Anant Jhingran's Musings

SDForum's 3rd Ruby on Rails Conference

So I gave a talk last Friday at SDForum's 3rd Ruby on Rails Conference, courtesy a request by Michael "Max" Maximilien.  My talk, "RoR for the Enterprise: Ready or Not?  A Database Perspective," built on lots of discussions with Leon Katsnelson, Klaus Roder and Max basically had these two main points:

1. For RoR that manage their own data, the scalability and flexibility of RoR app building needs to be matched with the scalability and flexibility of the database.  DB2 is a great choice for this.  DB2 Express-C will get you started with no pain.  DB2 pureXML will allow you to manage XML (I gave an example of an in house application that Leon is building).  And DB2 performance, reliability and disaster recovery will allow you to grow.
2. For RoR applications that extend existing databases and applications, there are also some positives.  In particular, our Info 2.0 vision and REST/Atom friendliness of Ruby go well together.  However, it is not a bed of roses for most cases.  Enterprise data and databases tend to be not as clean as what RoR wants.  Autoincrementing "id" field, really? Also, ruby skills, separation of concerns etc. make the style of RoR development and that of enterprise class applications not necessarily a great match.  So more work is needed there (I got comments which implied that the database vendors need to do all the things to come closer to the RoR community, which I think is extreme.  The database community has its own momentum, and it needs to be a partnership.)  What do you guys think?

At the end of the talk, one of the organizers caught me and taped me for a 5 min interview.  Highlights of the interview are here.

Legacy Modernization and Skills

James Governor, with whom I had a very interesting unconference at IBM's Impact (more on it later), commented on a dialog he had with Yvonne Perkins in his blog -- on the whole aspect of CICS modernization.  Fundamentally, he is asserting that just wrappering is not enough, without skills growth a platform can only ever be a cash cow...

CICS has an IM counterpart -- IMS (which is often known as a database, but really is two things in one -- transaction manager and database). We are finding, indeed, skills to be an important issue, so we want to make the programming in and out of it easier, including soa verbs in and out, but a 100 other things. Xquery in and out. Mashups out.... I do not have the facts about our clients, but I am observing that in IMS development, this makes dev on ims also very exciting. And it attracts a lot of new talent.  Many start off at the edges, which due to modernization effort is almost no different than similar work in other middleware products that abound here at the site I am at.  But many get comfortable enough, that they migrate into the bowels of the IMS code, whose code, in many many cases, is older than them!!! A relatively large fraction of IMS developers satisfy this criterion!

So abstraction is not bad, it drives new usage, but for me, equally importantly, it drives new skills that keeps the platform going and going and going...

Wow, all this excitement!!!

Google announces its own App Exchange!!! What would Amazon do? Databases are dead, long live the cloud!

Interesting, but wait!

If for an enterprise, data and information is the king, either data moves to analytics and processing in the cloud, or analytics and processing moves to the data. Which way the world will go? Can you really say?

And for a completely different perspective, see this.

IBM Software Strategy

Often when we give strategy, we give a "spin."  But sometimes it is important to understand some of the unvarnished truth behind that strategy.  Take a look at Steve Mills' interview on IBM SWG's strategy...  And tell me what you think

Hadoop Meeting

I am blogging this from Santa Clara, attending (alongwith, my guess anouther 400 people) the first Hadoop meeting, organized by Yahoo.  What has brought all of us here?  It is clear that there are a class of applications (TBD, the full scale of what they are) that benefit from the infrastructure that the googles and the yahoos use.  Of course, large scale text analytics, of course graph analysis, but many many more. Log analysis, data mining, optimization to name a few more.  So Doug Cutting (the same guy who gave us Lucene, which I love) has now given us Hadoop (map-reduce) and other people have built PIGs and JAQLs and HBases above and now not only Yahoo, but also, by the show of hands here, many many other people are beginning to use it for their applications.

Technically, it is easy to get jaded and say that this is all old wine in new bottle.  That to some effect was what Mike Stonebraker and Dave DeWitt said in this blog.  It is also a full employment act for reimplementation of all database gems in this new model.  However, that is besides the point.  Innovation and invention should not be confused.  Hadoop is innovative, it might or might not be inventive. 

It is great to see the interest in this open community.  I am here because I feel this is very important for IBM clients in the future.  I am trying to understand the use cases, and therefore the application part of the day is much more useful for me than just the pure technology, which having done databases, I get easily. 

Doing good, part 2

I think I am going to start a regular series on this.  How people are using information for betterment of society.  I began by talking of INCOIS and tsunami warning.  Today I want to talk about PatientsLikeMe.  I first came across this when Marty Tannenbaum gave a lecture at Almaden.  Marty, himself a great marketplace creator from his e-commerce, CommerceNet days, mentioned several other "ventures" of information freeing up medical decision making, and gave PatientsLikeMe as one of the examples.

Yesterday's NYT magazine had a long article on it.  Go read it.  The synopsis is simple.  Think match.com for patients with rare diseases.  That's it.  And do good by not asking for subscriptions, or even ads.  Perhaps get the pharmas to benefit from the information, and subsidise it.  There is a dark cloud in all of this -- not privacy or HIPPA, but whether patients can or should dismabiguate information without the help of their doctors.  But my view is -- freeing up information always has the technology run ahead of the "ethics", "laws" and "controls."  Eventually they catch up.

India, Part Deux

I am writing this from Hong Kong, having just finished my India trip, meeting with IBM Labs, and with IBM current and future customers.  I will discuss the labs in my next post, but a few things struck me as I listened to the customers.

1. The scale of the problems to be tackled is enormous.  One of the banks I visited has hundreds of millions of banking customers, yet, a single transaction might be a few dollars only.  One of the telecoms I visited has plans to have similar order of magnitude wireless customers, yet a single transaction (SMS) might be 2.5 cents retail, and even smaller on wholesale rates.  So while solutions born in the West work when it comes to scale, the price consciousness of a business buyer is extreme.
2. Change happens all around.  As I talked about Dr. Nayak in my previous post, this is an example of a change happening (at least) from the top.  Other changes are brought about by dynamic personalities such as Prof. Phatak of IIT Bombay, that are constantly consulted on problems big and small by the private and public sector. And a huge amount of change happens bottom-up.  It is not just that Indian IT community is optimizing around the low cost design point.  Perhaps having missed a lot of the automation phase that happened in the West, there is a chance for them to leapfrog into a different space.  As an example, in talking with my old colleague, Jai Menon, who is now the CIO and also in charge of Innovation at Bharti Airtel, I realized what a game changer cell phones are in India, even affecting, if not the bottom of the pyramid, then a large portion of the population close to it.

Of course, all of this excitement does not take away from the fact that India continues to be a land of contrasts, and the bottom of the pyramid is not rising fast enough.  I visited a slum in Delhi India, where my dad teaches school going kids -- it was sad to see the poverty, but it was amazing to see the excitements in the kids to learn (an amazing young girl took me aside and requested me to arrange for English teacher because she felt that English is the way forward); and how their parents, in spite of being of extremely modest means, still dress their kids well and in spite of all horror stories of girls being discriminated against, the school was full of very bright, very eager girls of all ages.

Doing good

It is often exciting when technology is applied for commercial purposes in novel ways, but it is truly satisfying when it is applied for the betterment of humanity.  I have been visiting India for the last week or so, and the use of technology to human upliftment is apparent everywhere.  And whenever IBM is a part of such technology usage, I feel especially proud.

One such moment came when I visited with the Director of INCOIS, a premier Oceanographic Studies Institute in Hyderabad, a city in Southern India, where I happened to have grown up in too. The Director, Dr. Nayak, walked me through his visions and implementations of Tsunami Early Warning. This is an application that sits on top of DB2, and uses computation and strategic decision making inputs to compute whether or not to issue warnings to Indian Coastal villages. The challenge is of course to make the right call -- too many false calls would lead to ennui, and one wrong call could lead to a disaster. He also walked me through the control room for this, and it is very clear that emerging countries such as India are really using technology for the betterment of the masses. I also got into some detailed discussions with him on the power of information coming together, the power of freeing up of information (he is wanting to link to many many other data sources, and to enable third parties to leverage information that the institute generates by publishing all of it). He could have been giving our information on demand message, except that he was doing it in a governmental, non-commercial contexts. Hats off to him and his colleagues! I will have much more to write on my various visits here, and I have been delinquent in blogging, but this trip will yield a treasure trove of blogs for all of you :)

Popfly and Tim O'Reilly comment

So Sunday NYT had an article on Popfly. Generally a positive article.  However what stuck me was the comment by Tim O'Reilly.  An excerpt from the article: “Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0,” said Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a print and online publisher. “They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game.”

Notwithstanding the obvious diss against software which I will punt on, I think that Tim has it wrong with respect to the network effect of data.  Of course there is network effect of data, but not all data is amenable to be network effect-able out in the great internet cloud.  A huge amount of information is locked within enterprise coffers.  It will never make it to the big cloud to be networked.  So the challenges that Microsoft and us in IBM are trying to solve is how do we create the network effect within an enterprise.  And we have to do it through software and through inside the firewall SaaS models. 

Cognos close

Folks, it is official.  They are part of IBM, my division, Information Management.  I am looking forward to deep interactions with Don  Campbell, their CTO, who will now become part of the technical leadership team for Information Management.  Every acquisition brings promise and some angst (technology overlap, new team dynamics etc.) but this one seems to be extremely positive from the get go.  More on our dashboarding, OLAP, streaming, text analytics, performance management and the like over the course of next few months from me...

Meanwhile, we also announced a new family of products, branded Infosphere -- our warehousing and master data management.  Fundamentally, these two, plus our Information Server, now represent the part of our portfolio devoted to comprehensive view of information across the enterprise.  While I try to keep marketing to a minimum in my blog, this product family will represent a critical thrust by us. 

Also, I was quite excited by a series of announcements in Lotusphere -- the annual Lotus conference.  In particular, Lotus mashups -- which will have close affinity with our Info 2.0 initiatives, and Live Text, which among other things contains my favorite Avatar annotation technology.  And yes, some other big events happened this week ($45B big), but let me leave that for a later date.