I am in Redmond this week. I am sharing a farily small room that is filled with 16 other architects. We are spending this week learning from each other and coming up with a repeatable approach to leading a transformation in the way we engage with and deliver “uber” opportunities. Quite exciting opportunity to be part of this effort and be the tip of the spear representing Microsoft and engaging with customers in discussing with customers how to realize business value. Our slog... Read Full Story

David Wheeler (computer scientist) once said: “Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection”.    This is often mis-quoted with “abstraction” substituted for “indirection”.  I think the main idea remains untouched.  We in computer science use this pattern all the time.  Most of widely used patterns are based in creating abstraction layers that hide the complexity of working with the overall system or architecture.  These ab... Read Full Story

The Microsoft Global SOA Practice is happy to announce that our new release of the Managed Services Engine is available now at CodePlex. (here) This new version is a huge departure from the Management Console snap-in. We now have a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) administration tool that simplifies management of the various old and new Service Model Components introduced in this version. Read Full Story

As you probably know by now. I joined Microsoft at the beginning of December 2008. I have been in ramp up mode while trying to contribue as much as possible on sales calls, QA for one of our solutions, and of course all that HR required training. Today we are less than a week away from Microsoft’s internal technology conference for folks in the field, people just like me! I am excited about attending my first TechReady. I’ve heard about this conference, kind of like a TechEd but w... Read Full Story

I was happy with 6mbps but you can never have enough.  I just upgraded my AT&T Internet service to the MAX!  My downlowad/upload speed test I am loving the speed and not to mention how happy I have been with the TV service.  IPTV Rocks!  way to go AT&T Uverse.        Read Full Story

More than once I’ve heard technologists complaint about the business and how they don’t understand the issues the IT faces to provide appropriate Service Levels to the business, on the other hand, I also hear the complaints of the “Business” on how IT and the solutions intended to provide functional services are not flexible and take too long to implement. Who is right?  BOTH! Until recent times, we had not been able to provide better alignment between IT and Business.... Read Full Story

Working with the Energy and Utilities vertical at nGenera we are seriously considering hosting a new product offering on the cloud using Amazon’s EC2 web service. My experience so far is very positive.  Easy to sign up, easy to use, easy to administer (even with the command-line tools) and the price…  can’t beat that!  at $0.10 / instance hour it beats the typical hosting agreements. even for a 24/7 site at an average of $73 / month plus the data transfer it looks like a ver... Read Full Story

Everyday I see more and more of the “wikinomics” concepts being applied in real business scenarios.  One of the latest is Starbucks.  they have been loosing steam and they are now brewing a social media project in order to find their ”lost soul”. http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/home/home.jsp Interesting to mention that this is build on force.com. Read Full Story

Recently I have been working with our y own Agile and Collaborative Technology group and with customers on the very topic of this post. There is so much to lean and unlearn about the Innovation Process that I recommend reading the following two books: ThinkerToys by Michael Michalko and Wikinomics by Don Tappscot/Anthony Williams (by the way Don and the company he founded, New Paradigm, are now part of the BSG Alliance.) These two books will provide some specific techniques and fresh ideas on... Read Full Story

I recently saw a similar product to MS Surface on TV.  Can’t recall the name, but while googling for it instead I found what appears to be the mother of all touch-screens.   This is a multi-touch, collaborative interactive media wall.  Just think about the collaboration possibilities! If you are interested you can get your own Intearctive Media Wall for $100K.  Available only in Neiman Marcus’ Catalog.   (http://tinyurl.com/2f6842) Now that I think about it, where else could I get... Read Full Story