Pivotal One - Driving the Software Revolution

"Software is eating the world" - Marc Andreessen

As predicted by Marc Andressen, software continues to disrupt a wide variety of industries, covering everything from retail to health care. This shift has resulted in businesses looking towards Platform as a Service (PaaS) to help rapidly develop and scale new applications.

I recently spent the afternoon with Pivotal in San Francisco, who are an independent entity funded by VMware and EMC. The office was hive of energy as the team worked towards the launch of Pivotal One.

Pivotal One is an integrated platform that includes a set of application and data services that run on the Pivotal CF PaaS, powered by Cloud Foundry. The goal of this platform is to enable development teams to rapidly build, update and scale applications in the cloud, allowing enterprises to embrace the software revolution.

At the heart of Pivotal One is Cloud Foundry, which is an open source cloud computing PaaS developed by VMware, released under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.

Like Heroku, Cloud Foundry is a polyglot platform, enabling developers to consistently use a number of different programming languages on a single platform, while removing the inherit challenges and switching costs that generally accompany a change of development language.

Cloud Foundry currently supports the following runtimes/frameworks:

• Java
• Ruby
• Node.js
• Scala

As well as the following services:

• MySQL - Open-source relational database management system.
• vFabric Postgres - Open source object-relational database management system.
• MongoDB - Cross-platform document-oriented database system.
• Redis - Open-source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store.
• RabbitMQ - Open source message broker software.

Cloud Foundry can also be deployed to different clouds (e.g. AWS, OpenStack), including behind the corporate firewall on VMware vSphere. This portability is a key differentiator (especially when compared to Heroku), delivering the advantages of PaaS, but on infrastructure of your choice. 

It's this power, flexibility and scalability that makes Pivotal CF the perfect core to enable the broader Pivotal One application and data services. I believe this value proposition is unique in the industry and therefore puts Pivotal in a very strong position.

As depicted above, the Pivotal One services focus on apps, data and analytics. These include:

• Pivotal HD - The widely adopted enterprise distribution of Apache Hadoop.
• Pivotal AX - Providing automatic analytic instrumentation.
• RabbitMQ - The leading open source enterprise messaging system.
• MySQL Service – Provisioning of multi-tenant, single instance MySQL databases.

Many of the services are already mature and available for use today, providing a strong starting point for Pivotal One. However, I believe this is just the beginning and I expect to see other interesting services being introduced over time, as Pivotal One gains momentum.

Overall I've been very impressed with Pivotal. The company culture is agile at its core and the team are clearly passionate and energised. In my experience this is a rare combination, where you have the right people, given the right environment to do something amazing!

As a result I'm confident that Pivotal One is more than clever marketing, with a real opportunity to disrupt the industry! I'll be watching the progress of Pivotal closely and look forward to seeing how the industry reacts.

Microsoft - Kinect 2.0

I recently got the opportunity to check out the new Kinect (bundled with the Xbox One) using a pre-release version of the "Kinect for Windows SDK". Although I don't plan to buy a Kinect for gaming, I can certainly see a lot of advantages to this technology in business, especially the retail sector.

The Microsoft team demonstrated a number of the new capabilities, covering everything from multiple users, fine hand gestures, face tracking and even heart rate monitoring. It was all very impressive and looked great! There were a number of occasions where the framerate dropped (sometimes significantly), however this was likely due to the pre-release software.

In my opinion Kinect is the key device driving Natural User Interface (NUI) design, thanks to its relative low cost and global availability. We have already seen some amazing demos where Kinect is being used in shop windows to entice customers. I believe this has huge potential, for example, fashion retailers could allow customers to virtually try on items and even purchase them before they even enter the store (my kind of shopping).

I believe the best vision of this concept was shown in Minority Report, where "Kinect-like" sensors are used to identify the user and personalise advertisements in shop windows.

With Kinect 2.0 this fiction becomes a reality!

In my opinion the only disappointment is that Microsoft have not found a way to integrate Kinect with their own services. For example, I believe Windows 8 would have been a great opportunity to push the boundaries of NUI, showing how Kinect can enhance the user experience. The same can be said for services such as Skype and Lync, which are perfectly suited for Kinect.

When I asked this question, Microsoft gave a cryptic response, but alluded to the fact that tighter Kinect integration is coming. Unfortunately this is the sort of answer you give when you have no real answer. With that said, whether Microsoft proactively drive Kinect integration (my preference) or they wait for the developer community to do it for them, I'm confident NUI will play an important role in the future.

The new Kinect for Windows SDK is expected to be available soon, after the public release of the Xbox One in November. It's then down to the developers to take advantage of these new capabilities. I can't wait to see what they come up with!

Quid - Make Informed Decisions

I was recently in the US with the Leading Edge Forum touring a number of technology companies across silicon valley. One of the people I met was Sean Gourley who is the co-founder and CTO of Quid.

Quid is a company that is building software to enable people to see patterns and extract meaning from data. In principle this sounds simple, but in the information age data is endless and constantly growing, making it increasingly difficult for people and companies to harness data and generate valuable insights. 

I was very impressed with the technology, but I was equally impressed by Sean's story, which explained how and why he chose to start Quid. Thankfully in 2009 Sean shared this story during a TED Talk, which I highly recommend you watch.

As Sean is a trained physicist, much of the maths he described during our meeting was beyond me, however his passion, dedication and humanitarian nature were hard to ignore.

The video below highlights how Quid is being used by telecos to solve the "dumb pipe" problem. 

As companies continue to struggle with the challenges of "big data", I can see tools such as Quid being critical for businesses who want to remain ahead of the game. In fact, I would go as far to say that without software like Quid, companies will be unable to adapt to the ever changing business landscape. Our "Minority Report" future is closer than we think!

Introcuding STOIC

STOIC is an interesting product that came from Kickstarter (raising $63,450). It enables you to turn your standard spreadsheets into apps for use on any web or mobile device.

The entire process is automated, simply select your spreadsheet and have STOIC automatically analyse your data to deliver an appropriate database and user interface. This is made possible because the guys at STOIC know that the majority of spreadsheets have common data types, specifically: names, addresses, currency, etc. As a result STOIC can take this data and enhance it, for example produce a Google map for the addresses. 

Any data type that STOIC does not automatically understand can be enhanced by the user in a few simple clicks. Therefore spreadsheets can quickly become beautiful, customisable apps, that are optimised for any device.

The video below shows Ismael Ghalimi (founder of STOIC) demonstrating the product:

The premise of STOIC is simple; everyone can now create apps, without typing a single line of code. This concept is clearly intriguing as many businesses (large and small) are run from Excel spreadsheets, therefore being able to unlock this data and make it mobile is an interesting value proposition.

STOIC is available in a number of different deployment options, including cloud and as a virtual machine for on premise use. The price ranges from $125 USD p/m for 6 users, up to $1000 USD p/m for 48 users.

Do I believe STOIC has a future?

The technology is impressive and I definitely like the concept. However, the solution reminds me of failed projects such as Dabble DB and the STOIC premise of "everyone can now create apps" is very similar to the "Citizen Developer" positioned by companies such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft.

As a result I can see STOIC getting squeezed by some very well established names, which may impact their ability to gain momentum in the market. This makes me wonder if their technology will eventually be purchased and assimilated into another product, for example imagine this technology integrated with Microsoft Windows Phone App Studio.

OS X 10.9 Mavericks - Review

Last Tuesday Apple officially launched OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Unlike previous versions of OS X, this update is available for free via the Mac App Store for all Mac users.

OS X used to be a premium upgrade (like Windows), however thanks to Apple's vertical business model they are able to subsidise the cost of software with the sale of hardware. This is an issue for other companies such as Microsoft, as their hardware footprint is small and therefore they must rely on software licensing to make a profit.

The other reason this approach makes sense for Apple is that OS X updates have become increasingly evolutionary over the past few releases, in fact you could argue that OS X has not seen a major update since 2007 with the release of Leopard. However, with a "free to upgrade" policy for all users, this lack of innovation is made easier to accept.

As a result Mavericks is a subtle upgrade over Mountain Lion, brining a number of "under the hood" features that focus on improving battery life, performance and security. The user interface itself remains mostly unchanged (see my minimal desktop below):

One thing that Apple has done with Mavericks is reverse direction on the use of skeuomorphic design, for example removing the linen stitching from Mission Control and the Notification Centre. This delivers a cleaner, simpler user interface that I personally believe is a significant improvement. The screenshot below shows Mission Control and it's texture-less background.

The same "flat" design philosophy has been followed for the built-in OS X applications. For example, Calendar no longer has the unnecessary leather user interface, replaced with the classic OS X grey. In my opinion these subtle changes help unify the operating system, delivering a consistent look and feel.

Unfortunately the team working on Game Center must have missed the memo as it's the one application that retains its skeuomorphic design. As a result it sticks out like a sore thumb and in my opinion is a stark reminder of what a miss-step this design approach was. Thankfully I (and apparently Apple) rarely use Game Center and therefore it does not negatively impact the overall experience.

The only major user facing feature upgrades are part of Finder, which now finally supports tabs, removing the need for third party applications such as Path Finder. Finder also supports tagging for all folders and files, which improves search and enables a more versatile way of managing your file system. Both features are a welcome addition, but otherwise Finder usage remains unchanged from Mountain Lion.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that not only is Mavericks more power efficient at its core, but it also allows the user to better understand application energy usage. For example, Activity Monitor has been redesigned to include an "Energy" tab which allows the user to see which applications are negatively impacting battery life. This is great news for all users as Mac notebooks are rapidly moving towards the vision of "all day usage on battery".

Overall OS X Mavericks is a solid update! It feels fast (booting and shutting down in seconds), reliable and appears to be compatible with all existing applications. Even historically troublesome applications such as VMware Fusion (5/6) work fine and you will likely find your Mac App Store applications have already been updated to leverage the new core capabilities of Mavericks. As a result I would not have any issue recommending Mavericks to all Mac users, especially as it's a free upgrade. 

Check out more screenshots of OS X Mavericks in my gallery and once you're convinced head over to the Mac App Store for your free download!