PICTURES: Marvelous sunset at home

This evening, we had a marvelous sunset at home. Picture taken with my Canon EOS 20D, lens EF 17-40 at 21:30 CEST.

Tags: picture - sunset

eCENTER: Venice, some pictures (02)

San Marco

Tags: venice - picture

BUSINESS: Better vs. Different

[via Seth Godin]

[...] Better is not always the right strategy. Better is not always superior to different.

When you make something that works a little better, you're playing the same game, just keeping up with the status quo. When you make something different, on the other hand, you're trying to change the game.

The next time your engineers or customer service people want to initiate a project to make something better, challenge them to make something different instead.

Tags: strategy - seth godin

eCENTER: Venice, some pictures (01)

As already discussed here, Nick and myself were in Venice, Italy last week for the HP Enterprise Executive Summit. Some pictures from our stay there.

HP Enterprise Executive Summit 2006

Gondola ride

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

[click]

Tags: venice - picture

NEWS: How to open-source Java?

[via BetaNews]

Following through on a promise it made earlier this month, Sun confirmed at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco Tuesday that it would open the source code to Java, but said it needs the community's help in getting it done to prevent fragmentation of the technology.

"The question is not whether we will open-source Java, the question is how," Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said during his opening keynote. [...]

In addition, Sun rolled out a new licensing program for operating systems, which will make it easier for companies -- including FreeBSD, Linux and OpenSolaris vendors -- to bundle the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) with their distributions. Restrictive licensing has held back Java's adoption on these platforms.

Tags: open source - java - sun

BUSINESS: Off-the-shelf components of business functionality

[via McKinsey Quarterly]

Sometimes, also high-level business consultants are analysing *exactly* in the same way as we are doing that in the ecenter (is it good? ;-).

custom-built applications are still very much a part of the IT landscape. Companies in many sectors spend well over half their applications budgets on custom software, used largely to enhance, support, and operate customized systems. For large companies in competitive, fast-moving industries such as telecommunications, financial services, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media, those outlays can run into hundreds of millions of dollars. [...]

Some pioneering companies have found a way to capture the benefits of packaged software in a customized-applications environment. They have adopted the approach of software vendors, which package and sell applications aimed at the common needs of many customers rather than of individuals, by writing an application once and then selling it many times. In this way, pioneering banks and media and pharmaceutical companies have reduced the complexity and cost of managing applications and speeded up the deployment of new or updated ones. [...]

A company can define the management of common elements among applications as standardized "products" designed to provide for the needs of many applications rather than one. Similarly, it can assemble new, custom-built applications from common, internally built modules of functionality and then reuse services developed by its teams to undertake common tasks such as authenticating users or accessing attributes of customers or products. [...]

The IT and business teams involved in developing a custom application decide independently on the type and version of the applications tools and deployment environment it will use—the server, the database, the portal, and so on. Decisions about service levels (such as availability) and policies on data storage also are made ad hoc. Such applications end up as complex beasts to manage, typically requiring a host of maintenance and support processes as customized as the applications themselves. [...]

In response to such problems, companies have tried to reduce labor costs by, for instance, offshoring the maintenance of applications and consolidating them in shared service centers. Consolidation improves utilization (fewer machines and people are needed) but rarely raises the productivity of IT maintenance, because the diversity of maintenance and support activities doesn't go away. Similarly, offshoring can reduce per-hour labor costs, but companies (either in their captive offshore centers or their outsourcing vendors) typically do little to reduce the underlying diversity in the maintenance processes for applications. [...]

A company may have thousands of applications, but we've found that, for most organizations, they can be clustered into fewer than a dozen archetypes—our term for applications grouped by their key commonalities. Archetypes naturally vary by company. [...]

Today companies bring some order and standardization to the process by using Internet-based service-oriented-architecture (SOA) standards.2 These IT advances help companies to codify business functionality in ready-to-use software building blocks much more easily and quickly, to scale up the kinds of functionality suitable for reuse in applications, and to ensure that such building blocks are employed more effectively across project teams and organizations—and maintained in a more standard fashion after an application has been deployed. [...]

For early adopters, the benefit that really counts is a reduction in the time needed to develop an application: they are finding that they can roll one out 20 to 40 percent faster when they use common applications products. Furthermore, the reduced expense could eventually allow companies to leverage the advantages by using easy-to-assemble applications to test new business strategies. If the strategies work, the companies can scale up the applications; if they don't, little has been lost, because such applications are inexpensive to build and easy to discard. [...]

The following lessons from early adopters:

• Build the products "prospectively," mindful not just of the existing base of applications but also of future needs.


• Organize groups to deliver products effectively against business needs and not just technology outcomes.


• Pay attention to organizational factors that will ensure proper governance and realize the business benefits.

Tags: mckinsey - strategy - software development

BUSINESS: Succession question in tech firms

[via Knowledge@Wharton]

But tech companies often pose unique succession issues, in part because of their unusually fast growth and young founders, according to Wharton faculty and technology experts. "If you look at the dominant companies in the technology industry, most of them are still led, or until recently were led, by a charismatic founder. [...]

Going forward, it remains to be seen what will happen at Oracle, which is still run by founder Lawrence J. Ellison after nearly 30 years, and at Apple, where founder Steve Jobs left the company once, but is now enjoying a second honeymoon with the success of the iPod and iTunes. [...]

Only a handful of the largest firms have had founders with the ability to manage both the technology and business sides of their rapidly growing companies, Hosanagar says. "For the more successful companies, there was not a reason for the investors to make the intervention earlier. That's why you have some of the biggest companies -- Microsoft, Sun, Apple -- run by the same people for 10, 20 or 30 years." [...]

The rate of innovation in the technology industry also allows entrepreneurial founders to remain in charge longer than their management skills might warrant because fast growth at the firms can mask management weaknesses, Hosanagar says. As the companies mature, those problems are not so easy to hide, making succession more urgent. [...]

It has been difficult, Cappelli adds, for fast-growing technology firms to develop top managers internally. "The companies generally have not had a lot of systems in place, particularly for developing people, so that often makes it hard to find qualified people inside." [...]

While technology company founders are among the most well-known business executives, they are often less ego-driven than CEOs in other industries, where elaborate hierarchies link power to position. "The tech industry is unique in many ways and it has to do with the strong meritocracy," says Hosanagar, who points out that technology executives work closely with employees at all levels to foster a sense of collaboration, which in turn leads to innovation.

And an interesting point of view about Ray Ozzie ;-)

Yet according to Kendall Whitehouse, Wharton's senior IT director, one possible successor to Gates is Ray Ozzie, the principal creator of Lotus Notes, who joined Microsoft when the company acquired Groove Networks in 2005, a company which Ozzie founded in 1997. "Ozzie is clearly a tech visionary," states Whitehouse. "He may be just what Microsoft needs to lead it into the next generation of Internet-enabled software applications."

Tags: wharton - strategy

OPEN SOURCE: Open Management Consortium

Great, now, we are going down along the stack :-) The idea of the Open Management Consortium is to enable the collaboration between different Open Source projects of systems management for servers runnning open source software stacks.


The projects which are participating are already quite exciting (we are using nagios in ecenter solutions):

• Nagios


• NetDirector


• openQRM


• openSIMS


• Webmin


• Zenoss

The Consortium is comprised of leading open source projects that are developing and shaping the technologies used to manage IT infrastructure, particularly open source infrastructure such as that hosted on Linux. The initial committee members represent community leaders and firms that are central to open management technologies. Specific objectives of the Open Management Consortium include:

• Create awareness of open source management tools in the market


• Provide education and resources to help end users make informed decisions regarding open source


• Establish conventions and standards that enable integration and interoperability


• Enable collaboration and coordination on common development projects


• Promote collaborative open source systems management solutions

The Consortium will work to drive open standards for systems management within the industry, assisting IT managers and system administrators to custom-create solutions to best serve their business needs.

That remembers something else, umh.... :-)

They have also a blog (feed).

Tags: open management consortium - open source

eCENTER: HP Enterprise Executive Summit 2006

Nick and myself are invited at the coming HP Enterprise Executive Summit in Venice, Italy (Mai 14-16, 2006).



Interesting agenda, we are participating to the vertical session Financial Services Industry - Insurance. Title of our presentation: Unleashing Technology Innovation for the Insurance Industry.

Tags: HP - ecenter solutions

MUSIC: Mercedes Mixed Tape 10

New tunes for a new season: with Mixed Tape 12 Mercedes-Benz presents 15 brand new tracks by international newcomers for you to explore, download and enjoy wherever you like - check out http://www.mercedes-benz.com/mixedtape to get your free compilation.

Mixed Tape 12 begins with a detour to Japan: Kyoto Jazz Massive, undisputed paragons of the Far Eastern Nu Jazz scene, celebrate their 10th anniversary and open our current compilation with a remix by British Nu Funk stars Quantic.
Europe, too, has plenty to offer when it comes to promising new
artists: whether rousing Indie Pop (The Royal We), Low Budget Soul's London-based Hip-Hop (remixed by Nu Soul legend Blackbeard), beautifully fragile Soul hymns from Sweden (Natalie
Gardiner) or the seductive Electropop sounds of German duo Suitcase - all tracks are simply brimming with musical surprises!

Please note - to keep up with the ever-changing music scene, Mixed Tape changes its playlist every ten weeks: from the 18th of July 2006 the above-mentioned URL will feature Mixed Tape 13 with 15 fresh recommendations from around the world.

Tags: mercedes - mixed tape

OPEN SOURCE: Licence models

Nick has found two articles from news.com, both published in 2005 but still very relevant to our point of view, to define new possible trends concerning the way of licencing software (by the way: generally speaking, not just for open source components).

Open source reshaping services market

Seeking services revenue is not restricted to the open-source crowd. With corporate spending on software restrained, established providers of proprietary software increasingly rely on ongoing revenues, such as maintenance rather than new license sales. In an earnings call earlier this year, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison touted the company's "subscription" maintenance business as "an extremely high-margin business." [...]

JBoss founder and CEO Marc Fleury said that his company's support structure will ultimately give it an advantage over others crowding into the field. He said scaling up its support offerings so that the company can handle many clients with large-scale applications is one of the biggest challenges the company faces. "Customers want to know their provider is viable," Fleury said. "Getting support directly from the vendor who wrote the software is a better model...What's the credibility (of others)?"

Open-source companies chase steady money

Many industry veterans argue that open source is accelerating a shift that has been going on in the software industry for some time: Rather than hinge their business on big-ticket license contracts, software providers increasingly rely on recurring maintenance revenue. [...]

And because most open-source tools don't have license fees attached to them, commercial open-source companies are often forced to build their businesses around services revenue, in the form of support, up-front installation or training. With this model, purchasing software is more like committing to a yearlong cell phone contract--and less like buying a car with a large cash outlay and making regular payments later. [...]

"Larry (Ellison) is buying everything he can get his hands on to consolidate the (business applications) industry. He believes that innovation in software is over. It's all about maintenance revenue," Goodnight said. [...]

Analysts say that open-source software requires an industry of services companies for its adoption to spread. Some open-source products have been created by a relatively small group of programmers and do not have round-the-clock support organizations. Corporate customers require some sort of vendor to rely upon. [...]

Also, a shift in buying habits is fueling interest in annuity-style contracts between providers and corporate customers. Increasingly savvy customers are shying away from committing to large-scale projects that consume millions of dollars and take years to complete.

"Enterprise customers, in particular, continue to be willing to pay fair and reasonable prices for software. The difference with the old days is that they don't want to pay for it all up front," Mitchell Kertzman, partner at venture capital firm Hummer Winblad and former CEO of Sybase, said at a conference in February. "They want to pay for it as they realize the value and get return on investment." [...]

"From a management point of view, if you do it correctly you can build a better forecast into expenses and revenue flow," relies on subscriptions. Instead of spending the end of every said Matthew Szulik, CEO of Linux distributor Red Hat, which quarter trying to land big deals, the subscription approach "allows you to focus on strategic issues," he said.

Tags: licence - open source

PICTURES: Sensational sights from Saturn

[via CICLOPS]

New raw images from Cassini have captured breathtaking views of Saturn's splendid moons and rings, including distant shots of Enceladus and its icy plumes.

Tags: picture - cassini - saturn - enceladus

BUSINESS: Metric driven management

[via Marc, again]

Metric driven management from Scott Maxwell, a difficult but so strategic part of leadership, specially when your company is growing. Very interesting.

When you can accurately predict your results in each operating unit, it means less risk and a greater opportunity to scale your company without blowing your capital (missed quarters get more and more expensive as you grow!). Being able to make accurate predictions also means that:

• You have an operating model (not just a collection of people), which allows you to scale better,


• You understand the key drivers of output in your operating model,


• You are consistently managing the unit to your operating model,


• You have a set of early warning signs (your key drivers) that you can focus more attention on when they get below certain thresholds (i.e., it helps you to know where to spend your time),


• You have a set of measures that you can benchmark against other companies to understand where you have opportunities to move to best practices, and


• You know when you need to add staff or other resources well before you get caught short.

Finally, the understanding of the above gives you a solid platform for experimenting with new approaches and accurately evaluating the effectiveness of the new approaches (thereby allowing you to kill the approaches that don’t work and expanding the approaches that do work).

Over time, the nature of emerging growth companies is that they move from simpler approaches to more sophisticated approaches (more specialists, more channels of distribution, more products, more marketing channels, more approaches to customer service) and you want to make sure that you continue to evolve in the right direction (note: this is not an argument to get more sophisticated as an end to itself, just that getting more sophisticated leads to better operating results as you growl…you clearly need to keep your operation as simple as possible).

Tags: strategy

NEWS: Zurich scores highest for quality of living

[via Mercer]

Wow, it seems that we are not the only one in ecenter solutions thinking that Zurich is a *great* city :-)

How it works

The analysis is part of an annual World-wide Quality of Living Survey, covering more than 350 cities, to help governments and multinational companies place employees on international assignments. Each city is based on an evaluation of 39 criteria, including political, social, economic and environmental factors, personal safety and health, education, transport, and other public services. Cities are ranked against New York as the base city, which has an index score of 100.

Ranking

Zurich ranks as the world’s top city for quality of living, according to a survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. The city scores 108.2 and is only marginally ahead of Geneva, which scores 108.1, while Vancouver follows in third place with a score of 107.7. In contrast, Baghdad is the lowest ranking city in the survey, scoring just 14.5.

Europe and Middle East

Almost half the top 30 scoring cities are in Western Europe. In this region, Vienna follows Zurich and Geneva in 4th position with a score of 107.5. Other highly-rated cities include Düsseldorf (107.2), Frankfurt (107.0) and Munich (106.8) in positions 6, 7 and 8 respectively. Athens remains the lowest scoring city in Western Europe, scoring 86.8 at position 79.

London is the UK’s highest ranking city and is stable at position 39 (score 101.2). The two other UK cities covered in the survey are Birmingham and Glasgow, which both score 98.3 and climb one place to joint 55th position.

Dublin has dropped two places to 24th position, scoring 103.8, mainly due to increased traffic congestion.

As predicted, cities in Eastern Europe such as Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague, Vilnius, Tallinn and Warsaw continue to benefit from incremental score increases and are gradually climbing the rankings.

Americas

Honolulu, the highest ranking city in the U.S., drops two positions to 27th with a score of 103.3. San Francisco remains at 28th position and scores 103.2. Boston, Washington, Chicago and Portland follow in positions 36, 41, 41 and 43 respectively (scores 101.9, 100.4, 100.4 and 100.3) while Houston remains the lowest ranking city in the U.S. at position 68 (score 95.4). Overall, U.S. cities continue to slip slightly or remain stable in the rankings, except Chicago which has moved up 11 places due to decreased crime rates.

Asia Pacific

Auckland and Wellington have both moved up the rankings from 8th to 5th and 14th to 12th places respectively, mainly due to strong internal stability relative to other cities, while Sydney remains at position 9 with a score of 106.5.

In Asia, Singapore ranks 34th (score 102.5) followed by Tokyo, Japan’s highest scoring city, at position 35 (score 102.3). Hong Kong’s modern and efficient infrastructure, including its airport (which is considered one of best in the world), has pushed it up from 70th to 68th position with a score of 95.4.

The top-ranking city in China is Shanghai in 103rd place (score 80.1).

Tags: mercer - zurich