Comments for Sarquol Limited

Comment on Innovation axes in IT… by admin

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:09:34 +0000

Thank you for the feedback. I am happy to see any improvments in power management when it comes to Green IT. All power usage reductions help, and move us away from the power-hungry days of the past. In those terms I hope it will help. Whether it would be considered a paradigm shift, however, is another discussion.

Comment on Innovation axes in IT… by MSFT_AlexT

MSFT_AlexT — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:19:04 +0000

Hi there,
I was impressed by your post. I read Windows 7 news all day but your post is refreshing! Very interesting points you make in regards to innovation categories.
I also agree with you regarding “green IT” perception positioning. I think the fact that Windows 7 is being packaged as a green(er) OS than previous ones is a good thing though because it brings awareness to the topic. Even if you may argue that the power management changes aren’t lifechanging (although I think they are!), they constitue an example for the rest of the industry to follow.

In any case, I don’t know if you read the comment section, but if you do read this, I encourage you to say hi to us on Twitter (if you’re there) and tell me what you think. We’re @CIOsConnect

Hope to hear from you and read more posts!
Cheers,

Alex
Microsoft Windows Client Team

Comment on Innovation axes in IT… by admin

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:52:35 +0000

I suspect that the original author (as a Management person) wanted all the points to begin with the same letter. I think the idea behind “Pardigm innovation” was the idea of managing the market into a shift for competitive reasons. If you can force a shift by making the environment correct for the shift to happen then that is, in effect, an innovation in itself. To take you example, whoever made PAYG mobile phones cost effective may have done so because they were more able to compete on that basis than the big players at the time. I don’t know engough about the history of the change to say it did happen that way. I can see that if you want a flood you could start by drilling a hole in the dyke.

As for Green Wash, if you define innovation as a application of new ideas in a useful way then I see your point. I’m not convinced it is useful as a whole.

Comment on Innovation axes in IT… by ben

ben — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:28:02 +0000

Hi David
Innovation is not invention: innovation is bringing something new to an activity (but it need not be new in itself).
I agree mostly with the four, but would possibly reword as follows:
- Functional innovation – same market niche, new function
- Process innovation – same functions, applied to the same niche but in a different way. Can include a change in process that significantly improves time to market, or (e.g.) logistics/supply management (Tesco – by joining till data with supply logistics)
- Marketing innovation – same functions but positioning to address a different market niche. This can include pricing based innovation.

A paradigm innovation I would suggest does not exist as an innovation – a paradigm shift occurs when the previous paradigm is no longer stable due to an accumulation of innovations (or, more rarely, one big one). The proximate cause of a paradigm shift might be a sufficiently disruptive innovation – an example would be PAYG mobile phone contracts (removes adoption barrier), introduction of SMS (changes private chat communication from synchronous to asynchronous) , the introduction of ‘clickpay advertising’ (drops risk of paying for web advertising to near zero). But the paradigm shift is not the innovation, it is the change in the mindset of the user population. ref – EJ Dijksterhuis, Mechanization of the world picture (paradigms et al) John Maynard Smith and George R. Price (1973), The logic of animal conflict. Nature 246: 15-18 (evolutionary stable strategies and their disruption).

Greenwash is an example of defensive adoption of a changed market position. It isn’t actually innovation at all.

I would agree that should you wish to create a disruptive change in the market without triggering a backwash of defense, then you should try and avoid the perception that your innovations will be associated with a paradigm shift – i.e. minimise their perceived disruption. But if the existing paradigm is no longer stable, then it will shift whether people want it to or not. Bit like a small breach in a dyke – once it starts to flow, it will all go whether you like it or not.

Comment on Is Cloud Computing doomed to failure? by Ralph Bolton

Ralph Bolton — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:51:54 +0000

I can’t really comment on the specifics here, but I wouldn’t describe Gmail as anything more than a “web application”. I don’t personally believe it can be called “a cloud”.

In my mind, “a cloud” is a distributed service, where each component of the cloud is different. Data gets duplicated across nodes in the cloud, but even still, no two nodes are exactly identical. Your access client figures out which node to speak to for a given request/response cycle, and will talk to different nodes for different requests. Of course, in real-world examples, the cloud may be “fronted” by a row of identical cache servers or whatever, but they’re just a refinement of the implementation, as opposed to critical to it’s core function.

GMail (or Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Facebook, Twitter, Google/Yahoo/Bing search, or umpteen other examples) are really just single-point web sites. Sure, behind the web pages you see there may be huge, complex infrastructures, but ultimately, they’re single point of entry. The provider may have taken their infrastructure and doubled it up so that if one fails, the other takes over, but essentially, both components are identical.

If you take redundancy away from both models, you end up with essentially the same thing you started with. A cloud is still a distributed “every node is unique” sort of infrastructure. If you take one node away, you lose a bit of your data, but the basic service (and your application) continues.

A web site is just a series of machines collaborating to fulfil a common purpose. If you take one of those machines away, some part of the application will fail (which may include data loss). Just because someone else runs those machines for you doesn’t make them “a cloud”.

So whilst the article’s points about centralised management and human errors in complex implementations are all valid, I’m not sure the example of GMail is anything more than “whoever is running your services for you might make a mistake, even if they’re a third party that you think are great”. I don’t think it’s valid to extend that into our choices of technological paradigms.

Comment on Should you be looking at clouds? by Ralph Bolton

Ralph Bolton — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:16:32 +0000

The hype-cycle illustration is interesting. The disillusionment will come when we start to flesh out some of the details of cloud technology. As a general rule, a cloud infrastructure will take care of low-level non-functional requirements, such as redundancy and performance, but in no implementation I’ve seen really offers any form of quality of service. Further more, clouds (or more precisely, grids) aren’t big-iron databases like Oracle (or even smaller ones like MySQL). As a programmer, you need to think in almost completely new ways to architect your programs to never use a table JOIN or some other constructs that are commonplace elsewhere.

The point I’m trying to make is that whatever limitations a cloud or grid has have to be understood – and not just because you’ve read the marketing flyers. You actually need to re-architect your application, your developers, the development/test/release process and probably your internal cross-charging models as well. That’s a considerably different proposition to the overly-simplistic “just stick it in the cloud and we’ll save money” approach that the current hype engenders.

As you say, clouds offer some fantastic opportunities. But right now, you need to do quite a bit of your own engineering to really make use of them. Unfortunately though, you’ll be side-tracked by news that some big player or other has cancelled it’s cloud projects because of spiralling costs, or elongated timescales, or poor returns. If you can stick it out through all of that and play your technical cards right, the rewards could be significant.

Comment on Should you be looking at clouds? by admin

admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:42:56 +0000

Yes please. Contact from Oracle users considering cloud technology would be very interesting.

Comment on Should you be looking at clouds? by Matt Miller

Matt Miller — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:23:53 +0000

People I met recently at Oracle User Group Conference and E-commerce Expo would be interested in this. Shall I connect you with them?

Comment on Performance problem solving process by Being a problem solver… | Sarquol Limited

Being a problem solver… | Sarquol Limited — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:22:05 +0000

[...] will tend to be technical. I have proivided advice on a technical process for considering solutions previously. In that article I didn’t consider the stakeholder management aspects of solving problems. It [...]

Comment on A tour of the performance model by Performance Model Example | Sarquol Limited

Performance Model Example | Sarquol Limited — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:50:32 +0000

[...] model would be more useful if it was better documented. The is a tour of the model available (here), but that doesn’t make it clear how to apply the model ina typical usage scenario. I have, [...]