IBM Mainframes on Linux
January 6, 2010
Behold IBM’s zSeries mainframes [yep, it is a 404 error. I just wanted to provide a reminder that IBM makes it tough to locate its product information when pushing marketing ideas without communicating with the technical writers in the affected engineering unit. The second link here points you to support, which is the real reason for the Linux on mainframes play.] running Linux. Now you won’t be using one of these installations at Starbuck’s to check your email. In fact, you may wonder why Beyond Search is writing about an IBM mainframe. Well, I like mainframes, having worked on an ITRC search project decades ago and then some other, more modest undertakings on the Bellcore MVS TSO environment when the Baby Bells had to keep track of what each did with one another.
Linux on zSeries opens up a brave new world for search. I must admit that world is a little out of step with the sorts of computing infrastructures I track, but IBM has its own symphony. Goose honks don’t matter at all.
This is a a testudo. One can mount a surface-to-air missile on the top of the formation, using the shields as a base. The question is, “Why?” Why not put the missile installation on the ground and avoid creating an anachronistic kludge? Image source: http://ferrelljenkins.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/soldiers_54sm.jpg
Navigate to “Pity the Poor Mainframe Salesman Scraping by on Cheap Linux”. The idea is that Linux eliminates a big chunk of the cost of working with mainframe systems. I think IBM is hoping that Linux experts will see the mainframe as the ideal vehicle for goosing [no pun intended] performance of some applications. The article explains:
With Linux, Blue figures it stands a better chance of moving iron, noting that the Linux capacity it shipped in the last two years was up 100% and that more than 3,000 of the 6,300 applications available on the System z platform are Linux-based. The two shiny new Enterprise Linux Servers, based on a special Linux processor known as an IFL or Integrated Facility for Linux, start at $212,000 for an entry-level two-processor model with three years worth of maintenance thrown in and go up over a million bucks from there for configurations with 10 or 64 IFLs.
What strikes me as interesting is that there is an assumption that a Linux wizard will be able to deal with the zSeries plumbing, its hardware, and some of those IBM oddities. Last week, we tore down an IBM server and counted five different fans, each with a proprietary connector. These puppies were not repairable; they were FRUs, or field replaceable units. How much does it cost to get an IBM service tech to drive over and order the device, go back to the IBM office, and then drive back to put the gizmo in. Some of the engineering of these mainframes requires a tear down to get to certain jumpers. Now the tear down isn’t difficult if you have some familiarity with IBM engineering logic for mainframes. A Linux wizard more familiar with pancakes from HP will be stumped. DASD configuration? Well, that is also a bit of work which begins with special screws, special housings, special cables, and – well – you get the idea.
I think that IBM is using external motivators in its labs these days. The IBM wizards put in their time and come up with quasi innovations. The intrinsic innovators at other outfits approach performance and stability in quite different ways.
I think that the idea of running Lucene or Solr on a zSeries is interesting. I wouldn’t mind having a couple of zSeries machines, a petabyte of DASD storage, and some time to run my test corpus on the gizmo. My hunch is that I could achieve equivalent velocity with some commodity hardware, a couple of Drobos, and some time. I can even rig white box servers to die quietly allowing back up servers to keep on trucking. If I need real speed, I could make a couple of phone calls and tap the engineering expertise of the folks at Coveo, Exalead, or Perfect Search, among others. Each company delivers sizzling performance via different engineering routes.
IBM is becoming more like the Burroughs Corporation. There are still D825s kicking around, and I ran across a person who told me that a small publishing company was running a Burroughs B25 with he BTOS operating system. You can still get support through Unisys I would guess. The problem is that the technical world is moving forward and grafting Linux to a mainframe is like mounting a surface-to-air missile to the shields of Roman soldiers in the testudo formation. It can be done, but why do anachronisms when innovations are much more interesting.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 6, 2009
A freebie. I will report this unpleasant situation to the War College which finds the testudo a useful tactic to discuss with young officers.
Blue Chip Firm Enters For Fee Portal Market
January 5, 2010
Short honk: Navigate to “New Booz Allen Analysis Site Persia-House.com Launched”. The government spin off of the consulting firm is now in the for fee portal market. The idea is to apply real intelligence techniques to information and allow anyone to purchase access. You can take a peek at the portal until January 31, 2010, here. With the commercial database world struggling to keep revenues from sagging, the emergence of a consulting firm as a for fee information service is not good news. The idea is that Booz Allen’s consultants will deliver insight that cannot be found in Web logs or other online information services. As a former laborer in the Booz Allen vineyards, I think this is an interesting move for the company, but it runs into the revenue targets the company has to hit in order to pay bonuses, attract high potential recruits who are lured by outfits like Google and Goldman Sachs, and maintain the editorial continuity a publishing operation requires.
Several other thoughts:
- No fee services deliver high value information that may lack a Booz Allen comment, but the core information is easily accessible. Examples range from RSS feeds in Google Reader to Silobreaker.com
- These types of services, even when endorsed by a high profile wizard like Nouriel Roubini are tough to convert into big buck operations. The information is expensive to produce and has to be wrapped with analytic services that do not take days or weeks to generate on point analysis
- In the intel sector, the US government provides a wealth of services that are both public and restricted
- Commercial services like Ebsco offer useful for fee content that is arguably as good or better than other services.
My take on this innovation is:
- Outfits like Gerson Lehrman Group and Guidant may be cutting into the blue chip consulting firms’ revenues and a for fee portal is an innovation that shows how tight the tasseled loafers have become
- The sell through from the portal is likely to be very different from other thought leaders plays; that is, the margins of traditional publishers are likely to haunt this initiative. Blue chip firms need to bill much more than an associates’ annual salary plus benefits, a whole lot more
- Consulting firms experience brutal turnover, so establishing continuity will require a different business method from fielding a team of one senior person and three junior MBAs. Very expensive. Booz Allen created its answer to the Harvard Business Review, but that journal has been a marketing tool, not a money maker based on what I have heard. This portal strikes me as a marketing play just like this Web log. I do the Web log because I learned at Booz, Allen how important thought leadership was to a service business. Maybe this lesson was the wrong one and today’s Booz Allen experts know something I don’t?
Will Booz Allen make this portal the intel home run of 2010? The addled goose thinks that this unit of Booz Allen will have to work extra hard to make Persia-House.com a winner that meets the firm’s revenue and margin targets. This new initiative has the makings of a useful business school case.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 5, 2010
A freebie. I must report this to the MTA because some folks are going for a for fee ride.
Google Disruptions Roil Telcos
January 5, 2010
Take a gander (no pun intended) at “New Survey Shows Android OS Roiling the Smart Phone Market.” The survey points out, like most surveys, what is in the rear view mirror. The notion of predictive analyses remains too fuzzy for most research firms. Nevertheless, this Change Wave study makes clear that folks realize that Google’s push into markets only loosely coupled to search don’t follow traditional, top down marketing probes. For me, the most important comment in the write up was:
…21% of those planning to buy a smart phone in the next 90 days say they’d prefer to have the Android OS on their new phone – a monstrous 15-pt jump in just three months.
Let me set the baseline. About 24 months ago, there was essentially zero awareness of Google in the mobile phone market. Android was a non issue. Without much in the way of traditional marketing, advertising, or sales, the research firm’s figure of 21 percent makes one thing clear—the Google is making progress in a market that has a different heft and feel from Web search.
Think about this percentage. If a company like Ford were to enter the ice cream business and surge to an awareness of more than 20 percent, Ford would have had to spend a heck of a lot of money. Even if the company pulled off this ice cream coup, most people would struggle to fit ice cream into the struggling auto company’s product portfolio. For Google, this type of jump seems to fit.
What’s the payoff for Google? A new market? A product extension?
No.
Google thrives because its telephony thrust is not much different than Google’s other products and services. Google is about digital services. Software allows Google to convert its search and advertising system into whatever its programmers want to do. Forget the physical devices, which Google does not manufacture. Focus on the software and the platform. Why hasn’t Microsoft or Yahoo been able to make the same push? Easy. Those companies lack the infrastructure of innovation and plumbing that Google has.
What’s interesting is that the telco crowd has figured out what Google is doing and seems unable to respond. People are busy reacting to Google. That’s the rear view mirror problem. Once Google probes a market, incumbents have to figure out what happened and what to do about it.
Incumbents must react to the Google. Google moves to another probe or maybe a couple of other probes. The disruptive shocks create opportunities. Google moves toward clicks which are like a Geiger counter’s clicks to Googzilla. The incumbents are trying to figure out what just happened.
Uncomfortable for incumbents. Tough to counter in my opinion. And search? It is baked into everything Google does, just like the flour in grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. No cookies for telcos I fear.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 5, 2009
I wish to report to Sullivan College’s cooking school that I was not paid for this write up involving rear view mirrors and chocolate chip cookies. Sigh.
Coveo Lands an Energy Deal
January 5, 2010
I saw a new item on January 1, 2010, and I thought it was interesting. I have been a fan of the Coveo technology for a number of years. One of the goslings worked to integrate Coveo into a local firm’s enterprise offerings. The Coveo technology was integrated into a new corporate Web site for Tenaris, a company supplying products to the energy industry. According to the new story “Global Supplier for the World’s Energy Industry Launches New Website Developed on Sitecore by Roundedcube”:
The content model and architecture of the website was extremely important due to the immense amount of content and depth of navigation levels within the website. In addition to using Sitecore for content management, the website also includes the customization and integration of Coveo Advanced Enterprise Search. Roundedcube also made significant use of advanced JavaScript libraries for enhanced user experience and Flash for video and multimedia content. To facilitate the launch of the new website and enhance search engine optimization (SEO), Roundedcube developed a 301 redirect management tool directly within Sitecore CMS to allow Tenaris the ability to specify URLs from the former website to be redirected to the new pages and indicate to search engines that the page has permanently moved to the new location. A .NET web app compliments the solution by allowing the initial massive number of redirects to be loaded automatically.
A happy quack to the Coveo team.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 5, 2010
Beaks up. This is a post for which I was not compensated. A year ago, a Coveo person promised me a taco and so far, no go. I must report this sad state of affairs to the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.
Publishers’ Savior or Entozoan: The Perils of Technology
January 5, 2010
David Carr’s “A Savior in the Form of a Tablet” in the January 4, 2010, hard copy of the New York Times on page B-1 reminded me of Jacques Ellul and his discussion of technology in La Technique: L’enjeu du siècle. The basic idea is that technology has some upsides and some downsides. The catch, according to Father Ellul, is that if the downside is really bad, the fix is more technology. Rinse, and repeat. It may be tough to get tech out of the system. Hence, keep the entozoan in your mind’s eye. It will be in your tummy out of sight but “there”.
Once technology bites, the remediation may be more technology. Source: http://img.tfd.com/wn/EF/60B01-parasite.gif
Mr. Carr focuses on the hopes of publishers for Apple’s rumored “tablet”. Not only is he pointing to a future in which those younger than the average purchaser of the Kindle buy and read magazines, he is by his own admission an optimist.
If you poke around a bit, you will be able to locate quite a bit of information or disinformation about the alleged Apple tablet will come to the rescue of the struggling world of traditional publishing. Some examples plucked from my trusty Overflight file on this subject include:
- The Washington Post’s “Hey! Look behind You!” The point is that tablets offer an opportunity to traditional media giants.
- NewsFactor Network’s “Apple’s Tablet May Come with Content Subscriptions” which translates to hard cash right now, folks.
- And Media Bistro’s uplifting “Apple Tablet Rumor of the Day: 30/70 Split with Publishers”. If accurate, Apple will give publishers more dough than publishers allegedly pay writers. Wow. Let the good times roll.
The music industry and probably the television industry may have a different view of the implications of a tie up with Apple or any other company that moves to a position of near market dominance. The music crowd has learned that Apple is pretty much a big dog in the tune-filled kennel. Even some TV execs with ultra bright smiles have learned that Apple and other companies in its position can be insensitive to the needs of the high fliers in the television game.
Here’s a thought, just a thought from the addled goose.
Let’s assume that the alleged tablet is real. Further, let’s assume that it takes customers from several different segments. Are these folks the magazine-reading type? Apple seems to appeal to a younger, more hip crowd. In fact, some of the most loyal Apple device customers may be found in places like Google. Microsoft, with an estimated 25 to 35 percent of its employees using Apple iPhones, can be safely excluded.
The tablet sucks in lots of buyers. But what is the projected demand for for-fee content on this alleged Apple tablet. My rough guess is that most of the buyers will be interested in Web surfing, video, and some Apple apps. I am not sure that my digital buying habits will change when I get an alleged Apple tablet. I think the Kindle device sucks, but I like the Kindle app on my iTouch. I don’t buy magazines in hard copy or digital form any longer for three reasons:
- The information I seek is generally not in hard copy or digital magazines. You can read the triggers for this Web log and see that I rely on industry stories, news releases, and company Web sites. I just referenced the hard copy of the New York Times, but I don’t like the online New York Times at all. I use the paper version. I am 65, remember?
- The information in magazines is stale. Here’s an example. Several years ago we subscribed to Future Publishing’s Net magazine. The magazine in 2006 had useful articles and included a disc with some interesting and little known to me software. When I dropped the subscription last year, the Net magazine content was way behind what I could find easily online. The Web became more timely, and the Net magazine became too slow and, therefore, uninteresting to me. Good bye to my $200 annual subscription.
- The baby boomers are heading to the rest home. The lads and lasses behind this cohort are not into reading books and magazines at the rate my grandmother and grandfather read them. I noticed that my parents stopped reading magazines and books as they aged. I still chug along, but I think that the demographics are working against traditional media. Book stores are looking like gone geese because most books sell to a couple of hundred thousand people. The rest of the US population struggles along without a dependence on books and magazines.
Magazine readers are rich and older. Books and newspapers are similar. What if Apple tablet buyers are really young and don’t expand the market? Source: http://www.mediainfocenter.org/magazine/mac/demographics.asp
What this means is that if Apple or another company sucks in the customers, those customers may not make the market for books and magazines larger. The Apple or whoever concentrates the market and we get a replay of the iTunes video.
In short, today’s hopes creates tomorrow’s “problem”. A bit of a Gordian knot for traditional media. The white knight may be a combination of Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan, two guys who took care of themselves first and then sort of chilled out.
A Gordian knot. Source: http://c2.api.ning.com/files/j2Rt6xrxQvd4X142DvH46mGI33tVpowUvzbh*SoB4WyF-7N29C0omG5*5ikELTZNRsGcMfZX8ZFZA6mPRzaKPEGzbJrE*hK2/Gordian.jpg
The Gordian knot may be a small component of a much larger problem: perhaps the straitjacket?
Stephen E. Arnold, January 7, 2010
A freebie. No one pays me to write this wacky stuff. I must report this to the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.
IBM and Its SEO Guru
January 5, 2010
I read an unusual write up on the DCDCQ.com Web site. No, I don’t know what the domain name means. The article was called “SEO in China Will Never Be the Same as Google’s James Mi, Adverted’s Stephen Noton and IBM’s Bill Hu [sic]”. The article explains how to get a site on the first page of a results list. I find this type of intentional manipulation annoying and usually misleading. But there are some folks who want to put more effort into spoofing algorithms than creating substantive content and providing information of high quality on a particular topic. It takes all kinds. I was going to blow off the article until one section made me laugh.
Here’s the passage that stopped me in my tracks:
The finial speaker, Hunt, might just be the most experienced SEO person on this panel because, china, unlike Noton (who headed to Asia to work with more startups and the upcoming corporate elite) is based, china, in the US and works with the current corporate elite including being the man behind IBM’s Search Engine Optimization success. Hunt’s talk involved him showing some of, China, the work he’s done with IBM, which really complimented, China, the other speakers. Hunt showed how changing text in images into pure text and how proper navigation and title tags can make a clients site like IBM grow from being in the top 100 to being #1 within 3 short weeks.
What! Several years ago at the Boston search engine meeting, there was a presentation by an IBM search engine guru that made zero sense to me. I had one of my goslings follow up with this person on a technical matter and she reported that he had zero clue about search and content processing.
Now we have a Web site that I have pointed out as essentially non functional used as an example of great SEO. Yo, dude. I don’t care what country is the searcher’s home base. I know that if I cannot locate information about a specific IBM product or service, the Web presence is fatally flawed. The notion that IBM can become the number one result for Web queries is interesting but essentially not supported in my experience.
Wow. The New Year is off to an amazing SEO start from IBM. Number one with a bullet. Try this query: “content management system”. Keep in mind that IBM owns FileNet, iPhrase, and other CMS systems. Scan the result list. No IBM on the first page, right? IBM is number one in the query “mainframe right after the Wikipedia entry.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 2, 2010
Full disclosure: A freebie. I shall report to Defense Field Activities when the government opens for the new year.
Google and Its Own Blog Popularity Tally
January 5, 2010
Short honk: If you want to know what was most popular on Google’s own blogs, you will enjoy “Five Years of Google Blogging”. There are a number of interesting factoids in this post, but the one that jumped off the page was that the posts about Chrome, garnered about 2.6 million unique pageviews. The number two post was about Google Wave, Google’s baby dataspace demo, tallied a respectable but less robust pageview count of 639,000. What’s this mean? Well, Microsoft may want to keep its eye on Chrome whether it is as wonderful as Windows 7 and SharePoint or not.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 2, 2010
Another uncompensated post. I am starting 2010 in a most pathetic manner, don’t you agree? I will report this situation to the Coalition Provisional Authority (in Iraq).
GrabIt Described for Noobs
January 4, 2010
Usenet can be a treasure chest of information. If I mention Usenet in a lecture, I see few sparks of recognition. PCWorld’s “Old-School Secret: Delve Into Usenet With GrabIt” does a good job of explaining Usenet content and providing useful information about GrabIt, an open source tool for accessing the content and assembling split files. The write up also includes links to other software that makes Usenet suitable for the under 25 cohort. Useful write up which is not about search or content processing. But findability and access are close cousins.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 4, 2010
A freebie. Whom do I tell? I know, I know. When Washington DC reopens for the new year, my oversight authority is probably the National Institute for Literacy, an entity which I am confident reads Usenet postings.
SharePoint Sunday: January 3, 2010 Round Up
January 4, 2010
Herd them SharePoint geese. Yee-hah. The goslings and I love SharePoint almost as much as Exchange. If you are a SharePoint 2010 wrangler, you may find these tips and tricks helpful. If not, click away, partner. The addled goose may trample you with its stampeding goslings who are full as a tick after New Year’s Eve partying.
- Do you know how to get the Search Query API calls to be logged in the search usage analysis reports? If the answer is no, then you will need to mosey over to Trailblazer’s SharePoint Blog. You will find the explanation and a code snippet to get you started. Check out the pre requisites. Omit one, partner, and the method won’t work. Log analysis is too much work for some busy SharePoint administrators in my opinion.
- If you are not aware of the social freight that will be heaped on SharePoint and its supporting servers, you will want to take a look at “Ray Ozzie’s New Social Lab: What It Means For Enterprise 2.0.” Microsoft has been gnawing on social functions for five or more years, but its seems that everything old is new again, including a social lab, big ideas, and more bloat for SharePoint. SharePoint may be getting roostered up.
- We had a client call us last week and talk about enterprise memory and knowledge management. We are not sure what knowledge is, but we poked around and provided some ideas. In the course of our research, we came across Melodika.net’s “Building a Corporate Knowledge Structure with KWizCom’s Wiki Plus.” the idea is that this tool runs within SharePoint and it seems to provide the type of content capture and access functions our caller wanted. You can get more information about KWizCom’s products and services here.
As a final note, one of the Microsoft execs (Chris Liddell) on duty when the $1.23 billion acquisition of Fast Sear ch & Transfer SA took place has skedaddled from Redmond. The fellow is now working at General Motors. I wonder what super acquisitions he will engineer at that fine organization. I think the assets of the Tucker Corporation and Studebaker Corporation may be in play. GM may not want to let those hot properties go up the flume.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 4, 2010
No one paid me to provide this summary of SharePoint search information, darn it. I suppose I need to alert the Joint Fire Science Program because I wrote about such a hot product as SharePoint without taking cash.
The Plight of eBooks: A Swiftian View
January 4, 2010
Most folks in Harrods Creek don’t read too many books. The local Barnes & Nobles, about a day’s ride by mule, is filled with book lights, knick knacks, and greeting cards. Because the addled goose has no work and no friends, he has time to read. I clip along at two or three books a week, and I buy most of them online. The sort of book that strikes my fancy like Taichi Skaiya’s “The Knowledge Value Revolution” or W. Brian Arthur’s “The Nature of Technology” are not too popular. These books don’t mix well with most folks’s idea of a fun read, and I don’t think in the entire US there are more than a few thousand individuals who share the addled goose’s taste in books.
When the book stores lose their best customers—that is, the folks who actually read several books a week or a month for that matter—there’s not much of a future for them. When popular books find their way into pirated eBook editions, publishers are going to be squeezed even harder.
Tomorrow’s pirates must be stopped today. Without people who read, the book publishing industry will be saved. Er, that doesn’t sound exactly right, does it? Never mind. Stamp out reading piracy by eliminating reading or children, whichever is easier. Image source: http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2006/10/28/schools291006_wideweb__470x312,0.jpg
CNN has an interesting article on its Web site: “Digital Piracy Hits the E-book Industry.” For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
Statistics are hard to come by, and many publishers are reluctant to discuss the subject for fear of encouraging more illegal downloads. But digital theft may pose a big headache in 2010 for the slumping publishing industry, which relies increasingly on electronic reading devices and e-books to stimulate sales.
Ah, the eBook readers from publishers and bookstores are encouraging piracy. Is that an unintended consequence?
Another passage caught my attention:
However, some evidence suggests that authors’ and publishers’ claims of damage from illegal piracy may be overstated. Recent statistics have shown that consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.
I get it. Readers are stealing eBooks but may buy more books.
With fewer readers per capita, the problem may work itself out. If no solution is found, maybe the publishers can seek help from the US government? Could it evolve that not teaching student to read, shifting attention to videos, and using government watchdogs to curtail reading will make the problem go away? I hope so. With no one reading, I would not have to write the articles in this Web log about unintended consequences and failures in developing viable business models.
Oyez, oyez. I am reporting to the administrative office of the Bankruptcy Courts that I was not paid to write this article about businesses likely to face bankruptcy. A bit of a virtuous circle is it not?
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