networking-info

Earlier this month HP announced that HP labs is going to focus on 20-30 large projects going forward instead of focusing on large number of small projects. If you compare the top 10 strategic priorities for 2008 that Gartner announced late last year you would find a lot of similarities even though HP's projects are not necessarily designed to address only the short term priorities. Quick comparison: HP : Gartner Sustainability: Green IT Dynamic Cloud Services: Web Platform & SOA + Real World Web Information explosion: Metadata management + Business Process Modeling “The steps we’re taking today will further strengthen Labs and help ensure that HP is focused on groundbreaking research that addresses customer needs and creates new growth opportunities for the company.” The role of a traditional "lab" in an IT organization has changed over last few years to focus on the growth and value projects that strategically aligns with company's operational, strategic, m...

Southwest airlines is known to have cracked the problem of how to effectively board the aircraft and Disney specializes in managing the crowd and long lines. Add one more to this list, Alaska Airlines. Fast Company is running a story on how Alaska Airlines has been designing the check-in area to reduce the average check-in time at the Anchorage airport . This is a textbook example of design-led-innovation and has all the design thinking and user-centered design elements - need finding, ethnography, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and end user validation. Alaska Airlines visited various different places to learn how others manage crowd and applied those learnings in the context of their problem supported by contextual inquiry of the check-in agents. They built low fidelity prototypes and refined them based on early validation. The story also discusses that Delta is trying a similar approach at Atlanta terminal. Passengers see where they're going . The mental rehearsal or mental ...

Not all user-generated content is factually accurate and it does not have to be that way. I don't expect Wikipedia to be completely accurate and some how many people have a problem with that . Traditionally the knowledge-bases that upfront requires high factual accuracy have been subjected to slow growth due to high barrier to entry. Wikipedia's prior stint, Nupedia , had a long upfront peer review process that hindered the growth and eventually led to the current Wikipedia model as we all know. Google Knol is trying to solve this problem by introducing the incentives to promote the quality of the thoughtocracy . I haven't seen Knol beyond this mockup and I am a little skeptical of a system that can bring in accuracy and wild growth at the same time. I would happy to be proven wrong here. For an incentive-based system it is important not to confuse factual accuracy with popularity of the content. If content is popular it does not necessarily have to be accurate. If we do ...

In a recent interview by Om Malik , Ray Ozzie discusses Microsoft's service strategy and economics of cloud computing. Desktop is not dead: He reaffirms that desktop is not going away but the desktop needs to be more and more network and web aware to support the computing and deployment needs. "A student today or a web startup, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the web, they start building web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge?........There are things that the web is good for, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that for all those things that the desktop is not good anymore." Microsoft did try to ignore the Internet in the early days and they obviously don't want to repeat the same mistake. The desktop is certainly not going away, but there are plenty of innovation opportunities around the operatin...

I have been observing a trend where business users or information workers become more-informed and educated about the range of productivity software options available in the marketplace and start using them without any help or consent from IT . If taken as a threat IT could potentially attempt to block these applications and users get frustrated and still find a way to work around these restrictions and if taken as an opportunity IT takes the hint and standardizes these options across the organization to speed up the adoption. The later is a win-win situation; IT has beta users doing acceptance testing for them without being asked and IT can focus on more strategic tasks, empower users, and support users' aspirations and goals by providing them with the tools that they need. This trend follows the rule of the wisdom of crowd. If software is good enough it will bubble up. Firefox is a good example of such a trend. The users started using it way before IT decided to include it in the...

Widespread adoption of RFID in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) systems diminish the boundary between the retail and the manufacturing systems and the respective competencies begin blend as well. Today's supply chain goes beyond adding few more warehouses or trucks. Think about supply chain of a new Harry Potter book and you will have completely different perspective about the timeliness and the security of your supply chain orchestration. Collaboration capabilities are the key competencies and they become even more crucial when a supply chain disrupts due to an exception. The solutions should have capabilities to handle exceptions. Some of the people whom I speak to in this domain tell me that a system typically does pretty good job when things are fine but when an exception occurs, such as a supplier backs out, people scramble to handle the disruption and an ability of a system to capture unstructured collaborative workflow in the c...

The choice of an open source license sparks a debate from time to time and this time around it is about using GPL as a strategic weapon to force your competitors to share their code versus use BSD to have faith in your proprietary solution as an open source derivative to reduce the barrier to an entry into the market . I agree with the success of mySQL but I won’t attribute the entire success to the chosen license. Comparing open source licenses in the context of commercializing a database is very narrow comparision. First of all PostgreSQL and mySQL are not identical databases and don’t have the exact same customers and secondly I see database as enabler to value add on top of it. EnterpriseDB is a great example of this value add and I think it is very speculative to say whether it is an acquisition target or not – the real question is would EnterpriseDB have accomplished the same if PostgreSQL used GPL instead of BSD. I see plenty of opportunities in the open source software lic...