Global workforce and virtual software

Posted by Bala Iyer on Tue, Jan 22, 2008 @ 01:40 PM

I saw two interesting trends in a couple of articles that I read today. A WSJ piece had an interview with Marc Benioff about software as a service. His prediction is that there will be no software and only services. As a result, everything is in the cloud and users can simply subscribe and get services anywhere.

The second article was in BusinessWeek. This one was on global workforce management. As we have moved from the early half of the twentieth century to today, we have moved from the colonial model of managing the workforce from the center to the multinational model of distribution to the transnational model of collaboration and sharing. In this model there is no center or periphery. Work gets done where the resources are available and fit the needs.

These two trends are interconnected. The architecture of work flow and how we support it using technology have to be isomorphic.

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Sun acquires MySQL

Posted by Bala Iyer on Mon, Jan 21, 2008 @ 08:43 AM

Sun is now in the database market with its acquisition of MySQL. Companies such as Google, Facebook, SAP and Nokia use MySQL in their products. MySQL is appealing to these companies because it is part of the opensource movement and a rival to Oracle. While this acquisition adds a key component to the stack that Sun offers to software developers, I don't see the synergies. In fact, MySQL has lost the independence luster. We should look for announcements by companies that either drop their support for MySQL or announce support for other opensource database products.

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Wikia

Posted by Bala Iyer on Sat, Jan 12, 2008 @ 08:20 AM

There is a new entrant in the search engine market -- wikia. Jimmy Wales the founder of wikipedia is behind this. The idea is to involve users in creating content for the search. When I entered the key word enterprise architecture, there were no results. The search engine offered me the option to enter an article on it and create new content. In addition, I could create a discussion forum on it. If others have similar interests, their profiles appear on the side. Similar to wikipedia, we will have some issues around the quality of content.
As we were discussing this in class, one of my students pointed me to the Korean search engine naver. They have used a similar approach to search. Since this is a highly wired country, people have been using this for local navigation and Q&A. In fact they are the dominant search engine with 77% share. While Google has been very good for generic search, it is possible that there is a market for localized search with input coming from users.

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