Jan 16

Jeleva’s crash course in democracy; software patents

By Ivo Sokolov IT, Politics 6 Comments »

I just can’t not comment on is the very unconvincing, thoroughly shameful hearing of Bulgaria’s EU commissioner designate R. Jeleva (here’s a link to the full hearing).

Right now it’s on the front pages of blogs, newspapers and media all over Europe. The Economist, European Voice, just to name a few. I will abstract from details, but Jeleva was basically attacked on two fronts – her non-compliance with the EU conflict of interest regulations regarding non-affiliation with private businesses as a MEP from 2007-2009 and her lack of familiarity and inability to convince the EP of any deep knowledge of the assigned portfolio – humanitarian aid. Even given the current situation in Haiti alone, it is most definitely not an insignificant portfolio.

Rumiana Jeleva’s lack of preparation for this hearing was a disgraceful display of the same poor leadership qualities that lead to the withdrawal of EU funds from Bulgaria’s previous socialist government: arrogance, disregard for European practices, disregard for transparency, lack of honesty and accountability. Jeleva should have prepared better, no matter how certain that EU commissioner post may have seemed to her.

Following the hearing, prime minister Borisov, not much unsurprisingly, did two poor moves. Firstly, he claimed “he had spoken to the right people to convince them our candidate was good”. Guess what? Everyone saw her poor performance, “calling people” in the same old crony capitalistic, police manner it is done in the Balkans will not cut it; Europe is more or less democratic now and things work differently. In fact, I am proud to be a European; this is a clear case, actually a monumental case for the enacting the Lisbon treaty, whereby the interests of the Union prevail against the interests of a single country. Secondly, in an attempt to cover up the fact that Jeleva acted against the law by not declaring an active participation in her consultancy firm, the deputy minister of justice Lyudmila Petrova issued a legal opinion that Jeleva may have made a breach of a seemingly insignificant regulation, but not an actual violation of the Bulgarian law. (New Europe has the original and translated documents). Notwithstanding, Jeleva did in effect mislead the EP in stating that she did not have commercial conflicts of interest after 2007.

It is indeed a major disaster on Bulgaria’s government part and also a tough hit on the EPP as well. We’ll have to wait a bit to see how things play out. The EPP is now probably mad at GERB and the Bulgarians for not doing their homework. But my guess is, eventually prime minister Boyko Borisov will appoint another candidate (the much better qualified and eloquent current defence minister Mladenov). The costs of plowing through and keeping Jeleva will be too much to bear for the EPP and for Bulgaria.

In addition, I’d also like to post a link to a petition to stop software patents in Europe that is currently gaining momentum.

The petition is aimed at promoting innovation in software. Copyright protection should be ensured whilst also removing the widely misused software patents that are still in many cases accepted in European court decisions. The petition lists a number of funny “methods” of doing things online that seem to be actually patented — e.g. paying with a credit card, video streaming, web shops, shopping carts, getting a key via SMS, etc.

I’m not a big supporter of signing random online petitions, but it is worth taking 2 mins and signing this one.

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Nov 18

The Economist: Debates on Cloud Computing

By Ivo Sokolov Economics and Business, IT 2 Comments »

I just came across The Economist’s debate on cloud computing. Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce outline their conflicting views on the future development of cloud computing. After a short scroll, I hold Benioff’s comments for clearly the more biased. I respect what Salesforce has achieved but Benioff’s views are still somewhat utopian. Elop on the other hand manages to deliver a much more realistic and less biased point of view. I am eager to see how Microsoft will realign or reshape their Azure strategy in general. I’m starting to think that some experts have prematurely underestimated Microsoft as the cloud losers.

All in all it’s great to follow these ongoing discussions. I’m especially interested in whether the outlooks I conceived in early 2009 (in my second bachelor’s thesis on cloud computing) will prove to be true in 1 or 2 years’ time. My personal opinion is that this technology is certainly not the “breakthrough” it is marketed to be. Rather, it’s a logical evolutionary step for virtualization combined with better utilization of existing computing capacities. Yet cloud services and cloud technology do make a lot of sense for a variety of business tasks and maybe even more technical tasks. But I guess I’m still skeptical because the cloud hype has to run its natural course first. Eventually, more mature solutions will settle in.

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Nov 17

Gartner: IT spending will underperform in CEE. Thoughts on Bulgaria’s IT industry

By Ivo Sokolov Economics and Business, IT 1 Comment »

It surprises me very little that Gartner’s assesment on software spending in CEE/SEE is very negative. Eastern Europe will be the slowest emerging market region in terms of IT spending growth, come 2010. Total growth is expected to be 4% compared to 17,7% for Latin America.

Let’s have a brief look at Bulgaria for a moment.

It is a Gartner -”C” country with IT spending-peers such as the mighty high-tech powerhorses BiH, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo. However, my observation is that the

overinvestment in IT

in the case of Bulgaria prior to the crisis was in fact second only to the housing boom in terms of growth and overall hype. Although of course generally positive (for the economy, workforce, etc.), structurally it now turns out to be weaker than originally thought and its

sustainability is seriously questioned.

Why? Because as Gartner points out, it was driven to a large extent by the financial services industry and cyclical demand rather than by organic expansion and export-development of the local IT companies. This is a very bold, stir-the-pot generalization and I know. But there is a serious

lack of strong local IT companies

(I know of less than a dozen such) with strong own product portfolios and stable cross-border client base. Let alone established brands.

Maybe now that the overly inflated IT-labor market has cooled down it is time for the bigger bulgarian IT companies to

rethink their strategy.

They already know that they rely too much on perpetually project-based, outsourcing contractual work. E.g. now that local banks aren’t spending they got a problem. While it is still okay to be an outsourcing company, they should probably figure out they need to better reinforce or establish their new own product lines to become

regionally and internationally competitive.

This is a banal and obvious statement and it’s easier said than done. I would argue however that it is now strategically more significant than ever before. How are companies going to achieve that? If you think about it, the only production factor at software houses are their people. From the

HR perspective,

now that skills retention is no longer the biggest concern (attrition rates have gone down dramatically) they need to strategically invest to further develop their own teams. Yes it would probably show on the bottom line and yes it is a recession. Yet they need to either get way better, or in the short-to-medium run get eaten by cheaper, better trained and well organized Indian or Brazilian outsourcing companies that, according to Gartner, will not see drops in demand for their services.

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Nov 15

Terabyte Sort, Google interview questions and Hadoop

By Ivo Sokolov IT 2 Comments »

Creative interview questions for consultancy companies and technology giants such as Google are nothing new. In fact the most commonly used of them are almost obsolete now and their “correct answers” are widespread. In fact one should definitely

google them

before going to Google’s interview. :) Questions such as How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? (obviously the market hourly rate or slightly above) or standard Fermi questions such as How many golf balls fit in a school bus? have a common solving pattern as far as a phone interview goes.

However, the popular question How long would it take to sort 1 trillion numbers? now has a very easy answer – 1 minute. The Hadoop project (led by Apache and Yahoo!) managed to benchmark a Petabyte sort in 16 hours, sorting a 1 Terabyte in 62 seconds. It seems that Yahoo! is very serious about bringing Hadoop to become the cloud computing platform. Yahoo’s strategy is to invest and lead the core developement of what is otherwise a free and open source project. They will eventually fully reap fruit and benefit once it really takes off and becomes the widespread standard for distributed applications/MapReduce framework. It will be interesting to follow how Google will actually respond and whether they would, at some later point in time share freely parts of their proprietary BigTable/MapReduce/GFS frameworks just to establish market share there too.

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