...by Daniel Szego
quote
"On a long enough timeline we will all become Satoshi Nakamoto.."
Daniel Szego

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Notes on offline availability measures...


Considering the wider-spreading of cloud solutions nowadays and the sometimes still limited possibility of full scale online availability, it is important to define if a certain solution or software is available offline as well or not. Therefore we define the followings terminology and definitions.

Let s be a certain cloud solutions or software. Let Fall(s) be the number of all functionalities or services provided by the s cloud solution. Let Foffline(s) be the number of functionalities or services that are still available even if the cloud solution is offline. So we can define the offline capability of a cloud service as:

Coffline(s)Foffline(s) / Fall(s) 

The number of services that are available offline per the total number of services. 

Similarly we can define the amount of time until the cloud service can remain offline but working further, as cloud service availability.

Aoffline = the amount of time until a the cloud service can operate offline as well...

Sunday, April 17, 2016

The cloud computing and the battery...


Cloud technology generally supposes that you have valid and practically always live internet connections, similarly that all of the electronic devices suppose that you have some kind of an electricity somehow. Electricity itself is actually produced pretty well with the help of the highly effective infrastructure, however it is important to note that it was taking about a hundred years until the electrical infrastructure got so stable. Well with internet it is still not the fact, even sitting in the middle of one of the most developed country in the world, Zürich, does not automatically mean that you gave stable mobile intranet. Certainly there are some software that support offline availability, for a certain amount of time, with certain functionalities and somehow providing the possibility to synchronize, some when, somehow...

Well the original idea of cloud computing is a little bit ideal, you will be online always, I guess it will be taking a couple of years to be realized. Until that point it would be important to build some kind of a standardized ways for offline availability. Similarly as batteries for electricity : if your electricity system is down, you can use batteries or accumulators having certain characteristics, like kwh indicating how much can you operate something without the electrical network. So is it possible to define something similar to the inernet? How long and how far is an internet gadget or service operational without net? Is there perhaps a way to really define a "battery" in an Internet way ? Like simulating and storing a certain level of Transactions until the network is really back? 

Monday, April 4, 2016

Is it time to "sell short" on the on-premise SharePoint market ?


Well current trends show that on-premise SharePoint market is going down. Microsoft has been being communicating for years that there is only Office 365 planned on the long run. As still there is a version for SharePoint 2016 on premise, but a lot of integrated functionalities like MySite, OneDrive or search are provided rather (or only) in different hybrid cloud scenarios. Hence developer certifications are cancelled as well; there is only Office 365 in the future. It basically means that the SharePoint on-premise market will go down, not because there is no demand for the technology, just because Microsoft communicates so strongly and consequent: Firstly the experts and the partner companies will change expertise, concentrating rather on other technologies than SharePoint. Secondly, the end customers will recognise as well, even if there is a demand for the technology, there is not enough expertise on the market, there is not enough support from Microsoft and last but not least, most of the cool new features are only available in the cloud. So the market is falling...

So, what is gonna happen ? Certainly it is possible that everyone changes to the cloud, although I think there are gonna be companies that still want to make sure to have the data privacy. Perhaps there is gonna be sometimes a so called "black" or highly secured cloud, where really nobody is capable to get the data apart from the owner, but until only the standard scenarios exist, the only option will be for companies who want to store high privacy data is to build and host a private cloud, that is gonna be pretty much expensive.    

So is it possible not just quitting from the market, but really "sell short" in a stock exchange sense, meaning betting on the falling of the market and trying to make capital gain from the fall ? Well it is not typical to interpret "sell short" for a technology cycle, but I think it is not impossible. I can imagine two scenarios, focusing on the customers who still want to use internal collaboration and intranet solution with high data privacy and they are having SharePoint: 

a. Creating regional private hosting solutions, to host Office 365 private: well as it is certainly a solution, it is actually not sure how much and which scenarios will be from Microsoft supported. As it is surely possible to host in a private cloud Office 365, I am not sure if all functionalities or integration possibilities are supported. As an example, what about Azure Data Mining services or Cortana analytics ? It is pretty much questionable if something similar will be supported in a private cloud scenario. 

b. Start to rechange SharePoint with another technology, that surely will develop on-premise scenarios in the future as well. The process and the idea can be actually the same that Microsoft uses to attract SharePoint companies in the cloud. 
Let we find such a T technology that:
   - T can be good integrated with SharePoint
   - T provided on-premise solutions on a long run.
   - T provides collaboration, corporate intranet functionalities and possibly rapid application development capabilities a well.
   - T provides useful extensions to SharePoint. 
   - you can scale up and out T.
   - on a small scale T has got a moderated entry price.
   - T should not be from a no-name provider, otherwise nobody buys it.  
   - start sell to T with SharePoint integration in a way that new SharePoint functionalities are fully or partly realized on T.
   - As the SharePoint on-premise market falling start to re change or re implement existing functionalities  on T with or rather without SharePoint integration. That is the reason why rapid application development is important, you will never have the chance to get alive your SharePoint 2010 source code on another platform, you have to re implement the business applications. 
   - At the end, migrate everything to T, forgetting SharePoint.

Does anybody know T ?  

Sunday, April 3, 2016

The four horsemen of the IT (R)evolution


"Forget offshoring or near-shoring, machines and algorithms'r gonna be always cheaper...."


1.  TAXING Systems: The taxing systems actually punish pretty much the live work comparing to the capital gain. On the other hand there is no such "taxing" punishment for the industrial achievements. It Implies that software, machines, computers and algorithms will be always much cheaper than having live labor force and due to the taxing system and capitalistic competition, these solutions will be preferred.  

2. AUTOMATION and Robotisation: Every physical work that can be done by machines will be done by machines. Considering the current trends, automation, robotisation and internet of things, it can be pretty much.

3.  ARTIFICIAL Intelligence: Artificial intelligence has been evolving from decade and actually till this point we did not reach the level that can be seen in the science fiction movies. Despite there is a huge development, the go world champion has been beaten from algorithms, a digital assistant called Cortana is installed on each mobile device and AI support getting to be part of our daily life. It is of course questionable what can be exactly automatized, but it is sure everything that can be covered by AI algorithms will be covered by  AI algorithms.

4. THE Blockchain: The previous trends will be summarized by difference manifestations of the blockchain that enables automatic cache-flow systems, practically automatic companies or corporations, running hundred percent without humans.