Information Playground

Innovation Ringmaster

I came across an article in the NY Times this month that discussed the different organizational structures that large high-tech companies use to foster innovation. Being heavily involved in my own company's innovation culture I gave it a pretty thorough read and compared it to the culture of innovation here at EMC.

The article was called "The Corporate Lab as Ringmaster". What I found most interesting was the question proposed at the beginning of the article:

So, in the Internet era, what is the continuing role and comparative advantage of the corporate R.& D. lab?

Here's one answer to that question, coming out of the Sloan School of Management at MIT:

Its role will be smaller and its advantage diminished, suggests Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. The idea-production process, according to Mr. Schrage, will continue to shift away from the centralized model epitomized by large corporate labs, going from “proprietary innovation to populist innovation.”

So in a sense, this direction can be viewed as a dismantling of the ivory tower approach to innovation, where a large team of people (often in one or two geographic locations) are set aside to work on innovative new concepts and proposals. The "corporate lab" becomes more of a coordinator. HP solicits grant requests from universities.  A GE corporate lab team partners with the University of Pittsburgh. IBM opens "its labs to the outside world and to customers".

Comparing to EMC Corporate Innovation Culture

First of all, EMC doesn't have a corporate research lab per se. I mentioned this in a blog post about a year ago. When it comes to new product development, EMC has quite the geographic distribution of corporate brainpower (e.g. Russia, China, Israel, Ireland, US, France, Netherlands, Brazil). All of the innovators, developers, and customer support employees working in these facilities are typically assigned to product delivery and/or customer interaction.

The ringmaster of it all is the EMC Innovation Network (run out of the CTOs office). This team coordinates (loosely monitors) internal innovation activity (including contests) across all of these sites via the process of leveraging intrapreneurs. External innovation activity in universities and industry is also monitored by this central group, and the results and status of this activity are posted and shared via EMC's internal social network (EMC ONE).

I like this model. It emphasizes that the people that innovate are the same people that deliver the solution into the hands of customers, as well as the same people that are receiving the input (and pain points) from customers.

How can the employees in the trenches find time for these activities? As I've pointed out several times, it's all up to the individual.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

Springs, Rails, and Clouds

One of the never-ending tasks when working at EMC is looking under the hood when it comes to new  acquisitions and product announcements.  It's all about understanding how the software is architected and working. When I say "never-ending" I mean it in the best sense. There is always something new to learn.

So as I've attempted to peel back the layers of the VMWARE SpringSource acquisition I've been bumping into a set of terms and technologies that I'm not quite familiar with, starting with the StorageZilla post about CloudFoundry. When I logged onto CloudFoundry.com I saw the word "Beta" and knew that I had found something that I could sink my teeth into (similar to the Atmos Online beta).

I signed up for the beta, which should allow me to deploy a Java web application into the cloud. CloudFoundry gives me a few options here, and one of them is Grails. I've heard that Grails is dirt simple, so I figured I'd give it a try. Figuring out grails would help me figure out CloudFoundry, which would help figure out SpringSource, which would help me better understand why VMWARE bought SpringSource.

I wanted to build a Java web application called "FleaFlicker", in honor of the upcoming (American) football season. After downloading grails from www.grails.org, I ran four commands:

grails create-app 

grails create-domain-class

grails create-controller

grails run-app

For each of these commands I gave some form of the name "FleaFlicker" as input. I also added the word "FleaFlicker" to a configuration file.  When I used grails to run the FleaFlicker web application, I was able to instantly connect (via my browser) and display/create/destroy FleaFlicker objects. Here are two different screen shots appended together:

That was easy. I hadn't written a stitch of Java code but I had already deployed a Java application (which I assume can be loaded into a compute cloud via CloudFoundry).

This leaves me with a web application framework that allows me to write some Java business logic. In order to run the 'ole FleaFlicker play I need to toss some objects around. I've downloaded the Atmos Java Binding and plan to attempt the integration of Atmos, Grails, and hopefully CloudFoundry. More in a future post.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

Cloud Cartography

Photo: Above The Clouds

One of the benefits of the recent partnership with MIT is that all EMC employees are invited to attend (in person or remotely) lectures on a variety of interesting topics. These lectures typically occur on Friday. Sometimes I'll drive in to Cambridge, sometime I'll dial in from my office. This summer I have learned quite a few things about "cloud computing" from a security researcher's point of view.

I dialed into a lecture a couple of weeks ago and was fairly riveted as Dr. Eran Tromer of MIT introduced the term "cloud cartography". I had always operated under the assumption that a user of "cloud computing" should not and would not care about the placement of their VM onto a specific piece of hardware in a compute cloud. Dr. Tromer (and his associates at the University of California at San Diego) have caused me to change my mind.

Take a look at the recently published research paper, cleverly entitled "Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third Party Compute Clouds". Dr. Tromer, Thomas Ristenpart (UCSD), Hovav Shacham(UCSD) and Stefan Savage(UCSD) explore security issues in the compute cloud. Here's a section of their abstract which highlights one of their main points:

"Using the Amazon EC2 service as a case study, we show that it is possible to map the internal cloud infrastructure, identify where a particular target VM is likely to reside, and then instantiate new VMs until one is placed co-resident with the target. We explore how such placement can then be used to mount cross-VM side-channel attacks to extract information from a target VM on the same machine."

What I like best about the paper is the concrete, hands-on experimentation that the team did with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. When a user provides EC2 with a first VM to run in a compute cloud, this VM is placed on an available physical server. Using network probing and a variety of other techniques, the researchers were able to effect/cause the placement of a second VM on the same physical server with 40% accuracy.

If the second VM is malicious, it can attempt to extract information from the first VM (using a variety of methods described in the paper).

  This leads to the introduction of the term "cloud cartography". Cartography is the study and practice of map-making. Cloud cartography is the science of mapping the physical topology of a cloud. Typical users may not care about cloud cartography and where their VM is running. But their adversaries do! They can map the cloud, understand VM placement strategies, induce VM co-residence, and then attempt to abuse the VM locality.

After listening to the lecture and reviewing the paper, it is clear that there are tough problems to solve. However, that's part of the beauty of the lecture series collaboration. My co-workers from RSA (the security division of EMC) are in the same room discussing potential solutions and strategies for these types of problems. They are on top of the issues. Think about the "golden lock" icon on a browser (which means RSA algorithms are in use).  I'm confident that an RSA "golden-lock for the cloud" will become pervasive (just as it has for secure browsing experiences).

As Chuck points out, security within the cloud is currently a huge area of investment. 'Zilla writes about dark clouds.  Like weathermen they're predicting the security future when it comes to cloud.

Because nobody wants to run their compute in a storm cloud. 

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

Reverse Engineering with Atmos API

Ever since 'Zilla wrote his post about installing Gladinet on top of Atmos I've been wanting to give it a try. So I followed his instructions (very easy), and within moments of receiving my Atmos "uid" and "shared secret", Gladinet had created a "Z:" drive on my laptop.

I navigated to my Z drive, dropped in a JPG, created a folder, and then dropped in another JPG. I was officially storing files in the Atmos-sphere. Here's a picture of the data I stored in my Z: drive.

Last year I had written several blog posts about the inner workings of Atmos.  As Gladinet uploads files to Atmos, it should be possible for me to program the Atmos API directly to see what Gladinet is doing. So I navigated to the Atmos Online community and got my hands on the "QuickStart" document. I decided to program in the .NET environment, and the QuickStart document stepped me through it. The samples built and ran without a problem.

Given that Atmos stores "objects", I knew that I needed a way to find the top level objects in the Gladinet hierarchy. It took a few minutes to figure out that I needed to find an API that did NOT accept an object-id as input. The appropriate API was named "GetListableTags".

Once I called GetListableTags I started to see some metadata. To make a long story short, here is the code that I wrote.

        EsuApiLib.Rest.EsuRestApi atmos_api = new
                EsuApiLib.Rest.EsuRestApi("accesspoint.emccis.com", 80, uid, sharedSecret);

        // call Atmos to get the top-level tags

        MetadataTags tags = atmos_api.GetListableTags(tag);

        for (int i = 0; i < tags.Count(); i++)
        {

            //iterate through each top level tag and print out the name

            tag = tags.ElementAt(i);
            Console.WriteLine("\nTag {0}:{1}", i, tag.Name);

            foreach (ObjectId oid in atmos_api.ListObjects(tag))
            {

                // for each tag grab all object IDs and print out all object metadata

                Console.WriteLine("\n    oid {0}\n", oid.ToString());
                ObjectMetadata obj_meta = atmos_api.GetAllMetadata(oid);
                for (int j = 0; j < obj_meta.Metadata.Count(); j++)
                {

                    Console.WriteLine("        {0,-12} {1}",
                                      obj_meta.Metadata.ElementAt(j).Name,
                                      obj_meta.Metadata.ElementAt(j).Value);
                }

            }
        }

And here is the data that gets dumped out when I run the code against the online Atmos account backing my Gladinet Z: drive:

Tag 0:GCDHOST

    oid 4980cdb2a110105e04980d61b3e98204a8069ad563b5

        GCDName      BoomChugHiking.JPG
        atime            2009-08-10T18:40:45Z
        mtime           2009-08-10T18:40:45Z
        ctime            2009-08-10T18:40:45Z
        itime             2009-08-10T18:40:45Z
        type              regular
        uid                EMC00270299F451F0E87
        gid                apache
        objectid         4980cdb2a110105e04980d61b3e98204a8069ad563b5
        size               578067
        nlink              0
        policyname    default
        GCDHOST      BoomChugHiking.JPG

    oid 4980cdb2a310105e04980d61b65b5904a8069c447b45

        GCDTYPE      Directory
        GCDName     FirstFolder
        atime           2009-08-10T18:41:14Z
        mtime          2009-08-10T18:41:08Z
        ctime           2009-08-10T18:41:14Z
        itime            2009-08-10T18:41:08Z
        type             regular
        uid               EMC00270299F451F0E87
        gid               apache
        objectid        4980cdb2a310105e04980d61b65b5904a8069c447b45
        size              0
        nlink             0
        policyname   default
        GCDHOST     FirstFolder

Tag 1:FirstFolder

    oid 4980cdb2a510105e04980d61ba265004a806a06722bd

        GCDName      tfc.JPG
        atime            2009-08-10T18:42:15Z
        mtime           2009-08-10T18:42:15Z
        ctime            2009-08-10T18:42:15Z
        itime             2009-08-10T18:42:14Z
        type              regular
        uid                EMC00270299F451F0E87
        gid                apache
        objectid         4980cdb2a510105e04980d61ba265004a806a06722bd
        size               2565454
        nlink              0
        policyname    default
        /FirstFolder   tfc.JPG

The API retrieved three objects: the two JPG files and the folder that I had created.

What's going on behind the scenes with Gladinet and Atmos? If you take a look at the data you can start to guess. I plan on trying to introduce another object or two behind Gladinet's back and see what happens. More on that in a future post.

The main point here is that it's very easy to get started.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

Skunkworks: The More the Merrier

Anyone who considers themselves an intrapreneur should have a couple of skunkworks going on. It's a win-win situation.

I'm not talking about organizational skunkworks (in which an entire division is dedicated to a secret project). I'm talking about personal, individual, and intrapreneurial skunkworks.

I keep a long list of new ideas in front of me at all times. I write down things that I think would be really cool to work on. They usually have nothing to do with the quarterly goals that I have, which are also in front of me at all times. My quarterly goals have to do with delivering on my business unit's core product.

Every once in a while I'll have a few spare minutes and pluck an idea out of the "new" column and promote it to the level of "skunkworks". I'll send out a few emails to people and see if they want to collaborate on the idea. My management chain may or may not be in the loop.

Why is this a win-win?

A Personal Win

I have about four skunkworks going on right now. All of them involve reaching out to someone in a new group that I don't know. That's a personal benefit for me. All of the ideas have been promoted from the "that-would-be-cool-to-do" list. This makes me look forward to coming in to work. That's another personal benefit.  And finally, when the skunkworks gets unveiled, there is the potential for recognition and reward based on creativite initiative.

Now, there's always the possibility that someone in my management chain may ask "why did you waste your time on that?", or "shouldn't you have been working on your quarterly goals instead?".  The potential for this situation is greatly minimized by practicing the core mantra of an intrapreneur: get your core goals done early and with the highest quality. No manager can argue with that (and if they do, it might be time to find a more innovative company or manager).

A Corporate Win

From a corporate standpoint, the more intrapreneurs that are exceeding their goals and skunk-working, the better.

Steve Shapiro makes this point wonderfully in one of his blog posts from the Blogging Innovation website. In his article "Why Edison Was Wrong", he describes an interview with InnoCentive founder Alph Bingham. After reading the article I believe that Steve's point is consistent with my belief about skunkworks projects.

If a corporation assigns innovation responsibility to "ivory tower organizations", it's quite possible that researchers are making a series of "experimentation mistakes" that will eventually lead to a feasible product offering. Steve references a quote by Thomas Edison that is often used to justify this type of innovation:

"I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work."

The problem with this approach is that it increases "time-to-market". Incremental mistakes take time to correct.

What if the researchers were actually distributed intrapreneurs working in parallel on skunkwork solutions to a common problem? Could it be that some of them would make mistakes, while some would get it right on the first try? If some of them are right on the first try, then the solutions could potentially be brought to market earlier.

There's very little a corporation can do to stop someone from firing up their own skunkworks. It would be easier, however, if it was an acknowledged part of the corporate culture.

For individuals, it's simple to get started. Start making your list. When you find an opportunity to collaborate on a skunkworks with someone you've never worked with before, take it.

Make sure you get your core work done, because as I have mentioned, it is the key behavior. There's one more important strategy to keep in mind. You'll need a contingency plan that you need to have in case your skunkworks is discovered early.

It's called apologize later.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

Passing Through the Dust of Swift-Tuttle

Stargazers will be looking heavenward tonight, but where's the data going?

 Tonight is the peak night for getting a great look at the Perseid meteor showers (if you happen to live in the Northern Hemisphere). The Earth is currently hurtling through the debris from the comet known as Swift-Tuttle. On the morning of August 12th we'll pass through the densest amount of this debris. These meteors are called "Perseids" because they radiate outward from the constellation known as Perseus. Here are some tips for viewing the Perseids. Lie down in any large, flat area, preferably one that is not paved, and/or without orange lines running down the center.

When it comes to the study of space phenomena, the amount of data generated and stored is, well, astronomical. I've often wondered how scientists configure their storage systems to handle this amount of data.

One group of scientists that is on the job capturing data about meteors are these guys from NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. The MEO is the "NASA organization responsible for meteoroid environments pertaining to spacecraft engineering and operations". I grabbed this picture of them from their website and I'm glad that they are working hard and wearing ties.

I started to dig around for the purpose of understanding where and how the world is storing the scientific data about outer space. Part of my motivation is to understand more about the re-use of scientific data as part of the MIT DataSpace proposal. I happened upon an effort called the Virtual Meteor Observatory (VMO), which has a goal of "improved access to astronomical data and computing resources".

In December of last year there was a meeting of the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) to discuss the architecture of a VMO. The meeting was attended by a variety of meteor observer teams, such as the Polish Fireball Network, the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and the IAU Meteor Center. The full report from the meeting can be found here.

The VMO has agreed upon a standard XML format for the description of meteoric data, which I've cut directly from the report and pasted here (for what it's worth I was unaware that Heidi Klum was involved in this effort):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <vmo xmlns="http://www.imo.net">
        <fireball>
            <time>2008-11-23T15:24:13</time>
            <brightness>as the full moon</brightness>
            <observer>Heidi Klum</observer>
            <location_latitude>
                35.24351
            </location latitude>
            <location_longitude>
                -89.62907
            </location longitude>
            <country code>US</country code>
            ...
        </fireball>
    </vmo>

With the agreed-upon metadata format, the team then determined five different types of "data formats" to be stored in the VMO repository:

• Visual meteor observations
• Video and still camera data
• Forward and backward scatter radio observations
• Fireball observations
• Orbit data

Existing scientific software that generates data and metadata must be converted into the VMO format, and ultimately everything is stored in a PostgreSQL database. Discussions are ongoing on whether  all scientific data is stored in one large database or if a distributed approach will be used.

Two thoughts that I had as I read through the information about this effort:

1. The researchers are involved with the submission and ingest of scientific data, as well as the dissemination of the data for scientific analysis. This workflow is very similar to the standard workflow described by the Open Archival Information System specification (depicted in Figure 4-1). The researchers could benefit from their awareness of this standard.
2. I was unable to find mention of the scalability limits of the system and requirements on the storage in general. Given that nearly all of the data being generated is fixed content (otherwise called reference information), then the XAM specification is a good candidate to abstract away the dependency on PostgreSQL.

Get out there tonight, find a safe piece of grass, and watch the show.

Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Intrapreneur

Adjacency and Intrapreneurs

One of the better speakers on innovation, in my opinion, is Vijay Govindarajan. I saw him speak at the World Innovation Forum in May of 2009 and published my thoughts about his ideas.

A word that Vijay frequently uses when describing innovation is adjacency. Innovation by adjacency is without doubt the form of innovation that I have practiced the most throughout my career.

In a June 22nd interview sponsored by the MIT Sloan Management Review and the Wall St. Journal, Vijay defined adjacency in the following way:

“I distinguish between two types of innovation: adjacency innovation, which is a little less risky because you are innovating in a business area adjacent to your existing core business, and breakout innovation, where you are going multiple steps outside of your core business."

Adjacency For Intrapreneurs

While Vijay discusses innovation adjacency from the business point of view, I've always thought about it from the "building software" point of view. In particular, how does an intrapreneur find adjacent software opportunities? What are the customer pain points that can be solved and the product opportunities that can be gained by adding a twist to the combination of two different technologies?

My first experience with this type of innovation occurred during the design of the CLARiiON RAID algorithms. I was writing software that would return customer information based on mathematical calculations; this information might not exist on the surface of any disk (e.g. the disk containing that data had completely failed). I was concerned about data integrity and I needed a solution to give me the confidence that my software was rock-solid.

A picture tells a thousand words. I was an expert in my own implementation of RAID. Customers had an expectation of quality, performance, and data integrity from their storage systems. The product needed an innovative solution to address the data integrity requirement. The solution was unknown and is symbolized with a question mark in the diagram.

Innovative Adjacency: Collaboration with Peer Experts

At the time I was working on this problem I was aware of a test engineering group down the hall from my cubicle. I was no expert in the qualification of systems; I decided to find the person who was. I sat across from an expert and described my problem. I answered questions about my design of the RAID algorithms. We began to do some "what if" whiteboarding. This back-and-forth exchange led to the creation of a brand new piece of software with the following mission:

Automatically inject faults at all critical RAID state transitions.

I had never imagined a piece of software that would shut off disk drives, corrupt disk data, kill power to a disk array, and flood rebuilding disk areas with over-writes. But that's what we built, and we called it the disk array qualifier (DAQ). This piece of software has been maintained and enhanced for nearly twenty years.

Pulling in a third, adjacent sphere is the essence of Venn diagram innovation (another form of innovation by adjacency). The intersecting areas of the three spheres can result in an innovative solution (in our case, the DAQ).

This brings me to the subject of being an intrapreneur, which I define as "an innovator that conceives and delivers an idea at a large corporation". Intrapreneurial behavior can thrive in a company that has a large intellectual property and product portfolio. As an EMC intrapreneur I have access to a huge number of adjacent spheres (and the experts that go with them!). For example, when an EMC intrapreneur from PowerPath collaborates with an EMC intrapreneur from RSA, the result is a PowerPath Encryption product.

There's one catch to this type of behavior and it's called "initiative". The second half of Vijay's post contains a statement which I also agree with:

"I would shift to spending more like 70% on the core business and perhaps 25% on adjacency innovations—and maybe 5% on really breakout innovation."

This quote highlights Vijay's philosophy of balanced business spending on innovation. I like to apply his thinking to the behavior of individual intrapreneurs and how they manage their time. Each intrapreneur must have the discipline to regularly search out adjacent technologies (while still getting their core job done!). This means dedicating time not only to learning about all of the products in the company portfolio, but also getting to know the experts as well. EMC's internal social media platform (EMC ONE) has made this type of collaboration much easier.

What happens if the manager of an intrapreneur mandates that 100% of work time be spent on advancing a core product? The key thought here is time management skills. Keep a laser-like focus on hitting goals related to your core responsibilities (getting them done early if at all possible) while simultaneously displaying initiative in the exploration of adjacent technologies.

One final point for intrapreneurs: don't focus solely on the adjacent technology, but focus as well on the customer and market need.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

Search Your Memory

At the beginning of 2009 there were several blog posts written on how people organize their personal information flow and/or work documents. For example: Dave, Scott, Stu, and myself.

At the time it was just an interesting conversation about how we work, but I've come to learn that the issue of search for personal information is a fairly hot topic. In fact, if you use keyword tagging to organize your personal information, you may not be using the optimal approach!

I just registered for this Wednesday's online lecture on "personal search". The lecture will be held this Wednesday August 5th at 2PM EST, and registration is open to anybody who is interested. The lecture is given as part of the monthly EMC Innovation Network Lecture Series.

The presenter is EMC Senior Research Scientist Jidong Chen. Given the global nature of the lecture series, Jidong will actually be presenting from China on August 6th. (keep that in mind if you are registering from the Asia-Pacific area).

Dr. Chen received his PhD in Computer Science from Renmin University in China and has a strong focus on personal and mobile information management.

The abstract for the lecture begins to describe the nuances between search for personal information and traditional search techniques:

Personal search is different from web search in that users generally have a vague picture of what is stored but forget the exact location and keywords of the resource. According to observations of human associative memory, people tend to remember things from some memory fragments in their brains and these memory fragments are connected by memory cues of user activity context. We propose the associative memory-based personal search technology, which exploits such associations and contexts by creating semantic links of personal resources from explicit and implicit user activities. It is superior to the traditional keyword-based desktop search because it is closer to the way human associative memory works.

EMC is actively involved in personal information management research, and as you may recall EMC acquired a personal information management company (Pi Corp), which is currently part of the Digital Echo (Decho) business.

For more information about the lecture series check here.

Steve Todd
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Intrapreneur