The FI-WARE project, Technology Foundation of the Future Internet Public-Private-Partnership (FI-PPP), has established procedures and tools to get in touch for any matter, no matter of public or private interest. A detailed How-To for issuing a ticket for „General Support“ via a FusionForge tracker system can be found at the FI-WARE Wiki.
To cut short klick here for direct access to the tutorial„.
Official today: Will be leaving SAP end of 2011 in order to join Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) from 2012 onwards.
Teaching Computer Science and continuing / intensifying Future Internet research at InIT -Institute of Applied Information Technology.
A first, stable draft of the Net!Works ETP expert group on Cloud Networking is ready for public release. The content, „Research Recomendations on Networking for Cloud Computing“ (final title tbd), will be presented at the upcoming 27th Meeting of the Wireless World Research Forum.
My slides and the proceedings are available for download: (slides) and (proceedings).
The paper will soon be accessible on the ETP Net!Works homepage.
FI-PPP
Certainly a good time to talk. The project is getting in shape and partner contributions (to Generic Enablers and related Assets) are getting more concrete. First signs for potential FI-WARE Open Call topics are slowly showing up. Definitively worth to keep an eye on.
The slides are available for download: FI-WARE Open Calls
Invited as speaker by SAPs Telco Industry Unit I had the pleasure to talk at the SAP Forum 2011 in Mexico City. Great event, well attended and even so organized.
The Telco Session was very well engaged and featured excellent speakers.
= Telco 2.0: New Business Models for Telco companies, Simon Terrance, CEO, STL Partners
= Sustainable Business for Telecom Industry, Jens Amail, SVP and Head of SAP Telecommunications Industry
= Monetizing Services in a hyper-connected World, Martin Schmid, Sales Director Convergent Charging, SAP
= Cloud Computing, New Technologies, and Co-Innovation, Thomas Michael Bohnert, Technical Director, SAP Research
An amazing speech with lots of insights was given by Simon. I especially enjoyed the discussion around Softbank, a telco that hands out femto cells plus DSL backhaul for FREE to its mobile subscribers in order to enhance mobile experience. A pure accident that femto cells were an element in my talk as well. Another interesting topic was the upstream-downstream business concept: Telcos as facilitator in the very heart of the Internet century.
Jens took on and presented SAPs strategy for the telco industry high-lightning convergent charging and and real-time analytics. Who says SAP does not have a reasonable telco footprint. With Highdeal first, and now Sybase, SAP took measures and if continued, may eventually exploit its huge experience and eco-system to become a true telco big-player.
And there was also Martin, an SAP telco veteran, making a strong case for convergent charging in a hyper-connected world, with cloud computing, mobile adds, services, or in general value-add at the forefront.
Finally, pleasure was mine to talk about tech transformations. To cut short, it was amazing to talk to an engaged crowed. The slides can be found here
… found in 2011. Check it out at future-internet.appspot.com
Happy new year wishes, TMB
This year closes with the Future Internet Assembly as part of the Ghent Future Internet Week. One more the event gathered the majority of European research projects/community around several sessions, workshops, exhibitions, and and and.
Presence of *common suspects* was harnessed to ran an ad-hoc meeting between FIRA (Future Internet Research Alliance) and EFII (Eurpean Future Internet Initative) members. As chairman of FIRA I had the pleasure to present vision and ambition of FIRA and to engage into discussions with EFII members in order to evaluate a potential collaboration of both organizations. Bottom line, this is was and still is the objective of the two communities, despite the number of differences to be sorted out. This is good news.
The meeting reinforced a conviction that complexity of such an joint venture must not be underestimated and after a poorly managed first attempt only a sound framework with clearly defined rules, roles, competencies, objectives, etc will create trust for moving forward. This was proposed and it now remains to be seen if reasonable agreement can be reached that represents the very different stakeholders and related objectives.
At the end the European research community seeks for a „Future Internet“ that is fundamentally different and enables Europe to take the lead in future Internet-based economies. Commonly agreed is that such an Future Internet will differ from the current one by consolidation and extensive collaboration across the different sectors, ICT and non-ICT, and from a technology, business, and policy perspective.
Such a vision implies not only technology transformation but mind sets as well. The Internet keeps proving to favor those that accept its openness and global nature instead of those trying to sustain protective approaches. Successful will be those ones, that endorse and assimilate the Internet as an opportunity to collaborate – isnt that what the Internet is all about?
The so-called G16, then the Industry Group, nowadays EFII, as well as FIRA are contemporary witnesses of this change and its pains. For the past two years the two organizations struggled with finding common ground for a multitude of reasons. Still there is a perspective, not least by the implementation of the FI-PPP, which was original motivation to the G16 and then EFII, as well as later FIRA. Lessons learned are that many players were finally able to put heads together and work for the greater good by letting „local“ agendas aside (to some extent). If eventually successful? Spring 2011 will tell; as usual writing/submitting proposals is a though job – but the origin of a real challenge at best.
One must not ignore the human dimension in all of this. Sincere consideration of the above leads to a change that has to happen at individual level. FIRA and EFII have proven this. Today I asked to stand down as chairman of FIRA given that original perspectives to founding members were reasonably met. Commitment to these was always a high personal priority to me. This was confirmed and implementation is already on the way. If this exercise will be repeated, I do believe, it could eventually be the natal hour of EFIA, the European Future Internet Alliance.
Roughly two years of preparation, from idea, over program design, to call for proposals for the „Future Internet Public-Private Partnership“. The deadline was passed last Thursday, 2nd of October 2010. It remains to be seen whether the enormous investments eventually pay off.
I believe in the European definition of a „Holistic Future Internet“. It is a rather broad concept; „Networks of the Future“, „The Internet of Things“, „The Internet of Services“, „Security“, „Cloud Computing“, and „Media & Content“. But it is not the range of topics alone, what makes the difference is that these domains are not considered in isolation. Instead, this vision of „Future Internet“ is a consolidation of these domains into one global Internet-scale platform. Objective is to turn the Internet into a an open eco-system with low entry barriers and support for innovation in infrastructure as well as application domains. And this far beyond the ICT sector.
This is very different when compared to US-style „Future Internet“ research, that is primarily focused on Internet communication architectures (c.f. NETS, FIND, GENI). While the European vision may appeal more complete and more universal, the US definition is more concise and warrant for potentially streamlined progress towards the ultimate objective, the next Internet. It is hard to quantify in terms of investment (social and monetary captial), but one predominant obstacle in European Future Internet research is definitively the „prerogative of interpretation“.
The FI PPP is a proper tool with a reasonable vision and capable provisions. The ultimate challenge, however, is to get the idea of an „open platform“ penetrating beyond technology in order to gain support by business strategists. The past has shown that technology alone does not suffice: 25,583 IEEE papers on QoS versus XXX deployments?.
In any case, FI PPP preparations already achieved one significant result, namely the ICT sector entering a (painful) process of collaboration towards this idea of an open Internet-scale eco-system. This process is still at the very beginning and who knows if a beneficial continuation will result. Yet an ambitious platform is there and enough evidence for significant economic potential should be a good motivation.
At the end, „gain is frequently related to risks taken“ and Europe is commonly perceived being too conservative, especially when compared to the US. The FI PPPs 300M€ investment prove otherwise.
NOVI is new research project that aims at developing a federation of „Experimental Facilities“. This is indeed needed looking at the very many „test beds, pilot sites, experimental infrastructures and facilities“ that were built in the past with public funds and co-innovation research all over Europe. Without knowing numbers, there must be hundreds if not thousands of such sites that allow to experiment with network architectures and more recently also compute and storage systems.
What remains to be seen is whether a cohesive/coherent federation will lead to an upsurge of usage, especially by industrial research organisation. From this perspective, the issue is less scale and simplicity but rather legal aspects related to running code on nodes/hosts that are operated by someone in the „experimental cloud“.
Some time ago I had a closer look into PlanetLab, perhaps the pioneer in this domain, and the concepts behind truly appeal. Technically, the conceptual proximity to Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, like the one by Amazon or Akamai, is intriguing. And usage statistics indicate significant interesst by the community. The biggest disadvantage in my view was/is the lack of support for reproducability of experiments as resources are not explicitely granted and isolated. Essentially, one can conduct an experiment at large-scale and realistic conditions but each and anyone remains unique and hence (striclty) uncomparable.
This is supposted to be different for GENI, which is a pretty large-scale infrastructure for a „Future Internet“ (communication architecture). Some claim it will turn sooner or later, once the Future Internet Architecture is identified, into the Future Internet, just like the ARPA/DARPA Net did orignially.
So something that is worth to keep an eye on.
But along with Cloud Computing (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offerings the IT domain is also looking more into this domain and OpenCirrus is a perfect example for this. It remains a somewhat semi-pubilc resource but allows to experiment with IaaS down to the virtualization layers (and slightly beyond).
It“s hard to keep track of this domain, indeed. In Europe there is a whole research theme / community after it – Future Internet Research & Experimentation – but the needed for experimentation seems to be there. Actually I know too little of actual usage stats and it was something that called experimental facilities in question over the past.
But now I got invited to the advisory board of the NOVI project and I am truly looking forward to gaining deeper insight in this domain.
The GEYSERS project met in Zurich for its first General Assembly. One year on track, good progress, first results.
GEYERS is a project worth to keep an eye on. A strong technical vision aims at bringing together the IT and Telco world with a clean architecture for „Telco+IT“ fulfillment (Connectivity, Storage, Computing in a Service-oriented Design).
At first sight this is not fundamentally new. Yet GEYSERS definition goes beyond pure Telco-based (GMPLS) provisioning with some (GRID-like) IT resources at edges plus some Web-Service interfaces.
By defining an SML-layer, that is based on Service-oriented Infrastructure concepts, IT-standards, and SLA-based service composition and orchestration, GEYSERS reference architecture turns into a complete Infrastructure-as-a-Service framework for public/private Cloud Computing with a IT-northbound / Telco-southbound interface. All this based on accepted concepts and respective open standards in the IT plus Telco domain.
For more details check the architecture reference model at the FP7 GEYSERS Website and the technical specs at GEYSERS Tech-Specs
Do not miss the GEYSERS Video!