Example of a service candidate
May 26th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Recently, I described how service inventory blueprints are an important deliverable when performing service-oriented analysis and modeling. If you review the example I provided, you’ll notice that it contains a collection of service candidates. What’s a service candidate? According to SOAGlossary.com,
The service candidate term is used help distinguish a conceptualized service from an actual implemented service. This distinction is especially important when documenting service inventories as part of blueprint specifications or even when keeping track of a service’s progress via its service profile.
To give you a better idea of how one of these service candidates is documented, here’s a sample of this next level of detail. Contact me if you’d like the original Word file to use for your project.
Example of a service inventory blueprint
May 18th, 2012 § 1 Comment
At WiseClouds, we design, implement, and maintain Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives for our customers. We’re big believers in the mainstream SOA methodology, and have found it to be very helpful. A major deliverable of the modeling and analysis phase is a service inventory blueprint:
…before any services are actually built, it is desirable to establish a conceptual blueprint of all the planned services for a given inventory. This perspective is documented in the service inventory blueprint.
Here’s a very simple example of what one of these blueprints look like. Contact me if you’d like the original Word file to use for your project.
Winning sales engineer trait #4: Confidence
May 8th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Here’s an old technical sales joke for you:
Q: How many SEs does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: I don’t know at the moment, but I’ll get back to you with an answer soon.
In this next installment of the 7 Habits of the Most Effective SEs, it’s time to see how a little confidence can go a long way. Many people think that confidence is like charisma: either you’re born with it, or you lack it your whole life. When it comes to being a capable SE, I don’t subscribe to that point of view. Instead, I’ve always felt that knowledge and experience breed certainty. Earlier in this series, I described how being technically skilled and inquisitive can pay big dividends, and confidence just happens to be one of those benefits.
Regardless of whether it’s in your DNA, or you gain it through the school of hard knocks, confidence is essential in technology sales. SEs will often find themselves in front of potentially hostile audiences, from scowling executives in dark suits to skeptical middle managers to jeering technical wizards. Each audience considers the SE to be an inferior:
- The executives view the SE as a peon attempting to extract large sums of money from the firm.
- The middle managers view the SE as a mere technician with no business sense.
- And the technical wizards view the SE as an impostor, incapable of understanding their unique technical requirements.
The SE must be able to overcome the natural instinct to flee in terror, instead relying on their confidence to gracefully face whatever challenges lie ahead. Prospects pick up on this self-assurance, too, which can help cement a winning sales cycle. Finally, it’s critical to remember that it isn’t necessary (or advisable) to answer every question on the spot, but they must be addressed promptly afterwards – just like the light bulb question I listed above.
Is a price war for solid state disk drives on the horizon?
April 28th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
A while back, I wrote about the impact of the flooding in Thailand on the price of traditional mechanical disk drives. Since just about every dark cloud has a silver lining, this natural disaster has accelerated the development and maturation of the solid state disk (SSD) market. Naturally, this growing segment has attracted a bunch of new players, and this is a bit unsettling to the established leaders. In response, these vendors appear to be trying a time-tested approach to squash newer and more nimble competitors:
Major SSD firms have initiated price reductions to reflect falling prices for NAND flash chips. The move is also aimed at triggering a price war in the market in an attempt to squeeze out smaller peers, according to industry sources in Taiwan.
From the perspective of cloud computing and Big Data/NoSQL, if an SSD price war does ensue, there’s a very good chance that it will result in further innovations in affordable hosted high-performance databases. In-memory disk drives should also go a long way toward increasing the scalability and predictability of shared cloud-based virtual machine instances.
A good example of an effective ROI calculator
April 16th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
A while back, I described a series of the most common technical marketing mistakes that I’ve encountered over the years. The price of these errors and shortcomings is measured in lost revenue and unhappy customers. In one of the most notable instances, many sales opportunities hit a brick wall when the vendor is unable to make a persuasive argument that demonstrates a solid Return on Investment (ROI). Ironically, there may be ample data to back up this proposition, but there simply isn’t any supporting collateral. To add insult to injury, it’s often relatively straightforward and cost-effective to construct and deploy the necessary tools that make the economic case in favor of your product or service.
For example, Think88 recently completed an ROI calculator project for Sybase. The goal was to help customers comprehend the financial advantages of employing the new compression capabilities offered by Sybase’s Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database platform. We created two versions of this calculator: one for anyone to use on the Sybase website, and another, more detailed edition – including pricing – to be used exclusively by Sybase sales representatives in one-on-one situations with their clients.
Accurate, honest, and concise ROI calculators such as this one can go a long way towards building a realistic business justification and then winning the sale.
Winning sales engineer trait #3: Intellectual curiosity
April 1st, 2012 § 1 Comment
In the first two installments of this series, I described how the best SEs have a competitive nature paired with solid technical skills. The next essential characteristic that I’d like to portray is the innate curiosity possessed by these top performers.
An SE who enjoys learning new concepts and technologies will be a joy to have on your team. An inquisitive SE won’t view the necessary training on your product, service, or marketplace as a chore to be avoided. Instead, they recognize that learning increases their job effectiveness as well as their marketability. This also means that good SEs take an interest in your industry by continually reading trade publications, blogs, applicable Web sites, and by attending conferences. It’s even better if they go the extra mile and establish themselves as domain experts by writing articles, speaking, or blogging.
Training can also play a big part in bringing a new SE up to speed and keeping them current. Sadly, far too many organizations are skimping on this indispensable prerequisite, and it always shows up in the sales cycle: nothing destroys an SE’s credibility faster than being exposed as out-of-date on vital knowledge.
Easy to use, free key-value Web service
March 23rd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
If you’re building a lightweight application that needs key/value storage or just trying to expand your understanding of NoSQL, check out OpenKeyval.org. It’s a free, open source Web service that lets you store up to 64Kb of key/value pairs each day. You can then securely retrieve this information and even grant access to others.
To help you get started, the web site provides examples of several different connectivity methods, including:
- cURL
- HTML
- JSONP
There are also some nice user contributions of utilities, libraries, and so on.
To me, this is a great example of the intersection of cloud computing, Big Data, and SOA. I predict that we’ll be seeing more innovative services like this in the future. Check it out.
Easy-to-understand graph database tutorial
March 13th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
If you’re curious about Big Data, NoSQL, MapReduce, or Hadoop – and you’re in London – you might want to stop by the talk I’ll be giving next week. As part of my presentation, I’ll be describing three of the most popular database architectures: relational, hierarchical, and graph.
I’ve found that most developers and architects have experience with relational and hierarchical data stores, but graph data is something that’s relatively unfamiliar. Ironically, every time you interact with social networking platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, your experience is largely driven by what’s contained in massive graph databases.
To help give you a better idea of this interesting new way of storing and accessing data, check out this tutorial from LinkedDataTools.com. It presents graph databases in a friendly, easy-to-understand manner, and also explains how the semantic Web (or Web 3.0 if you like) is built on this type of data.
Learn about key-value pairs in Amazon’s SimpleDB
March 4th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Key-value pairs represent a fundamental Big Data concept. But if you’ve only worked with relational databases or other storage technologies, you may find key-value pairs to be a bit confusing. Fortunately, here’s a helpful tutorial that succinctly explains key-value pairs as well as shows you how to use them within the Amazon’s SimpleDB.
The tutorial provides an example of the full lifecycle for key-value pairs:
Instead of requiring you to install a development environment and write code, the tutorial provides a simple GUI that gives you everything you need:
Sybase’s new hybrid-threaded kernel architecture
February 29th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Sybase continues to enhance the performance capabilities of its flagship Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) platform. Here’s an article I wrote for Database Journal that describes the new hybrid-threaded kernel architecture.
