Agile data integration using data mashups

The data integration is one of the key driver for companies to stay competitiveness. In today’s economic conditions it is much more imperative and explains the basics of the survival of fittest and adaption is the key.  Top executives use BI in order to bridge the gaps between data and knowledge exists inside their organization so that they can take proactive decisions and hence remain more competitive.

Today’s enterprise contains data in varied form and it is one of the biggest challenge for the companies to integrate and aggregate them to make meaningful decisions. Most of the time not more than 20 to 30% of data is  available for decision making. One of the way this can be addressed using data mashups.

In simple term data mashup is nothing but allowing data to be integrated and transformed from multiple sources with in an enterprise without any custom coding and understanding more complex underlined mechanism. This allows anyone to create a simple data integration using these mashup tools and remove the understanding of underline technology. This is one of the best fit for web 3.0 projects.  

For example Aptar data mashup tool allows users to pull data from different sources without any coding and more simples means. I personally like this as it allows business users can simply use drag and drop to create their prebuilt data sources and start integrating data. Any user without much knowledge about data integration can drive a data integration project. These tools can really help bridge the gap between so called “data integration project” which used to take multiyear now can be reduced to few days or weeks. However in the context of enterprise these tools still might need some time to show the real action. But the data mashups provide a way forward in agile integration.

 

Some of key take away from Opensource tech day held in Chennai …. 13th March ‘09

In the morning I reached the Chennai Trade Center  around 9 am. Though I lived in Chennai for years but never visited this place. Thanks to open source community for providing me this opportunity.

I have attended the CXO summit in presidency hall of ITC, if I correctly recall the name of the hall. The session exactly started by 10am IST.

The theme of the day was SAAS, cloud computing and virtualization and foss. This is expected normally from any road shows and conferences happening currently.

I got a sense from the panelist that they were more talking on the technologies but  not on how to deliver the Maximum ROI quantum metrics using foss technologies. I think that should have been the key message delivered from the panelist.

First of all to start with, the virtualization technology means different to different players and each one has its pros and cons. As usual like all other technologies.  Each vendor in market crafted differently to differentiate themselves from the rest of the competition.

Dr. Mishra from Novel is more keen on explaining XEN virtualization features and how it competes with the other technology like for example Redhat’s sweet pot KVM and similarly the Amit from Redhat explains about the KVM. All these are good to understand but how as a manager I need to take a decision on which virtualization technology to adopt.

As Mishra pointed out that, currently there are two virtualization technology vendor  are enterprise ready and one is commercially available and is there for quite some time is VMWare. As of now VMWare is the market leader and XEN is the industry ready from Novel perspective which is open source.

There are lots of discussions on the Openvz ( openviz.org ) model of virtualization, which is more native to unix and exploits the unix features. It has a small memory and performance foot print. However this is not industry ready yet as it does not provide all the tenets of enterprise grade virtualization tools. Also one of the key important parameter to be considered as the performance can be different in different virtualization technologies. In case of full virtualization, the performance foot print will to high compared to a para virtualization model.   

What I got at the end as Amit pointed out is in today’s context the Hypervisor is anyway free and is available for without any cost. So it makes more sense for the IT managers to think louder and introspect the right Management tools for virtualization which is the key.

I will continue with some more articles on these technologies as these are the four key pillars of innovation and there is lot of attentions paid. I prefer to add one more technology to watch is SOA and how it is unfolding in coming days. 

 

 

 

Is still Open source a Myth or influences the social freedom

There are enormous discussions and posts in the past whether to adapt the Open source or not. It was a matter of choice in the past. Today the whole world has changed. The clouds are looking dark. Every one is witnessing a sense of insecurity about the future due to what is happening around us. In early 2000, the slowdown was caused primarily due to tech industry but we did not witness  this bad. Today it’s different and the financial meltdown caused millions of layoffs and an insecure mind in so called white scholar tech savvy developers. Though, tech is not necessarily heart of this, but feeling its share of pain.

The corporate budgets are shrinking and the CEO and CIOs are bound to think innovative ways to cut costs. I think all these paying in positive direction towards open source community and open source business model. The open source companies are making money  due to they can be more innovative and at the same time can sell products and services in a much cheaper price of what the proprietary software can offer.

 The open source business model is gaining a rapid momentum. Companies like Redhat, IBM, Sun are the testimony for the fact that open source is not just a myth but is a viable and sustainable business model. At the core of this, what we are witnessing is the collaboration and hence it fosters innovation. One of the testimony for this is foundation like GNU,  Eclipse, Apache, Open office, KDE to name a few. I can say today most of the proprietary companies either one way or other use open source. Almost all the big tech companies like IBM, SUN , ORACLE, GOOGLE  more and more either adapting or changing to open source business model. It is so much so that the VCs are not willing to invest proprietary if the business model does not allow to outsource the  IP engineering. This momentum and growth is fundamentally restructuring the social freedom and sustainable one.

 

 

 

 

spicing the web with your native apps

 Now days the cloud computing makes too much of buzz in the IT industry and it is a perfect storm in right time. More recently most of the companies migrated to saas ( software as a service ) model to reduce cost and increase the availability of applications to much wider customer base. The cloud computing is the perfect technology to address this space. Few days back the Big gorilla of software, Microsoft has shown the interest  towards cloud computing by releasing of it’s new technology called Azure service platform under the new leadership of Ray Ozzie ( chief software architect. Microsoft ). Google and Amazon, salesforce are already in the race.

This makes some sense as the future computing more dependent on web. More and more applications and technologies will be available as hosted apps rather than standalone ones. That is good for customers and enterprises  as they can access this massive technology and infrastructure as on demand and with very less price. All these technologies and infrastructures are sold at monthly price based on the bandwidth, storage  and computing power required for the client application and for that time more like a utility bills. It’s like classic model of what you pay is what you get.

While these all make sense, in the other hand the desktops are no behind in providing the rich computing power and storage. Now most of the desktops are coming with multi core processors and providing huge computing power. There are large number of applications need lot of memory and computer power. The scientific application most suited apps in this category. These technologies are very difficult to port on web as they will talk directly to the hardware of the host system. For example the graphics libs will directly access underlined hardware.

 The technology like alchemy from Adobe  and Native Client from Google will be the perfect fit for these kind of applications. These technologies allow the native application to run in browsers with rich client interface.

The alchemy from Adobe is experimental technology allows the native apps built using C and C++  to run in a Action Script Virtual Machine ( AVM2 ). Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to web.

The  Native Client from Google is also similar such project to run the native rich apps in web browser.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/

http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/?tbbrand=GZEZ&utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-et-osrcblog&utm_medium=et

I think applications modeled on N-Tier with a thin client will find more place towards cloud computing model where as the applications directly talking to hardware will be find their place running under web apps still accessing the local host. However the browser is the medium of tomorrow.