Free Software?

Quick tip on installing SOAPpy on Python 2.5

While you install as per the instruction given, you will run in the issue as you see below:



Now, do the following to resolve it.

1. Open the file Client.py and make "from __future__ imports" line to be the first import
2. Open Types.py, Server.py and GSIServer.py and do the same
3. Run - python setup.py build
4. Run - python setup.py install

Now you can start writing your SOAP server and clients.

Happy hacking !

Google bids to lose

Google has lost the wireless spectrum bid to Verizon, but the reality is that they were never in the game to win.

Read this.

Interesting and it shows the way Google not just focuses on business, but how they want to change the lives of people.

Quick questions on crisis management

What do you do when you have to deal with a mismanaged project? Here are the constraints:

1. You cannot rewrite the application because client is still strict with timelines
2. Unit testing was not done properly and a bunch of requirements were never coded
3. While fixing defects, more and more defects are getting introduced
4. Resources are not competent enough to handle all the technical difficulties and few of the good ones become heroes are are over worked
5. After being mismanaged, the senior management suggest to go on a 24x7 repair plan and completely over seeing their responsibility in having the project in this situation in the first place. This has resulted in people getting overworked, and resulting in stress

Offshoring to grow 40% - Gartner

Gartner, in one of it's press releases, states that offshoring is going to grow more than 40% in 2008.

Gartner evaluated 30 countries on following parameters:
1. Language
2. Government support
3. Labour pool
4. Infrastructure
5. Educational system
6. Cost
7. Political and economic environment
8. Cultural compatibility
9. Global and legal maturity
10. Data and intellectual property security and privacy

Gartner’s top 30 locations for offshore services, by region, were:

Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Uruguay
Asia/Pacific: Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA): the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Northern Ireland, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine

Their region specific analysis says:

In Asia/Pacific, although positioned as India’s greatest challenger in terms of its potential scale, China fared poorly for language skills. China, India and Singapore all demonstrated strong government support for the promotion of their country as an offshore services location.

The political and economic environment remains a concern for many companies when moving work to offshore locations; in this area Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam all performed weakly.

My take

Good news !!! atleast for an IT professional like me based in India. :)

Gartner also reports that offshoring is going to grow more than 60%. This will require services companies who can cater to non-english client's requirements. This is tricky and will pose challenge to India. My comment can be challenged because, there is quite a lot of work done by Indian MNCs in Europe.

I am not sure if China or Vietnam is going to be a real challenge to India with the such big English speaking population. Added to this, we have around 2 million engineering graduates getting added to the talent pool. Considering that only 20% is employable in IT, we still have enough talent available.

Having said that, the issues that are going to bite us back are:
1. Infrastructure
2. American economy slump
3. Sticking on to different flavors of same old operating model and methodologies
4. Attrition

Bright Future For BPMS

Guest blooger Gib Bassett at EDM Blog writes about Gartner Predictions for 2008.

Gartner recently issued two “Predicts: 2008” reports highlighting their expectations for Enterprise Architecture and the Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) Market. Both recognize noteworthy and highly complementary trends reflecting the value of Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), particularly Business Rules Management Systems (BRMSs) supporting EDM principles.

I do not have the financial muscle to purchase the report. Here are some snippets from Gib's post.

“Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2012, the BPMS technology market will subsume greater than 80% of the pure-play business rule technology sector (for example, stand-alone business rule engines).”[...]

Gartner goes on to make two final points worth mentioning:

“Due to the increasing need to model rules and business processes simultaneously, it is going to be increasingly difficult to maintain separate rules and process repositories.”

And

“Enterprises need to understand the consequences of not managing rules and processes with a shared metamodel, as well as the effects this will have on their ability to create dynamic business models.”

Read more >>

Pouring cold water on SOA ‘reuse’ mantra

Pouring cold water on SOA ‘reuse’ mantra by ZDNet's Joe McKendrick -- Is reuse an idea that’s too good to be true? The idea of "build once, use often" has a lot of appeal for enterprises, and, as discussed many times in this blogspace, the first and foremost return on investment to be gained from SOA. There has been a lot of buzz and money flowing into [...]

This article points to David Chappell's take on service reuse.