latoga labs

Alliances & Partnership Advising

© 2006–2025 · Log in

My Other Alter-Ego

1 Comment

Everyone has an alter ego out there in the world. I found out today that I’m lucky enough to have two. My first is my twin out of Rhode Island that is a musician and owns the domain of our names. (I’m still trying to figure out if we are related in the family tree or not…). The second I discovered this morning…Greg the Architect.


I was doing some SOA blog reading this morning when I came across Greg the Architect. This is Tibco’s way of trying to tap the viral and community marketing engine. As attempts by larger established IT vendors go…their attempt isn’t bad. It’s got the humor factor down pretty, I found my self laughing and thinking…”been there” (from both the client and vendor perspective). What will be interesting is to see if Tibco has the fortitude to do more of these and build something behind it. Viral marketing takes more than just a single shot to work…that is where most large companies tend to fall down, not willing to stay the course long enough to see the effect.I do find it interesting how the YouTube clip has no mention of Tibco as the vendor behind the clip. The end of the video clip mentions SOA Now Journal, which is a “thought leadership” site that is authored by Tibco. Tibco is using Greg as a way to drive people to this website. Personally, I have issue with the lack of transparency behind both of these.

Tibco, don’t hide the fact that your doing both of these…it usually burns the audience you’re trying to capture. At the same time, don’t swing the other way and make these both Tibco items. There is a middle ground in there that has to be found…I think there close, but think they need to be a bit more up front with their involvement.

Either way, I found it funny and worth sharing.

Visiting With a Performance Tuning Guru

Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago my good friend Jon Hodgson was visiting me over the weekend. Jon and I worked together for over five years at Resonate during the startup, through IPO, to acquisition of the company (quite an interesting 5 year ride). Jon has spent the last few years, from Resonate through today, focusing on multi-tiered application performance tuning. This is a complex area that can contain all sorts of technologies within the Enterprise infrastructure (i.e., firewalls, networks, servers, web servers, application servers, database, middleware). He is currently the guy in this area at OPNET with their Panorama product.

If you have a multi-tier application (and who doesn’t today) and are running into performance issues, you need to give Jon and his team a call. He shared with me some of the work he has been doing in this area with clients, and the advances that he has been involved with in this area since we last worked together are amazing.

He showed me some of the capabilities that Panorama and the OPNET technologies have, and my jaw kept hitting the floor. With Panorama, he showed me how the tool can display the communication between each tier in a multi-tiered application, drill into the part of the communication that is causing the most latency, and then pinpoint the source of that latency within the multi-tiered environment. Like that wasn’t enough, he then combined the Panorama capabilities with ACE to then predict what would happen to the application’s performance if various changes were made to the network environment. Like what would happen if you added a firewall and only 1ms of latency between a Java application server and a database?

Jon and I were involved with building some of the early capabilities for a tool in this area at Resonate before the company was acquired and taken private. The recording, playback and predictive simulation capabilities of the tools that Jon has been involved with building at OPNET are mind blowing compared to what we were working on eight years ago! While I haven’t been involved in this space for a few years, I also know that I haven’t seen anything that comes close to the capabilities of the combined OPNET solutions.

While this tool may not work for everyone, OPNET’s Panorama is definitely one of those hidden gems of the technology world that should be considered by anyone responsible for application performance tuning.

Was Your IT an Hour Late?

Leave a Comment

I found the recent DST change here in North America and interesting exercise in advanced planning on behalf of IT departments and IT vendors. How many of you received notices about the DST change and steps you needed to take with regards to your IT infrastructure only a week or two before the change? I’m referring to both your companies IT department as well as your IT vendors (if you don’t think you have any IT vendors as an individual, look at the name printed on the front of your cell phone). More importantly, why did we need to have receive notices about it at all?

This past Monday, my day was busier than usual due to the fact that my calendar was more than slightly screwed up. The early change to Daylight Savings Time (DST) played havoc with my calendar (MS Outlook), even after I applied the so call patch from Microsoft. I had calendar events that were off by an hour and kept receiving unneeded meeting updates from others that I work with. One may wonder if on-demand users were safe from the DST debacle? Unfortunately, the answer is no. I noticed on Monday evening that Google’s Calendar application had the dates wrong too (a meeting scheduled for 8 was showing up at 9). At least all that affected me was my calendar applications.

The US Government pass the Energy Policy Act of 2005 back on July 29th, 2005; this is the act that changed when DST starts and stops. What I find surprising is that I didn’t see any notice about how to update my IT equipment (e.g., home computer, palm pilot) from vendors until only a few weeks ago. I saw home grown notices from Palm users about how to manually update my Treo, but didn’t see anything from Palm until a few days before the DST change. This lag from IT vendors then created a lag from IT departments to their users.

The end result appears to be a breakdown of IT that had wider impact than Y2K. Granted, this appeared to be a slight breakdown and (as far as I know) nothing seriously broke other than calendars. However, I see this as a challenge to IT vendors and IT Managers to focus on improving their advanced planning tactics. There is no reason for the delays we saw with how the DST situation was handled. To me, this was just a slight annoyance. In my opinion, technology vendors and managers need to start focusing on eliminating even these slight annoyances.