Search results matching tag 'Emerging technologies '

Central Nervous System for the Earth

Charlie Bess — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:45:00 GMT

The New York Times had an article on HP labs activities to gather information on a massive scale. It's a research and development program to show an example of building a planet-wide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors." This kind of sensor network is one of the enablers of the age of abundance of data, I've mentioned before. Sensing is one of the low hanging fruit of nano-technology so we'll see more of it in the future. Of course, the use of cloud computing to maximize the value from that data is key as well.

Here is an article from the labs that includes an interview with Stan Williams on the activity.

Companies will use similar techniques in the future to develop a deeper understanding of what is going on within and around their business. A good example of where this is going on today is smart grid within the energy industry. It allows for a more finely grained understanding and proactive use of information by the supply and demand chain to improve efficiency as control consumption.

A whole other kind of cloud computing for the 2012 Olympics

Charlie Bess — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:48:00 GMT

This article from the BBC describes a huge piece of infrastructure being proposed for the London Olympics.

"A giant "digital cloud" that would "float" above London's skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.

The construction would include 120 m (400 ft) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data."

This big project promises to be funded entirely by micro-payments from the public (which would also determine its final size), and be completely self-powered, relying on a combination of solar power and regenerative braking from the lifts in the towers.

I wonder: What kind of zoning laws they have in London? If this is built how long it would stay up? It's a good think that England has relatively mild weather. I can't even imagine this kind of structure surviving a Dallas thunderstorm. It would likely be in Louisiana before long.

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Three ways to thrive

Charlie Bess — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:35:00 GMT

Jim Miller and Mateen Greenway (a couple of other fellows here at HP) just posted an article on hp.com about Three Ways to Thrive in an Uncertain Economic Upturn. These are a different perspective of some of the same issues Jean and I talked about in our Innovation During a Downturn podcast a few weeks back.

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Web 2.0 four years later and five years out

Charlie Bess — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:19:00 GMT

There is a good interview of Tim O'Reilly that validated many of the posts we've made in this blog over the last 5 years. He also published a white paper that goes into more details.

The way business value is generated in the future will be changing, as we have the intersection of sensors and edge computing with large databases of information and context. The kinds of skills needed by the personnel will be changing as well. As value is generated by having people focus on the unique aspects of the business instead of being involved in "normal". Some may think this mimics science fiction, but really it will just become the new normal.

The interview provides some good examples and greater understanding of a holistic view of the intersection of technologies that we'll likely see coming out of this downturn.

Are the drivers for a cloud data center all that different than for a traditional data center?

Charlie Bess — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:15:00 GMT

A colleague asked some of us here: “Does the enterprise data center as we know it needs to change?“

My immediate thought was “Of course it needs to change!” The typical raised floor data center is filled with isolated hardware running independently managed operating systems. These environments are important for many organizations but are not compatible with the cloud data center.

The parking lot of the typical traditional data center has more infrastructure needed by the cloud data centre than the traditional data center. We can drop containers of computing that are connected in the open spaces of the parking lot — something that can’t be done in the traditional data center.

For the cloud data center there is a need space to have homogeneous environments that can be scrubbed clean during a refresh — another tasks that is almost never done in an traditional data center, since removing a cable can have unintended side effects on the other machines that remain behind.

The big problem for cloud is getting the data to the processing. These new high-bandwidth solutions (e.g. 10GB Ethernet) facilitate that movement. They also facilitate new, more dynamic configurations of processing environments. The traditional data center was designed around scarce computing resources that are protected from themselves as well as other computing resources. In a cloud environment, the computing resources are fungible as well as fault tolerant and it is the connection that must be maintained. This is a shift in mentality as well as support structure – a fundamentally different driver.

Taxonom

Charlie Bess — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:04:00 GMT

I was in a discussion the other day with HP's research lead Prith Banerjee. One of the research areas he talked about was Taxonom a data classification SaaS. This project is focused on deriving taxonomies from data.

This is always an area I find fascinating, since it is having the computers automate a tasks that is normally done by experts. Experts of course can later look at this and validate the data associations or look through it for unexpected structure.

There are a number of industries that could benefit from this kind of solution. This is one of HP's many XaaS activities.

Interview with HP Fellows: A prime time for innovation

Charlie Bess — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:52:00 GMT

A few times on this blog I've talked about the use of the downturn as a jumping off point for innovation and advantage. The other day Jean Lehmann and I were interviewed by about why now is a prime time for innovation. I've put a link to the MP3 file here.

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StreamInsight – pulling CEP upstream?

Charlie Bess — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:40:00 GMT

Last month Microsoft StreamInsight went public. This software provides a platform for developing and deploying complex event processing applications based on recognizing patterns and enabling an organization to act upon them. "Its high-throughput stream processing architecture and the familiar .NET-based development platform enable developers to quickly implement robust and highly efficient event processing applications. Typical event stream sources include data from manufacturing applications, financial trading applications, Web analytics, or operational analytics. StreamInsight enables you to develop CEP applications that derive immediate business value from this raw data by lowering the cost to extract, analyze, and correlate the data and by allowing you to monitor, manage, and mine the data for conditions, opportunities, and defects almost instantly."

Complex event processing (CEP) is something I used to interact with the Tandem folks (ZLE) on back in the mid 90s. In the mid part of this decade, it generated a lot of hype and then fell into the hype cycle Trough of Disillusionment. Hopefully tools like StreamInsight will help drive in back up the slope of enlightenment, using the significantly more powerful computer resources available today. I fully expect this kind of pattern recognition to be built into most cloud services.

Enterprise Architectures role in combating cloud sprawl

Charlie Bess — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:25:00 GMT

In a recent article in Computerworld there was a discussion of the phenomenon of cloud computing expanding uncontrollably in an enterprise. Cloud was compared to the client/server and departmental computing shift that took place in the late 80s and 90s. I agree that this is a concern, but as presented the argument was focused too much on an internal IT orientation. An organization's shift to Cloud computing is not about hardware -- that is now someone else's concern. I've tried to stop using the term cloud computing, since many people shift to thinking about hardware at that point and instead talk about cloud techniques or cloud architectures.

A primary issue with cloud a need to understand how business value is generated (when, where...) for the enterprise and how to get the information in and out of the organization securely and reliably, without giving up the flexibility to move to another service provider at a later date. Some people think about getting their data into a service provider but not about what to do when requirements and capabilities shift or another commodity service provider offers a better approach at a later date. As you move up to higher levels of cloud technologies these issues can be much harder to overcome.

Being business goal oriented is of primary importance -- if you're not focused on the corporate goals it doesn't matter how many new compute cycles can be brought on line. There are numerous issues that CIOs and IT personnel are familiar with like: service (data and process) integration, security and enterprise data management... These are part of any viable Enterprise Architecture and the IT organization can help the business by providing structure and insight. These issues in the EA space have been defined via standards efforts like TOGAF from The Open Group and the issues classified by techniques like the Zachman framework.

Just because an organizations shifts to a cloud service, it does not mean that all these concepts will be thrown out. Client/server and Web techniques didn't make everything known about computer and business operations before their introduction irrelevant, cloud is an evolutional change from the business perspective. Cloud is part of a next wave of computing but only a part.

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens?

Charlie Bess — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:29:00 GMT

A week or so back I did a blog entry on augmented reality possibilities, and in this month's IEEE Spectrum there is an article on the placing displays right on the eye. This is done by having the display and possibly sensors integrated with a contact lens. Although Terminator view displays can't be done right now, the article describes efforts to display simple but important information like glucose levels for diabetics or ambient noise level for the deaf.

Not sure what implications there are on business but it will likely have some interesting possibilities.

If a display integrated with the human body is linked up to smart fiber cameras that are integrated into our clothes some fascinating sixth sense possibilities develop.

Some people think that there are some interesting possibilities for displays integrated with clothing as well but I'd hate to see someone hack my eye like the clothes in that article. It would definitely get my attention though.