There’s a theory that if you take into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert, then the large group’s aggregated answers to questions involving just about anything is typically just as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any individual expert within the group. This is called the wisdom of the crowd.
Of course, so-called experts aren’t necessarily that expert. Most complicated court cases seem to involve expert witnesses disagreeing over the right conclusions to draw from the evidence. Similarly, psychology studies have found, for example, that experienced parole board members are no better at deciding whether a prisoner will offend again than ordinary members of the public. Worryingly, other studies have found similar results with experts being no better using their expertise than members of the public.
So what has this got to do with anything? Well, as you probably have guessed from these blogs, I’ve been doing a lot of work on social media recently with companies and charity groups. We were chatting about how to use LinkedIn, and they wanted to take a look at my profile to see what areas of expertise people thought I had. If you want to play along at home, the URL is http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddolls. At the bottom of the page is the skills and expertise section. The way it works is LinkedIn members can endorse the skills or expertise of others. And, gradually, using the wisdom of crowds, a person’s expertise profile should, pretty much, match up with their real-life skills and expertise – you’d think!
So, I listed my skills – an embarrassing process in itself – and then we compared them to what ‘the crowd’ think are my skills. I thought as I’ve been blogging since 2005, and I blog on the Destination z site each month, and I’ve written blogs that have been published as written by other people, ‘blogger’ ought to be there. I write articles that have been published in numerous publications and Web sites, so ‘writer’ ought to be there. I edited Xephon’s Update journals for 20 years and I’m editorial director for the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, so ‘editor’ should be there. I’ve been associated with mainframes for thirty years, so ‘mainframes’ should be there. I chair the Virtual IMS user group and Virtual CICS user group – so ‘CICS’ and ‘IMS’ should be there.
I’ve also done coaching work with individuals, and a few years ago qualified as a hypnotherapist. I’ve also passed NLP exams. I see clients for these, so ‘hypnotherapy’ and ‘NLP’ should be there. And, for the past five years, I’ve been designing and building Web sites for people – so ‘Web designer’ should be there. And, of course, with my recent focus on it, ‘social media’ should be right up there.
The actual scores on the doors suggest a slightly different profile: 14 Mainframe, 14 CICS, 12 Hypnotherapy, 9 Technical writing, 9 NLP, and 9 IMS DB/DC. Blogging has only 5 votes; as well as technical writing, I have 6 for writer; 5 for editing; and yet I have no endorsements for social media or Web design!
Now, I know it’s still early days, and there aren’t that many endorsements at all yet, and probably, over time, the endorsements will come to match the work I’m actually doing, but it did seem surprising that it should be so different, with some area of ‘expertise’ so lacking in any endorsements. I just wondered whether other people were finding the same thing.
Or maybe, it’s me. Maybe I have an incorrect idea of what I am good at, and there is wisdom in the crowd!
Sunday, 21 April 2013
Saturday, 13 April 2013
A bad time for mainframes?
It seems that nowadays is not a good time to be in the world of mainframes, with BMC Software likely to be taken over, Compuware recording a loss, and to add insult to injury, Oracle is talking about releasing a mainframe!
So let’s start with BMC Software, which got its name from its founders back in the early 1980s – Scott Boulette, John Moores, and Dan Cloer. BMC, notably, bought Boole & Babbage at the end of the 1990s and shortly after acquired CONTROL-M and its company, New Dimension Software. But those heady days must seem a long time ago because on 22 April it’s expected to receive final takeover bids.
Elliott Management owns a 9.6 percent stake in BMC, and signed a standstill agreement with BMC last summer, but that ended on 6 April. So they could bid for BMC or nominate directors to its board. People who know about these things are saying that buyout firm Thoma Bravo has joined a bidding group led by KKR & Co LP and TPG Capital LP in order to bid. Their likely rivals are a team comprising Bain Capital LLC and Golden Gate Capital. You can assume people are arranging to have access to large pots of money on the day. Bids are likely to be between $40 and $50 a share. We’ll be watching to see what happens, and, more importantly, what the impact is on users of their mainframe software.
Compuware is probably most famous for its Abend-AID product, which first saw the light of day in the 1970s. In the 1980s, they launched File-AID. Compuware recently reported disappointing fourth-quarter results and said its total year-on-year revenue is expected to drop from $1 billion to between $942 million and $946 million for the fiscal year ending 31 March.
CEO Robert Paul has increased his planned cost-cutting to between $80 million and $100 million over the next two years. (It was $60 million over three years.) A natural consequence of this could be layoffs – and that could impact on the quality of the software mainframe users can get hold of, or may mean longer delays between upgrades.
Interestingly, Elliott Management (see above) is Compuware’s second-largest shareholder, owning 8.7% of the stock. In January, their takeover bid of $2.3 billion ($11-per-share) was rejected by the board. Meanwhile, Sandell Asset Management, which holds 2.8% of Compuware stock, is urging the board to sell the company to the highest bidder as quickly as possible.
And while these mainframe companies are facing financial difficulties, Larry Ellison has launched, what he’s calling, a mainframe-class machine – arguing that any mission-critical app that runs on any Unix system will run better on the new Sparc T5 and M5 servers. In addition, Oracle is claiming that it has passed IBM on integer throughput performance – but that’s compared against IBM Power series.
The big news over at CA Technologies is that CA has filed a patent infringement suit against AppDynamics, which was started by one of its ex-employees. CA got hold of the patents when it bought Wily Technology in 2006. The ex-employee led the design and architecture for several Wily products. You may also remember that last November CA sued New Relic Inc for patent infringements. Again, the founder of New Relic had been a senior executive at Wily.
At least IBM seems to be doing OK. It's just released a $1 billion plan to construct and check Flash technology for enterprise solutions. The technology should assist firms coping with Big Data challenges. The people at UBS have upgraded IBM from ‘neutral’ to ‘buy’, saying IBM has the best strategy of its peers in what it terms the “IT as a service” industry. Plus a new Synergy Research Group study shows that IBM’s share of the cloud infrastructure equipment market has hit a two-year high in the fourth quarter of 2012, reaching just over 19 percent.
So let’s start with BMC Software, which got its name from its founders back in the early 1980s – Scott Boulette, John Moores, and Dan Cloer. BMC, notably, bought Boole & Babbage at the end of the 1990s and shortly after acquired CONTROL-M and its company, New Dimension Software. But those heady days must seem a long time ago because on 22 April it’s expected to receive final takeover bids.
Elliott Management owns a 9.6 percent stake in BMC, and signed a standstill agreement with BMC last summer, but that ended on 6 April. So they could bid for BMC or nominate directors to its board. People who know about these things are saying that buyout firm Thoma Bravo has joined a bidding group led by KKR & Co LP and TPG Capital LP in order to bid. Their likely rivals are a team comprising Bain Capital LLC and Golden Gate Capital. You can assume people are arranging to have access to large pots of money on the day. Bids are likely to be between $40 and $50 a share. We’ll be watching to see what happens, and, more importantly, what the impact is on users of their mainframe software.
Compuware is probably most famous for its Abend-AID product, which first saw the light of day in the 1970s. In the 1980s, they launched File-AID. Compuware recently reported disappointing fourth-quarter results and said its total year-on-year revenue is expected to drop from $1 billion to between $942 million and $946 million for the fiscal year ending 31 March.
CEO Robert Paul has increased his planned cost-cutting to between $80 million and $100 million over the next two years. (It was $60 million over three years.) A natural consequence of this could be layoffs – and that could impact on the quality of the software mainframe users can get hold of, or may mean longer delays between upgrades.
Interestingly, Elliott Management (see above) is Compuware’s second-largest shareholder, owning 8.7% of the stock. In January, their takeover bid of $2.3 billion ($11-per-share) was rejected by the board. Meanwhile, Sandell Asset Management, which holds 2.8% of Compuware stock, is urging the board to sell the company to the highest bidder as quickly as possible.
And while these mainframe companies are facing financial difficulties, Larry Ellison has launched, what he’s calling, a mainframe-class machine – arguing that any mission-critical app that runs on any Unix system will run better on the new Sparc T5 and M5 servers. In addition, Oracle is claiming that it has passed IBM on integer throughput performance – but that’s compared against IBM Power series.
The big news over at CA Technologies is that CA has filed a patent infringement suit against AppDynamics, which was started by one of its ex-employees. CA got hold of the patents when it bought Wily Technology in 2006. The ex-employee led the design and architecture for several Wily products. You may also remember that last November CA sued New Relic Inc for patent infringements. Again, the founder of New Relic had been a senior executive at Wily.
At least IBM seems to be doing OK. It's just released a $1 billion plan to construct and check Flash technology for enterprise solutions. The technology should assist firms coping with Big Data challenges. The people at UBS have upgraded IBM from ‘neutral’ to ‘buy’, saying IBM has the best strategy of its peers in what it terms the “IT as a service” industry. Plus a new Synergy Research Group study shows that IBM’s share of the cloud infrastructure equipment market has hit a two-year high in the fourth quarter of 2012, reaching just over 19 percent.
Saturday, 6 April 2013
Big SQL
Suppose you wanted to access ‘big data’ stored in HDFS or HBase. What would you do? Well, for many people, the first step is to find out what we’re talking about. So, let’s start with big data – it’s data that’s so large and complex that it’s difficult to process using standard and familiar database management tools or applications.
According to Wikipedia, there are issues around data capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization. You’re probably thinking: why not go back to using smaller and manageable data? It seems that people want access to larger and larger amounts of data because additional information can be gained from it – allowing people to “spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions”.
Now that’s clear, what are HDFS and HBase? HDFS stands for Hadoop Distributed File System. It’s a distributed, scalable, and portable file system written in Java for the Hadoop framework. HDFS stores large files across multiple machines, and replicates the data across multiple hosts. HBase is an open source, non-relational, distributed database and is also written in Java. It was developed as part of Apache Software Foundation’s Apache Hadoop project and runs on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), providing a fault-tolerant way of storing large quantities of data.
Each node in a Hadoop instance typically has a single namenode; a cluster of datanodes form the HDFS cluster. So what’s needed is some way to access that cluster. At the moment, the choices are basically Hive, Impala, and Big SQL.
Again, a search on Wikipedia informs me that “Hive supports analysis of large datasets stored in Hadoop-compatible file systems such as Amazon S3 filesystem. It provides an SQL-like language called HiveQL while maintaining full support for map/reduce. To accelerate queries, it provides indexes, including bitmap indexes. By default, Hive stores metadata in an embedded Apache Derby database, and other client/server databases like MySQL can optionally be used. Currently, there are three file formats supported in Hive, which are TEXTFILE, SEQUENCEFILE, and RCFILE”
The Cloudera Impala project allows users to query data, whether stored in HDFS or HBase – including SELECT, JOIN, and aggregate functions – in real time. Furthermore, it uses the same metadata, SQL syntax (Hive SQL), ODBC driver, and user interface (Hue Beeswax) as Apache Hive. To avoid latency, Impala circumvents MapReduce to directly access the data through a specialized distributed query engine.
When you look up information about these things, names like Apache, Cloudera, Amazon, Facebook, Google crop up, but not IBM. You might think that’s a bit strange. Wouldn’t IBM be the organization you’d expect to have experience of big data? I mean just think of those massive IMS databases. So, why haven’t I mentioned IBM? The answer is because I haven’t got to Big SQL yet.
IBM claims that Big SQL provides robust SQL support for the Hadoop ecosystem:
The really interesting thing about this is that all the information is available in one place – Big Data University (http://bigdatauniversity.com). I’m looking forward to taking the course. Big data isn’t going away any time soon.
According to Wikipedia, there are issues around data capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization. You’re probably thinking: why not go back to using smaller and manageable data? It seems that people want access to larger and larger amounts of data because additional information can be gained from it – allowing people to “spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions”.
Now that’s clear, what are HDFS and HBase? HDFS stands for Hadoop Distributed File System. It’s a distributed, scalable, and portable file system written in Java for the Hadoop framework. HDFS stores large files across multiple machines, and replicates the data across multiple hosts. HBase is an open source, non-relational, distributed database and is also written in Java. It was developed as part of Apache Software Foundation’s Apache Hadoop project and runs on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), providing a fault-tolerant way of storing large quantities of data.
Each node in a Hadoop instance typically has a single namenode; a cluster of datanodes form the HDFS cluster. So what’s needed is some way to access that cluster. At the moment, the choices are basically Hive, Impala, and Big SQL.
Again, a search on Wikipedia informs me that “Hive supports analysis of large datasets stored in Hadoop-compatible file systems such as Amazon S3 filesystem. It provides an SQL-like language called HiveQL while maintaining full support for map/reduce. To accelerate queries, it provides indexes, including bitmap indexes. By default, Hive stores metadata in an embedded Apache Derby database, and other client/server databases like MySQL can optionally be used. Currently, there are three file formats supported in Hive, which are TEXTFILE, SEQUENCEFILE, and RCFILE”
The Cloudera Impala project allows users to query data, whether stored in HDFS or HBase – including SELECT, JOIN, and aggregate functions – in real time. Furthermore, it uses the same metadata, SQL syntax (Hive SQL), ODBC driver, and user interface (Hue Beeswax) as Apache Hive. To avoid latency, Impala circumvents MapReduce to directly access the data through a specialized distributed query engine.
When you look up information about these things, names like Apache, Cloudera, Amazon, Facebook, Google crop up, but not IBM. You might think that’s a bit strange. Wouldn’t IBM be the organization you’d expect to have experience of big data? I mean just think of those massive IMS databases. So, why haven’t I mentioned IBM? The answer is because I haven’t got to Big SQL yet.
IBM claims that Big SQL provides robust SQL support for the Hadoop ecosystem:
- it has a scalable architecture;
- it supports SQL and data types available in SQL '92, plus it has some additional capabilities;
- it supports JDBC and ODBC client drivers;
- it has efficient handling of ‘point queries’;
- there are a wide variety of data sources and file formats for HDFS and HBase that it supports;
- And, although it isn’t open source, it does interoperate well with the open source ecosystem within Hadoop.
The really interesting thing about this is that all the information is available in one place – Big Data University (http://bigdatauniversity.com). I’m looking forward to taking the course. Big data isn’t going away any time soon.
Monday, 1 April 2013
GSE UK 2012
You’re probably wondering why I’m talking about an event that happened last year – and one that I blogged about last November anyway. Well, the exciting news is that the video of last year’s event is now available. You can stream it from YouTube from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNalXiM_4QI. And you can download a copy from http://www.gse.org.uk/tyc/video/GSE_UK_Conference_2012_HD.mp4.
The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference ran 16 streams, had 32 vendors, 326 attendees on day 1 and 314 on day 2, with 260 dinner reservations at the end of day 1. It took place on 13-14 November at Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.
If you were there, watch the video to bring back happy memories. And if you weren’t there, watch the video to see what you missed! The people who organize GSE UK are happy for you to share the link with your colleagues and post it on your own Web site and tweet it, and whatever other social media you’d like to use.
And if you like wallowing in nostalgia, the 2011 conference video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfT9km93V0U.
So, if all that has whetted your appetite, this year’s conference will be on 5 and 6 November at Whittlebury Hall. Put the dates in your diary – don’t miss it.
The Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK Annual Conference ran 16 streams, had 32 vendors, 326 attendees on day 1 and 314 on day 2, with 260 dinner reservations at the end of day 1. It took place on 13-14 November at Whittlebury Hall, Whittlebury, Near Towcester, Northamptonshire NN12 8QH, UK.
If you were there, watch the video to bring back happy memories. And if you weren’t there, watch the video to see what you missed! The people who organize GSE UK are happy for you to share the link with your colleagues and post it on your own Web site and tweet it, and whatever other social media you’d like to use.
And if you like wallowing in nostalgia, the 2011 conference video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfT9km93V0U.
So, if all that has whetted your appetite, this year’s conference will be on 5 and 6 November at Whittlebury Hall. Put the dates in your diary – don’t miss it.
Monday, 25 March 2013
Social businesses
What is a social business? Wikipedia tells me that a social business was first defined by Prof Muhammad Yunus as a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective within the highly regulated marketplace of today. A wider definition includes any business having a social rather than financial objective. Or a social enterprise can be defined as a commercial activity by socially minded organizations. Perhaps a better definition these days is a business that has adopted social networking tools and practices for internal and external functions across their organization.
The IBM Web site tells us that: “Social business technologies help people connect, communicate, and share information. Becoming a leader in your marketplace means using social solutions to transform how business gets done – driving cost savings, increasing revenue, and cultivating competitive advantages.” That definitely sounds like a good thing.
In a report from Altimeter entitled The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, it’s suggested that many social strategies are not linked to business goals, but are instead often driven by a “social for social’s sake” orientation. The report notes that, even when goals are aligned, social initiatives frequently must deal with a lack of defined strategy, governance, or funding. The report suggest six stages a company has to go through to become a social business:
Interestingly, there are products like Yammer (www.yammer.com), which Microsoft bought last year, Chatter, and others, that offer private social networks for organizations.
IBM VPs Jeff Schick and Sandy Carter were on stage at IBM Connect 2013 showing off the capabilities in IBM’s social business platform. It seems that companies are combining social technologies, the cloud, mobile, and analytics to create a flexible, intelligent framework for making the most of social connections. In an IBM survey of CEOs, 57% picked social business as a top priority and nearly three quarters (73%) are making significant investments in analysing data.
According to Jeff Schick: “A disconnect between how we live our lives – through digital connections and sharing – and how we work isn’t sustainable. Particularly since the new generation of workers who will fill companies’ ranks don’t know any other way of interacting and working than social media. The rate of productivity, innovation, and employee retention will increasingly depend on who can master this coming age of social business.”
For an organization to just have a social media strategy isn’t enough. The organization must transform itself into a social business to ensure its continued success.
The IBM Web site tells us that: “Social business technologies help people connect, communicate, and share information. Becoming a leader in your marketplace means using social solutions to transform how business gets done – driving cost savings, increasing revenue, and cultivating competitive advantages.” That definitely sounds like a good thing.
In a report from Altimeter entitled The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, it’s suggested that many social strategies are not linked to business goals, but are instead often driven by a “social for social’s sake” orientation. The report notes that, even when goals are aligned, social initiatives frequently must deal with a lack of defined strategy, governance, or funding. The report suggest six stages a company has to go through to become a social business:
- Planning – understand how customers use social channels and prioritize strategic goals where social can have the most impact.
- Presence – amplify existing marketing efforts and encourage sharing
- Engagement – drive considerations to purchase and provide direct support with internal employee engagement.
- Formalized – set governance for social, create discipline and process, and have strategic business goals.
- Strategic – scale across business units and move into HR, sales, finance, and supply chain.
- Converged – social drives transformation and integrates social philosophy into all aspects of the enterprise.
Interestingly, there are products like Yammer (www.yammer.com), which Microsoft bought last year, Chatter, and others, that offer private social networks for organizations.
IBM VPs Jeff Schick and Sandy Carter were on stage at IBM Connect 2013 showing off the capabilities in IBM’s social business platform. It seems that companies are combining social technologies, the cloud, mobile, and analytics to create a flexible, intelligent framework for making the most of social connections. In an IBM survey of CEOs, 57% picked social business as a top priority and nearly three quarters (73%) are making significant investments in analysing data.
According to Jeff Schick: “A disconnect between how we live our lives – through digital connections and sharing – and how we work isn’t sustainable. Particularly since the new generation of workers who will fill companies’ ranks don’t know any other way of interacting and working than social media. The rate of productivity, innovation, and employee retention will increasingly depend on who can master this coming age of social business.”
For an organization to just have a social media strategy isn’t enough. The organization must transform itself into a social business to ensure its continued success.
Sunday, 17 March 2013
Trevor Eddolls - IBM Champion 2013
iTech-Ed Ltd is pleased to announce that Trevor Eddolls, its CEO, has again been recognized by IBM as an IBM Champion for Information Management for the fifth year running. Trevor was first made an IBM Champion in 2009.
Trevor Eddolls, CEO of iTech-Ed Ltd said: “I am really proud to get this award again this year. There may not be a financial benefit to being an IBM Champion, but it’s a positive way for IBM to recognize people around the world who are helping to promote IBM’s products and help share information about those products amongst their users”.
But what does it mean? According to IBM: “An IBM Champion is someone who makes exceptional contributions to the technical community.
Contributions can come in a variety of forms, and popular contributions include blogging, speaking at conferences or events, moderating forums, leading user groups, and authoring books or magazines. Educators can also become IBM Champions; for example, academic faculty may become IBM Champions by including IBM products and technologies in course curricula and encouraging students to build skills and expertise in these areas.
“An IBM Champion is not an IBMer, and can live in any country. IBM Champions share their accomplishments and activities in their public profiles on IBM developerWorks, making it easy for the IT professional community to learn more about them and their contributions, and engage with them.”
So why is iTech-Ed Ltd’s Trevor Eddolls an IBM Champion? Well, he doesn’t work for IBM, but he does write about mainframe hardware and software. You can read his blog at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com and it.toolbox.com/blogs/mainframe-world. He also blogs once a month on the Destination z Web site (www.destinationz.org). He’s Editorial Director for the well-respected Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. He’s also written technical articles that have been published in a variety of journals including here in Enterprise Tech Journal and its predecessor, z/Journal. And Trevor Eddolls is the chair of the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group. He also looks after their social networking – you can find information about the groups on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
IBM Champions receive the title for one year, during which they can enjoy the benefits associated with the program – rather than any direct payment from IBM. Existing Champions are eligible to renew their status for the following year, as long as they can demonstrate that they have made significant contributions to the community over the previous 12 months.
Are IBM Champions compensated for their role? No. Do IBM Champions have any obligations to IBM? Again the answer is no. The title recognizes their past contributions to the community only over the previous 12 months. Do IBM Champions have any formal relationship with IBM? No. IBM Champions don’t formally represent IBM nor do they speak on behalf of IBM.
But it’s not all one-sided! IBM Champions receive merchandise customized with the IBM Champion logo. And IBM Champions receive: visibility, recognition, and networking opportunities at IBM events and conferences; and special access to product development teams, and invitations and discounts to events and conference.
You can see Trevor’s profile here.
On a completely different note... you can ‘Like’ iTech-Ed Ltd on Facebook. You can find it here. Thanks.
Trevor Eddolls, CEO of iTech-Ed Ltd said: “I am really proud to get this award again this year. There may not be a financial benefit to being an IBM Champion, but it’s a positive way for IBM to recognize people around the world who are helping to promote IBM’s products and help share information about those products amongst their users”.
Contributions can come in a variety of forms, and popular contributions include blogging, speaking at conferences or events, moderating forums, leading user groups, and authoring books or magazines. Educators can also become IBM Champions; for example, academic faculty may become IBM Champions by including IBM products and technologies in course curricula and encouraging students to build skills and expertise in these areas.
“An IBM Champion is not an IBMer, and can live in any country. IBM Champions share their accomplishments and activities in their public profiles on IBM developerWorks, making it easy for the IT professional community to learn more about them and their contributions, and engage with them.”
So why is iTech-Ed Ltd’s Trevor Eddolls an IBM Champion? Well, he doesn’t work for IBM, but he does write about mainframe hardware and software. You can read his blog at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com and it.toolbox.com/blogs/mainframe-world. He also blogs once a month on the Destination z Web site (www.destinationz.org). He’s Editorial Director for the well-respected Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. He’s also written technical articles that have been published in a variety of journals including here in Enterprise Tech Journal and its predecessor, z/Journal. And Trevor Eddolls is the chair of the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group. He also looks after their social networking – you can find information about the groups on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
IBM Champions receive the title for one year, during which they can enjoy the benefits associated with the program – rather than any direct payment from IBM. Existing Champions are eligible to renew their status for the following year, as long as they can demonstrate that they have made significant contributions to the community over the previous 12 months.
Are IBM Champions compensated for their role? No. Do IBM Champions have any obligations to IBM? Again the answer is no. The title recognizes their past contributions to the community only over the previous 12 months. Do IBM Champions have any formal relationship with IBM? No. IBM Champions don’t formally represent IBM nor do they speak on behalf of IBM.
But it’s not all one-sided! IBM Champions receive merchandise customized with the IBM Champion logo. And IBM Champions receive: visibility, recognition, and networking opportunities at IBM events and conferences; and special access to product development teams, and invitations and discounts to events and conference.
You can see Trevor’s profile here.
On a completely different note... you can ‘Like’ iTech-Ed Ltd on Facebook. You can find it here. Thanks.
Sunday, 10 March 2013
IBM and social media
Let me turn time back to the very early 1980s. IBM are feeling fairly secure with their mainframe business and have just made the decision to own the small and exciting personal computer business. I’m imaging the Execs talking about the hardware standards they will set and maintain. Then perhaps someone asks about the operating system, but they’re immediately dismissed – operating systems on PCs are two a penny, we can just buy one and use that. They’ll have to do what we tell them!
And in the real world, a small start-up company made a version of DOS (Disk Operating System) their own – MS-DOS. And that little company grew and grew into the Microsoft we know and love today. And IBM? Well, it eventually sold its PC hardware business to Lenovo.
Now some of the youngsters at that imaginary meeting back in 1980 might still be turning up for work, only now they’re hearing about the ‘third platform’, and warning bells are beginning to sound! No-one at IBM wants a repeat of what happened with the second platform, so they are very keen that IBM will keep control of this third platform – even though there are plenty of other players out there already. As an aside, mainframes were the first platform, PCs are the second platform, and this new ‘third platform’ comprises cloud services, mobile computing, social networking, and big data analytics.
My scenarios above may only exist in my head, but we’ve seen IBM embrace other technologies before. Look at how it made Linux run so much better on a big box than on multiple little ones. And now Doug Balog, general manager of IBM’s System z mainframe business, is telling us that IBM is making it easier for customers to run mobile and social networking applications on mainframes.
There’s a couple of easy wins here. For example a bank – and banks are users of mainframe technology – could provide an app for smartphones and tablets that gave secure access to users’ account information. But more likely, the low-hanging fruit will be big data. Big data generally describes large amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data that organizations generate. It might come from CCTV footage, recording telephone calls, or just logging the position of company vans throughout the day. It’s just big unwieldy data. Having some way to analyse it so you could derive useful information would be something businesses are likely to embrace. One piece of big data analytics that might draw large organizations in is the ability to identify fraud. Others might be more interested in the purchasing patterns of their customers.
Mobile phones and mainframes aren’t strangers. There are plenty of software vendors that are making the results of their mainframe software available to users working with browsers on smartphone and tablet devices. IBM itself has brought out an aggregation of mobile tools to combine big-data analytics and cloud computing under its MobileFirst heading.
In terms of cloud computing, we’ve seen IBM Docs announcements and, perhaps more significantly, SmartCloud, its storage access product for implementing private cloud storage.
In addition, IBM has demonstrated its Social Media Aggregator (SMA) at IOD, Pulse, and other events. It provides a consolidated view of real-time social activity on specific topics or events, based on hashtags and keywords.
And at the back of IBM’s collective mind – certainly in my imagination – must be the desire to sell mainframes to customers who need these facilities and are currently using alternative platforms. So keeping control of this third platform gives their sales staff a way in to potential customers’ offices.
And in the real world, a small start-up company made a version of DOS (Disk Operating System) their own – MS-DOS. And that little company grew and grew into the Microsoft we know and love today. And IBM? Well, it eventually sold its PC hardware business to Lenovo.
Now some of the youngsters at that imaginary meeting back in 1980 might still be turning up for work, only now they’re hearing about the ‘third platform’, and warning bells are beginning to sound! No-one at IBM wants a repeat of what happened with the second platform, so they are very keen that IBM will keep control of this third platform – even though there are plenty of other players out there already. As an aside, mainframes were the first platform, PCs are the second platform, and this new ‘third platform’ comprises cloud services, mobile computing, social networking, and big data analytics.
My scenarios above may only exist in my head, but we’ve seen IBM embrace other technologies before. Look at how it made Linux run so much better on a big box than on multiple little ones. And now Doug Balog, general manager of IBM’s System z mainframe business, is telling us that IBM is making it easier for customers to run mobile and social networking applications on mainframes.
There’s a couple of easy wins here. For example a bank – and banks are users of mainframe technology – could provide an app for smartphones and tablets that gave secure access to users’ account information. But more likely, the low-hanging fruit will be big data. Big data generally describes large amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data that organizations generate. It might come from CCTV footage, recording telephone calls, or just logging the position of company vans throughout the day. It’s just big unwieldy data. Having some way to analyse it so you could derive useful information would be something businesses are likely to embrace. One piece of big data analytics that might draw large organizations in is the ability to identify fraud. Others might be more interested in the purchasing patterns of their customers.
Mobile phones and mainframes aren’t strangers. There are plenty of software vendors that are making the results of their mainframe software available to users working with browsers on smartphone and tablet devices. IBM itself has brought out an aggregation of mobile tools to combine big-data analytics and cloud computing under its MobileFirst heading.
In terms of cloud computing, we’ve seen IBM Docs announcements and, perhaps more significantly, SmartCloud, its storage access product for implementing private cloud storage.
In addition, IBM has demonstrated its Social Media Aggregator (SMA) at IOD, Pulse, and other events. It provides a consolidated view of real-time social activity on specific topics or events, based on hashtags and keywords.
And at the back of IBM’s collective mind – certainly in my imagination – must be the desire to sell mainframes to customers who need these facilities and are currently using alternative platforms. So keeping control of this third platform gives their sales staff a way in to potential customers’ offices.
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