Shaking Off the DazeNew technology passions must find a home as solutions to emerging challengesAs I write this column, I am, like everyone, still numb from the horrific events just days ago. The daily whirl of actions and intentions stopped: It is not easy to once again set them in motion, to return to "normal." We offer our heartfelt condolences to those in the Intelligent Enterprise community who have suffered personal loss from the unspeakable crimes and tragedy in New York City, Washington D.C., and the fields of Pennsylvania. No doubt, by the time you are reading this, events in the aftermath will have overtaken anything I might write here. Grief, anger, and other emotions live by their own rhythm, to disappear and reappear forever. If we wish to look, the dim lantern of history will light the way to an accounting of grievances and their origins, and we can dwell there. Or, we can face forward, grab the reins, and ride with confidence toward a new day. The business world has no choice; as it has been since the beginning, business is about change and adaptation - finding opportunities to thrive - no matter what the conditions. On television, analysts have been debating the "massive failure of intelligence," which several believed exposed the United States to the horrors of September 11. Many of the discussions are reminiscent of issues explored in a commercial context by authors in Intelligent Enterprise. On CSPAN's Booknotes, an author (whose name I unfortunately missed) of a recent work on the National Security Agency (NSA) described how the organization spent billions of dollars to build a formidable capability to collect data: but it remains poor in its ability to translate, analyze, and interpret data. The NSA is only one of several government agencies that together spend reportedly $30 billion per year to gather intelligence: and apparently none of these agencies integrate their data. A caller to the show wondered why the FBI's knowledge of some of the attackers was not available to airport security officials. What use is information if it can't be put in the hands of those with an immediate need for it? INTELLIGENT DECENTRALIZATIONGovernmental agencies are not alone in their meditations on how better information flow might have averted disaster. Businesses, with so much at risk, will surely consider how they must not only protect themselves from terrorism but also how to recover rapidly. Leaders of the world's economy might debate whether it is wise to have so much trading activity centralized in just a handful of cities around the globe. Finally, it might take many years for both business and tourist travel to return to the previous levels. Perhaps the World Trade Organization, for example, will no longer hold physical meetings. Will this spur a new age of virtual meetings, conferences, and even tourism? Clearly, businesses and governmental bodies will be looking at their IT infrastructures - and at how new technology will enable them to adapt to change rapidly. Security and disaster recovery will be prominent topics. Excellent data quality and integration, both so critical to any form of rapid knowledge discovery, could become subject to legal requirements, thereby giving strong impetus to industry standards efforts. The financial services industry and trading exchanges could decide that they must dramatically decentralize operations, thereby reducing exposure to a titanic blow to their personnel and IT headquarters. CIOs could be under pressure to rebuild their organizations' database and application resources to function over distributed networks that nonetheless continue to meet the most demanding requirements for speed, access, availability, and reliability. CHASING TECHNOLOGY PASSIONSIn the weeks before September 11, I attended a series of trade shows and conferences in the Bay Area. Due to tightened travel budgets and the lull in IT spending, many trade shows have become listless shadows of themselves. Thus, it was refreshing to attend LinuxWorld, produced by IDG World Expo (August 26-30, San Francisco). Finally, here was some serious, spontaneous, nonpartisan buzz. The show floor featured a startling array of vendors, from storage network providers, database vendors, cluster platform providers, to rapid application development tool vendors. It was like the old days. What will be the impact of open source computing on IT operations? Could Linux become critical to companies looking at how they can rapidly and cost-effectively distribute and decentralize applications over the Internet? Will Linux help or hinder security efforts? It's probably too early for industry players to answer these questions seriously in an enterprise IT context: but they will try. Of the major IT solution providers, IBM is by far the most aggressive when it comes to Linux. On billboards and through some now-famously outrageous marketing efforts, IBM has made it clear that when we think penguin, the company wants us to think IBM. I wondered if IBM's customers might find it puzzling that the vendor best known for safe IT choices would now be pushing this renegade technology. IBM officials, pointing to the total cost of ownership issues facing IT, said that corporate customers are indeed very interested in Linux as they contemplate building 5,000-node server farms and large, scalable, clustered operations. Linux also has huge potential for IBM customers hoping to consolidate systems currently running with IBM's array of operating systems. Linux would serve as the operating system integration layer. IBM also has a major interest in Linux to integrate and scale the massive hosted services it plans to offer to customers of all sizes. Looking around LinuxWorld, another reason for IBM's and other established vendors' interest in Linux became clear: Linux is a passion for young programmers. To attract top young talent, companies like IBM need to draw them in with an opportunity to fulfill their dreams. The promise of working on VM maintenance releases is not going to do it. Established vendors will be critical in guiding Linux and other young technologies toward productive applications in emerging industries, most prominently bioinformatics. At LinuxWorld, Intel hosted an extremely interesting session devoted to clustered supercomputer applications running on Linux (and Intel-based clusters, of course). Enormous applications for drug discovery, genomics, and large-scale patient behavior simulations will demand scalable and flexible systems that are not only effective but also bring down rising costs that present a daunting challenge to pharmaceutical businesses mindful of narrowing patent windows. These companies are already collecting huge amounts of data: however, they can't effectively mine or analyze it to save time and cost. Don Becker, CTO of Scyld Computing described how his company implements the Beowulf Project cluster technology, which he helped develop at NASA beginning in 1994 and has been used for scientific computing projects. In 1998, Scyld brought Beowulf into the commercial world. Scyld offers a "single-system image" philosophy, and according to Becker, an architecture that is more secure and immune to such problems as "version skew" than other cluster approaches. IDEALISM: IT'S GENETICBioinformatics will be big business, but it will also feature an interesting and refreshing fusion of technical and social idealism based on the notion of moving potential drug cures through discovery faster. Linux and open-source applications may form the platform upon which this emerging industry will rise. Some established vendors, perhaps blinded by market research surveys, are taking their eyes off the Linux ball as they contend with mergers and other internal competitive battles. IBM and Intel, to their credit, are clearly not. Bioinformatics also touches the passions of the data mining community. At the Seventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2001; August 26-29, San Francisco), many speakers expressed their hope that at KDD-2002, bioinformatics applications would dominate data mining - rather than direct marketing lift, personalization, and Web log analysis. As life sciences organizations consider Linux platforms, they also must satisfy their desperate need for efficient, affordable means of analyzing huge data sets. For many attendees, building solutions to such needs appears to be a matter of personal idealism: a desire to contribute to solving the world's problems. David Stodder [dstodder@cmp.com] is editorial director of Intelligent Enterprise. |
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