead. This is where cloud computing becomes a force multiplier – companies from small businesses to global corporations can leverage cloud services for exponential gains in operational effectiveness by shifting IT resources from firefighters to roles that provide direct value to the business. Managing servers (“boxes”), software versions, operating system patches, databases, etc. gets shifted outside of the walls of the company, and thus outside of the realm of internal IT; those headaches become someone else’s…someone else who specializes in providing a specific service better than anyone else in the world, including the internal IT staff. By shifting to cloud services, internal IT can focus on tightly integrating technology with business architecture, rapidly supporting new business opportunities with on-demand customer-facing systems that reduce the process friction that customers experience when doing business with you, and most importantly…taking all of that creative energy that was once spent in crisis mode and applying it to value-creating functions and initiatives.
Joel Dietz: VMForce – Battling for the Cloud
I just came across a nice post from a Force.com developer on his blog, d3developer.com, that touches on many of the concerns that are being felt throughout the salesforce.com partner and developer ecosystem regarding the company’s recent VMForce announcement.
Three key points:
(VMForce) raises the question of just who Salesforce is competing with.
Salesforce can no longer simply compete with Oracle business applications, can it realistically think to match Amazon or Google to be a leader in a PaaS (Platform as Service) race?
(Salesforce needs to) Articulate more clearly the gameplan to the developer community.
I came across Jeff Kaplan’s recent post, Welcome to Cloud 2.0, and realized that the moniker has moved beyond just Marc Benioff and salesforce.com trying to own a new term and will probably start to stick over the summer as more cloud pundits and vendors begin to use it freely. My own thoughts:
- Was there ever a Cloud 1.0 to begin with? I don’t even think we’ve been able to agree on a taxonomy or definition for the cloud, but I do agree with Jeff’s assertion that the initial driver of cloud services was price and cost savings. Thankfully we’ve all become more creative in setting forth our value propositions.
- Does anything ever move beyond version 2.0 in the evolution of overarching technology terms and principles? As much as we joke about being somewhere around “Web 8.64″ in the versioning of the concept and term, “Web 2.0″ is still the nom de guerre for the once-new way of looking at web content and media…and it’s sounding extremely dated. Are we going to be stuck in “Cloud 2.0″ until the next seismic shift in technology, or can we work on a roadmap to get us to “Cloud 2.5″ or “Cloud 3.0?”
- Will “Cloud 1.0″ be considered a sort of purgatory for firms that haven’t made the shift even to the commodity cloud services that Jeff references? Do you have to go through “Cloud 1.0″ to get to “Cloud 2.0,” or will there be a sort of “catch-up effect” that allows slower adopters to leapfrog the 1.0 paradigm?
Thoughts?
Glenn Gruber: The Fallacy of Software Factories and the Importance of Talent
Mr. Gruber makes a number of good points in this post regarding the general tendency in IT to try to commoditize talent within the software development space. While we at Delivered Innovation employ a “factory approach” to development, our philosophy regards the standardization of the delivery process itself, and not the application of tacit knowledge to the process of creating value, as the ultimate candidate for standardization. Glenn is spot on in his assessment that many firms within the outsourcing world try and apply a factory model for the purpose of reducing development expertise to the least common denominator, and this comes at the expense of quality design…and ultimately of quality output. DI has been brought on to a number of large “cleanup” projects in the Force.com space this year to untangle messes created by these so-called software factories where developers are routinely referred to as “bodies” (as in, “We’re behind schedule, so let’s throw a few more bodies at this”), and in every case the customer ended up spending significantly more on the project using resources that may have cost less on a per-hour basis, but ended up costing more in the long run due to the watered-down skill levels and lack of insight into the big picture design and architecture.
Three key points:
…under the traditional outsourcing model success (i.e. margins) is achieved by trying to break any task down into its most basic components so that those activities can be completed by the most junior and cheapest resources.
Tools and methodologies are more like guiderails to reduce mistakes and help less-seasoned developers accomplish more advanced tasks, but don’t necessarily guarantee well written, high-performance software.
Architecting, designing, building and testing products that are tied to revenue, that require high levels of performance, scalability and resiliency is not a task to be done by lowest-common-denominator individuals.
