Tag Archives : operations

Many of us use Twitter, a free cloud-based service, to market ourselves and conduct one-to-one business development. Unfortunately, hackers brought Twitter down several times already this month with Denial-of-Service attacks. This begs the question, “when should we invest in obtaining our own clouds—vs. sharing free crowds with others?”…

A few weeks back, I shared an observation from one of AOL’s former CTO’s that the US Constitution was the best architecture document in history (my apologies to my colleagues from other countries). As we approach US Independence Day, I thought it would be appropriate to begin a series that presented the Architecture Constitution ten years ago and how I am still applying these key concepts five software generations later.

In the Web 1.0 world could use different approaches to scale static and dynamic data. This does not translate well into a Web 2.0 world where most content is dynamic (i.e., user-generated content) that can come from ANYWHERE…

Many intermingle the terms “Application Service Provision (ASP)” and “Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).” However, these can be very different. It is important to confirm what your getting when you buy and ASP-based solution to ensure you avoid surprise costs…

The launch of the enterprise application market was a great step forward for software. It significantly reduces the risk of using software to enhance enterprise operations and provided much-needed standardization that allowed CIOs and CTOs to acquire knowledgeable staff and adopt best practices. However, it takes a careful approach — and a lot of work — to achieve the desired internal rate of return (IRR) on these programs. Here are my thoughts based on experiences on $590 million dollars worth of off-the-shelf enterprise programs over the last decade…

I could title this, “Confessions of a Serial In-house Build-over-buy Guy” as I was guilty of doing this many, many times. Regardless of how good your team is (I have been privileged to lead some of the best) and how unique your requirements are, it will ALWAYS be more expensive to build “it” in-house (vs. using a Software-as-a-Service model). To see why (and for my counter-arguement as to when it is wise to do this), keep reading…