Just sitting here today banging away at all of these desktop ‘productivity’ applications on my laptop and thinking about how great it would be to have tools that are fundamentally different than what we have been using for lo these 20 years. I am rooting for new market solutions that can release me from these separate applications for ‘writing’, ‘calculating’, ‘emailing’, ‘collaborating’ and ‘presenting’. As Google, Zoho and others introduce new web-based office applications in the cloud they will solve the issue of local thick client installs of office software.  But, here’s hoping they, or some of our open source friends include fundamental changes in the nature of how these tools behave and inter operate, or at least have a plan to get there soon!

A small example - why should I have to switch out of my email presentation window to look for a map to an address presented within the message? We did a review (more…)

 

CIO’s as Investors

CIO’s are required as a primary role to be investment managers. The company is acquiring technology assets and we carefully choose our investment strategy against a matrix of objectives. A primary objective is to select solutions which exceed or can be extended to exceed the requirements of the business, so that these solutions are flexible, extensible, and can grow with the business. At the same time we are required to invest wisely. CIO’s spend much of their time managing the selection process, managing the resulting investment portfolio, and assuring returns.  On the whole, too few CIO’s have made the switch to open source and SaaS based sourcing strategies. This latest downturn should change all that.

The Old Model

Fundamentally, the model within which these investments have been made in the past, focusing on perpetual license models, is obsolete. In good times, it is inferior simply due to the large inordinate up-front cost to acquiring technology. In an economic downturn, it’s worse than inferior, as the company finds itself with sunk costs that cannot be recovered in lean years. (more…)

 

Okay, the ubiquitous use of the term ‘cloud’ or ‘cloud computing’ is already getting annoying. It seems practically every other marketing offer, industry analyst and sales exec is adopting this nebulous term as if it has specific meaning to them. Very quickly this is squeezing the last drop out of what meaning there was to the term. I am drenched in a deluge of offers and admonitions to get ‘into the cloud’.  It’s enough to make you wish for a cloudless day.  Already the backlash has begun - just search on ‘cloud computing’ to see the griping.

The silver lining?  However the term is used, business models that allow you to subscribe to software are of great benefit to us, the consumer. (more…)

 

Semantics and Euphemisms

George Carlin laments the softening of our language through excessive euphemisms in his final tome and notes as an example that many things which previously were “free” are now “complimentary” - allowing the requester to retain a bit of dignity, instead of sounding like a “mooch“. With all the talk about free open source, commercial open source, enterprise or business class open source, some basics could be lost in the semantics. However you name it, the core term open source software implies a way of building and licensing software. Sometimes the software rises from a team of unpaid developers, and other times it comes from corporations paying for the development.

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I talked to Chris Lynch yesterday from CIO Magazine about our 100% SaaS and Open Source strategy for sourcing IT solutions at Ingres. The article Chris posted is titled: The Benefits of the All-SaaS Shop: Money, Application Integration, and Did We Mention Money? Thanks to Chris the quotes are accurate and I appreciate the time to discuss our strategy. The “money” headline focuses quite a bit on the savings inherit in the SaaS model, and probably my only additional comment would be that what we really look for is cost effective, variable based pricing for our solutions rather than something cheap. Semantics yes, but a distinction. Thanks Chris - glad you are “on the bus”!

 

Choice is Complete

Last year I switched from buying CD’s to downloading singles, therefore I have only occasionally acquired a complete “album” of music from one artist. Of the top 20 bands in my collection last year, more than three-quarters of these were cases where I downloaded one or two single tracks. The risk is that by doing this we might miss the summary effect of a complete work. This week we went to see the band “Sea Wolf” live and discovered that their debut album, “Leaves in the River”, is one of these cases. Like the new release by “Coldplay“, this one deserves a listen from start to finish.

A Second Look

At Ingres we are now taking a second look at our own digital face to our customers, the Ingres community, and Ingres Service Network. The capabilities we offer are all built utilizing open source tools and utilities. To render these sites as a more complete whole, we just signed up with Tricipher to provide a single sign-on solution for our web properties. (more…)