Supercomputers, Not Just for Chess, Weather, and Nuclear Bombs?

Like most of you, I have marginalized the super computer space as a kniche I'll never play in. I considered that the realm of big government agencies predicting where the next hurricane will strike or modeling the temperature and density of uranium and hydrogen isotopes inside a nuclear bomb 9 nanoseconds after detonation. (Sorry, I read The Sum of All Fears.)

Well... my opinion was changed by an unlikely source yesterday. I stumbled across an investing article by The Motley Fool called "Do the Math: IBM Wins" in which the Fools extol the virtues of IBM as the best blue chip stock of 2007 because of supercomputing.

"I am convinced that IBM is going to be the best blue chip of 2007, but not just because it is a leader in the development and creation of supercomputers. Rather, it is because I believe that IBM's Global Consulting business, working in conjunction with its Center for Business Optimization (whose small staff specializes in applying advanced mathematics to business problems), will be able to first help businesses harness the power of these powerful computers to crunch data and then translate that data into meaningful -- and profitable -- insights."

"For example, IBM's Center for Business Optimization recently helped a company that had more than 70,000 SKUs (stock keeping units) with an inventory problem. Normally, finding the best way to manage this number of products would have taken six hours. With a supercomputer, it took 17 seconds.

What this implies in more practical terms is that the company, instead of waiting overnight for results, now gets them immediately. More importantly, because the results are available immediately, the company can now insert different variables into the program to find an even better way to optimize its inventory."

So it appears now I have to consider yet another hardware option in my solutions. I suppose somebody in IBM or Cray or both is selling super computer cycles "on demand" in a hosted environment for anybody who wants to rent one for a millisecond or two. (or is that nanosecond or two?)

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Overtime Pay for I/T Architects?

I didn't even know this was going on until this morning, but apparently several high-tech companies including IBM, Siebel, and Computer Sciences Corp. have settled class action lawsuits regarding overtime pay for technology workers.

"International Business Machines Corp. settled a federal class-action lawsuit Wednesday, agreeing to pay a total of $65 million to 32,000 technology workers who claimed the company illegally withheld overtime pay....The case involved workers classified as "Technical Services Professional and Information Technology Specialists." IBM considered them highly skilled professionals exempt from overtime laws detailed in the Fair Labor Standards Act and California labor laws....Software maker Siebel Systems Inc. settled a class action suit by more than 800 workers earlier this month. The workers, who had job titles such as "software engineer" and "senior software engineer," will receive a total of $27.5 million....Last year, El Segundo-based Computer Sciences Corp. settled an overtime class-action suit by 30,000 employees for $24 million. "

For more complete details, see IBM Settles Overtime Lawsuit for $65M.

I don't plan on spending the money until I see it in my bank account. :-)

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Companies that Need SOA the Most Are Least Likely to Implement It

My eyes were drawn today to an ITBusinessEdge post "Companies that Need SOA the Most Are Least Likely to Implement It". How could I resist that title? (That reminds me of a previous post of mine "Naming Well, an Essential Skill of an I/T Architect" but I degress.) That post in turn drove to yet another cleverly named post

Is SOA success in the genes? by ZDNet's Joe McKendrick -- Todd Biske recently responded to my post about Microsoft's recommended approach to SOA (inch by inch, it's a cinch; mile by mile, its a trial), and ponders whether some organizations can get SOA right away, but others will never get it. How do organizations end up with their IT out of synch with business [...]

The basic premise here is worth entertaining. Companies that already have good alignment of I/T and business, already have good governance in place, already think proactively and strategically about I/T, etc. will find moving to a Service Oriented Architecture just the next incremental step in their improvement process. For the other companies out there (the vast majority?), the gap between where they are today and SOA is an insurmountable chasm that they dare not even try to cross.

I think there is an element of truth. I've seen a lot of situations where a company could benefit from new approaches but because they organize a bunch of independently funded, tactical projects no one project can fund the leap to the next level of maturity and flexibility. (See also "The Scourge of the I/T Architect's Universe".) Just a couple of weeks ago an acquanitance of mine at a major manufacturer told me he was interested in using SOA software products for their EAI-like-middleware value but he didn't think his organization was ready to embrace SOA yet. I guess this is like "flying under the radar" to wait until the political situation is more receptive to SOA.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Still More on Reverse Engineering Code into UML Diagams

Judging by the unexpectedly large number of hits on my recent posting about reverse engineering Java into UML diagrams, I am not the only one interested in this topic. Along the same lines, I found this pretty cool demo of reverse engineering UML sequence diagrams from Sparx Systems. I haven't actually used the tool but what appears to be different with the reverse engineering capability of their Enterprise Architect tool is that it will generate diagrams via runtime execution. It also let you manually step through your code as it executes in a debugger type presentation. This would let you control how far “down in the weeds” you want your sequence diagram to go. For example, do you really want to include that call to the Integer class?

(Dec 2007) English not your native language? I've begun making podcasts of popular posts and they are available at http://artsciita.podbean.com/. Listen online at that URL, with the MP3 player below, or subscribe to the podcast using the RSS feed and listen with your favorite MP3 player.

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Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Musings on Bill Gates, the IT Shortage, and Globalization

I've taken an interest (by necessity) in the globalization of software development (and corporate life in general) so I read with interest "Bill Gates Says West Not Supplying Enough IT Talent" by James Kilner of Reuters. Bill Gates was speaking in Moscow and is quoted as follows:

"Worldwide, a lot of the developed countries are not graduating as many IT students as they were in the past, which is kind of ironic as it does mean it does increase the opportunities."

"There is a shortage of IT skills on a worldwide basis. Anybody who can get those skills here now will have a lot of opportunity."

If you follow the link above to the story about Gates and look at comments posted at the bottom, they were mostly bemoaning the fact that I/T jobs in places like Russia, China, and India pay a lot less than the US and other Western nations. They attributed the "shortage" to a shortage of people willing to work for low wages.

I was probably as nervous as anyone else about the globalization of software development a few years ago. Since then I guess I gotten past my fears. On my best days, I have embraced the idea. On my worst days, I guess I just try to make the best of it.

It does appear to me that CIOs are taking the cost savings of global resourcing and using it to fund additional projects. If they had a budget 5 years ago to do 4 major projects a year then today they are using a similar budget to execute 5, 6, or even 7 major projects. These "extra" projects are often the ones that are the most fun to work on. They would have been "stretch" projects that never got funded in the past. One change that has happened, however, is that those of us in the US are having to play more of a leadership role vs. doing the "heads down" coding.

Another anecdotal piece of evidence that the sky is not falling. I've done some interviewing right here in the US for college graduates. Are we taking just anybody? No, we are being selective. But this is quite an improvement over just a few years ago. We're hiring both overseas and in the "high wage" countries.

By the way, see the Oct 31st article "IBM Plants New SOA Development Centers in India, China" to see that this trend is only accelerating. This is not about using global resources to maintain old code. This is about investments in the latest and greatest SOA technology... and doing it with talent from around the world.

"It's all about business model innovation—giving clients the ability to rapidly change business models by building applications with reusable software components," said Sudhir Sastry, leader of the IBM SOA Solutions Center, in Pune.

Key to the initiative is IBM's WebSphere Business Services Fabric—based on technology IBM recently acquired when it purchased Webify Solutions, Sastry said.

Back in September 2004, I got to make a trip to Bangalore, India. I saw an office building for almost every big-name tech company while I was there. Here's a few samples from my personal photo archives. They aren't great pictures as they were taken through the window of the taxi I was riding in.

First Oracle

• 
  Next Intel
  IBM
  And finally Microsoft
  
  
  

  Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

  The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

The Future Market

You've really got to view this new commercial showing how wireless technology can be a game changer in retail. See "The Future Market" (a play on words.. think super market).

I've been told the commercial is actually pretty old but I don't ever remember seeing it. Maybe IBM needs to try using it again.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Silo-ed Organization Abolishment and Other Variations on the SOA Theme

Brenda Michelson has some clever variations on the acronym SOA in her post Talking "S-O-A" with the Business.

Some of my favorites from her post include:

• Strategy Offering Agility

• Stream of Acronyms

• Seizing Operational Agility

• Silo-ed Organization Abolishment

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.