Cubegeek

BlockCon Trip Report

So those of you who know me know that I know something about BI / DW and VLDB aka Big Data. I think I may continue to use VLDB to distinguish big structured data from high heaps of Hadoop which may or may not map to anything or reduce you to tears. So let's block and tackle shall we?

Brock Pierce
I'm fairly sure that I saw this dude a year ago at a conference in DTLA. Dude was in a completely different suit. Today he wore a cowboy hat and showed slides from his wedding at Burning Man. He's quite a showman, and his topic 'Disrupting the Disruptors' excited some non-zero fraction of the audience when he mentioned certain disruptions, which I forget. Seeing that he was an actor does not surprise me. He clearly knows how to play to different audiences. His overall message was very reasonable and underscored what people like me already know. Don't fuck with people's money. I think it's a message that needed to be said, underscoring what was true about what Jamie Dimon said in the previous fortnight or so. This is real money and real people will destroy the fraudulent, real people meaning governments in organized countries and organized criminals in others. 

Thinking about Pierce and the DTLA crowd, including the guy who runs Gem and pointed me to Netki boss Justin Newton, one is reminded that players will play in this space and when they have particular interests that they can articulate, things will happen. If I had any doubts about matters of inevitability, they were swept away. This is a herd of smart cattle. They may not know which particular direction or destination they will find, but when those hooves start thundering, watch out. What is clear from Pierce' perspective is that donkeys will get whipped. There's more regulation that applies here than most people are aware of. It's not a whole new type of human endeavor, it's just a whole new set of technologies that haven't put together a full ecosystem yet. It will be the web of value, but we already know what to do with money. 

ICOs are a volatile term, and people are already coming up with alternative acronyms. But the writing about underwriting is on the wall. Entrepreneurs can enable a new class of investors in boilerplate fashion so long as they are clear and have no intent to deceive. This will ultimately have salient effects on financial transparency in startups and the accountability of OTC traded public companies. Huge, but ultimately very reasonable. I get it. 

The other half of the speech was something interesting that I'm noting from both he and Richard Heart. After you make your first doshpoint, the emphasis is on other things. This is reinforcing my set of ideas around 'the smart money'. Easy for Burning Man types, after all, they're not playing to the masses. Well, not at first. Quoth Pierce, a 'billionaire' is not the person with a billion dollars but someone who helps a billion people. 

Experts & Grownups
I had the good fortune to be sitting between an angel investor herder, Jeff and a legal diligence dude, Matt. The former I only spoke a small bit to, whereas I had a bunch of questions for the latter. We briefly talked about China as I poked him about how much the SEC is likely to say. He informed me that their may be questions in the minds of some startup entrepreneurs about whether they can pivot from security to utility or vice versa, but the law is clear. There are, apparently, relatively pro-forma channels for doing this sort of business, and in fact one company has done so as an exchange back in the day. These packages of diligence, provided by his firm which has a technical auditor as well as an economist can look at all of these things. As I thought before, he added some confidence to the idea that coins are commodities and can work like commodities markets. 

Other Kibbles & Bits
First of all the overall sense that I got from this conference is that there is a good amount of money and brains in the crowd. There is a level of energy that is frenetic. People are committed to be present in the space. There is a wide variety of done-ness to the projects on display and what is one conference today will surely be 3 or 4 separate conferences in the future. Blockchain is simply too big to put under one roof, and the roof they had this time was already too small.  This crowd skewed towards entrepreneurs and devs, very much unlike the one last year DTLA which skewed towards financial folks and VCs. I suspect there is a lot of hashing (!) out to be done before this becomes what I would consider a coherent industry. But believe me, the gongs of inevitability are vibrating the air. 

NEO
I talked to my friend Mark J who introduced me to one of his technical associates. His idea is to generate a coin economy around subcontractors to his product. It's a super cool idea and I hope it works out. But I must say that I need some clarity around the difference between a value coin and a utility coin. I asked his tech guy, whom I'll call 'Pedro', where he was on the idea of Solidity. I tell you it was such a relief when I heard him blurt that it sucks. I'm glad I'm not the only one with reservations about writing what ought to be considered ironclad contracts in a language that looks like a crippled half-sister of Javascript. They're building what they're going to build. So I asked him what he thought about EOS, and he skipped right to the money. He said that if he had to do it all over again, he would choose the Chinese system called NEO, which he characterized as a 2nd and a half generation blockchain ecosystem. If he didn't say the word 'bulletproof' his expression implied it strongly. I popped over to the NEO website and promptly lost my ability to recognize the problems it claims to solve. Only proving I have a lot more homework to do. 

Bitcoin's Antifragility
The best thing I wanted to hear was that there are some practitioners and champions in this brave new world who understand that it is actually brave to be new, and newer is not always better. So I was pleased to hear the term 'anti-fragility' in the presentation of Jimmy Song. His presentation was coherent and structured and I have added him to my feeds. I will continue to keep an ear out. 

Identity
Identity and security are one of my ongoing concerns, and one of the deeper reasons I am paying attention to blockchain. The blockchain will bring to the masses what I'm calling a more 'perfected security'.  Since the beginning days of e-commerce a bit of fudging has been going on primarily owing to the original design of the Apache webserver. Too much of the WWW is built on stuff that was overburdened for the applications they would eventually support. Now there are more than enough serious developers to make thing work with purpose-built languages and frameworks. Go exists because of what the web has become.  The internet of value will clean up some of the messy identity and security problems we now face, not only for the web itself, but across enterprises as well. It was clear during the panel discussion here that there is a broad set of customers in the identity market and a lot of market penetration is going to happen with brand-y products that may or may not be a comprehensive solution. I'm rather skeptical right now. I want there to be a standard that is at least as good as KYC (if that's a standard). It didn't appear that the panelists were interested in that so much. So I'll keep my bets with Apple and the more boring financial community for the moment. 

Pay Close Attention
The two best presenters for my attention span were BlockCypher and This Guy.

BlockCypher
Basically they are the AWS of blockchain tech. They lease infrastructure and they have an API that ties the whole thing together. No matter which cryptocurrency does what, this company is the surest bet. They have the proper commercial attitude and they've lined up the most real world partners of anybody I can recall at the conference. They're doing work. 

Hyperledger Project
I've tended to forget about this project primarily because I've been answering newbie questions about cryptocurrencies instead of actually building something and answering questions I need to know. Altoros looks like a very sharp operation and so I'm not surprised that they are rather deep into working with those companies that are ready to take a serious look. Oleg's presentation was the first coherent thing I've heard about the differences between private and public blockchains that wasn't dripping with hype about the superiority of Bitcoin. It cannot be that there are only 500 people in the world smart enough to implement, especially given open source, the guts of a world class blockchain. So the breadth of companies seriously looking at this project augur well for the future. I'm really looking to see if I can get a copy of Oleg's presentation.

That's all for now. I should go again next year, and I'm hoping and expecting that if and when Amazon makes an announcement, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

Dodeca Rules Again

Tim Tow of AppliedOLAP is one of those guys you know in the industry that reminds you that excellence is its own reward. He has been one of the go-getters that I've always admired working with and knowing. We spoke together on the phone today for the first time in years and his baby, Dodeca, is all growed up. 

As part of our strategic marketing at Full360 we will begin developing vertical markets for our data platform and go after those customers. After a long time of feeling rather sorry for Essbase and the EPM part of our business, the progress of Dodeca and its customer successes have warmed my old cold cockles. I've taken some notes about the things I most specifically need in Dodeca for a customer or two I'm thinking about. But here's the turning point. Dodeca has proven to me today that the true spirit of Essbase has not been lost and buried in the competition for the market domination of Oracle Middleware, which has been a battle royale for mid-tier technology in the enterprise market for years. What did Dodeca do today? It convinced me once and for all that Essbase can dominate with a single fat client reporting platform based on the world-beating concept of the spreadsheet. It's all the front-end Essbase will ever need.

For many years, there seemed to be nothing capable of beating the simple, pure combination of Essbase and the Excel Add-In. It was simple, fast and powerful. Then came a bunch of big front-end integration ideas that made sense on paper and passed muster of integration test, but lost the spirit and speed of discovery. Then, before ASO, Essbase itself was starting to show signs of fatigue in dealing with larger higher order dimensional models. And once that was overcome, came the problem of drill-through, which still had some security problems four years ago, not to mention timeout issues with APS when the data got big. Today, I believe firmly that a one-two punch of EAS driven Essbase and Dodeca's current version is all anybody on the planet needs for that holy grail of multiuser-concurrent-multidimensional read/write data with security down to the cell level. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the return of speed of thought, brought to you by C# fat client .NET brilliance. This is not a slow clap. This is a little bit of giddy excitement, and I'm really too old for that. 

While Full360 has been plunging the depths of new paradigms of data management, parallelization and asynchronous data streams, real-time processing and massive query spaces, we've lagged a bit behind on the current comings and goings of the datamart world. In other words, we've been fulfilling our mission of being cloud-focused data experts. Now with some renewed spirit, our longtime friendship and partnership with ApplieOLAP brings to mind a lot of interesting possibilities. 

So.. to wit.

 Highlights

• - Essbase Java API
• - All versions of Essbase since 6.5.3
• - JDBC support
• - custom starting points by user
• - xcopy for .NET deployments to Citrix
• - APS and/or straight TCP connection to Essbase
• - MySQL, MSSQL or Oracle repository, no special server-side scripting
• - Highly scalable to thousands of users.

Dodeca is the best way to get fast data out of Essbase. It is extremely configurable in ways that serve user requirements over technology requirements. It is a .NET based product that takes a bottoms-up approach to getting Essbase multidimensional data into grids. It has extended the ability of Essbase to deliver tens of thousands of rows at the old 'speed of thought' speeds. It is a managed spreadsheet environment under complete administrative control with hybrid drill-through capabilities.

Dodeca is entirely spreadsheet-centric and is exhaustively so. It uses highly specific defined data areas to perform multiple multi-sourced retrieves from data sources.  It has control of all events both local and specific to Essbase API and remote JDBC operations. This allows a multi-layering, multi-query ability to draw data into the spreadsheet exactly where it is needed. Dodeca can employ any of the 300+ Excel functions to manage front-end calculations.

AppliedOLAP has re-engineered the spreadsheet interface and allowed Essbase to work to its full potential writing with C# that which used to be VBA. The product is clearly superior to all other Essbase front-ends. If you want to work with data in the spreadsheet paradigm, it is the gold standard. Dodeca's performance is remarkable and handles 100,000 row retrievals with ease. Its ability to cascade data into multiple tabs of a spreadsheet is beyond anything I've ever seen.  It has managed both to allow highly complex database operations as well as keep basic ones fast and simple.

Mastery of Dodeca will take time. It clearly is aimed, for more sophisticated applications, towards .NET programmers comfortable with that level of detail and control. If you have complex workflow rules and highly detailed report requirements, you're going to have such people in IT anyway.  But I see every indication that a quickstart implementation and its ability to use basic Excel templates support rapid prototyping any VBA competent guy can pull off with ease at smaller companies. No doubt AppliedOLAP with its long and deep roots in the Oracle customer community has plenty of third-party developers at hand. 

I am impressed with Tim's direction in making a tool that, with its flexibility, makes for simpler implementation leveraging the dynamism of the Essbase query space, rather than fill up servers with canned reporting each with a single query statement. It's a win. And suddenly Essbase is way more interesting again. 

The Municipal Grid

This year one of my goals is to ingratiate myself with minds and bodies in Los Angeles. That means thinking, eating, drinking, discussing. I'm all about putting together a bigger orbit of fellows. To that end, I've put together a new calling card and purchased some nice shoes. So far so good. Over the past few weeks I've made contact with four outstanding individuals, but let me tell you about the last guy, Codename Gambler. Gambler because he looks like Kenny Rodgers at the top of his game.

Among other things, Gambler knows streaming media. I was unable to disambiguate HLS from H.264 and don't know most codecs from each other, but I could generally parse the stream of info he burst to me yesterday afternoon. I asked him whether or not he could articulate a technical reason for going against Net Neutrality. It was mildy surprising to hear him say what I've said on my less chartiable days about the extent to which the likes of Comcast are justifying 'technology' price increases just for turning up dials they've already built. IE your bandwidth is throttled back to 3. I could turn the knob up to 5 in just a second, but defeating Net Neutrality allows me to charge you to turn it up to 5. (BTW it goes up to 10, I'm just pretending that it doesn't). In other words, the infrastructure is already there and paid for. 

Now I'm going to inject something I knew for many years. A long time ago when I drove a VW Beetle, I found myself driving from LA to Georgia to work in Alpharetta at Cingular Wireless. This was right about the time that Deutche Telecom was first putting a footprint into North America as T-Mobile. So I asked the obvious question. How the hell do they just put up a network and start doing business in the US? The answer, cell tower clearinghouse. Huh? What?  Since there is a standard for cellphone traffic, (GSM or CDMA or some such) all the electrical engineers with enough brains can build cell towers. Cingular owns some, Verizon owns some, AT&T owns some. If you have a cellphone and you drive away from a Cingular tower, chances are an AT&T or Verizon tower will pick up your signal. In other word, they share cell network infrastructure and have balances of payments settled at a clearinghouse. AT&T knows when your cellphone is talking to a Verizon tower and vice-versa, etc, etc. But none of those carriers own all of the electrical engineers building the towers.  Obviously it makes sense to have cheaper capital and build more cell towers vis a vis market share of the clearinghouse balance of payments, but it's in everybody's interest to keep all of the towers running. Now some of this may have changed with all that LTE 4th Gen blather, but I still think there's no monopoly of cell tower networks as they imply in the commercials. Speaking of which, do you keep track of whose network you are calling in order to save money? If you are AT&T, do you try not to call people with Sprint phones? Of course not, that would be rediculous. Carriers *could* charge you more, and I think they used to, but it's stupid now. My point is that infrastructure can be shared and clearinghouses can be kept, and the prospects for charging for cross-traffic is probably not a good long range business model.

Enter municipal broadband. I've got FIOS. Every time I go to Fry's and the Direct TV guys are there trying to sell me dish, their faces fall when I tell them I've got FIOS. They know that fiber rules when it comes to delivering internet traffic to the home. But guess what, a lot of that fiber used to belong to (still belongs to?) Level Three Communications, ex railroad guys who built lines in the railroad right of way. When it came to delivering to the legendary 'last mile', well all that has been done and paid for. And similar to cell towers, the technology is understood by many, not by a monopoly. Yet the monopoly for the consumer exists. My neighborhood, for better or worse, is a FIOS neighborhood. I used to live in a (horrors) Adelphia neighborhood, and before that a Time Warner Cable neighborhood.

Gambler tells me that there are smart people in Los Angeles city government who are proposing regulations that will remove that content monopoly by relicensing the physical monopoly. In other words, let the fiber guys build the right kind of fiber (that dials all the way up to 10) to every house in Los Angeles and then share it through a clearinghouse. If I want Comcast, it goes over the fiber. If I want FIOS, it goes over the same fiber. If I want Roku, it goes over the same fiber. Why? Because Google can play too, and why shouldn't they?

So I am now very clearly for, somewhat tangential and possibly obviating of Net Neutrality, a regime in which cities get rid of captive monopolies by forcing carriers to all talk to the same grid, the Municipal Grid, in the same way they do for cellphone traffic. And I think that just means that Net Neutrality will be a software setting in your cable modem dialed up by the main office. Sounds delicious. 

Certification Road

Several hours from now, I will have entered the first level of the Shaolin of AWS. I've been studying for almost three years at the foot of my elastic ninja master, monkey coding in the fields. Now I approach formal gates and turn my experience with the raw into gems. Mysteries abound. Patience will be rewarded. 

In parallel, I am also moving in other certification worlds. I will be pursuing my Amateur Radio license next month, and by the end of October, I will become a CERT adjunct to the local fire fighters in my town. In multiple dimensions, I am embracing disaster, death and rebirth. I am conforming to the shape required to hustle people past, around and through tragedy - the end of things most of us know to be inevitable, but avoid. 

It's odd to notice the 1000 ways to die. Did you know that you need to approach burning cars from the sides? Because the bumpers are on shock-pistons that might suddenly expand in the heat and break your legs. Can you look at a building and tell how it might collapse? I'm going to survive. I have little doubt in my mind, but how is the interesting part. Survive and let the upside take care of itself. 

I have come to the point, and I'm about to step over it, where I find it amusing to build code in my spare time. So I have ideas and plans. Maybe this year I'll do something loud.  It will be official.

As for the AWS, the more I brush up against its culture, the more I have to take seriously the fact that the fat client and proprietary interface world is moribund. Once you accept that the sophistication and overload of HTTP protocols is just inevitable, the more you take as legit the enormous amount of unstructured data that needs to be dealt with. I don't actually feel like expounding on it so much as learning more Mechanize and Nokogiri. See?

I expect that I will be combining a lot of API level stuff and orchestration this year. Lots of SNS and SQS and SWF and hand-built CLI. Damn, I need a web guy.

iPad2: It Can't Be Love

I have been wanting the iPad2 for about three years now - since before anyone was absolutely certain that Apple was interested in building something larger than the iPod Touch. I knew that kind of inevitability in the way those of us who have been around in this industry forever understand what juices the geek in us all. 

So now that it is here, I'm finding the brilliant marketing success of what Steve Jobs and Apple have done to generate in certain Americans an interesting kind of skepticism. OK, what I mean to say is weird skepticism. Aside from all the Android fanboys, people are essentially whinging about what they believe the iPad2 still doesn't have. And I have determined that it is something of Jobs' fault precisely because of what he evokes in his videos. He evokes love. And so if you don't want an iPad2, which is by far one of the most technically brilliant inventions of the digital era, it's probably because you don't love it. That's not the product's fault, it's your fault for expecting an emotional attachement to the product. It's like aborted transferrence. You fall in love with the cereal box and it doesn't matter what's inside, all you want to do is read the box. People don't think so much about what the iPad2 can deliver, but its combination of features as a product. 

Jobs did something a bit deeper this outing which suggested to me that he's revealing a bit more philosophy. It's a good thing to see him do so. Like most people like me, I'm sick of him talking about 'magic'. There are many serious reasons why a finger-based device which gets us all beyond typing and mousing is a momentous idea. You don't have to watch an autistic child's mother be brought to tears to understand this, but Apple is peddling love. It is the enthusiasm of Jobs' second tier presenters who get down into explaining the grits of the machine that show the energy that used to be Steve. Now Steve can talk about the intersection between Technology and Liberal Arts. This is the good stuff, and he's correct to note that it is the sort of thematic and cohesive design that makes all the difference in the aegis of the Apple product line. Obviously any cadre of second-world factories can assemble the bill of materials and quality check the engineering, but only people thinking about the synergies between the arts and sciences can produce the sort of vision for excellent products that advance both. For Apple products to be an intellective toolset for creation requires such a vision. 

But that's not about love. 

Apple should not try to make us love the iPad and the iPhone. They should make us think about what we might be enabled to do with our hands with these devices. For the moment, they are picking low hanging fruit - which is why competitors are throwing money at the same product types. Making music is an obvious and well capitalized choice, as is reading. Apple app developers are the thousands who can and will evolve that vision towards new horizons, far beyond what Apple heads can predict. That's as it should be, and I still support Apple's walled garden approach to application approval. The Apple product line very well should have a philosophy, and I can see it coming together, but I wonder how Apple sees business.

The implication to me is also that Apple could, and just might, start considering ruggedized inputs. The intersection of technology and liberal arts does not limit one to the sweetness and light of light consumption. But we may not see that for a while. Apple may very well be content to become the premium distribution medium for higher education, visual arts and music. Creation means Pixar, distribution means iTunes Store, consumption means iPad. But Apple should very well consider the industrial revolution in computing. Enderle gets what I'm talking about.

Post-PC Market
One of the initial issues I have with this concept is that it is defined for what it isn't as opposed to what it is. I think we all can see that smartphones, tablets and even MP3 players (think: iPods) are eclipsing PCs on the client side, and the concept of cloud computing is driving the server side. Few appear to be good at both and it would appear that post-PCs will be a blend of cloud and unique client devices. Strangely enough, Google seemed to see this first, but its execution has been marred by an excessive focus on advertising-based offerings and an apparent inability to create high-quality offerings.

Microsoft is massively invested in the cloud, but is having trouble producing a timely universal cloud client outside of the PC.

Both platform-based firms are coming at this market a bit differently and both appear to be crippled by their unique legacies.

Apple and Dell
This brings up hardware vendors, with Apple and Dell appearing to be the most focused out of the PC segment. Apple is strong on the client side and has the most popular smartphone and tablet, but on the cloud side, it is relatively weak (it killed off its server product a few months ago). In terms of profit, it isn’t coming from its PCs, but from its alternative devices, which is turning Apple into a true post-PC company.

Dell is on the alternative track. Nearly two-thirds of its revenue come from services, storage, servers and other back-office solutions that are being wrapped into cloud bundles and not from PCs. It just had one of its most profitable quarters, largely because it, too, has positioned itself as a post-PC company.

Could the ultimate winner be Dell?

I think Apple doesn't necessarily get the database Back End, and they might not necessarily care to.  I began falling out of love with Apple in 1991 when they introduced something called DAL, a completely different standard than ODBC. It didn't work and nobody in the database world cared to write interfaces to DAL. So small companies like Watcom absolutely creamed Apple, who was evidently satisfied with FileMakerPro. The cottage industry of visual programming and database query tools was completely missed by Apple and all of the mounds of spagetti that became Visual Basic became the standard in a world where Apple had a version of Office for the desktop. Somehow Apple abandoned the corporate desktop and now they are just coming back around. It's an opportunity to have a clean slate in the same way that Google had a clean slate in corporate email and what is now Google Apps. But Apple, like Google, will have to really understand the database Back End. 

The Back End Apple understands is music, movies and to some extent whatever Mobile Me is supposed to do. It's a brilliant retailer and has demonstrated its ability to run circles around traditional channels. Taking software out of the Apple Store is a brilliant move. But could Apple change the way that enterprise software is bought and sold? How about medical software? How about CAD? This is the time for Apple to consider partnering and risk. It has the platform and beautiful hardware, it has the philosophy to hold the products together, but does it have the desire to handle more segments of the computing industry? That depends on how long Steve Jobs and Apple decides it wants to sell love and make videos with cute kids and beautiful people on vacation. It can't be long.

The iPad2 can do anything Apple wants it to do. They have mastered the hardware. But the 65,000 apps are really all about what? It can't be love.

Cringely Predicts Apple Will Buy...

I forgot Cringely, and I've been listening too much to Dvorak. Dvorak and Adam Curry got on my nerves after a while, and the best thing about Cranky Geeks was Enderle and Dibona. I can still read Enderle but I haven't bumped into Dibona anywhere else.

So Cringely has a set of predictions which hinge around a central, and probably inevitable technical problem that affects the entirety of the web, which he calls bufferbloat. Simply stated, bufferbloat is a to the internet what too many ninja loans were to the financial system. Or actually the analogy is flawed, but the context is properly systemic. Bufferbloat is the ability for fast clients to suck up data so quickly that it makes the senders of data believe that there are no problems. In otherwords, client buffers are too quick to fail. Since TCP/IP expects failure and hears that there is no failure, the protocol forces data senders to exhale all of their bits at high rates of speed without stopping to listen to see that everything is OK in case a packet needs retransmission. So everything is going great until a burst makes everything go horrible. The protocol is out of touch with reality because all these buffers are faking good conditions. So TCP/IP is inefficient for the size and speed of memory buffers at the last mile.

Since Cringely predicts that your average ISPs and cable companies aren't going to to jack about it, (and whatever happened to IPV6?), that leaves one man on the planet to come up with an end to end solution. Steve Jobs, of course.

What is he to do?

Let’s guess that Apple will use that new data center to serve audio and video streams carrying music and TV and movies maybe for a flat subscription fee.  I predict there will be price tiers based on resolution and some content and/or earlier access will go for higher prices.  Apple trailers, for example, come in 480p, 720p, and 1080p, so those tiers become no-brainers ($59.95, $69.95, $79.95 per month possibly — remember this is Apple). And 1080p-60/7.1? That’s $99.95.

And how does Steve introduce this service?  I think he takes some of that $50 billion in cash, buys an existing cable TV company and essentially shuts it down.  He only has to buy one to make the splash he likes — a splash that is also a kick in the face to Google with its metro gigabit networks.  Once the people of North Carolina get the real Apple TV, how long before other cable subscribers simply give up their TV services, forcing their cable companies to become pure bit-schlepping ISPs for Apple?

Apple’s data center is in Maiden, NC, which is served by Comcast. No luck there.  But it isn’t far from Time Warner, which I believe Steve would see as an acceptable purchase costing around $30 billion.

I like it.  I really like it.

HP + Palm = Third Way

Right about now I'm asking myself why it is that IBM doesn't own a phone company. It used to. It was Rolm. Tipped off by Enderle, I am thinking about what moves and what doesn't move in the computer industry.

What's moving now is the peripherals market, and the hottest peripherals are now owned by Apple. They are enabled by the network market and the hottest networks are still boring, but the changing of new and old protocols are making it interesting. Matters of net neutrality, Flash vs Ogg vs H.264 and the adoption of cloud strategies are what's making it interesting. Database technology is undergoing a renaissance too.

Only Google seemed to have its head in the game of comprehensively coming up with a 'new' computing paradigm which is network centric and going after the desktop. That was until the introduction of Apple's iPad. Apple now has an opportunity and is showing evidence of the vision to disintermediate Microsoft's desktop domination.

Think about it this way. The desktop has been, for a generation, the dominant computing metaphor. It is how must computing work is done today and it is the desktop metaphor including the mouse and keyboard that is how must of us do what we call 'computing'. 30 years ago it was the green screen. 10 years before that it was the punched card. What are you touching when you are using a computer? That is the question. Those who define and dominate win, and it starts with the generation of data and ends with the consumption of data. That, broadly speaking is what the computer industry is all about, it is about interface domination. What goes on in the black box is only of concern to the industry professionals - the battles in the marketplace are won and lost on interface.

For example. What is gaming? Gaming is an interface market with competition between the iPhone + iPad, XBox360, PS3, DS, Wii, and the Desktop. The game console wars are pretty much over and the winner is Microsoft. They dominate and so now everyone must write to XBox. However Microsoft has opened up a new front with Project Natal. Interface.

All this has to do with HP + Palm because HP has perhaps determined that it needs to be its own software integrator. HP can now extend its compute capacity into a new interface. This is key.

Bloomberg & Government Transparency

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a pioneer who is at the very beginning of a revolution started simultaneously with Walter Wriston. The second fruits of his pioneering spirit are beginning to bloom. The first fruits were, of course, his fortune in the securities information industry created by the machine and company that bear his name. The second fruits can be seen here in Citywide Performance Management.

The Market, Again

Well, sooner than I would like, I am reckoning with the market. Which is to say that I am out looking for a new gig. I recorded a bit of self-documenting blather on Google Video yesterday, rambling in order to put some past, and present into perspective. The future part is a bit weak but the general direction is right. I really want to see what's next for operational OLAP and near-realtime business intelligence whether or not it is based on multidimensionally organized data. I'm fascinated by the possibilities of the multitouch paradigm and new visualization tropes, next generation identity management and the application of cinematics to knowledge management. If I can manage to get through the keyword search algorithms hardwired into the brains of high tech recruiters, then maybe I'll have the opportunity to hookup with the right folks in my next move.

I make some fleeting references to XRepublic, but I would really require some venture capital on that score. Perhaps as I'm working on my next contract and using the more technical parts of my brain, I'll feel out a specification for the product and design a design team that might be presentable to the right parties. For now, it's bacon-hunting time.

Oracle + Hyperion = Gorilla

Oracle is buying Hyperion. SAP is buying Pilot. Cognos and Business Objects stand alone.

This is huge. I'm still overwhelmed by the implications.

I don't doubt anything this article says:

Hyperion and its popular Essbase product, has "almost no overlap" with existing Oracle products, Phillips said. But, there is overlap between the PeopleSoft's performance management products Oracle acquired in 2003 and Hyperion's products. The PeopleSoft products will become part of a new enterprise performance management division, Phillips said. Oracle has had a "small" performance management product that "wasn't that pervasive in the market," it considers Hyperion a complementary, best-of-breed vendor, he said.

Instead, Oracle has focused on building out the underlying infrastructure required for BI, he said, and the Hyperion acquisition will give it critical analytical applications to layer on top of its data management and BI technologies. Specifically, the acquisition gives Oracle an enterprise planning system, a financial consolidation product, a powerful OLAP engine and a "dedicated" field sales organization. It also believes the move will help it in its battle's with rival SAP. Many SAP customers use Hyperion, Phillips said, and Oracle is achieving "critical mass" within SAP accounts.

"Now Oracle's Hyperion software will be the lens through which SAP's most important customers view and analyze their underlying SAP ERP data," he said in an earlier statement.

From my perspective as a consultant it's all good. I'm confident that Hyperion's BPM apps are going to go through pretty much as is. It puts the Informatica OEM in a wobbly position, and it will probably delay integration of the more recent product acquisitions like Crystal Ball and Upstream. The integration of Hyperion MDM works technically but it will have to compete with Oracle's Customer Data Hub. I don't know how successful that product is. MDM hasn't sold well on the Hyperion side although everybody who gets it loves it.

There's basically no question that this is excellent news for us core Essbase folks and for those applications based on Essbase. The war between Essbase and Oracle's Express is ages old, and while performance wise, old hackers like myself and those on the Express side could get into lengthy debates, there was no question the Essbase was the more interoperable product. Now that it is plug-compatible with the new Yukon DTS, Oracle will have another way to kick MSFT around.

I say this is really bad news for Microstrategy. When the Oracle technical folks recognize what they'll be able to do with Oracle + Essbase, Microstrategy's whole high end BI story will crumble. In many ways this is a technical match made in heaven.

What's iffy is of course matters of marketing and product synergy. That is to say if I were a product marketing manager at Hyperion, I would get that resume out. Sullivan, in his letter to customers this morning declared in about as obvious as is possible to say that Hyperion sales reps have some security. So that whole organizational end of Hyperion is in jeopardy.

There have been a lot of us who have been worried about Hyperion development, ie without Gersten where would the engineering organization be. I think that Oracle would make a huge mistake to do anything but hang onto a lot of that engineering staff and keep them happy. Obviously System 9 integration will become a priority as product feature planning levels off. The good news is that there are not many major flaws in System 9.

Hyperion's tech support has taken a dive in recent years. The Oracle Developer Network will be a huge boost for that end of the business. If I were smart, I'd probably spin off a training business and start raking in dough for anybody out there who wants to become certified.

There's a lot more to think about, but on the whole there's basically one thing to know. There is now a new gorilla in the BI and BPM space.