Solutions

I’m sick and tired of products. Actually, I’m sick and tired of product features and the announcements related to them. I remember back in the late 80’s and early 90’s when database products were introducing new features like row-level locking and relational integrity. These were new features introduced into markets that were just starting to buy relational databases as a product.

Here we are, almost twenty years later, and we still talk about product features. I received an email from Microsoft that highlights the features of SQL*Server 2008 with cool new things like “transparent data encryption.”

Good grief, where are the solutions? Why am I still expected to build the solutions myself? Why haven’t we moved beyond self-integration of independent technology stacks?

In the open-source world we still mimic much of the marketing and product management methods of these old-school software business models. One of the greatest promises to me of open-source is the ability to integrate products and build completely new solutions. One can not take Oracle, or a sub-set of Oracle, and combine it with technology from Microsoft Windows to build something that didn’t previously exist. Licensing and intellectual property protection prevents that type of innovation.

With open-source, however, one can take source code and products from different projects and combine it into unique, new solutions designed to solve actual problems faced by large IT organizations. It’s one thing to save an IT department money at the acquisition point, it’s quite another to solve the real-world problems they face every day.

I’ll give you an example. IT organizations face a nightmare today when creating new development environments for their developers. They have to provision physical servers. They have to create stacks of software that have to be manually managed and serviced. They get stuck with proprietary interfaces and file formats that have to be maintained. This is a problem screaming for a solution. The larger IT organizations are independently creating internal solutions to the problem yet there is precious little being done by the industry to solve the problem. The technology is there today that would allow the dynamic instantiation of server environments for developers. Imagine a developer who needs a new sandbox using a web interface to identify the components they need in their development environment and having it automatically instantiated in a virtual server environment. An instantiation that only occupies CPU and memory real-estate when being used is much more efficient than today’s world of dedicated servers. This type of solution would drive standards. I’d love to see the day when the developer doesn’t care what database lies behind their interface, the developer would simply expect a standard API and standard set of behaviours. The developer could concentrate on development and not on the nuanced differences between different database implementations or the proprietary features of any particular database. I’ve seen systems like this implemented by individual companies. If there was a solution in the market, though, it would sell and would help us all reach another level of efficiency.

When are we going to move beyond the tired product and feature announcements and start to see, as a matter of course, new solutions being delivered via the combination of heretofore unrelated products?