latoga labs

Apple’s New Corporate Push

March 6, 2008 Leave a Comment

In my morning reading this morning, the headline Apple Goes Corporate from a BusinessWeek article caught my eye. I felt for a while that the pre-announced iPhone SDK was a lucrative opportunity for some enterprising developers to port or build a VPN client for the iPhone. This would be the missing link that would allow corporate users to move to the iPhone as they would at least be able to get their email on the device, even it if wasn’t in as seemless way as a BlackBerry provides. There would be a large number of new iPhone under just such a scenario.

But from this article, it looks like Apple is planning on doing a much more frontal approach to developing specifically for the Corporate market. What I don’t understand is…What Took So Long?

Did it take a 35% stock price drop to budge the stubbornness out of Apple with regards to the corporate customers? Or is now finally the right time after having enought Macs sneak their way in the back door of many companies over the self-serving concerns of the IT department? I made a switch almost 6 months ago back to the Mac and I would need to be hard pressed to move back to a PC again at this point. And every day I visit more companies where I am spotting the renegade Apple users.

Now, the interesting thing will be to see if this is just a marketing push to increase the stock price or if there will be a serious drive to move Apple into the corporate world. I wouldn’t expect a full frontal attack on all fronts, but using the iPhone as the wedge to open the crack in the corporate customer is a great strategy.

(Photo by Shapeshift)

Of Guard Dogs and Wall Street Bankers

March 5, 2008 Leave a Comment

It’s not often that I’ll break out into a full fledge guffaw while reading the Wall Street Journal, so when it happens it’s understandable that my wife gets a little concerned. This morning, while reading the page one Marketplace article How Kerkorian Won Wynn’s Mirage (WSJ.com login required), this is exactly what happened.

The article is an excerpt from the new book Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las Vegas (whew, what a title!). As I was reading this article, the following quote is what made me break in laughter:

Mr. Wynn’s ranting excited his precision-trained guard dogs. Perceiving a threat to their master, the German shepherds commenced to case the room for danger. One dog shoved his nose into Mr. Fusco’s [a Goldman Sachs banker] crotch in an attack position. The dog stayed that way, staring at the investment banker, for the full length of Wynn’s tirade. “I was petrified,” Fusco recalls. “I’m thinking, ‘This job isn’t worth this.’ “

The vision of a high power wall street banker making a “sales call” on a prospective new client and finding himself petrified with an attack dog staring at him hungrily is delicious! Oh the pain of landing a $15M new client…

Edge Integration with SnapLogic

February 20, 2008 2 Comments

Around the beginning of this month I started doing some consulting work with SnapLogic. SnapLogic was founded by Informatica alumni who were solving problems of quickly gaining access to data located inside the enterprise in order to build hybrid applications that solved their real-world problems. They originally solved this problem with resourceful scripts that would pull data out of various data sources, store and/or index this data, and then make it available to users in a format of easily consumable by the end users. (when they were originally doing this, the term Mashup wasn’t coined yet, and still isn’t favored inside corporate walls…hence the term Enterprise 2.0).

They quickly realized that they were working for a data integration firm and had build their own low level RESTful data integration. Hence, SnapLogic was formed. As an open source company, the SnapLogic edge integration platform can take data from various data sources and represent a RESTful interface to that data. Since the platform has Components that can talk to standard data sources, you can use the platform to implement a standard data services layer within an organization. Also, since it’s all open source, you can build your own Components, or use ones built by the community, to provide data services into a mix of data sources: local, remote, accessed directly, accessed via an API, etc.

On the internet, we have all see mashups of data from multiple sources (i.e., fetching a set of locations from a real estate database and then laying those homes for sale on top of Google Maps). This is an example of the RESTful data integration in action. Slowly, the enterprise has been pulled in this direction by their users (usually with the IT department kicking and screaming because they have to give up control). The SnapLogic platform has the potential to offer the IT organization a layer of control, but also offer the users access to the data that they need in order to build enterprise mashups.

I have been aware of SnapLogic since before they came out of stealth due to the fact that a number of people that I used to work with were involved with the company. At that time, I was working at IONA and there were a number of interesting discussions going around about REST (most were usually started or ended by Steve Vinoski 🙂 ) as well as the process of migrating the company from a pure closed source software provider to a hybrid model of closed and open source. Thus, I was glad when the opportunity arose to help out SnapLogic recently and gain more experience with their platform; mixing my integration experience with my recent experiences in open source.

Stay tuned for more about my experiences working with the SnapLogic and their Edge Integration Platform