Alan Kay on Basic Research in ICT

While listening to the fireside chat moderated by Paul Saffo at the Churchill Club event last night, I found Alan Kay’s displeasure with the lack of basic research being conducted in information and communication technologies both understandable and justified.  He made several points, though the few pieces of reportage I’ve seen didn’t quite pick up on them all.

• Basic research in ICT was in great part a byproduct of the Cold War, which made available significant amounts of funding
• Basic research in ICT, particularly from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), benefitted enormously from the stewardship of J.C.R. Licklider and like-minded technologist-managers, who understood the ‘success-to-fail’ ratio and how best to organize project support.
• The role of private industry in basic research was significant, and Alan referenced the minimal sums of money spent by Xerox on the work of PARC.
• In ‘stepping up’ to address basic research in ICT, companies like Xerox (and, might I add, Bell Labs and IBM) were successful when they put the same kind of evangelistic and experienced management that Bob Taylor brought to Xerox.
• Basic research in the private, corporate sphere was and remains (in those few places it still exists) poorly managed and shackled by inappropriate metrics and outright fear of causing industry disruption - arguably the most important outcome of basic research.
• Corporate support in basic research appears destined to be a generally fruitless endeavor without a very significant mind- and management-shift.

Despite the ‘grass roots’ mentality and volunteerism found in today’s open source / ‘maker’ ethos, nothing in Alan’s opinion seems to compare to those few decades of work shepherded by those who (deservedly) should be considered visionary technologist managers. 

The point about the dedication of funds to basic research in ICT and its consideration in the scheme of things was brought home to me still more forcefully this morning when I noticed Simon Wardley’s reference to this article: Apple spends more on patents than R&D after Jobs patent vow. 

Here’s part of David Needle’s TabTimes post on last night’s conversation. 

Kay said only a few dozen people at PARC worked on the Alto and even though it was part of a pure research effort, it created “trillions of dollars” of wealth, i.e. the personal computer industry.

But he said there’s been little in the way of true tech innovation since then because the funding for basic research has dried up.

“The past 30 years have been completely mundane,” said Kay. “It’s all been scaling (of old technology) and Angry Birds.”

Kay was joined onstage by Vishal Sikka, Head of Technology and Innovation at enterprise software giant SAP, and tech forecaster Paul Saffo, Managing Director of Foresight at Discern Analytics.

Sikka agreed not enough was being done in the way of basic research, but said companies had to find ways to encourage creative ideas that could take years to develop, but would be worth nurturing even if many of them failed.

 In reading it and reflecting on the evening, Alan Kay's criticism and displeasure appears on the surface to be recognizable as that of ‘angry old men’ who romanticize their past glories and decry the present.  I have to admit, there is some of that in Alan’s comments, and it was palpable last night.  That doesn’t mean, however, that he’s not justified in that point of view.  Alan Kay is hardly one to restrict his mental efforts to re-living the past.  Thanks, Alan.

IBM's embrace of OpenStack and 'open source': OSLC, TOSCA and ...?

David Lindquist’s post in IBM’s Thoughts on Cloud blog (made in conjunction with the IBM OpenStack announcement), is an excellent high-level explanation of the rationale behind IBM’s decisions.  It is telling for at least two reasons, and notable for what might be construed as missing pieces.

Along with the whole-hearted endorsement and embrace of OpenStack, IBM has called attention to two open initiatives.  Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration(OSLC) is an initiative of which I personally was unaware until Sunday’s presentations at the IBM Pulse Open Cloud Summit. The objective of the initiative is to standardize the way that software lifecycle tools can share data.  Not just an admirable goal, but one of the necessary preconditions of a truly open, multi-vendor approach to operations, administration, management and provisioning of cloud components.

Lindquist calls out the IBM support of OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (aka TOSCA).  IBM has started (and will no doubt continue) to make a strong case for the use of LinkedData and OSLC in combination with TOSCA to ease the job of integration and federation within the cloud ecosystems.   Again, it’s nothing less than what one would expect from IBM, a company with a long history that values systems management.  

From David Lindquist, For cloud computing, open means agile

Together with the OpenStack Foundation, Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and OASIS, we are helping to lead open cloud standards and open source initiatives. Creating an industry rallying point to drive interoperability is accelerating delivery and lowering costs, while optimizing the infrastructure layers and enabling management of the entire lifecycle to support agility with integrity. Further, workload portability and optimization supports scale, security, recovery, resiliency and agility in the development and delivery of new business applications and business models.

…

Further, to support the interoperability and portability of workloads across clouds we are contributing and supporting the OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications known asTOSCA. To drive the full lifecycle of design, development, and delivery we architect our cloud solutions with Linked Data and OSLC. By leveraging OSLC we are creating an open environment to easily integrate and federate our capabilities as well as third-party tools to support DevOps, Continuous Delivery pipelines, orchestration and automation.

By opening access to data though OSLC, we can quickly pull together solutions that span the complete lifecycle, provide dashboards with insights driven by analytics, and link information across applications and infrastructures to support subject matter experts, all with a compelling user experience. With OSLC we have been able to leverage the extensive capabilities and data across our products to provide consumable interfaces. These examples include storage management, application and infrastructure monitoring, and control desk solutions. With this architecture and these interfaces, users can easily access information across systems, using mobile access, and compose dashboards with the insights their businesses need.

What seems to be missing, however, is a less well-known, but arguably vital initiative known as the OASIS Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP).  As expressed in its charter, 

CAMP defines interfaces for self-service provisioning, monitoring, and control. Based on REST, CAMP is expected to foster an ecosystem of common tools, plugins, libraries and frameworks, which will allow vendors to offer greater value-add.

That seems to be a logical addition to the effort by IBM. As important, perhaps, is the adoption and recognition of the LinkedData and OSLC work within the CAMP TC.  I know, after a number of informal conversations with participants in both OASIS TCs that the IBM emphasis has created new energy around OSLC for CAMP, and increased interest in seeing IBM attend to the work of CAMP.  

(Truth in advertising:  I am a participant in the CAMP Technical Committee and an observer in the TOSCA TC.) 

AWS re:Invents Workflow and Hybrid Storage

While the news about AWS RedShift had the 'drama' and novelty, it implies an attention to enterprise customer requirements that is ALSO found in an important, but less heralded, service and a ground-breaking partnership. 

Data Pipeline: The workflow services with which users can create a variety of reasonably straightforward data processing workflows, with all of the major AWS services and their 'manageable' objects, are now capable of being included in a work flow.  While it won't be the tool of choice for the expert DBA, it will be appropriate for the work-group user that signs up to use AWS rather than the Corporate IT resource.  Over time, this will become more sophisticated.

NetApp Private Storage for AWS: This 'joint infrastructure' offering allows customers to utilize both private and public cloud resources, and is one of the only services I have seen that builds on the AWS Direct Connect capabilities announced last year.  This starts to address a set of requirements that have been called out by enterprise IT related to safe and performant data storage (and data transport) from on-premise data center to managed data center to AWS.  It begins to take into account the data residency and data privacy issues about which enterprise IT has been most vocal.

That said, as important as the AWS private storage services is the way in which AWS must now address the issues of contractual responsibility and liability of AWS data 'stewardship.' Similarly, AWS owes 'the enterprise' some clarity about the respective contractual responsibilities of AWS and its enterprise customers when using AWS' multi-tenant resources.   When these issues are addressed to the satisfaction of enterprise IT hard-cases, the compliance auditors, and PII regulators, the resulting explosion of cloud usage in hybrid environments by enterprise customers will dwarf the last two years' growth of AWS… and that's saying something.

Splunk IPO - The Joys of Data Exhaust

Since I first heard about Splunk (probably in early 2005) I found the whole notion of using the log files as a source of actionable information to be a perfect exemplar of the 'data exhaust' principle.  To see them do so well over the course of the past 6 years and top it off with this IPO makes me very happy for all involved ... kudos (particularly to Michael Baum who led the charge in the company's infancy)!

I've spoken about this for years, but have never done justice to the idea in a really thoughtful post.  But, don't worry... I won't do that here.  At least, not yet.  

The fundamental idea is: Extract value from the operational data generated by the transactions that are (ostensibly) the primary business function.  If the situation is really an exemplar of the 'data exhaust' principle, the by-product becomes more valuable than the 'primary' business.  

I've enjoyed (and benefitted from) a few businesses that executed on this model.  Instill (acquired in 2008 by iTradeNetwork) was one of the first SaaS companies on the planet, offering order entry and order management to the biggest buyers of food -- the big restaurants, chains and institutional food operations (e.g. schools, hospitals).  They were so prevalent in the institutional food business that they became the trusted source of market data and a means of verifying whether pricing triggers built into national sales contracts had been reached.  (Hey... if you're Olive Garden, buying 43 gazillion metric tons of grated parmesan a year, you want to know when you've hit the 40 gazillion tier, and are saving a buck on every ton!)

But, back to Splunk.  They've paved the way for an incredibly valuable set of companies which now use many of the same principles for different aspects of event analysis, capacity planning, configuration, accounting and security in both conventional data centers and infrastructure services (aka IaaS cloud). They've definitely delivered value to their customers and their investors.  So, ... good on you, Splunk.

Splunk IPO kills, lives up to expectations : GigaOm

The widely anticipated Splunk IPO has not disappointed, with shares up nearly 90 percent from their opening price at one point Thursday. This initial excitement is hardly surprising given the interest in big data in general, and Splunk in particular. The term ?big data? refers to massive amounts of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data that is generated not only by standard-issue computers but sensors and all manner of devices and machinery not to mention social networks. This is information that?many companies want to winnow for useful insights. Splunk?s technology searches, analyses and visualizes that data. Customers include Bank of America, Comcast, Salesforce.com and Zynga.