HP and Cisco Square Off

I love a good dust up in the computer industry. The latest WWF style bout comes to us courtesy of HP and Cisco. In one corner of the ring is Cisco who won't be renewing a system integrator contract with HP. In the other corner is HP who plans to bail from the Cisco Certified Channel and Global Service Alliance Partner programs.

Two giants of the industry beating on each other is so much better than David and Goliath match ups. Those make us feel sorry for the little guy and angry at the mean old big company beating down on the poor entrepreneur who's just trying to make the world a better place.

These bare knuckle brawls are both good and bad for the industry. First, it brings to light the farcical nature of big company alliances. Let's face it, they are marriages of convenience. These folks really want to be on top and there can only be one top dog. It's good that they occasionally remind us not to get too vested in them.

Competition is also good. It drives down prices and ratchets up innovation. When things get too cozy, the industry tends to stagnate. We need another round of wow! inducing products at woo hoo! low prices about now.

It is bad though for those caught in the wake of these two battleships as they try to sink each other. In this case, the indirect channel partners of both companies could become collateral damage. It may well become more difficult to integrate products from both companies and channel partner customers are not likely to want to pay extra for that added effort. It's not their problem that HP and Cisco went from lovers to bitter rivals practically overnight. There will be costs that someone has to absorb and the channel looks like the dry sponge here. Hopefully a hardware price war will ensue that give a little more margin to channel service providers.

This move is just one act in an ongoing drama in the computer industry. Over the past ten years we have seen the growth of the full service, full product line computer company. There are now only half a dozen (if that) companies that sell solutions to customers and they want to sell whole solutions. Servers, networking, storage, software, the whole system plus services. This is what is behind the Cisco Unified Computing initiative and HP's acquisition strategy. Everyone is trying to be IBM. Even software companies are getting into the act. Just look at Oracle and their purchase of Sun and other investments in hardware. It will get harder and harder for independent hardware companies to continue to exist unless they are making OEM equipment for one of the big, full service companies. A few will survive to provide niche products whose revenue stream is too small for the big guns to care about. A few others will get by on overservicing specialty markets. It's like grocery shopping. Most everyone buys from a big supermarket. Sure, you occasionally go out to the specialty market or “all local foods” shop but that's not for everyday purchases.

Next up: Exclusive channel partner programs. Want to sell our stuff? Then you can't sell anyone else's stuff. It's been done in the past and will likely happen again.

Into the Matrix with Neo

Everyone needs a hobby. Lately, mine happens to be writing code. I used to be a software engineer so I used to code for a living. Over time two things happened. One, it ceased to be fun (that's why we call it work folks) and two I didn't need to do it anymore. As my career transitioned into management and then executive management, I rarely got my fingernails dirty with real coding projects.

What's good about that is that coding could become fun again. So a couple of months ago I decided to start on a new coding project. I had two goals – learn some new technology and do something at least marginally useful. That has led to my latest project, a document management system built on the idea of relationships between documents.

Most document management centers around classifying documents in some fashion. Whether you use a hierarchical category system or free form tagging schema, it's about putting documents in buckets. I wanted to add something else to the mix. Documents rarely stand on their own. They exist in relationship to other documents. Think social networking for your files.

Unlike people, documents don't know other documents nor do they care if another document is having lunch at Spot Coffee. Documents do belong to an ecosystem just like we humans do. They refer to other documents and are part of larger documents and collections of documents. They have their own relationships.

To model these relationships in more traditional databases is difficult. Using an SQL RDBMS you end up with a lot of cross reference tables and lots of Joins. It's not what SQL or relational databases were designed for. Instead, I decided to use a graphing database called Neo. Graphing databases organize data as a series of nodes connected by explicit relationships. This allows you to build applications that focus on finding like objects. For example, what documents are referenced by this one? Or, which are the child documents to this one? These questions are more easily answered by graphing database.

To date, Graphing databases are primarily used for social networking applications. That makes sense since managing data by relationships sits at the core of social networking. Graphing databases have a lot of other potential uses. They would be great for modeling workflows, simulations, and building ontologies, all hot areas of software.

Neo has a few warts. It's still only a release candidate so things are still changing. The recent most version, bringing Neo out of Beta and to an RC, changed the names of several basic objects. That forced me to go back and recode certain key sections of the application. The online documentation is good at documenting the API but light on how to make things work right. Figuring out the transaction model, even though it's pretty simple, required digging into the class level documentations and a bit of trial and error. Might be a book in there. Hmmm...

In the end, I won't have a commercial grade application. My GUI design skills are too poor to make it look and behave the way I want it to. However, once my pet project is done, the application will at least be useful. I will have learned something interesting and it will have been fun. What more can one want out of a hobby.