Integration considerations

Just back from last week's trek back East to IBM's Software Analyst conference. That company has certainly formed an impressive software group largely through acquisitions over the years and through keeping their value intact and in many cases even growing it. Both Lotus and Rational are excellent examples of acquisitions made years ago that have flourished, matured, and grown into much stronger brands under the leadership of Steve Mills. We can expect more recent acquisitions like Telelogic and Cognos to do the same.

They obviously know how to integrate their acquisitions, and that's a pretty good trick. Many companies wind up destroying them, spending huge sums to acquire a company, and then burying the brand, most of the people, and sometimes even the technology. Now and then it's blatantly done to eliminate a competitor, but mostly poor acquisition integration is an accident that comes from not enough thought or experience about the process, and from the fact that companies actually do have cultures and it's not that easy to knit two together without encountering clashes. The trick is knowing how to handle those clashes and how to promote collaboration instead.

The current economic climate is sure to stimulate more mergers. It will be interesting to see who survives.

When to Send an Email

We have a panel of over 75,000 developers in 85 countries around the world, and we regularly send them email invitations to do surveys online. Thus we're always trying to figure out what the best time to send them an email is. We know that they're more likely to respond if the email actually arrives while they're at their desks and so we set the mail program to send different groups at different times - but what about the day?

Until recently our rule of thumb was to have the email arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday - but never on Saturday or Sunday. Then we published our Indian Developer Marketing survey report last Summer - all exclusively conducted in India, and one of the things we asked the Indian developers was what day of the week they were most likely to read an unsolicited email. It was a BIG surprise when more of them said Sunday than any other day ( in North America the best day IS Tuesday).

But there's a reason for that and it has to do with fundamental cultural differences. In North America - South America too, the dominant religion is Christian and the "Sabbath" is Sunday - thus not a day for working - it's part of the weekend. In Israel, however the Sabbath is Saturday and for Muslims all over the world Friday is the celebrated day and thus part of the weekend. In India, the predominant religion is Hindu and Hindus don't really have a particular day of the week for religious celebration - thus emailing on Sunday works fine.

The thing to take away from this is that to market globally to developers you can't just do the same thing as you'd do in North America except bigger and expect it to work. It's important to understand your audience and when it's global there's a lot more to understand.

Governing SOA

In our latest survey of developers actively working on SOA projects, a full two-thirds of them had implemented a formal SOA governance structure or planned to do so within the next two years. The puzzling thing would seem to be the one-third who had no formal SOA governance plans, until we stop and think about how nebulous "SOA governance" is anyway, and how it means different things to different people.

Most definitions of SOA governance describe control of the services in a SOA project, but what kind of control, who is wielding control and how? At the minimum a registry and repository must be maintained for the services, but more than that business decision makers must be actively involved in the process early on in order to ensure that services will be picked up once they are available. Indeed, a continuing communications strategy is needed throughout the life of the project and should be considered part of the governance structure.

Until recently an enterprise review board was the most common type of formal SOA governance structure, but in this last survey - just conducted - automated policy management had become more popular and is now on par. So what will the shape of SOA governance evolve into? We'll see.

C++ and multi-core development

Well, at Evans Data we've been watching the C++ language slowly die away for the last ten years - and I do mean slowly. Of course there's about a little more than a gazillion lines of C++ code out there to maintain and enhance, and yet still we're always surprised at the tenacity of the language. In our latest global survey we're even seeing a slight positive shift in usage.

So I was scratching my head about that yesterday, when I got a note about Intel's new C++ and Fortran compilers - both version 11 and both optimized for parallel programming. With auto vectoriziation, auto-parallelization, support for OpenMP 3, and oodles of other goodies for the developer writing multi-threaded apps, these compilers are impressive.

So is it possible that the C++ language (or maybe C) might be in for a comeback in the wake of manycore processors flooding the land. It's a great language for performance and with Intel supporting the language with tools like these - could it be that C++ will gain new ground?

First Thoughts

The first thing that comes to mind on this very first post is how is anyone ever going to come to read this? We've all heard about the blogs that everyone reads and that color our perceptions and shape our politics (though I personally don't know what they are) - can anyone name one? I'd like to visit it. But for all those there must be a host of blogs that no one reads - that are very existential.

So, if you're reading this - how did you happen to find it?