Architect 2 Architect

It is one thing to read about Internet of Things (IoT) and get dazzled by the commercial opportunities it offers based on the stats like the number of connected devises there are in the world today. Or how more and more consumer products are getting connected to the "grid" to enable remote monitoring/ operations.  Despite all that, it is unclear as to how an enterprise would be able to make a strategic decision about benefits of an investment in IoT.  How would it know if their business model or product portfolio or customer base would gain from this investment?  I am looking for any case studies, market research material that might help in this analysis.  Are there players (established industrial giants and/ or manufacturing heavy-hitters) who have adopted this technology and gained market share or helped make significant product improvements and /or branch out into services not possible before the advent of IoT.  Some notable companies ...

Fellow Bloggers – My role is to create & deliver digital products and solutions that help deliver value to the customer and increase customer loyalty.  As an architect of these solutions I am constantly striving to effectively leverage Big Data, NLP and data science techniques.   However, when it comes to data science I always struggle with the concepts of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) .   In this blog I embark on a quest to find a way to set apart the concepts of ML & AI and to simplify the decision of when to apply which of these two concepts.       In just the past couple of years, ML/ AI have magically penetrated into all aspects of our service industry - from automating a manual process to driving cars to offering self-help assistance to recommending next best offers to automation of complex decision making.  So the question becomes are these algorithms "simulating" the human or just "mimickin...

Expanding on the context of Data Aggregation , variously called data refinery, data factory or data lake, I would like to analyze if the concept of Data Aggregation is just a theoretical construct or if there is a practical side to this. My opinion is that Data Aggregation (regardless of how it is referred to) is just a means to an end; an enabler or precursor for  Data Discovery .   This is truly a facility to bring together various types of disconnected sources of data that were previously leveraged in very “targeted” use cases.  The idea being to discover new connections or to explore new usage patterns.   These explorations might belong to the realm of identifying proactive growth opportunities or in the domain of preemptive loss prevention.  Data scientists are able to employ statistical algorithms and predictive modeling techniques to see if new patterns emerge or else to see they are able to ferret out alternate connections.  One al...

A lot of talk has been heard lately about the concept of data lake.  Variously known as, data refinery, data factory etc.  I find it interesting that we now hear logical architectural terms that speak to the concepts and to the purpose of the big data technologies such as Hadoop / HDFS and Apache distributed database technologies such as HBase / Cassandra .    This may be indicative of a shift.  What I am not sure of is does this mean that there is a level of maturity that has been achieved by this suite of open source technologies? Or could  this point to the fact that these technologies have practical applications that solve enterprise scale problems? Or does it show that enterprises have realized that they are no longer able to just deal with "structured data" and that a vast majority of information lies in the space of "unstructured content" leaving them no choice but to venture into the realm of big data technologies?  Not really sure! ...

Hi Fellow Architects - I was recently reviewing old publications EDW and some of the related concepts such as those of Corporate Information Facotry, Operational BI etc. and came across an old Inmon article from ’98.  I was curious to find out as to whether or not an ODS is relevant in today's landscape where we have EII, EDW Appliances, cloud based Warehousing solutions. Thanks for tuning in!! surekha -

Hi Fellow Architects - Here are some common questions Architects often have to deal with when trying to build/ define a Platform. Of course, I would like to hear from the experienced among you to seed this discussion. What is the purpose of the Platform? Is it for others to build business capabilities or else is this for serving up some business capability that is your competitive advantage. The former may be called Infrastructure as a Service and the later Information as a Service. This informs your decision on how much of the interface to expose. The first, Infrastructure as a Service, requires you tighten the integration and management interface and the integration pathways via strict SLAs and service contracts that drive both the infrastructure usage patterns, infrastructure management and billing. The later, Information as a Service, drives you to define the service contract that is unique to your business needs with very tight service definition and service u...

Hi Fellow Architects, Master Data has almost become a boring topic these days but I still find that many orgnaizations have not yet either harnessed the power of their master data or else have not really turned the corner on the "Master Data Project" which is now becoming an unwieldy expensive never ending project.  I was wondering if any of you have had success stories in this space and have been able to come up with some simple best practices on tocpics related to master data such as the following - a) how do you determine what is valuable information to be mastered and what not to? b) how do you determine if the master data continues to be of relavance to the enterprise? c) how the profile of master data has changed in the world of social networking etc.? Your feedback is always welcome!! -- Best Regards. surekha -

I am wondering if the following use cases qualify for being a first foray into Application Infrastructure Virtualization or more loosely Platform as a Service (PaaS)? For instance, would I be able to deploy a shared global service that has a wide variety of consumers with different usage peaks?  These peaks could coincide with global marketing events where  by the compute cycles available for the service that is hosted in the different regions could be varied by just changing the provisioning policies. In addition, I am looking for the platform to be able to insure that the commerce site has the ability to honor the QoS needs of its' key subscribers/ top rated customers even during times of unpredictable bursts.  So the question is does anyone know of PaaS or Application Infrastructure Virtualization platforms that are able to provide such an elasticity in the platform to scale up or to throttle the compute resources specifically based on consumer calls....

My fellow blogger wrote about " Should Architects aspire to be Product Managers? " in which he recounts talents like being able to interact with customers, understanding the revenue model, being able to understand and articulate how the technology maps/ aligns with the business strategy, being able to work with a cross-functional teams and so on (8 attributes in total).   Strikingly, softer skills of "passion" and "focus" were called out on at least a couple of occasions, two key characteristics , in my opinion shared with the consummate  architect!! Not only do I completely agree with the list my colleague outlines but from experience I can also testify these as key qualities of an good Product Manager.  In addition, I have found the following two attribute in a couple of " great " Product Managers with whom I have had the pleasure of interaction.  I wish to highlight these qualities as well.   Hence, at nine and ten I propose these abi...

Welcome to the "Architect 2 Architect” blog, Mahi!   Awesome first post as well!   I am using an unconventional mechanism to reply to your intriguing blog post “ http://architect2architect.blogspot.com/2011/05/innovation-incubator-for-rogue.html ”. I am in complete agreement with you on both your dilemma about introduction of “out of compliance’ business solutions into the main stream enterprise technology stack and with your observation that the architect community is in fact at odds with the business in terms of   the value prop assigned to these so called "rogue" solutions.   First of, a quick comment on why architects approach these “rouge or disruptive technologies” with skepticism!   Architects fear lack of interoperability standards in the new technology, the solutions’ inability to scale, or that there are security loop holes.   Architects are also right in verbalizing the business concerns in the pre-production phase which are the very QoS conc...

We, Architects, always have heartburns whenever we talk/think of a system that does not exactly fit into Enterprise Architect and it’s standards. I always struggled with such systems mostly because every time we talk about integration and information/data consistency across the systems this so called “rogue” application becomes yet another system to deal with. And that potentially makes it very difficult because it is not built based on the same Enterprise Architecture Standards rest of the Enterprise subscribes. What’s interesting is, often, business loves such systems. Few months ago I read a paper (I will try and find the bookmark again) on Gartner that talked about the same topic but had a different spin on it. That got me thinking whether the cause of “heard burn” is simply a matter of being on the same page with business in terms of their expectations from such “rogue” systems. I think these “rogues” are probably an area where Enterprise Architecture should start sho...

In this post I try to outline a few features of what I would consider a strategic partnership with a service provider or a technology vendor.  These are thoughts that I have distilled from years of experience (good and bad) with my vendor partners.  Hence this aspect of doing business cannot be overlook and not the least of these is the "cost" of doing business. Here are a few key attributes, not necessarily in any particular order of preference. 1) the strategic partner relationship has to go beyond a transactional one to that of a more long term one 2) the strategic partner has to have skin in the game - they have to be measured with your success criteria - they can succeed only if you do 3) the strategic partner has to be willing to "share" their technology roadmap with you 4) the strategic partner has to allow you to re-shape their technology roadmap to meet your needs 5) the strategic partner relationship has to include making their test labs, test gear, pr...

Hi Fellow SOA Practitioners' and Cloud Service Providers - I am sure that many of you are struggling with monitoing highly distributed services that have stringent business SLAs.  I am wondering about how you are managing to tune the performance of the individual components that make up the business service or business process.  I feel that there are some key differences that need to be kept in mind in terms of what legacy APMs have to offer to us vs. what we need in these so called next gen APMs that are built to monitor and manage performance of a distributed SOA stack or a cloud based business service offering Here are some of the salient features that differentiate this APM 2.0 concept from the legacy APMs. requires to have a deployer or Ops centric deployment view as opposed to a developer centric view built ground up for highly distributed service based deployments as opposed to the single appliction server container or single JVM based monolithic de...

To my fellow architects - A lot has been said about how elastic computing or on-demand computing or cloud computing can be a great cost containment vehicle for companies. The key element there is the pay per use costing model of each of these concepts. If an enterprise is able to predict it's work load and it's usage models then these computing concepts make a lot of sense. The question not withstanding issues such as security, the need to control the deployment environment etc. is in regards to whether these elastic computing models truly deliver on the promise of cost savings and/ or cost avoidance. Has there been a proven way of calculating the TCO for traditional investment in IT assets that could now be used to compare and contrast the advantages or to identify the hidden costs of these pay per use computing models? I am wondering if there have been any frameworks that exist for doing a cost benefit analysis for even concepts such as Virtualization and Grid Computing....

Question to the viewers of this blog is how many have used concepts of cloud computing (and I do not mean private clouds, here)? Are you looking at Cloud computing for reduction in infrastructure costs by moving to a pay as you use concept or to augment your peak capacity or else are you using cloud sofware as a service? What is your experience and are you realizing the ROI as in a lowering of your TCO, or increase in operations efficiency and availability? Thanks for your input. surekha -

Virtualization has been considered a great way to maximize utilization of server resources by increasing server density. In addition, this concept is considered to be very key to green IT initiatvies as it reduces the number of compute resources needing to be supported in a data center thus reducing the cooling and power costs. Having said that, there seems to be a performance downside to virtualization. Given that a virtual machine (VM) is yet another layer of indirection the server HW this layer negatively impacts the performance any time there is a need for the application to access IO Channels, SAN disc and other network resources. This is especially so when the application code is either running inside of a JVM or an application server container such as a JEE container, .NET CLR or even a web server servlet container. In all cases, performance profiles of an application seem to vary whether the application is running inside of a virtual layer vs. directly on the physical server. V...