Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 25
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has been in existence since 1901--responsible for promoting economic development via standards setting and measuring. Vital work, to be sure, but seemingly dull, at least to the non-measurement scientists among us. But now something really intriguing his happening. The onrush of the smart grid, cloud computing, green energy, sustainable manufacturing, e-health, and a new wave of cybersecurity threats has suddenly placed NIST in the middle of some of the most crucial technology advances of our era. One result: it's a great time to be Pat Gallagher, the newly appointed NIST director. "NIST has never been asked to perform such significant, high-visibility roles as it is now. Its day has come," he says.
Think about it this way. NIST is responsible for making sure the physical and technical interfaces in the nation's infrastructure fit together well. In the past, it concentrated on things like fire hydrant connections, so any fire hose could connect to any hydrant. Now it's handling digital systems of all types. Its role is becoming ever more vital as the world is increasingly networked.
The smart electrical grid is an example of the kind of role NIST is playing these days. Gallagher and his colleagues have come up with a three-phase approach that they hope will hasten the adoption of smart grid technologies and the energy savings they promise.
Phase I: NIST has been convening all of the parties with economic or business interests in transitioning to smart grids. In the past, most of the players in any standards discussions were in a single industry, but because of the importance of info tech in these initiatives, new players are coming to the table. So NIST's role as a convener is important. It's bringing people together and helping them identify the standards that already exist that can be used or adapted. Then it's working to identify the gaps and help to define the system architecture that needs to be put into place. This phase has been underway for 6 months.
Phase II: It's putting together a permanent governance model for ongoing standards and measurement deliberations. Last week it announced the formation of a panel to oversee the development of standards--with 20 members elected by companies, trade groups, and government agencies. Members include Google's Vint Cerf, Intel's Matthew Theall, and the Consumer Electronics Association's Brian Markwalter.
Phase III: Getting the participants in smart grid initiatives to agree on measurement techniques and testing procedures. You want to make sure that devices and digital systems really do interoperate--that the interfaces really work. This is key, says Gallagher: "The real challenge isn't mal intent; it's the complexity of the system. When you put three and four devices on a network that have to talk to each other, with different ways of talking to each other, the complexity increases so fast that you can have 'emergent behaviors'--new behaviors you didn't anticipate when you look at the components in the system piece by piece." This phase also starts now.
Gallaher's approach points to one of the big challenges emerging in the 21st Century. Because of the application of digital networks to most every physical and electronic system, everything is increasingly connecting with everything else. And all those systems have to interoperate. So you don't just have to understand the inner workings of an individual system; you have to understand the inter workings of intersecting systems. So I'm talking about systems of systems.
This stuff is crazy complex.
But I'll predict this: The nations and companies and individuals that come to understand the interrelatedness of systems and take problems on holistically will be thriving a couple of decades from now. The ones who try to handle things the old fashioned way will lose out.
Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 24
...... and brings plenty of bugs with it.
The trend has been a long time coming, but corporations are finally caving in and okaying the use of free or mostly-free social networking Web sites as in-the-office software applications. Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter, Google Apps, etc. are becoming the everyday tools of the knowledge worker--elbowing aside stodgy programs like Microsoft Outlook and the like. Corporate IT managers have been forced to accept the inevitable and lower their guards. Unfortunately, though, allowing workers unfettered use of social networking and Web 2.0 sites is like leaving the back door open on a restaurant. A lot of bugs are coming in.
Here's the problem: Traditional firewalls are fairly good at filtering out ordinary Web threats, but they're not good at managing Web 2.0 stuff. Enter Palo Alto Networks. The three-year-old Silicon Valley startup has leapfrogged legacy firewall makers such as CheckPoint and Cisco with its next-generation firewall technology. It inspects digital traffic coming from the Web into a corporate network and not only understands what's in the data flow but also recognizes the applications associated with it. This level of penetration allows corporate tech managers to set policies that block certain risky Web 2.0 activities, such as Facebook Chat, and limit other activities to people in the organization who need to do them. For instance, programmers who use the BitTorrent program to download software code can be permitted to do so while other employees can be blocked from using the program. "This is about dealing with the negatives of companies opening up to social media," says Rene Bonvanie, who heads worldwide marketing at Palo Alto Networks.
Bonvanie knows all about the risks and rewards of social media. Until a couple of months ago, he headed marketing at Serena Software, where he helped lead a major shift in software strategy. Over the past couple of years, the company has dropped most of its traditional software and is using Facebook, Google Apps, and other Web services instead. When Serena began the switchover, there wasn't much in the way of malicious code in the social media world. That's not true anymore. A prime example is Koobface, which targets the users of Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and Twitter. Another is the spam program being run by My Mafia Family, an online game, which gets its tentacles into people's Twitter accounts and the won't let got. At one point, the company had to close off all external file sharing via Google.
There are lots of Web 2.0 services that are vulnerable to being abused by Black Hat hackers and other unscrupulous operators. Palo Alto Networks does occasional studies of the aggregate traffic of its 600 corporate customers, and the survey done in September found 202 Web 2.0 services inside corporations, 70% of them capable of transferring files and 28% of them known to propagate malware.
As employees use more and more Web 2.0 stuff, the threats will get worse and worse. It just goes to show once again: Free software doesn't necessarily come without costs.
Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 23
When Google launched Orkut in 2004, the social networking site seemed to have the potential to eventually grow to rival MySpace and Facebook in size and influence. That didn't happen. Early on, Netizens from Brazil became such avid users of the site that many people from other countries felt out of place and settled elsewhere. These days, according to Wikipedia, about half of Orkut's users are Brazilian and another 18% are Indian. (Apparently Indians aren't put off by Portuguese. What could that mean?) The first social networking site that seemed positioned to be global didn't work out that way.
Now, along comes an upstart with truly global ambitions. It's XIHA Life Launched last year, the site was designed from the ground up by a young Finn living in China, Jani Penttinnen, to be multilingual and to bridge between languages and cultures. Users submit content or chat in their own languages and other people can translate the discrete chunks using Google's translation technology, which is deeply embedded in the site. Today, the site has 600,000 registered users from 208 countries (No country accounts for more than 5% of the total traffic) and about 1 million unique visitors per month. Small, yes, but it's only a year old. Penttinnen, a soft spoken guy with an elfin persona, has ambitious growth targets: 5 million in the next year and 30 million in the next five years.
This site has great potential in its globalocity. But it's not for everyone. It's a magnet for people who see themselves as global citizens or who want to reach across the national chasms. (A group that's about 70% female.) For some, the site offers the possibility of developing online pen pals. For others, it's mostly about reaching out to people in places where they're planning to travel or where they're temporarily working to get the skinny on what they should see and do. A smaller group is hooking up with people willing to help them learn a foreign language. "We try to get and keep the 'right' people--the people who are focused on our themes," says Penttinen. To help steer things in the right direction, he's rounding up a network of expats who will produce high-quality blogs about their experiences--in exchange for small fees. (If you think you have the right stuff, contact Jani@xihalife.com)
Penttinnen, 33, has a personal history befitting his occupation. He came to the US in the early 2000s as a game software programmer when he was hired by EA's Westwood Studios in Las Vegas. After EA closed the studio in 2003, he launched his own tiny mobile gaming company, XIHA Games, with a dab of angel funding. He tried to keep costs ultra-low by outsourcing much of the programming to China, but discovered that remote management of software projects didn't work very well. So he moved to China and managed a small team of programmers. A new problem emerged: To make it in the mobile gaming business, he needed to create versions of his games for each handset operating system--a huge amount of work that was unattractive to him. Fortunately, he had a hobby that he could turn into a business. Back in 2006, he had launched a crude social networking Web site aimed at an international and multilingual audience. In late 2007, he and his Chinese wife, Wen, moved to Finland and launched an early version of XIHA Life.
This could be one of those really good ideas that never grows up, though. XIHA Life doesn't have much of a business model. Today, Penttinnen, collects affiliate fees for selling mobile games and connecting people with travel sites. That won't support a big operation. Fortunately, he has low costs. The whole thing runs on a single server (Highly optimized software) So it seems likely that XIHA Life will have a chance to succeed. In the meantime, it will be well worth watching to see how a truly global community develops. It could teach valuable lessons even if it doesn't become the next big thing. And, for travel-related businesses, it could turn into a valuable advertising and sales venue.
By the way, xiha means "fun" or "happy" in Mandarin and "Hip-Hop" in Cantonese.
Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 18
Silicon Graphics Inc., or SGI, is one of the storied Silicon Valley names. Co-founded by Jim Clark (who later co-founded Netscape) in 1981, SGI was a pioneer in powerful desktop engineering workstations and, later, super-powerful servers. The company got hammered by Sun Microsystems and other competitors and became a shadow of its former self after the dot-com bust. It filed for bankruptcy in 2006, limped along in a zombie state, and then was picked up in May for about $25 million by Rackable Systems--which bought it out of a second bankruptcy proceeding. Rackable renamed itself Silicon Graphics International to squeeze the remaining brand equity out of the Silicon Graphics name. Mark Barrenechea, a former Oracle and CA executive who took over as CEO of Rackable in 2006, has the task of reviving a faded icon. "It's humbling to have this incredible brand under my stewardship," he told me recently.
He's got a terribly tough job. Only two tech icons have brushed with death and come back to become powerful factors in the industry again: Apple and IBM. One of Barrenechea's hurdles is the name itself. It cuts both ways. While there's brand equity in SGI, the name also has the odor of failure lingering around it. Do tech managers really want to buy from a faded icon? While SGI's 6000 existing customers may want to stick with the name they know and the technology they have adopted, it seems unlikely that new customers will rush to sign up.
So the value of the name is a question mark.
Barrenechea is depending on other factors, namely new product development and the trend winds, to power the new SGI forward. The trend winds are blowing in his direction. Rackable specialized in producing thousands of small computer servers that are mounted on racks in data centers--so it's benefiting from the growing popularity of cloud computing. On the product side, the new SGI is starting to deliver new computers that were already underway before the merger was completed, and which strengthen its hand in a couple of important markets.
First, a month ago, it introduced a new line of deskside supercomputers for use by university researchers, national laboratories, and product designers. These babies take up very little space (one foot by two feet) but pack up to 80 microprocessor cores.
Second, on Monday, the company announced a new generation of server products, called Altix UV, aimed at supercomputing applications, large-scale databases, and data analytics. The clustered machines take advantage of x86 processors, the Linux operating system, and shared memory--so they're economical. SGI hopes to differentiate itself with a proprietary and ultra-fast interconnect system linking the servers. This marks Barrenechea's attempt to keep SGI relevant in the high-performance computing market--where he hopes to collect 30% to 40% of the company's revenues.
SGI has a solid position in supercomputing. One of its systems, nicknamed Pleiades, located at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, ranked sixth on the Top500 semi-annual ranking of supercomputers that was released on November 15. Bill Thigpen, engineering branch chief in NASA's advanced supercomputing center at Ames, says he and his colleagues chose SGI's technology when they installed the machine last year because "we got the most computing for our dollar." Also, the supercomputing center provides shared services for all of NASA, so it needs general-purpose machines that can handle a wide variety of software. That's what SGI sells. Thigpen calls the merger of SGI and Rackspace a good marriage. "It's good for the industry. By having multiple vendors in the space, everybody benefits. And having multiple healthy vendors is even better," he says.
But the crowded competitive landscape is going to be a major challenge for SGI. It faces supercomputing giants HP and IBM, an on-rushing Dell, and a strong niche player in Cray, which captured two of the top three positions in the Top500 ranking. Sun Microsystems is fading, true enough. But in a business where size matters a lot, SGI will have a difficult time keeping up with the giants.
I don't know enough about SGI and its markets to expertly handicap its chances, but, based on what I know of the industry I'm going to have to wish Barrenechea luck. He'll need it.
Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 16
I was pleased to get an e-mail message today from Online Colleges.Net telling me that Globespotting ranked in the top 10, overall, among blogs that appeal to international business students. Here's the list: http://tinyurl.com/ykvdamb
A lot of the people who post comments on Globespotting are angry about one thing or another, which, of course, disappoints me. I hope my blog can build bridges across cultures and continents.
