Need to have an exit strategy

I believe it is time for me to get out of the business of IT. Here are the reasons:

• Deer in headlights: I talk to some of my senior managers and they look at me as a deer in the headlights when I tell them about the innovations of Ruby on Rails or noSQL databases. On the other hand, if I was tell them about client server technologies of the late 1990s then we have a conversation. I see myself going down the same path in the next twenty years unless technology is outsourced.
  



• Outsource IT: This brings me to the second point. IT is so commoditized. Within a couple of years, I won't need to worry about the operations part since most of this will be outsourced. I heard of government agencies outsourcing the whole Blackberry program to a third party vendor. WHAT?!!! All those jobs! I know this is a big part of the whole world we live in. Do I want my job outsourced in the next five years? I don't think so.




• Open Source - innovating out of existence: As open source technologies rapidly evolve, more businesses are relying on market analysis and large vendors to recommend what their IT strategy should be. Should a CIO look at open source technologies to enable their IT strategy or look to proven technologies which could be legacy in the next five years? I would guess the latter. As Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Google start putting cloud services, they are going to bring down costs and at the same time bring down the IT salaries. I believe the days of an Oracle DBA making a decent living are history. An Oracle DBA will make a similar salary as a typical engineer, which is 20% - 25% less then a typical IT staffer. These companies will also start filtering the Open Source technologies and the open source world will become an R&D lab. This is the best bet for any business since businesses don't have the time to update infrastructure every quarter.

What should I do then? I need to refine my customer relationship skills well enough to say, "Would you like fries with that?" ;-)

I sound like a left wing donkey (aka Democrat)

I asked myself, "Will open source technologies ever fly?" after reading this article "Google asks US Patent Office Oracle Java patents". As businesses try to make a dollar or two from innovative minds who donated their "code" to better of man kind, I wonder if my children will enjoy the benefits of open source technologies. I don't know the answer but one of way of safe guarding these open source technologies is let government agencies take over the maintenance of open source software. I realize that I sound like a left wing "donkey" (aka. Democrat) but the open source community needs to address the bigger problem. How can brilliant works of engineering like Java, Ruby on Rails, Linux, Hadoop can be safe guarded from the hoards of entrepreneurs? I don't have a problem if a company like Cloudera and RedHat who make a living on supporting open source software. I however question when businesses fight the over basic fabric of open source software. Here is one idea we can look at:

• Apache and other open source organizations should be care takers of open source. These organization should be funded by government agencies and they should be regulated by a UN organization.

My right wing friends may ask the question, "why should the government get involved in managing open source technologies. I answer by saying do you want human safety compromised over a business indicator flashing red. Since IT is being used to track and guide flights, manage energy grids, and control access to vital information, I say the government should be responsible for managing open source technologies. Government has so much red tape that it reduces efficiencies but the red tape also safeguards the things under its control from the economic and political moods.

Frankly if things don't change then I will start working Objective C, C#, and reduce my investment as a developer on open source technologies.

That was Suite! Not really

This morning I was asked to go to an all morning presentation by Oracle. The presentation explained Oracle's vision with its products and its newly acquired company's, BEA, products. The core presentation was given by Thomas Kurian Senior Vice President for Oracle's Fusion Middleware. The presentation was insightful and it showed that Oracle has a defined and definite vision. I, however, being a skeptic will accept Oracle's vision when I see results. Other than enjoying Oracle's flagship product which is their relational database product, I have not been impressed with Oracle products. That being said, I do believe that Oracle is going to keep the Weblogic Application Server as well as other quality products. It is going to be interesting how other vendors will compete with Oracle in the Application and Middleware space.

Like Oracle, IBM has been buying strategic companies like Oracle but they NOT are buying monster size companies like BEA or PeopleSoft. IBM products work well however they are very expensive and their support is expensive as well. Oracle is following the Sun and RedHat approach which is to follow the Open Source paradigm. Thomas Kurian stated that Oracle is going to streamline the Weblogic IDE,which is based on Eclipse framework, make it open source. It will be interesting where Oracle Fusion Middleware will be in the next two to five years. During the presentation, Thomas Kurian talked about the Weblogic Suite, SOA Suite, BPM Suite and every other Suite possible. So in closing I say, "That's suite!" Actually I say this Larry Ellison, show me good software and I will say, "Suite software". If the software is not good then I will call the Oracle Fusion Middleware, law-suit software and not suite software.

Can Oracle learn from Google?

I just read this article on Java Developers Journal (JDJ) that Oracle is looking to buy BEA. This should be interesting. If Oracle does buy BEA then Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, and his company will have the Weblogic stack, Aqualogic stack and their supporting products. These products will have add to the Oracle collection which consists of:

• Oracle Application Server,
  
• Oracle Database technologies,
  
• Oracle Fusion Ware,
  
• PeopleSoft,
  
• Stellent, etc., etc.,
  

However after working with Oracle's non-database technologies and hearing other voices in the developer community, Oracle's non-database products are not that great. Unlike Microsoft's products which emphasize user interaction and user experience, Oracle products don't integrate well and they are quite buggy. I don't know if Oracle needs to hire more effective product managers who can build better products. Like Google, it needs to promote innovation and creative. There are reasons why Google is the best company to work for. Among other benefits, Google offers free gourmet meals, 20 % of the work done is on personal projects. As these projects evolve into product ideas, Google inturn takes these ideas and produces great products. Here are some products they created:

• Gmail
• Google Talk
• Google Reader
• Google Map and other APIs
• Google Labs
• Google Apps
• Google checkout
  

Most of these ideas were built on technologies they acquired like:

• YouTube
• Blogger
• Keyhole (Google Earth)
• Orkut

To please its shareholders and client base, Oracle simply acquires companies and their products however they don't spend much time in making their products "cool" or "nitch" after they acquire them. Larry Ellison, if you are reading this, learn from Google's model. Software is cool, fun and it meets business and user needs. If you forget cool and fun then what you end up with a boring, expensive and bulky products like Mainframe computers which eventually joined the dinosaurs in extinction.

Microsoft Popfly and more

A few days ago I was granted access to Microsoft's new and dandy Mashup Editor called Popfly. Why did they call it "Popfly"? I have no idea. Popfly offers functionality like integration to their Visual Studio, the new Microsoft technology called the Silverlight plugin. I had high hopes for the Popfly technology since it is from Microsoft.

Unfortunately tonight I faced with the "Blue screen of death" in the Mashup editor world. I was working with the Popfly's Facebook block , which is like a Yahoo! Pipes widget, and I tried to get pictures of my friends from my network. Unfortunately it didn't work. Instead, I saw the default set of friends who looked like Microsoft employees. The only functionality that worked was that I could only see my information. The Popfly product has promise however it is still alpha. Unlike Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo! Pipes, Popfly offers UI aggregation interface as well as a .NET API interface. The competition has just begun between the major vendors in providing Mashup Interfaces. I am waiting for Oracle to join the party.

As I had suspected, Microsoft is slowing but surely integrating Facebook into its platform. Popfly is a great example of it. It looks like Microsoft and Google see immediate short term gains going the Web 2.0 route and not the Semantic Web route which seems to a better approach in the long term.