Reduced deployment costs - the real futureproofing

Apple continues to supply lessons to the enterprise industry. Speed as a feature is certainly one that has spread to the SaaS community.

Externally driving configuration management and document storage, as iCloud has planned, offers some very interesting possibilities.

Consider the costs of a new computer or server.   The vast majority of costs are incurred through new configuration, new software, and testing.  Bare metal imaging doesn't resolve that much since the new hardware might need different drivers than the old hardware.  Truly reducing deployment costs of new hardware - as Apple has done with the Mac line, can increase hardware sales while reducing overall costs of the consumer.

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The Network is the Computer Redux

There has been a promise - which has mostly been fulfilled - that PaaS and SaaS would free customers from a variety of system maintenance and configuration management tasks they once spent lots of time and money on.

I believe that virtualization of CPU and Storage resources is ushering in a new level of efficiency for application maintenance and deployment.

A great deal of resources have been spent creating homogeous deployment envirorments but applications has asymetrical requirements.  In addition, commercial applications often have reference deployment architectures (database, security, application server, etc) that are quite different from your deployment architecture.  Even even you standardize on a vendor or architecture, there are incompatibilities and differences between versions.

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Virtualization for SMB, an Oxymoron?

Like many small businesses, Ambleside has a variety of applications spread over a set of desktop computers.  I don't think our case is that atypical.

We have 6 desktop workstations of various vintages, a small windows home appliance doing backup, 2 laptops, and a bunch of iPhones and iPads.  We run accounting (quickbooks), materials management (fishbowl), source control (SVN), CAD repository (D-Tools) and requirements management (JIRA + Greenhopper) in production.  Like some, but probably not that many, we started moving towards Linux 18 months ago

Oh, and our electrical bill for the computers alone has been running $150/month.  When a key workstation died, I knew I had some rebuilding so I went ahead and started consolidating.  I started with ESXi (it's free) but got frustrated by storage initialization.  I tried out MSFT Hyper-V but it's practically impossible to run on a single machine.  I went back to ESXi, figured out the formatting issues and started migration.

Each machine had VMwares P2V tool run on it.  Process took close to 20 hours per machine.

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Why does product search still suck?

In the past few years I've been away from enterprise and commerce search, it seems like things have stood still.

Hadoop, Lucene, Solr, Nutch - all very cool.  But where are the taxonomy tools? Has anyone improved on the Potters Wheel update we did at Cohera?

Why do I say this? Lets pick on one site:

Run "Kids Hockey Movie" on Netflix.com

It doesn't return "Mighty Ducks" on the first page.  Ack!

Take a look at slots 4+5 - Scary Movie and Garbage Pail Kids!

Why? Seems like a weak synonym library or a broken content process.  Or can Solr not handle this? I doubt it.

Looking at the content, the description of "The Mighty Ducks" doesn't contain the common dictionary synonyms for kids.  They are a "peewee" hockey team.  The merriam webster doesn't show peewee as a synonym for kids nor is the inverse listed.

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Hulu Plus + Pandora on Tivo - "We have a pulse!"

Everyone wants to be the box....But if there is only one, it really needs to have broadcast TV.

Tivo, on it's deathbed for the past decade it seems like, pulled one out of the air in my opinion.  We got Pandora last week - ho hum given their lame music player but it's progress...And this week we got Hulu Plus.  We'll have to see how the back catalog of Netflix shapes up next to Hulu.  For 1st run stuff, Hulu on Tivo seems redundant - just record it...Still, it's nice to see signs of life from Tivo.