Roman Stanek

Archive for May, 2008

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Cost of Offshore Development in the Czech Republic

In Czech on May 27, 2008 at 9:44 am

From time to time I am asked to help setup an offshore development site in the Czech Republic. This post should answer all future requests:

The first chart below shows the falling exchange rate of US Dollar (from 42 Czech Korunas per US$ in 2000 to 15,80 CZK/USD today) and the increased salary of Java developer (from 40 000 CZK to 85 000 CZK in the same period). This means that the cost of development increased 565% in dollar terms!!!

And not only are Czech developers more and more expensive. The competition for talent increased the expectations for employee benefits as well. Here are top ten employee benefits expected in the IT industry (My favorites are number 5 and 6!):

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Making Good Data Level 1 Platform of Global SOA

In SaaS on May 20, 2008 at 12:57 pm

I intentionally mixed two concepts in the title of this article. The first one is the concept of Internet platform as defined by Marc Andreessen here. And the second one is the Global SOA: the non-visual data and services portion of the World Wide Web. So what does it take to make Good Data a Level 1 platform and make it a good SOA citizen? Here is my list of interfaces:

Upstream APIs (REST/Atom):

Data integration processes access the following APIs to manage the data/metadata flow from the transactional systems into the hosted datawarehouse

- Physical model definition and management
- Bulk data import (CSV, XLS, XML)
- Event driven data load (feeds, ESBs)

Downstream APIs (REST/Atom/JavaScript):

Enterprise application (wikis, mashups, dashboards) use these APIs access the modeling, analytics and collaboration features of the platform

- Logical model definition and management (Attributes, Dimensions, Hierarchies)
- Report creation and execution
- Metrics definition and modification
- Collaboration: tagging, comments, search

Federation APIs

Support for OAuth, OpenID, and others.

I am sure this is not a complete list and I even wonder what BI/DataWarehousing features could be provided by Level 2 platform…

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Hypertransparency of information

In Work on May 16, 2008 at 11:34 am

The May issue of Harvard Business Review contains an interesting article on future of leadership: Leadership’s Online
Labs. The main assumption here is that decision making in global teams — partly composed of people from outside the institution, over whom a leader has no formal authority — is analogous to the leadership seen today in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (Eve Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft). And one of the main requirements for success of these geographically diverse groups is the “hypertransparency of information”:

Unlike a corporate dashboard that is located on a handful of computers at headquarters, with access limited to the senior executive team, these personal, view-as-you-go game cockpits give people in the field access to information as soon as it is available. That, in turn, allows game players to act on it without waiting for instructions from a guild leader. What’s more, the information allows players to assume impromptu leadership roles as needed.

I like the idea of calling our BI client the “impromptu leader’s dashboard”!


Relaxing and Enjoyable Threat

In Travel on May 15, 2008 at 11:24 am

I received the message below from BA earlier today:

Terminal 5 has new measures in place to improve security and avoid delays. Here is some important information you need to know about using the terminal to ensure you have a relaxing and enjoyable airport experience:

At Terminal 5, you must ensure that you pass through ticket presentation and Security and be ready to fly at least 35 minutes before your flight departs. If you miss this deadline, you will not be allowed onto your flight.

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BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS? Yes and no!

In SaaS on May 15, 2008 at 9:24 am

Can you agree and disagree with someone at the same time? The quote below comes from Rob Ashe, general manager of IBM’s business intelligence and performance management unit:

BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS. Every company is different because even if transaction systems are the same the decision making process is different. Unlike Netsuite or a CRM application where everyone does the same basic things, BI uses a different model every company. The one to many model doesn’t work.

And while I agree with Rob that it’s the “intelligence” part that makes hosted BI difficult it is not impossible to provide BI as a service. Capturing the data model and sharing it with users will be a core piece of Good Data…

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Five Cambridge Center

In Work on May 14, 2008 at 8:59 pm

Systinet moved to Five Cambridge Center (Kendall Square/MIT) back in 2002 and it was a great place for a hi-tech startup. No surprise, then, that Google moved to the same location six years later:

Google Cambridge
5 Cambridge Center, Floors 3-6
Cambridge, MA 02142

A2LL

In Work on May 12, 2008 at 9:55 pm

A2LL is the abbreviation of the German social services and unemployment software system, “Arbeitslosengeld II – Leistungen zum Lebensunterhalt“ (Unemployment money II – subsistence payments). It may be a strange name for a computer system but what really freaked me out is the architecture used for this huge German e-goverment project:

The system is based on 16 servers with 4 processors each, all running Linux. A Tomcat servlet container defines the graphical user interface. A web services framework from the company Systinet uses a server farm of approx. 200 Windows 2003 servers which run the application server developed by ProSoz. The application server was developed using Microsoft’s (D)COM technology and uses an Informix 9.4x database running on a Solaris machine containing 80 CPUs and a 300 GB Cache-RAM.

More about this explosive technology mix here. I don’t think we ever envisioned anything like this when we started Systinet…

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Skrbl

In Czech on May 7, 2008 at 12:59 pm

Vowel deficiency makes the Czech language a perfect source for Web 2.0 startup names. I wrote about it last summer but here comes another example: the name of online whiteboard tool Skrbl is just a shorter version of Czech Skrblik and it can be translated as miser, niggard, skinflint or Scrooge.

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Clouds over NYC

In SaaS on May 2, 2008 at 9:16 pm

I would never expect New York to be the cloud computing hotspot but two hot startups in the cloud space are actually based in NYC: 10gen and Appnexus.