Tag Archive for ‘IBM’ rss

What Keeps a 100-Year-Old Company Feeling Like a Teenager?

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jun 06, 2011. Leave a Comment

This year IBM turns 100 years old, and last week IBM’s “Watson” was named 2011 “Person of the Year” by the Webby Awards. The mere thought of IBM as a start-up (circa 1911) boggles my mind, especially when you consider that this year they reached their all-time high water mark at $205B in market valuation. This feat is even more amazing given the somewhat rocky road that they traveled during the late 80’s and 90’s. Over the last ten years under the watchful eye of Sam Palisamo, IBM is beginning to experience a rebirth. While they are nowhere near the dominant leadership position that they held over the technology sector from 1940 – 1980 when the market was defined as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs,” today they are beginning to show signs of re-emergence as — if nothing else — the “supervising adult ” that their 100 years of existence entitles them to.

So what keeps an old company relevant after all these (100) years? Probably the same things that keep older people young…they hang out with their kids or grandchildren. In IBM’s case they have learned (over the years) to partner with a few young, innovative companies that are proving to be the new “game changers” in several traditional markets — even in some markets that have long been considered to be IBM’s strongholds. By partnering up with these young “upstarts,” IBM has given their customers fresh alternatives for new technologies and approaches for dealing with a rapidly changing business world. Perhaps even more importantly for many of their customers, IBM is also delivering a much-needed layer of “adult supervision” in this increasingly crowded and complex vendor landscape. Their years of experience enable IBM to become a trusted advisor to their customers on how to navigate through this vendor mine field.

As one those lucky few young upstarts that Grandpa IBM has chosen to partner with, we here at SOASTA get the advantage of their many years of experience surviving and thriving in both up and down markets. We also get to benefit from what may be the greatest technology distribution channel ever compiled, a channel that no start-up could ever replicate organically.

Time will only tell if Grandpa IBM and its young upstart partner SOASTA will make an interesting combination for the IBM nation, but the hourglass has been turned. One thing is for sure, SOASTA is one youngster that is eager to learn from Grandpa.

Consumer Websites Must Stop Cheating on Their Tests

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Nov 01, 2010. Leave a Comment

Another week goes by and more leading consumer websites crashed and burned, causing losses in both revenue (millions) and, perhaps more importantly, in consumer confidence in ecommerce. This week fail whales were sited swimming in the oceans of one of the world’s largest retailers, a leading children’s toy manufacturer and the industry’s leading online payment processor. PayPal alone (which was down for several hours this past Friday) may have lost hundreds of millions of dollars for itself and the enormous network of retail outlets that rely on them for their financial transaction services.

So why are fail whales continuing to happen so frequently? Don’t these companies test their sites? The answer, for load and performance testing, is of course they do…most of the time. In fact, some companies are spending millions of dollars on people, hardware and tools to load and performance test their websites. So why all the fail whales? One answer may be that organizations that have chosen the wrong testing tools or test service are, in fact, cheating on their tests!

Consumer facing website have become the primary channel of revenue and product information for millions of companies around the globe. So why cheat on testing? The pressure to deliver (business agility) is enormous today, for all IT organizations, and may well be a key reason cheating has become a common practice. Many test subcontractors and test companies cheat on their tests simply because they run out of time. According to PCWeek, this is what happened to AT&T on the pre-registration site for the iPhone4 launch. Due to a last minute feature upgrade they had no time to adequately performance test the site, which, of course, crashed an hour after it was launched, due to a 10x spike in traffic, creating a PR and revenue nightmare! Other organizations cheat because they just can’t afford the resources (people, hardware and tools) to properly test their sites in the first place.

The most common way to defend this cheating is to use semantics to obscure the shortcuts taken. When asked by an enraged business owner “did you test the site before going live?”, the answer is always “of course we did”. The problem is that it’s the wrong question. The right question is “did you test the site by accurately simulating real users performing both normal and unusual tasks, at and above expected volumes?”. For instance, if the goal was to simulate 5,000 concurrent users, a tester may respond that they tested for 5,000 “page views”! This is when language matters, since 5,000 page loads rarely equals the activity of 5,000 real users. In fact, it likely represents only a fraction of the target volume. By simply substituting page views or transactions for accurately simulating the activity of users on the site they almost certainly won’t reach the expected goal set by the business owner.

Another method of cheating the system is to adjust the timings of test scenarios. This practice is widely used by the testing community, primarily due to the cost of hardware and software when using traditional testing tools. For example, if buying a plane ticket online typically takes about 10 minutes, a clever tester may reduce the timing of this process in the test to just 1 minute. This, on the face of it, allows many more “users” into the system, but it doesn’t accurately simulate real world conditions. Finally, many leading edge companies are beginning to realize that the only way to accurately test a site is by including production testing. Testing only in the lab, and then extrapolating the results for the production environment, leaves far too many variables unaccounted for in the complex deployment environment that is the web. Again, cheating the testing system.

Whatever the reason for the cheating (lack of time, people, or resources) we must change this game now to maintain a high level of consumer confidence and continue to expand the growth of online commerce.

TechCRUNCH: The Gorillas are NOW in the Room

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Feb 28, 2009. Leave a Comment

Last November at a cloud computing conference here in the Valley, I mentioned to a friend that what I found most significant about that specific conference  was who wasn’t in the room. Of course, Amazon was there giving their terrific pitch, but none of the traditional giants were there in any significant way. Where were Microsoft, IBM, SUN, Google, HP, Dell, Oracle, and  Yahoo? After all, each had been making “place setting” pronouncements in the previous months regarding their emerging cloud offerings. There weren’t any CTO’s (except for Werner), no big name sponsorships, no big booths full of sales guys chatting up their new cloud offerings. They were all missing from this action . . . and, subsequently, the action was missing from that conference.  I felt a little like I was attending a John McCain town hall meeting when I knew O’Bama was packing a stadium in a city somewhere close by. Something was missing.

Well NOT anymore. Yesterday’s Cloud Computing conference put on by TechCrunch was cloud computing’s version of Oscar Night.  This time, all the Gorillas were in the same room, at the same time, and NOW all talking cloud.  In fact, loudly proclaiming “Software is Dead”, “Cloud is the new .com”,  ”Cloud is the Future of Technology”, etc.  Each statement made even more significant by who was making them . . . the CTOs of Google, Microsoft, SUN, Facebook, Rackspace, and even the CEO of Salesforce.com.  All proclaiming their long lasting love of the Cloud and cloud services. Now, all sitting at the same table smiling and making nice (although some did poke fun at each other a few times), laying out the future of cloud computing.  There were a few MIA’s even from this conference,  most notably  IBM and HP.  But, all in all, it was quite an impressive group as it was an illustrative moment in time for cloud computing. It was, for many young start-ups, a few large firms like Amazon, and  visionaries like Reuven Cohen who have been toiling for years on bringing us first Elastic then Cloud Computing . . . validation!  A significant sign that the Cloud “game” is changing.  I fully expect that this change will pick up some significant momentum on a global scale in the coming months. After all, everyone knows that you can’t start the really big party until the Gorillas arrive!

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

Email Us!
Subscribe to our Feed!
Join us on LinkedIn
Find us on Facebook
Follow our Tweets
See our pics