A day in the Internet

Internet World Statistics  is one of my favorite web sites and the work done by these folks is amazing and valuable keeping us abreast of what is going on around the world in terms of the Internet.

These statistics are mind boggling.  They also put some clarity into otherwise meaningly huge numbers.  The following all occurs in a single day!

• Enough data is transferred (downloaded) each day to fill 168 million DVD's!
• 294 billion emails are sent each day!  It would take 2 years to process that much snail mail.
• 2 million blog posts are written each day.  That would fill Time Magazine for 770 years.
• 72 million unique people visit FaceBook each day.
• 40 million people visit Twitter
• 22 million people visit Linkedin
• 20 million visit Google+
• 17 million visit Pinterest
• There are 532 million FaceBook status updates
• 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook
• People watch 22 million hours of old TV Shows and movies on Netflix
• 864,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each day.
• 18.7 million hours of music are streamed via Pandora
• 1288 new apps are made available and 35 million are downloaded
• There are more new iPhones sold each day than there are babies born in the world:
• 378,000 iphones versus 371,000 babies born

If you could obtain one dollar from a fraction of these people you will have produced a huge revenue stream.  What are you doing to reach these people?

As many cell phones as people?

Not quite, but almost.  According to Internet World Statistics There are now over 6.8 billion cellular subscribers and a world population of 7.1 billion people.  The number of cellular subscribers has grown from 2,205 million in 2005 to the current 6,835 million in 2013.  Mobile Internet is a driving force behind this growth both in personal usage and business.

The bottom line is that people want whatever it is they want and they want it now.  Your business must have a superb web presence, be search engine friendly, and above all be smart phone friendly.  If you do not make a good presentation on an iPhone or Android you will lose customers to a competitor who will.

Your customers must be able to first and foremost find you instantly when they are sitting in their car looking for your products.  When they do find you, they will leave your web site in a heart beat if it is not easily readable and easy to navigate on their phone.  Today, the impress you make on a customer's smart phone will be a lasting one.  If they don't like what they see on their phone, they will not come back via another device.

An additional significance of the growth in smart phone population is the need for extended availability.  You never know when a customer may wish to reach out and find your web site or communicate with someone on your staff.  Do you provide web based chat facilities with customer service reps?  Is this covered 24 hours a day?

Are your products attractive to foreign customers?  Can you handle foreign business?  Just a few quick thoughts on this startling new report.

Open Source for Your Business?

Open source software has gained popularity relatively recently as a  means of creating and delivering high quality computer software for just about any purpose you can think of.  While its origins were based in technology such as computer operating systems, most notably, UNIX  and LINUX, it has crossed over into business application software and today offers everything from ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) to accounting, inventory, merchandising, or software that addresses the needs of just about any commercial enterprise, non-profit, or government entity.  

Open source software projects may be found all over the Internet and projects have some very distinguished members who fund and support them.  The success of open source software is based on the concept of “group development”.  Groups of users of the software (often competitors) evaluate modifications or extensions to the product and insure its steady evolution meeting demands from folks who push the edges of their respective industries.  Open source is a place where business expertise meets computer technology.  

Good open  source products have an organization and web based electronic community that support them.  Most products are free for the download along with the source code used to create the software.  Today’s open source licenses allow you to use and modify the sytem for your own use, but require that you share modifications with the community.  

Good product communities have extensive discussion forums where often vigourous if not violent discussions on the merits of an enhancement occur.  If you actively use the software, you are asked (but not required) to become a member of the organization and provide financial contributions.  

Frequently there are a staff of developers that work for the non-profit organization that manages the software.  Frequently you may contribute money to the organization to fund a specific project and help pay for an enhancement that you want.  Generally these projects are posted on the organizations forums and others are solicited to participate and help fund the projects. 

When changes are made open source change control software is used to strictly manage the changes and users are encouraged to download updates and test it.  You get some of the best testing done in the computer industry for open source.  Defects are found quickly and resolved almost as soon as they are found.  

Overall, the quality ratings of open source are better than commercial vendors of in-house developers.  The larger the user community, the better the quality of the product.  

“Buyer Beware”

Yes, you must look at yourself as a buyer when reviewing and selecting open source software.  Many commercial vendors are hiding behind the “illusion” of being an open source vendor and giving away a free version of their commercial software that is little more than a demo.  

Many products are the brain child of an individual and do not have a large install base or organization or funding to back them up and they do offer a high degree of risk.  These products are generally specialized and may provide you value if you are willing to accept the risk of limited community and support. 

On just the other side of the equation you will see many products dominated by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and other industry giants.  Look at the Eclipse Foundation and its tools for Java development.  Look at the Apache Foundation and its server projects including a focus today on “BIG DATA”.  

Look at IBM’s investment of over $2 Billion in LINUX!  IBM is a major participant contributing both human resources (developers) and money to the Apache Fondation, Elcipse.org, ASPECT-J, Bugzilla, Java, and many other open source projects.  

Major companies often invest in open source to create a viable alternative to commercial products that have the potential to dominate a market.  IBM created Eclipse and donated over $30 million worth of its proprietary software to the open source community to stop Microsoft’s potential domination of the development market with its Visual Studio line of products.  IBM’s investment in LINUX provides both a cross platform solution that runs on all of its hardware and is a major deterent to the continued domination by Microsoft of the server market.  

So when selecting a product that holds promise for you, see who is supporting the product and projects.  Read the community forums and get a sense of what people are saying, who is saying it (business or technical), how many people have downloaded the software, who is using it, and how viable does it look.  How well does the solution fit your needs?  

Competitive Advantage

Many people will argue that use of open source software limits your competitive advantage in the industry compared to in-house developed software, or customized commercial software.  

 The reality is that much of the open source software is highly configurable with business rules defined by users to the system giving each user a competitive edge. 

Examples and Sources

You can do Google searches on “Open Source Software” and an education.  A search on “open source software education” produced over 240 million results.  Here are three major results designed to handle all aspects of administration of classrooms, assignments, attendance, grades, etc.  Note that these products include relationships to parents or guardians, teachers, administrators, etc.  In other words a comprehensive set of software to run a K-12 school.

• Project Fedena -- http://www.projectfedena.org 
• Opensis -- http://opensis.com
• Epoptes -- http://www.epoptes.org

Here are some lists of various types of open source software:

• ERP software - http://blogs.bistasolutions.com/2010/05/27/final-list-of-open-source-erp-system/ 
• CRM software - http://www.insidecrm.com/articles/crm-blog/the-top-10-opensource-crm-solutions-53507 
• Accounting Software - http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/24/featured/best-open-source-accounting-software.html 
• Retail Software - http://www.getapp.com/software-system/Open-source/retail-store-software
• Point of Sale (POS) software - http://www.infoworld.com/t/business/open-source-point-sale-262 
• Inventory Management Software - http://www.getapp.com/software-system/Open-source/inventory-management-software 

There are lists for any industry or application you can imagine.  Here is a list from Wikipedia by category that may prove helpful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_software_packages

Once again, open source is not the panecea for everyone, but there are many superb software products and packages that are as good or better than commercial software costing millions of dollars!  

Buying in to open source is not about getting free software, but rather buying into a user driven software development metaphor of community based development that brings you high quality superior software to that sold by commercial vendors or developed in-house.  

Be careful, but don’t rule out this option. 

BTW, if you need help with open source systems, there are generally consultants associated with the package that are certified by the organization that controls the package to assist you at a reasonable cost.  They provide implementation, training, support, and customization services.  Note:  I do not do this type of work.  

47.8 Million iPhones in First Quarter of 2013

Apple reports selling 47.8 Million iPhones in the first quarter of their 2013 fiscal year! Are your computer systems capable of supporting the iPhone for your customers, employees, or trading partners. With close to 200 million iPhones in use that is one big market place!

Programming Jobs in US Lowest in Recent History

In 1990 there were 595,000 Programming jobs in the US.  Today there are less than 320,000 jobs.  These numbers are from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov).

Many of these jobs have been outsourced to India, China, and other countries paying programmers less than 10% of the typical US salary.

As much as I hate the idea of outsourcing US jobs, there is little that any individual company can do to counter this.  The only reversal on the trend in outsourcing will be taxation and regulation by government that addresses the issue.  Until such time, I strongly recommend that companies get on board and outsource their IT in order to be competitive.

While I maintain that there is no single solution for any specific enterprise which each has their unique requirements, outsourcing and cloud computing should both be on the table as serious potential means of reducing costs while improving IT services.

Don't fall for the argument put forth by many internal IT folks, that offshore people are low quality and cause more problems than they provide benefit!  That is simply not true.  Offshoring requires strong management and controls at your location and within your company.  Note that developers in India and China as well as some other companies are better educated and more highly skilled than the traditional US worker.

So tell me do you want to pay $80,000 and up (plus benefits) to a US worker with a high school education, maybe a year's worth of training a technical school, junior college, or worse a couple of weeks by an IBM SE, or a person with a Masters in Computer Science from Universities that rival MIT and people with IQ's and performance scores equalling or exceeding MIT and other major US universities for $10,000 per year (with no benefits).

The key in successful outsourcing is the agreements you have in place between you and your outsourcing contractor, statements of work governing each project, and clearly stated responsibilities for  defect resolution.  It is also your responsibility to provide very specific and accurate specifications as well as creating and executing formal test plans with review and acceptance by key business unit managers and executives.

The real key to success is your up front work and planning followed by your oversight on the execution.  You can save millions of dollars.

The importance of Tablets and Smart Phones

Dell just announced the hiring of Jai Menon, former IBM CTO of its Systems and Technology Group as its new CTO of its Enterprise Group.  Dell like other PC makers are seeing the handwriting on the wall and adapting to tablets and smart phones which are rapidly replacing desktop and laptop PC's as the user interface to computer systems.

With Apple's new iPAD mini announcement along with devices from other Android based tablet providers it looks like the PC as a client driven device is rapidly diminishing.

Vendors like Dell are moving to backend server providers leveraging both Linux and Microsoft Windows based technologies, but also adding data storage via low cost advanced SAN's (Storage Area Networks).

This will have a very interesting impact on IBM who has always maintained an extremely high price point on its Intel based servers known as the xSeries.  IBM has always been able to charge more money by providing services on top of the equipment and therefore selling a high price total solution to its customers.

Companies like Dell are responding with lower cost equipment with integrated software that reduces the need for vendor provided expert consultants.

While IBM may have been a step ahead of others by selling its client oriented PC business to Lenovo and retaining its server business, but lets see if it can adapt to this new low cost easy to use set of equipment from Dell and other competitors.

With cloud on the up swing and major could providers buying literally thousands of servers as they grow, and internal companies moving to a tablet client server driven environment the demand for low cost servers is increasing rapidly.

It shall be interesting to see how this all plays out.  There is a strong message here however.  If you are not looking at tablets along with Internet based server centric solutions for your employees and systems you need to take a closer look.

BIG DATA?

First of all if you are working with "Big Data", I'd love to hear from you.

I was recently involved in a discussion where old AS/400 based folks were debating the merits of relational database and SQL.  It was a bit unbelievable since Dr Codd first published his papers on relational database architecture in 1970, 42 years ago!  In the course of discussion the issue of modern alternatives to relational database systems came up.

This brings us into the topic of "Big Data".  "Big Data" is defined by Volume, Velocity, and Variety.  We are seeing data volumes in Petabytes (1000 terabytes) and Exabytes (1000 petabytes) materializing regularly.

The concept of "Big Data" first materialized in scientific computing circles where measurements in weather, aeronautics (i.e. wind or airflow on an airframe), medicine, and other industrial or scientific applications produced massive amounts of data that needed to be captured and analyzed, often in real time.

We then began to see social media sites like Facebook Google, Amazon, and others create unbelievably huge repositories of data.  Facebook reports that it operates over 30,000 computers and captures log files of over 25 terabytes of data each day...

Today we are seeing Big Data move into commercial business enterprises.  Consider the following:

• Marketing applications that search the Internet for hits on a product or company name and then collect and analyze the content of everything found to determine the sentiment or attitude of the public toward the product or company.
• Consider huge international retailers who capture and monitor every sales transaction in every store (millions of transactions daily) to analyze product movement and revenue opportunities.
• Consider a major retailer who captures everything that a user does in their e-Commerce web sites, including products they look at but do not buy, searches they perform, every single keystroke and then analyze why visitors behave the way they do...  

I would really like your help in pursuing this line of thought and exploring the use of "Big Data" by commercial business enterprises.  Send me your experience at:  bobc@rjcancilla.com.  Let me know if I can use your name or company name or if I should keep that info confidential.  I'd really love to hear from you.