Matt Roberts - Cloud Architect Circa 2001?

I helped start a company called Meetrix, which delivered multi-point collaboration services back in 2001.  We had a good run for about 4 years, but we ended up taking a bridge loan (bridge to nowhere), and the whole thing went through bankruptcy for $10k.  At one point, the offer had been in the millions, but it "wasn't enough".  Sigh.

Anyhoo, as we were strapped for cash and our original investors were all Enron guys who ended up pulling back the $5 - 10MM promised for the initial investment, I had to get creative on putting the service together.  So, I looked for third-party solutions that I could customize, keeping the IP of the multipoint audio and video conferencing as our core.  IBM/Lotus Sametime was the software that I selected to use as the meeting room (like now WebEx/Gotomeeting) software that would kick off the audio/video portion.  In order to make this happen for our SaaS model, I had to make some *ahem* modifications to the source.  What we wound up was with a "cloud" based version of Lotus Sametime that was multi-tenant.  This, of course, was before anyone referred to the cloud except in fancy architecture presentations where you'd always start with a cloud representing the Internet.  It was also SaaS before anyone came up with that particular popular palindrome.  It worked really well, and ended up being the only thing that survived the bankruptcy and ever since, some of the guys have been working the model.

I just heard that they won the 2011 Beacon Award "IBM Cloud Computing Innovation - For Application Providers."

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https://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHandler/pw_com_prb_2011_beacon_smarter_solutions

Meetrix is the first company to virtualize Lotus Sametime in a public or private Cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. Meetrix UC in the Cloud integrates Telco 2.0 telephony and third-party plug-ins. The innovative Cloud-based design delivers low-cost, secure, anytime, anywhere unified communications and collaboration; connecting people, data and environments and enhancing business productivity.

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So there you go--Matt Roberts, Cloud Architect, for over 10 years with expertise in multi-tenant Saas n-tier web applications.  I may even put it on my business card :)

@multicastmatt

What's in the background of Matt's Blog?

Good question.  It's called "Multithreaded" and it was captured when I was in the Chicago O'Hare Airport in 2005 and is available under the Creative Commons license.

More from the "Abstrakt" set are available here.

iPad SketchUp - Finger Painting made less messy

When I got my iPad (third-hand generation one--work sponsored), I started exploring the possibilities of using it for drawing thanks to inspiration that I received from an artist friend of mine, Adolfo Isassi.  Both of these were done as "emergent" drawings.  In other words, I didn't know what I was getting myself into until I started to see it take shape in front of me.  That's actually something I tend to do regularly as my drawing/sketching tends to be a form of meditation or a way of keeping myself in motion while I take in information in forums such as presentations, conference calls, meetings, etc.  I used to get in trouble for this behavior when I was in class as a child, but I never stopped.  I wonder how many other people doodle/draw in this fashion....

Both of these were created using SketchUp and my finger was used as the stylus.

AgileAustin Conference Pitfall! Theme

About a month ago, the AgileAustin Conference Team was discussing various ideas on themes for the conference.  Janelle Klein originally had some ideas around problems with trying to adopt "A"gile (as opposed to agile--more on that later).  Paraphrasing her idea, it would be framed as a conference on Agile Problems.  I thought that was a brilliant idea as we've seen so many challenges on so many levels over time.  However, the consensus from the conference team was that it may not be inclusive enough or have more of a negative focus.

So, I had a problem that needed fixing, and harkening back to the 1980's where the A-Team could solve anything, I decided to call upon that golden era with a single word that evokes memories of massive problems overcome and treasure gained, all under 2KB of RAM--"Pitfall!"

Here was my concept drawing that I doodled during the meeting:



I threw it up on the whiteboard to see what everyone thought.  A lot of folks in the room identified with it and really liked it.  We delved into the various aspects of what it meant, and we started tweaking the concept.  I originally wrote "For Use by Intermediate and Experienced Teams" but was swayed by folks who thought we could be more inclusive, so I wrote "For Use in Learning Agile Organizations." I realize I was trying to focus our conference on the "swingers" to focus our efforts in the conference.  However, when I heard how many were planning to attend that were very new to agile concepts, I changed my mind.  There will ALWAYS be pitfalls for new teams running into that brick wall or teams that had been swinging through the jungle for a while.

The theming is excellent--gold bars (e.g. technical debt reduction, cost-of-delay value measurement, exploiting variability for profit), brick walls ("doing" vs. "being" agile, queues, siloed knowledge, lack of transparency), logs (technical debt, not focusing on engineering principles, work-in-process, beauracratic processes), aligators, scorpions, pits...It's a rich area for metaphor to say the least.

We ended with a decision that this might not be appropriate for a main conference theme, but it could certainly work for one of the four conference tracks.  I'm happy with that, especially given my recent thoughts on the "Mix Tape" Open Space.

I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks here!

Oh, and here's a simulation of how I spent a great deal of time in the mid-1980s. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhXMYw1lXY0




@MulticastMatt

AgileAustin Conference 2012 - "Mix Tape" - Does anyone have Open Space experience?

There are some really exciting things happening with the conference planning and things are proceeding nicely.  I noticed however that the team had initially been struggling with some of the following challenges:

-          Should it be paid vs. free?

-          Should it be on a Friday or Saturday?

-          Should it be content tracks or Open Space / Unconference?

-          What should our theme or themes be?

It dawned on me that AND is often more helpful than OR, so I came up with a proposal (enclosed) for a Saturday Open Space that would be free for all conference participants.  It would also be free for anyone else who wanted to attend that was not a paid conference attendee J

The theme is “mix tape” (80’s lingo—it could be “mashup” 00’s lingo) where the goal would be to have every session be a mix of at least two (more = better) disciplines getting together to achieve agility.  These can be cross-functional, cross-organizational, etc.  The classic example is something like DevOps, but what about UX and QA, executives and individual contributors, technical writers and salesfolk, chip designers and product marketing folks?  It could also be a conference track in and of itself and the open space could riff off of that.  Think about it—one day of presentations/workshops, and the next day of engaged discussions. To me, this is a really exciting idea.

In my typical style, I have signed up to run this if no one else does.  However, seeing as I’ve never run an open space conference before it would be really nice if there was someone in the community who had the experience and wanted to partner with me in this effort. 

Please let me know if this strikes your fancy and you have some relevant experience in doing this type of thing.  As usual, we’ll have all the logistical support (room, food, sponsor, etc.) from AgileAustin.

Thanks everyone!

@MulticastMatt

SIGs continue to take flight (Thank you PlanView)

About a month ago, I announced that BazaarVoice had stepped up and helped spread the SIG goodness by agreeing to host the DevSIG and the DevOps SIG.  I hinted that another one was in the works, but I didn’t name names J 

I am now pleased to announce that two SIGs have moved from CA Technologies to PlanView!  This is due to the direct efforts of Eric McVickers, who was one of the AgileAustin founding members, to contribute to the community and help find sponsorships that are meaningful and aligned with local companies’ interests.  The QA SIG and the KanbanSIG had their first meeting there a few weeks ago, and will continue this going forward.  This has been a great part of the DeltaAgileAustin working group—I might not have met Eric if not for his involvement in this effort, and our subsequent discussions.  Rock on.

The Leaders SIG and the Architect SIG remain at CA Technologies as will another that will be starting shortly—the AgileUX SIG.  More on that one soon.  If you or someone you know is interested in volunteering and getting more valuable programs started for the community, please contact me or any other board member!

@MulticastMatt

Communicating Architecture Decisions in Financial Terms

During yesterday's AgileAustin Architect SIG, we had a lively discussion about communicating architecture across various parts of the organization, which was particularly relevant to me as we're now communicating our decisions to a group of about 4,500 where the number was previously less than 40! Good times.

Now that I'm frontal cortex-deep into _The Principals of Product Development Flow_, I stated thinking about communicating architectural decisions in light of economic factors, expanding the communication chain out to the corporate finance types, etc. During this discussion, I remembered a book that I read a while back that presented a series of financial models for software development projects--especially agile software development projects that may be able to fund themselves by releasing the most valuable features early. This one is interesting as it finally gets to that holy grail of terms to couch various technical decisions--total lifetime profit.
The book that I was discussing was _Software By Numbers, Low-Risk, High-Return Development_ by Mark Denne and Jane Cleland-Huang. It was written in 2004 and is still very relevant. While I find that the concepts can be applied in the large, they're also very appropriate to be applied in the context of day-to-day decision making and can be used effectively for arguments for technical debt reduction, doing things "the right way" and so on. The important thing is to frame technical decisions as business decisions, especially when non-technical folks have the final say.

By the way, if anyone wants to borrow this book, just let me know--I'd be happy to bring it to
the next meeting or would just mail it to you.

Thanks again Lee and David for leading this awesome group!