Sun Microsystems, Cloud Computing and the premier European VC event ‘Entrepreneur Country’

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Entrepreneur Country

At Sun UK we recently supported and attended “Entrepreneur Country” a major European Start Up and VC event.

Acting as a rallying cry to the entrepreneurial, VC and Start-up communities, the event affirmed that now is the best time to start your own company and that entrepreneurs were key to the recovery of the economy from the recession. Almost 300 of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs, including Caffè Nero founder Gerry Ford and Betfair co-founder and Chairman Edward Wray, shared stories of success at the event. Roman Stanek, a founder of NetBeans, and now founder and CEO of Good Data Corp and successful serial entrepreneur, said “tough times create tough companies”, whilst Gerry Ford, urged us to “be restless and relentless” in the pursuit of success. The seminars were held at the Institute of Directors (IoD) in central London and coincided with the official launch of Entrepreneur Country online.

Other highlights of the day included keynotes from Sir Paul Judge (from the Enterprise Education Trust on ‘Risk and Enterprise’), Glen Manchester (Founder and CEO of Thunderhead), Ed Wray (Co-Founder and Chairman of Betfair), Niall Harbison (Founder and Chef at iFoods.tv), and David Courtier-Dutton and Paul Brown (from SliceThePie).

The event was organised and hosted by Ariadne Capital, an entrepreneurial investment and advisory firm. Ariadne was set up by current CEO Julie Meyer; probably best known as being a founder of First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs (which many credit for igniting the Internet generation across Europe).

The agenda also included two panel sessions discussing Online Gaming (and virtual worlds) and Cloud Computing (and, to an extent, it’s impact on the entrepreneurial, VC and Start-up communities and how they might best capitalise on it). The later of which I had been asked to take part in of behalf of Sun. Cannily I kept mental notes and have been able to write the session up as a separate blog post “Cloud Computing panel interview with Sun Microsystems at ‘Entrepreneur Country’“.

To whet your appetite for the article above the questions we were asked included:

  1. Surely we’ve heard all of this before in various forms and guises? What is different this time? Why will it work? #
  2. For this stuff to become truly embedded it will need to move from the man in the street to the corporate. Corporate CIOs are a risk averse bunch especially when you move into some sectors (e.g. Financial Services). What will influence the CIOs’ buying decision? #
  3. It was all very easy when you went out and bought or developed software, installed it yourself, ran it yourself, etc. Does working in the cloud bring new issues with regards to data ownership, IP rights, other legal issues, etc.? #
  4. What is your vision for the future and where this goes? #
  5. An audience driven Q and A session including responses to “What do you think of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud initiative?” and “What is Sun’s Cloud Computing strategy?” #

I really enjoyed the day and had a productive time networking and meeting people, all of whom shared with me their vision, enthusiasm and wonderful business ideas. I met people from MovieStorm, TechnologyDen, NewVoiceMedia, Broadcom UK, SaaSPlex, Spinvox, Teamer, and a quite a few others too. Some of these companies had been funded by Enterprise Ireland and it was very good to see them there as well as representatives from the UK’s Technology Strategy Board.

Accompanying the days themes of Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurism were handouts, books and other resources, and I picked up a copy of Jeremy Coller’s new book “The Lives, Loves and Deaths of Splendidly Unreasonable Inventors“.

On the night we went to an associated networking dinner where I fell deep into conversation with a number of people including Paul Flanagan, Executive for Digital Entertainment at Ariadne, Declan Cunningham, Director at Ariadne, and Tom Salmon, founder of AfterShow and Traffic Digital.

The event was supported by the Sun UK Internet Business team, led by Paul Tarantino, with additional support from Simon Culmer, Director of Sales from the UK executive management team, as well as myself. Here’s the official write up, a variety of photos taken and also a selection of video recordings.

Thanks to Rebecca Temple, Manager of Portfolio Marketing at Ariadne, here’s a variety of some of the other coverage of the day, much of it focused on the business messages we heard:

links for 2009-02-14

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TPB Tracker Geo Statistics – as in ‘The Pirate Bay’ – A helpful, handy, real-time, mash-up of Google maps and ‘The Pirate Bay’ (TPB) web logs, showing number of users on the site by country. …..

Friday the 13th Black Sabbath

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Happy Birthday to Black Sabbath’s first album ‘Black Sabbath‘, released on this day 39 years ago; yes that’s right on Friday the 13th, the wags.

Favourite song? ‘The Wizard’ the harmonica at the start is ace. Yes, this post is very short, and, no, it doesn’t contain any technology content.

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CBI calls for urgent Government intervention – CBI Press Release – If credit isn’t available soon the recession is going to get a whole lot worse; CBI Director-General, Richard Lambert, has this week urged the Government to implement its various support packages to tackle. …..

The Open Group release TOGAF 9

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Today the Open Group released the latest version of their Enterprise Architecture (EA) Framework “TOGAF 9” (The Open Group Architecture Framework version 9).

It’s been more than a few years at version 8 so an update was due; according to the Open Group the new version has a number of enhancements, including:

  1. Modular structure
  2. Promotes greater usability & encourages incremental adoption
  3. Supports evolutionary release management
  4. Content framework (donated by Capgemini)
  5. Extended guidance on using TOGAF
  6. Explicit consideration of architectural styles (includes integration SOA with TOGAF)
  7. SOA and Security
  8. Further detail added to the Architecture Development Method (ADM)

Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group, said this about the launch:

Today sees the launch of the much anticipated TOGAF 9. From the beginning TOGAF 9 was always intended as an evolution from TOGAF 8 and this is exactly what has been delivered.

A number of enhancements within TOGAF 9 support greater usability of the overall specification. The modular structure of the specification makes it easier for an architect to consider a specific aspect of the architecture capability. In all areas, the specification seeks to add detail and clarity above and beyond previous TOGAF versions.

I wish TOGAF 9 the continued success of its predecessors and extend my thanks and appreciation to all Architecture Forum members who have involved themselves in its development at any level. It is an astonishing achievement and I am delighted to have been able to play a small part.

There have already been a number of reviews and articles about it being released, some of which are well worth having a look at, including Mike Walker’s blog article “TOGAF 9 Release and Impressions” and online IT industry magazine eBizQ’s “Open Group Releases TOGAF Version 9; Ready for SOA“.

As a whole TOGAF 9 is still rather process focused, and I doubt we’ll see a resolution to this in the short term, despite Capgemini ‘gifting’ the new Content Framework to TOGAF. As such I expect that this issue will continue to drive people to adopt elements from other EA Frameworks which are more artifact focused, however given the extensive material on how to integrate TOGAF 9 with other frameworks I don’t see this as a major issue, unless you come from an organisation where there is, or has recently been, an EA “religious war” based around a single EA ideology. If that is the case you may need to take a more pragmatic approach to deliver your EA strategy.

If you are an Architect, or work with Architects, I recommend being familiar with TOGAF and becoming certified (if this is a viable cost option). Principally because I see TOGAFs main value in bringing a common and standardised language, set of semantics and terminology to EA; acting as a “lingua franca” for the architectural community, as well as acting as a standardised approach to EA and as a robust EA Framework in it’s own right.

Sun are a partner of the Open Group and a number of us, including myself, take part in the Open Group’s ‘Architecture Forum‘, the community which defines the TOGAF standard itself.

Downloads of TOGAF 9 and other related documents, such as an introduction and a migration overview, can be found on the Open Group’s TOGAF website: http://www.opengroup.org/togaf/

he Open Group release TOGAF 9

Today the Open Group released the latest version of their Enterprise Architecture (EA) Framework “TOGAF 9” (The Open Group Architecture Framework version 9).

It’s been more than a few years at version 8 so an update was due; according to the Open Group the new version has a number of enhancements, including:

  1. Modular structure
  2. Promotes greater usability & encourages incremental adoption
  3. Supports evolutionary release management
  4. Content framework (donated by Capgemini)
  5. Extended guidance on using TOGAF
  6. Explicit consideration of architectural styles (includes integration SOA with TOGAF)
  7. SOA and Security
  8. Further detail added to the Architecture Development Method (ADM)

Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group, said this about the launch:

Today sees the launch of the much anticipated TOGAF 9. From the beginning TOGAF 9 was always intended as an evolution from TOGAF 8 and this is exactly what has been delivered.

A number of enhancements within TOGAF 9 support greater usability of the overall specification. The modular structure of the specification makes it easier for an architect to consider a specific aspect of the architecture capability. In all areas, the specification seeks to add detail and clarity above and beyond previous TOGAF versions.

I wish TOGAF 9 the continued success of its predecessors and extend my thanks and appreciation to all Architecture Forum members who have involved themselves in its development at any level. It is an astonishing achievement and I am delighted to have been able to play a small part.

There have already been a number of reviews and articles about it being released, some of which are well worth having a look at, including Mike Walker’s blog article “TOGAF 9 Release and Impressions” and online IT industry magazine eBizQ’s “Open Group Releases TOGAF Version 9; Ready for SOA“.

As a whole TOGAF 9 is still rather process focused, and I doubt we’ll see a resolution to this in the short term, despite Capgemini ‘gifting’ the new Content Framework to TOGAF. As such I expect that this issue will continue to drive people to adopt elements from other EA Frameworks which are more artifact focused, however given the extensive material on how to integrate TOGAF 9 with other frameworks I don’t see this as a major issue, unless you come from an organisation where there is, or has recently been, an EA “religious war” based around a single EA ideology. If that is the case you may need to take a more pragmatic approach to deliver your EA strategy.

If you are an Architect, or work with Architects, I recommend being familiar with TOGAF and becoming certified (if this is a viable cost option). Principally because I see TOGAFs main value in bringing a common and standardised language, set of semantics and terminology to EA; acting as a “lingua franca” for the architectural community, as well as acting as a standardised approach to EA and as a robust EA Framework in it’s own right.

Sun are a partner of the Open Group and a number of us, including myself, take part in the Open Group’s ‘Architecture Forum‘, the community which defines the TOGAF standard itself.

Downloads of TOGAF 9 and other related documents, such as an introduction and a migration overview, can be found on the Open Group’s TOGAF website: http://www.opengroup.org/togaf/

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Andrew Gabriel, of the UK Systems Practice, awarded joint Patent contributing to Solaris virtualisation

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Congratulation to the UK Systems Practice’s Andrew Gabriel, who has been awarded a joint Patent entitled “Global visibility controls for operating system partitions”, along with Andrew Tucker, John Beck, David Comay, Ozgur Leonard and Dan Price. Issued as US Patent 7437556, this is the main patent covering the key inventions in Solaris Zones. For those not in the know Solaris Zones are a significant component within Sun’s Operating System Virtualisation capability and have been rolled into OpenSolaris.

For more information on Solaris and Virtualisation there’s the official Sun UK Virtualisation page. Alternately you can get in touch here and I’ll connect you with the right people inside Sun UK if I can’t answer you directly.

This is a great example of how the UK technical community is contributing to Sun Microsystems capabilities world wide. A copy of the patent can be viewed and downloaded at http://www.pat2pdf.org/

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links for 2009-02-02

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BBC NEWS | Politics | 10 lessons from my Euro MP’s life BBC political reporter Brian Wheeler spent a week living the life of a Member of the European Parliament. …..

Simon Freeman, ex Chief Architect of the Government Gateway, responds to “Evolution of UK Government Messaging Systems”

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About eighteen months ago I wrote up an overview of government to government (G2G) systems in the UK, followed by a high level comparison of the three most utilised, and a look at the potential evolution of the G2G systems across the UK.

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links for 2009-01-30

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BBC NEWS | Education | White working class ‘losing out’ As if we didn’t know this already “Class” still matters in the UK; working class people are losing out on several fronts, from education to housing, and the current school system is skewed in favour. …..

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