Tech Trends

Lotus Notes + Internet = Facebook?

Remember how "groupware" software such as Lotus Notes was supposed to make it easy for knowledge workers to collaborate, share ideas and track work in progress,.

Lotus Notes never conquered the world because of a kludgy interface, the need to maintain multiple Notes servers and the slow and network-hogging replication of databases among those servers. Companies I worked for tried and failed to use Notes for everything from story scheduling to a "knowledge base" where reporters could share sources. (Sociologists take note: Reporters hate to share sources the way salesmen hate to share leads.)

In each case, Notes eventually was used only as an email client - and a very slow and ugly email client it was.

Now, fast forward to "MySpace," "Facebook" and other social networking sites where users (mostly those younger than yours truly) are constantly checking each other's status, schedules and general well-being. These sites have replaced, or at least reduced, the need for, email and IM because they let people:

Quickly update schedules or make plans without scrolling through dozens of spam emails;

Create, promote and communicate within groups organized around a common interest without searching for email addresses and creating custom email lists, and

Send and receive information on their own schedule without the interruptions of IM.

Why have Facebook and similar sites taken off when Lotus Notes didn't? I draw three lessons:

Keep it simple, stupid - REAL simple. If the user interface is hard to use, it will never make it really, really big - especially if you're depending on viral marketing via the Web.

Infrastructure counts. Lotus didn't have the advantage of using the Internet as a low-cost wide-area network, and couldn't have predicted it was coming. Hence, installation and maintenance costs were too high for too long for too many customers.

Business models count. Social networking sites spread site development and maintenance costs across hundreds of thousands or even millions of users, and offer the service at little or no cost by selling ads. You can't charge company employees for access or sell ad space on your internal company site (although I bet someone will try someday.)

Timing is everything. Ray Ozzie saw a real problem, but tried to solve it before the appropriate technology and business models were there to make the answer possible.

Speaking of Web-based groupware, Wikis are supposed to be the new age, Web 2.0 collaboration tool of choice. Is anyone out there using them, and do they work?

Rough Tough Removable Hard Drives

When I saw the slides from ProStor Systems and saw what looked like removable tape cartridges I was almost sorry I had agreed to the briefing.  After all, what can anyone say about tape that's interesting these days?  But my mind quickly changed as they explained that the little cartridges were actually portable disk drives designed to be as rugged has tape cartridges, but with all the speed and capacity of disk.  ProStor's real secret sauce, though, is the archiving, indexing and WORM (write once, read many) capabilities they've built into the disk drive.

All these features could make these removable disks a viable alternative to tape for the archiving needs of midsized customers.  (ProStor is aiming at the midmarket as its far more fragmented than the enterprise space dominated by the likes of EMC's Centera.) Before launching its own line of storage appliances (which accept their removable drives) under the InfiniVault name yesterday, ProStor did a good job seeding the market through OEM relationships with the likes of Dell, and has shipped 35,000 of its docking units in its first year.

InfiniVault pricing ranges from $11,000 to $75,000, and the removable drives hold up to 300 GB of data (scheduled to rise to 750 GB by the first quarter of 2009.)  ProStor isn't yet the "juggernaut" of the midsize archiving market it hopes to be, but it has a lot of the right technology and marketing pieces to make a run for it.

Is SOA In Trouble?

I recently got an e-mail from ZapThink expecting more of their usual excellent commentary on the service oriented architecture  (SOA) market.  What I found instead was an impassioned screed asking whether SOA would ever become the predominant approach to enterprise architecture or "succumb to the pressures of confusion, misdirection, and ignorance that assail it, and become a tired label that signifies little more than a set of product features?"

Lest you wonder what all the excitement is about, SOA is an approach to application development that delivers functions to end users not as standalone applications, but as sets of "services" (such as "look up customer record" or "calculate credit rating") that can be used by multiple applications. The main objectives is to make it easier for large organizations to share information about applications, and with their business partners, and to allow developers to re-use the code needed to perform these standard services rather than re-writing them from scratch each time they're needed.   

Suffice it to say SOA is somewhat of a niche market, so it was surprising to see a consulting firm that makes a living from that market question it's viability so openly. It was also interesting to see ZapThink's Managing Partner Jason Bloomberg (the author of the post) frankly ask readers whether ZapThink was "part of the problem" by being a cheerleader for SOA.

ZapThink is facing a classic problem that comes with marketing or understanding a new idea (SOA) rather than a standalone product such as a general ledger application or a service such as on-site PC repair. All the problems ZapThink raises about SOA -- CIOs don't understand it, consulting firms lack the skills to implement it, entrenched vendors lie about how their existing products work with it -- are endemic to writing about or marketing an attempted conceptual breakthrough like SOA. 

What's an analyst (or a PR or a marketing firm) to do? Stay calm and keep your eye on the ball. Where the ideas behind SOA have value (the flexibility of exposing application services over the network, software reuse, open "directories" of services and data anyone can use) applaud them. Where products from newcomers or legacy players make it easier to reach the goals of SOA, praise them. When vendors, CIOs, consulting firms or end users misunderstand or distort the SOA message, correct them.

But remember that you're primarily talking about a set of ideas and principles. Even if SOA fails, the best of its ideas and principles will survive in the next round of technology acronyms. That's how we humans make progress. If you did a good job explaining or marketing these ideas in their SOA incarnation, you'll do fine the next time around as well.