All of us have had challenges with IT projects and the “fluid” nature of requirements. Having frozen requirements is a fallacy. I was reading about Six Sigma and found this interesting piece of data that I thought I would share.
Donald Reinertsen from the California Institute of Technology has been collecting data from product development managers who attend his classes. (Basic data are from Thomke and Reinertsen’s “Agile Product Development,” updated via personal communication with Donald Reinertsen, December 11, 2006). Note: I got this from a book on Six Sigma and am sharing since I think it will be exciting for all us software professionals.
Out of hundreds of projects, how often did the requirements remain stable throughout design?
Never
How many developers had complete specifications before starting design work?
5 percent
On average, what proportion of requirements were specified before design commenced?
54 percent
For each developer who waits for at least 80 percent of the requirements, how many have already started designing?
Five
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In IT, I guess we finally got tired of TLA’s (three letter acronyms) – so in the Cloud world, we are inventing FLA’s (four letter acronyms).
SAAS – Software as a Service is now pretty well known.
So let’s add to it –
PAAS – Platform as a Service (can be a whole range – User Interface, Workflow, Security, database, integration, messaging, queuing etc etc)
IAAS – Infrastructure as a Service (which basically means Servers, Storage and the Network)
It’s like a pyramid -
SAAS
PAAS and finally
IAAS
SAAS vendors use PAAS vendors, which use IAAS vendors. As you go higher in the stack, the profit margins tend to increase – meaning that IAAS companies have the least profit margins. This makes sense – since IAAS is about infrastructure = expensive, as compared to SAAS which is Services / Software – and that is cheap.
A recent study has shown IAAS to be a $4 billion market by 2012, PAAS to be $9 billion and SAAS to be a 21 billion. This means, cloud computing totally would be a market of $34 billion by 2012.
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A recent infoweek article talks about 20 Cloud vendors to keep your eye on. These include
CogHead
Enomaly
Heroku
Hyperic
Intridea
Joyent
Layered Technologies
Mosso
Parascale
Relationals
10Gen
3Tera
You can find the article at
http://i.cmpnet.com/informationweekreports/doc/2008/210602537.pdf
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I have been analyzing the different cloud vendors in the market. The table below shows one snapshot of this analysis – which compares the number of vendors that have products in beta vs production. I am offering this analysis and advice as part of my consulting services. Contact me if you are interested in learning more.
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By now you have surely read a lot of stuff about SOA being declared dead as of Jan 1st, 2009. Hmm.. what does that mean?
Does it mean all SOA projects have come to a stand still?
Does it mean that the principles that SOA preached are no longer viable?
Does it mean that technologists will stop working on SOA enabling products and solutions?
Does it mean standards organizations will not create more standards around Web Services, ESB, etc?
Does it mean that ESB is dead?
This and a hundred other questions come to mind when someone makes a statement like “SOA is dead”.
My 2 cents for those who might care – SOA in its traditional form is dead – and by that I mean that the large multi million dollar SOA projects are dead. The concept and architectural principles preached by SOA are only becoming more and more relevant. 2009 and 2010 should see the emergence of true SOA architects and business analysts who know how to implement SOA in less time and money.
I have always preached that any “SOA” project with a price tag of over 250,000 is a failed SOA project. If you just use a quarter million dollars as a threshold, you are forced to scope projects that have to quickly demonstrate ROI and are 6-9 months in duration.
The key mistake around SOA has been projects that have implemented a millions dollars of technology with 5-7 services sitting on top of it. Of course, SOA would be considered DEAD if that were to continue into 2009.
SOA is not dead – people who understand SOA are getting smarter about implementing it – or should get smarter about implementing it.
I can agree that the acronym SOA is now tainted, and someone should give us another TLA (three letter acronym) that represents the fundamentals of SOA.
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