Tech Industry – Page 29

Why IONA Bought C24

March 12, 2007 Leave a Comment

(Disclaimer: I am currently employed by IONA as a Senior Solutions Consultant. See general disclaimer to the right.)

This past week, IONA announced the acquisition of C24 Technologies out of the United Kingdom. IONA has had a reseller agreement with C24 Technologies for quite some time that matched the strengths of our two companies for the greater benefit of mostly our financial services clients. This acquisition is a great example of complimentary products and people joining forces to provide truly differentiated value.

I have been working with the C24 IO tool (re-branded by IONA as Artix IO) for the past seven months at various Fortune 100 financial firms. IO (Integration Objects) is a data mapping and translation tool that enables model driven data management. Not only does IO come preconfigured with in depth knowledge of standard financial industry message formats, but it provides a graphical data mapping tool for building data translation models, it can convert these models into transformation rules, and generate optimized java code based upon the data mapping models. IO also has the ability to provide constraints to message validations that go beyond what’s available today with XML schemas or XPATH; and these constraints can be applied to any message format. Data models generated with IO currently process trillions of dollars of financial transactions daily around the globe.

Side Box: John Davies, co-founder and CTO for C24, enjoys showing prospective clients how IO can handle the intricacies of complex message schemes like SWIFT, FpML, and ISO 20022 and then providing the test schemas to the client to have them try the same test with the other data mapping tools they are evaluating…he hasn’t come across an instance yet where the other tools didn’t fall over on some part of the schema’s intricacies. After spending over two decades in the financial services industry dealing with these complex message formats, John and the C24 team has ensured that IO can handle the complicated formats that enable electronic banking in today’s world. (John also did an interview with TheServerSide.com on the acquisition.)

To provide some contextual background, IONA’s Artix family of distributed SOA infrastructure products enable true distributes service integration and has been in use for years within both the Financial Services and Telecommunications markets. The entire concept of SOA is about service enabling functionality within your enterprise and making that functionality available to anyone who needs to access it. Any point in your enterprise could directly consume a service within the enterprise to leverage its functionality. Enabling this type of efficient point to point connectivity using standards based message formats and transports is the genesis of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) concept. That concept seems to have gotten diluted over the past few years during the conversion of existing applications server stacks into essentially ESB Hubs that all service consumption must pass through. Artix is a truly distributed technology that embraces this ESB concept. (For further discussion on the Stacks versus Distributed concept, see William Henry’s Gravity of the Hubs postings).

By hosting the model generated Java code from IO within the Artix runtime on the distributed services within an enterprise, Financial Service clients gain the combined benefit of efficient distributed services with robust model driven data mapping for financial message formats. This allows a firm to choose the best way to service enable an application based upon the unique technical, business, or political architecture of their organization. And they can do it in the incremental value driven approach that has become the new standard within the maturing technology industry over the past five years.

I am very excited about the joining of IONA and C24. I foresee some exciting case studies coming in the future as we continue to work with our large financial services clients on Artix and IO based solutions; and as the combined team continues to expand IO’s preconfigured message format understanding beyond financial services.

Steve Jobs’ DRM Genius…But Not Why You Think

February 9, 2007 Leave a Comment

(Photo Courtesy of Jesse Wu)

This week Steve Jobs’ web site posting Thoughts on Music has created quite a bit of hype. Commentary on this news item is spread across multiple blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines (when they finally get their printed versions out). I first heard of this on Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection and then later read an article in the USA Today (it was a travel week and the USA Today gets 10 minutes of my attention during breakfast when I get it delivered to my room..).

What I find so interesting and quite shocking, is how most of the media attention given to this story totally misses the point of why Steve and company wrote that piece. There are a lot of smart people out there who like to point out how it’s a bit of marketing genius (and it is), but they think that it was done to free the music from the restricting shackles of DRM and the music industry.

Come on. It’s about Apple’s revenue stream. It’s about selling more iPods!

Last quarter Apple posted an 18% increase in net sales of iPods over the same period last year (and a 29% increase in “Other music related products and services”). At the same time, Norway declared that iPod and iTunes DRM is illegal (and a slew of other European countries are about to follow their lead). It doesn’t take an MBA to realize that the continued backlash across Europe of Apple’s DRM means that these double digit increases in sales can’t (and won’t) continue.

So, what is a responsible CEO to do? Same thing that all responsible CEO’s do, protect their revenue streams. (no mater what a CEO says, a companies first duty is to itself). One of Steve Jobs’ greatest achievements was to convince the record labels to bless Apple’s iPod and iTunes by providing content for them. All Apple needed to do was provide DRM protection for that content. This is what allowed Apple to market both products without a backlash of bad publicity from the recording industry. Now, in order to continue to sell these same products, Steve needed to strike out at the recording industry against DRM.

Poetic in a Ouroboros kind of way…

Community Networks: Build it and Tread Lightly

February 3, 2007 Leave a Comment

Within the last few days, there has been a huge uproar within the Flickr user community regarding some limits that Yahoo was going to start imposing on Flickr accounts. For those that don’t know Flickr, it’s the original photo sharing community. Sign-up for a free account, upload your photos, share them with friends, family, and the rest of the world. Over time the system evolved to allow comments to be left about photos, building lists of friends and favorites, etc. Now that Yahoo has been the owner of Flickr for a while, they are starting to change a few things. In this case, they wanted to limit the number of friends that you could have (limit it to 3000) and the number of tags that are associated with a photo to describe it.

Thomas Hawk has done an excellent job of reporting of the announcement then description of the user reactions followed by his coverage of the slight modification of the new limits. This gave me flashbacks to one of the recent user backlash against eBay. I would have thought that Yahoo/Flickr would have remembered that little incident and taken a different approach to their limit changes.

What this just continues to exemplify is the need for community networks to think and act differently with regards to product management (actually any software company with the continuing movement toward online and community based products). Having spent over 10 years in the software industry working with customers and product managers (including some time as a Product Manager), I’m still amazed at how many crucial decisions are made without clear understanding of the customers or without doing something as simple as asking the customers.

I’ve seen product features be designed with no idea of how a customer uses the product. Products built based upon huge assumptions made from the ivory tower of the corporate office. Even a product manager sit in front of a large fortune 100 customer listening to them state their specific needs only to later say “I think what the customer really meant was…”. As someone who sells technology for a living, my job would be so much easier if at least 60% of what was built was what customers ask for. (I know there is a huge discussion that can be had about innovation here…but that’s for another time.)

Getting feedback from users has only gotten easier and easier over the past 10 years with new internet based technologies. You have internet based user forums, online surveys, user groups, etc. Mostly it’s the time to market pressures that the technology industry creates itself that prevents this from happening.

In the world of community network type services and products a totally different approach is needed. It’s the community that makes the product successful, so why isn’t the community used to drive the development of the product? Flickr, and most community networks, succeeded because of the evangelizing that is done by early members. These same members should be given the option of continuing to drive the success of the business. In the case of the latest Flickr changes, it was a Flickr early user who suggested the change to one of the limits that eased a lot of ruffled feathers.

All the advances and changes in the technology landscape, and yet some attitudes are so slow to adjust.