Years ago, innovation took place in locked basements behind steel doors with retinal scanners.  With the publication of Wikinomics crowd sourced innovation has slowly become commonplace.  Companies ranging from P&G to Big Pharma now try and incent external people into solving their pressing R&D problems.  This model can work pretty well — just ask P&G about the Swiffer. 

This week SAP announced a "partnership" with Innocentive a company that facilitates crowd sourcing of ideas and solutions.  The company has received a fair bit of press over the million dollar prize to find the gene responsible for Lou Gehrig’s Disease(ALS).  The company was originally founded around helping Pharma companies reduce R&D spending.  David Ritter, the CTO, said, "R&D spending at Pharma companies was growing faster then revenue, that is not sustainable."

Clients of Innocentive (Seekers) put challenges up on the company’s site to deliver either ideas or complete solutions to some of these R&D challenges.  One of Innocentive’s differentiators appears to be their ability to make the Seekers secure that the IP they are receiving is clear of claims.  I however, worry more about the implications of competing for a prize, being a Solver.

The company receives all entries for their review so that they can select the best one and reward the prize.  This probably works well in a space like Pharma or real goods where infringing on a patent is more obvious, a compound has a composition or a product does something and looks a certain way.  With software this is a bit more muddled.  The exact implementation of the software isn’t as important as what it actually does and why it is an improvement.  Additionally, software is compiled, obfuscated and it can be hard to even prove if someone has stolen or not stolen code.  Ask SCO and IBM about how much it costs to sort that out. 

More troubling, Mr. Ritter noted that "The bulk of problems on Innocentive are submitted anonymously, because they don’t want to "tip" their hat to the problems they are working on."  Which makes it even hard to find where your software idea or algorithm went.

When pressed on this Mr. Ritter conceded that there was a certain amount of faith the Solvers are putting into both Innocentive and their clients.  Personally, given my knowledge of SAP I would feel perfectly safe in giving in an idea and if it did not win, not having to check every new product for some of my ideas.  I don’t know if this is true for every person or every company.

Photo courtesy of soldiersmediacenter

The only other thing I was able to attend was a session run by Amir Blich about the future of the SAP Sneak Preview systems.  All I can really say is that it is great to see SAP looking to the mentors and to their community for advice about how to proceed.

My blog has been quiet and I’ve been off Twitter for close to a month now, mostly due to taking some well needed time off after the SAP Fellowship but also weighing a pretty big choice I had to make.

Stay at Colgate-Palmolive or leave for a job working for Adobe in a new product group creating a new enterprise software offering.  A new job certainly has its risks especially when compared to the stable home I have made for myself at Colgate.  However, with some good advice from my friends I have decided to leave Colgate to pursue the opportunity with Adobe.

Working at Colgate has allowed me to do so much and opened so many doors for me.   I cannot begin to express how much I appreciated all the support through the years the company’s management has give me.  I’ve traveled ( and taken pictures ) all over the world from India to Bangkok to Dublin.  I got to learn what makes a business like Colgate run from both the IT and business side.  I’ve presented in front of thousands of people in both the US and EU.  These experiences cannot be learned from a book and having this as my first job out of school was a great experience.

However, working for Adobe is going to be a great new chapter in my life — getting to see how software goes from just an idea on a whiteboard to a full fledged product is going to quite an adventure and I look forward to the challenge.

Thanks again to Colgate and more importantly all the Colgate people that made my time there so enjoyable.

For those of you keeping track my last day at Colgate will be Jan 18th and I will start at Adobe that following Monday, Jan 21st.

“[B]eauty and sexiness is in the eye of the beholder… [seeing] UPS give each one of its drivers a DIAD – and they did it years before the recent wave of personal gadgets – with GPS, wifi, scanning and other technologies. And with a battery that lasts all day. Can our iPhones do that?”

Vinnie does a great job showing how underneath the ugly exterior enterprise software is amazing and sexy.  Most of these posts are all missing the important comparison Scoble is making that Nick Carr picks up on here:

perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use

The post from Michael Krigsman(which although Nick beats up on chooses not to link to) talks about, how all this isn’t relevant because enterprise software is “intended to “enable core business processes” with a high degree of reliability, security, scalability, and so on.”

Enterprise vendors need to be keenly aware of the consumer market but, SAP’s customers don’t pay them to run around like Scoble and chase every new technology/website that comes out.  They pay them to make measured, smart choices with what they create and how they spend their R&D money.  Their customers do indeed expect the software they create to have a “a high degree of reliability, security, scalability.”

Enterprise vendors have an advantage – they can ride on top of the frothy startup market cherry picking things that work well and will deliver value back to an enterprise’s bottom line.  In the consumer tech industry, the invisible hand of the market is addicted to crack and has the attention span of a two year old.  The consumer market is chaotic, jumpy and prone to fickleness.  Online companies/ideas are created and destroyed everyday, and it is up to Scoble and other followers of tech to survey what’s out there, they need the thousands of readers.  The two industries have totally different business models, Twitter needs millions of users to monetize their software, SAP is very profitable on about 40k “users” world wide.

This shows the Enterprise software market is much more focused and so is their advertising.  Dan Farber does an excellent job of handling this topic and refocusing the discussion on what Gates actually said:

The business computing market, which is way bigger than the consumer computing market, no one pays attention to it. Even in the Wall Street Journal, and you think, oh, this is the paper they’re going to tell me about business computing; no, it’s all about consumer computing

LiveSide.net – Bill Gates, Mix n Mash, and the future of Microsoft

Dan goes on to point out why ZDnet covers enterprise topics:

We recognize that in the 21st century you cannot easily separate the two, given technology is deeply embedded in work and personal lives… [T]he financial equation is not just about page views or number of readers–more important is the quality of readers we draw into the ZDNet orbit

Who am I to contradict Dan when it comes to the determination of advertising revenue — after all he is the Editor in Chief of ZDnet.  In the advertising arena you can also point to things like SAP sponsoring golf stars, tennis pros, formula one cars, etc.  Who watches these things?  CIOs, and other TLA execs who make these decisions.  If SAP cared about CPM they would advertise with NASCAR.  Let’s just give SAP the benefit of the doubt that they understand their market more then Scoble.

I couldn’t agree more that Enterprise vendors need to make things easier to use and an all around friendlier experience but, they need to be smart and measured because that’s what their customers want.

The license you are granted is a development license if you intend to resell or license any of your solutions you create you need to get a different license from SAP

So what this means is that if you develop something on the subscription program you cannot resell it.  The EULA is pretty clear in this regard:

If You wish to use an Add-On or Consuming Product Application created by You in a production environment, or to otherwise commercialize and/or distribute that Add-On or Consuming Product Application, You must first enter into a separate agreement with SAP.  Under this Agreement You are not entitled to: … license sell, offer to sell, transfer, rent, lease, distribute and/or otherwise make available the SAP Software and/or any Add-On to third parties. [source: EULA]

Thanks to Eddie for the link to the EULA.

Basically this means if you want to sell something you need a new license and probably any open source work would also meet with a cease and desist from the SAP legal team. 

To compare this to another player in the industry the EULA associated with the MSDN subscription appears to not make any distinctions like this.  Granted the pricing for the MSDN subscription is a bit higher, New $10,939, then $3,499 / year thereafter.  Compared to the SDN Subscription cost which is $2,300 / year.  I wonder how the MSDN numbers compare with the cost of the SAP license to resell your solutions.

I think the subscription is a great idea and a big step forward for SAP but, to become a “platform company” they need to make it easier(cheaper being part of this) to get started in the ISV market.

ODE2Paper

ODE2Paper is the main visualization and physics library I wrote that underpins the Majority Desk application.  It binds the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE for short), which is the underlying physics system to Papervision3d (PV3D for short), the 3d rendering system.  The foundation of this interaction is actually very simple: every time Flex fires an ENTER_FRAME event I issue a refresh command over a socket that is connected to the physics server.  The physics server is a python application that uses pyODE to wrap the ODE libraries.  The physics server “parses” the refresh command,

<refresh/>

iterates across all the objects in its world producing a new XML document with the position and transformation matrices of all the existing objects and sends that XML back to Flex. 

<world>
    <o1 x="0.0" y ="0.0" z="0.0" r0="0.0" r1="0.0" r2="0.0" r3="0.0" r4="0.0" r5="0.0" r6="0.0" r7="0.0" r8="0.0"/>
    <o2 x="10.0" y ="15.0" z="10.0" r0="0.0" r1="0.0" r2="0.0" r3="0.0" r4="0.0" r5="0.0" r6="0.0" r7="0.0" r8="0.0"/>
<collisions/>
</world>

When this data transfer is complete on the Flex side, I move all the objects in the PV3d scene and then call the camera render.  Simple right?

A Wii bit of background

The Wiimote is a blue tooth transmitter, it reports its position and state to the blue tooth receiver on the client computer.  It determines its position by “looking” through the IR port on the front of the Wiimote at the poorly named sensor bar.  The sensor bar in reality has no sensors in it — it has two IR emitters that allow the Wiimote to triangulate its X and Y position in space.  The Wiimote also has an accelerometer on board that allows it to measure movement in the X, Y, Z planes (pitch, yaw, and roll).  This page has a mountain of technical detail about the Wiimote.

WiiFlash

The information from the Wiimote is sent to the WiiFlash server.  WiiFlash removes all the complexity out of using Wiimotes to control any Flash application.  The API is pretty complete and we found it to be fairly stable.  This is the section Eddie dealt with most so, I can’t talk too intelligently about it except to say that we use the WiiFlash AS3 API to access all the position and button state information from the Wiimote.  The API handles all the calls through a local connection that streams the information from the projects WiiFlash Server, which for now only runs on windows, sorry Mac faithful. 

This pretty much rounds out the subsystems that lie underneath the application.  This doesn’t really explain how the thing works so, I will walk you through how the Wiihands move around the screen to hopefully give you a better idea of what is going on.

Moving Wiihands

The most common thing we do in Majority Desk is move our Wiihands to interact with the world.  To allow interactions with the state of the physical world maintained by the physics server we have a set of commands in ODE2Paper.  The ones that matter for the Wiihands are createSphere, setObjPos, createJoint and breakJoint.  These methods serve as proxy for the real commands flying over to the physics server.  The rationale for this is again the main underlying concept that the physics server knows where the objects are and PV3d simply renders them.  So all the interactions are really taking place on the physics server.  The Wiihands are represented in the physics system as sphere because they are in reality just a cool texture wrapped on a sphere in PV3d.

So as a Wiimote moves we get its position and call a setObjPos method in ODE2Paper library which moves the object in the physics server.  Again the physics server leads and PV3d simply renders a view of the world.

Grabbing stuff

If you got the chance during Hacker Night or our Meet the Jammers session to mess with Majority Desk you may remember that if you hold the trigger and bump into something with your Wiihands you can grab it.  Letting go of the trigger will release the object and let it float around again.  This is achieved using the collisions XML node that I didn’t talk about earlier.  If you look back at the XML doc that the physics server creates to represent the world you will see an empty node there for collisions.  ODE2Paper notifies our Flex application that two bodies are about to collide via this XML node.  This allows us to detect that the Wiihand is touching something and then build a joint, using the ODE2Paper method createJoint.  A joint is a type of attachment between two bodies in ODE, we use simple static joints but a whole slew of different joints types are supported by ODE.  This is why the widget seems to follow a Wiihand around as it moves.  The great thing is this affect is achieved by just calling setObjPos on the Wiihand, which is the normal behavior described previously.   To release the object we simply call breakJoint and the physics server breaks the joint allow the attached object to move fluidly again.

If you want a run down of links and a good video that shows Majority Desk in action, check out Eddie’s blog post about it.

SAP is really starting to push the Composition Environment at this TechEd.  Recently I’ve started to think a lot about this topic given that it could radically change the way enterprise developers do their jobs.  This environment must also come with a new and necessary workflow akin to the Design – Developer workflow that MS and Adobe are both talking about.  Adobe has recently released Thermo which tries to address this gap with software.  Ryan Stewart gives a great rundown of the Thermo and the importance of this interaction:

It’s all possible because Thermo is a jewel of the designer-developer workflow. We can rely on Adobe’s incredible experience in creating design tools with our growing and powerful development framework, Flex. A good designer-developer workflow is so important to creating great RIAs. You only get great experiences when you combine the right brain of a designer with the left brain of the developer and let them collaborate.

Although, the design-developer paradigm is a good starting point it isn’t nearly complex enough ( not to say this interplay isn’t complicated but, come on if you put the wrong color somewhere your enterprise doesn’t stop running ).  The design-developer workflow relies on something else too — that both parties have at least a tacit understanding of what the other does.  There has been a lot of talk on SDN/BPX about this but, I am unconvinced that a common “language” is all we need. 

Life Guards

Development-QA-Production, the 3 tiered architecture that helps stabilize SAP development.  How will this be implemented in this workflow?  Where do the we do business process re-engineering?  Who tests these changes?  How can we communicate the shared responsibility?

A common language doesn’t solve this problem — it would seem more like IT would have to transition resources to be the life guards at the pool.  Changing workflows and/or “document flows” can radically affect  the running or compliance of the enterprise.  Who serves as the gate keeper for these things?

Treading Water

Right now the average IT department is trying to do more with much less.  They are trying hard to build new functionality for their businesses in a choreographed manner, using all manner of controls from code reviews to OO design patterns.  One big question is how does the business person even ask for this new functionality?  What if there isn’t something in their enterprise service repository or what if a field they want isn’t there?  Do they create some vast wiki system?  Do they open an OSS message ( although we would have to make the GUI a bit easier to deal with! )?  Ah, I know Solution Manager — open a message there.  Great. 

We use certain programming techniques to do more with less, “Why not write this section of the project as a set of subsystems and a facade so we can use it again if we want.”  How can we see these interconnections if IT is just trying to tread water supporting these new “business process reengineering” tasks.

Leaky

I guess my main problem is that I know enough about programming to know that even when we have nice abstractions they never work exactly as planned.  “All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.”

…you can’t drive as fast when it’s raining, even though your car has windshield wipers and headlights and a roof and a heater, all of which protect you from caring about the fact that it’s raining (they abstract away the weather), but lo, you have to worry about hydroplaning (or aquaplaning in England) and sometimes the rain is so strong you can’t see very far ahead so you go slower in the rain, because the weather can never be completely abstracted away, because of the law of leaky abstractions.

When someone goes to change a business process they are using abstractions to deal with the complexity of business.  They are using objects created by programmers to represent the world and when we try and put them together there will be instances where they leak.  The biggest problem with this is that the person doing the re-engineering isn’t going to know.  They are just going to try and move blocks around till it works right and this is dangerous.  Adding more steps or trying to circumvent the abstractions inherent leakiness is bad and will just produce poorly designed processes. 

Mark Spitz

Success in this is possible — we just have to realize that the only way to do this is get people on both sides who have a shred of understanding about what the other half does.  The optimum process has to have a collaborative model at it’s core where the person doing the re-engineering is leading the way.  IT would continue to support this function with technical knowledge and broad enterprise experience.  Here is an over simplified version:

See even I can do swim lanes!

 This is such a great representation of online communities everyone does this — everyone has multiple personas when they are online, at the same time a noob and expert.

“Get your Wiihands on!”

For more pictures of the Mindspace check out Marilyn’s flickr photo stream.

It seems that most people fall in the latter category.  I’ve already spoke to a number SDNers from all different industries who see how they can use this type of interface in a broad range of applications.  A airplane manufacturer navigating large engineering drawings to business people visualizing data sets in 3d to see patterns.  This was the reaction we were hoping to create in the community a true sense of innovation and possibility.  It’s also been a blast watching people mess around with the interface.

Here are some great photos from hacker night with Mark Finnern and Marilyn Pratt messing around with Majority Desk.

Big thanks to Coté at Redmonk for getting this video up so quickly!

For those of you at TechEd you can drop by the clubhouse at 5 to “get your Wiihands on” MajorityDesk.

Also we will be talking about the architecture and the OSS we used at this evening’s hacker night.