chris horn's blog

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a keynote address at a Science Foundation Ireland seminar in UCC. A few people have asked me to post a copy on my blog, so with apologies to those of you uninterested in Irish science policy who may want to skip this blog entry, here it is.

The event was a public presentation by all seven Centres for Science and Engineering Technology, to the general public and media. Minister Michael Martin attended. The seven CSETs are:

· Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) led by Prof. Fergus Shanahan, and researching gastro-intestinal health

· Biomedical Diagnositics Institute (BDI), led by Prof. Brian MacCraith, and researching early detection and diagnosis of disease

· Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Naondevices (CRANN), led by Prof. John Boland, and researching nanotechnology applications

· Centre for Telecommunications Value Chain Research (CTVR), led by Prof. Donal O’Mahony, and researching telecommunications technologies

· Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), led by Michael Turley and Prof. Dr. Stefan Decker, researching the semantic web

· Lero, led by Prof. Kevin Ryan, and researching software engineering

· The Regenerative Medicine Institute (Remedi), led by Prof. Tim O’Brien, and researching gene and cell therapy for tissue repair

I had returned from Beijing the previous evening, and got up very early that Monday morning to drive down to Cork for 8.00am. The address follows:

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Welcome. 24 hours ago I was in China, where I have been a regular visitor this decade. I am sure many of you here in Cork will be proudly aware that your city is twinned with the city of Shanghai, since 2005. Perhaps only some of you will be aware that in addition to a sharing of challenges and opportunities as a nation’s second capital, that both cities have 021 as their city telephone dialing code!

China is one of the few nations to have put a man in space. They have a stated ambition of a man on the moon within the next decade. Just recently, they demonstrated a millimeter accurate trajectory in intercepting at high speed, and thus deliberately destroying, one of their own satellites. They have just two weeks ago launched their first satellite of the first non-US global positioning system (GPS) constellation, a full two years ahead of likely launch of the first satellites of the European Galileo GPS constellation.

China is widely accepted as the global focus of manufacturing, including high value intricate parts and systems. But it is quite clear that China is also increasingly undertaking world class scientific research and development, and is doing so specifically to enhance the national competitiveness. Large science parks co-exist alongside manufacturing zones to further improve their processes and capabilities. There is high investment in research and development for improving the environment, improving energy efficiency, and improving health care. Biopharma and biodevice research and manufacturing is collocated with large clinical hospitals. There are rumours of nanomanufacturing and nanofabrication initiatives being planned. There are high levels of technology literacy, appreciation and fascination, particularly amongst the young. Space science merely accelerates a scientific and technology culture, together with an immense national pride.

Minister Martin has stated that “Ireland’s sustained economic growth and prosperity depends upon establishing a culture of scientific and technological innovation‚ a high level of research and development‚ and a globally competitive knowledge-based economy”.

In my view, we have yet to establish a deep culture of scientific and technological innovation. Given the major economies – the US and China - and their investment and momentum in science and engineering, where is there room for us here in Ireland ? What should be our focus, if we are not to conduct catch-up “me-too” science ?

A world class scientific result is now increasingly no longer the privilege of a single dedicated science professional. Today, it is far more usually the work of teams, collaborating domestically and worldwide. As but one example, consider how laboratories world wide collaborated extensively with their peers in China to identify the virus in 2003 which had led to unexplained deaths amongst poultry workers in Guangdong province: hitherto virus in poultry which was neutral to humans, but which had mutated. To my knowledge however, Ireland then played no role in the international detective work.

Today, I believe that the greatest opportunities for novel discovery lie on the boundaries between disciplines, areas in which specialists from a variety of backgrounds work together on a common challenge. Equally, the activities with the likely highest benefits to society and economic opportunities may be discovered when others may be too narrowly focused. The most likely successful structures are inter-disciplinary and highly collaborative, both science and engineering, teams, which is why we have – centres for science and engineering technologies – CSETs.

The Minister has mentioned the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre, and this morning we will hear more about it and each of its six peer CSETs. All the CSETs are inter-disciplinary. As an example, the convergence of biological expertise with semiconductor engineering and nanoparticle scientists in the BDI CSET is leading to highly sensitive and hence early detection and low cost detection of diseases. The collaboration of radio frequency physicists, with software and electronic engineers, with market trading theorists and business analysts in the CTVR CSET means that radio frequencies need no longer be exclusively licensed and auctioned to the most competent bidders, and instead that right to use specific frequencies can be dynamically traded as a new global commodity: COMREG has described this initiative as Ireland’s potential new gold.

We need an integrated national focus to yield economic and social success. Cross agency co-operation on sustaining research, and development, nationwide on a small, carefully chosen, number of specific scientific and engineering problems which, if solved here in Ireland, will yield intense value for our tax payers’ investment. Such investments clearly need to be thoughtful and nationally strategic.

As taxpayers, we now own seven highly energetic CSETs, led by seven outstanding scientific chief executives whom you will meet today, our centre directors. Will the portfolio of economic and social agencies as part of our civil service now build on the CSETs, these seven people and their teams, as the foundation for a sustainable economic and social benefits for the decades ahead ?

The focus is not solely on increasing R&D undertaken in Ireland, but also problems which if solved will provide immense value to our society and to our economy. If the agencies can collectively execute well on the CSET model, I believe that Ireland will have built a global show case which we will hold in pride in the years ahead.

The LeMass era, also associated with TK Whitaker, opened Ireland to international economies. The IDA was established, leading to substantial manufacturing jobs, and also which a decade ago gave birth to its sister agency Enterprise Ireland. The concept of a free economic zone was one important tactic used in the national strategy, and which has been widely admired by the Chinese and others. Today, now, in this – as yet unclaimed and unnamed - era, our administration has established SFI. In this era, the CSET model, if fully developed as a national initiative of carefully orchestrated strategic impact , will I believe be even more significant than the model of a free economic zone.

2007 has so far been of public concern here in Cork, with plant closures. But Cork is uniquely placed through its formal alliance with the east to demonstrate the economic and social benefits of a sustained focus on science and technology, including in particular international co-operation. Like Shanghai, Cork has the number 21 associated with it; and like Shanghai, Cork has an opportunity to come of age, as a dynamic and energetic location in the 21^st century.”

This month is the 10^th anniversary of the IONA IPO n Nasdaq. I can remember vividly being asked by a smart Harvard MBA during the roadshow: “are you guys trying to be a Microsoft or an Oracle ?” Very presumptuous I thought, but the core of the question was our go-to-market strategy for our middleware technology.

Until the IPO, we had had a shrink-wrapped package approach, enabling inbound telesales in IONA and a number of regional distribution channel partners – the “Microsoft approach”. We believed we had introduced a new leverage point into the industry: apparently, nobody had thought about shrink-wrapping middleware before – up until us, middleware had been an enterprise sale with a large amount of systems integrator involvement.

The MBA’s question was whether we would, after the IPO, build a more conventional enterprise field sales force – the “Oracle approach”, and attempt to increase our average selling price beyond its then current sub 10,000USD level.

I had thought about this business strategy issue at length. The stock answer to the question was – audaciously – “both!” It was my belief that we were seeding the enterprise market with a low cost, packaged Trojan horse. However, having seeded opportunities in our customer base, there could well be an opportunity to up-sell additional enterprise products to the basic platform. Some IONAians may remember my BMW theme: “we first sell them a 3-series over the phone, but later they’ll want a 5 or even 7 series which they will want to buy from us face to face. And they must be all part of the same brand” (and as an aside, BMW didn’t yet have a 1 series back in the 90s).

So that’s what we did. We built a field organization after the IPO to sell our high end products, and continued to use the telesales operation to prime the pump. Some MBA types and business faculty now call this “ambidextrous” I think (see for example O’Reilly/Tushman; Celly/Han/Nia; Organizational Science. Another aside: Charles O’Reilly is one of the faculty on the Enterprise Ireland Leadership for Growth programme).

Sometime later, I had the privilege of being invited to join Sanjay Vaswani’s Centre for Corporate Innovation (CCI), which is a number of chapters of CEOs of high technology companies, most of them public, across the US. I believe I was the first European CEO to join. Each quarterly meeting typically consists of a roundtable discussion, followed by a presentation and discussion led by a guest speaker. At one such event, Clayton Christiansen spoke to us about his then latest book “The Innovators Dilemma” – I’m sure you’ve read it. As I listened, I realized that our approach at IONA followed Christiansen’s model: we disrupted the incumbent market from below by a low-cost high-value displacement, and then introduced add-ons as we focused on the enterprise. Shrink wrapped middleware was our successful attack on the incumbents. Christiansen’s general observation and warning was that a company had to be wary of itself being displaced from below by a new entrant – i.e. a company had to continue to be ambidextrous. I was sufficiently and perhaps naively confident that our ability to innovate and “eat our own dog food” would protect us. In retrospect, we were late catching an emerging technology wave in the late 90s – but that’s another story for another blog entry sometime.

Roll on to today. Is open source the weapon to displace incumbent enterprise software by disruption from below ? Is IONA today a closed source enterprise software company, or an open source aggressor ? I guess, as before, the audacious answer is: “Both!”.

Let me explain. I believe that enterprise customers – Fortune 2000 and federal – seek vendors whose competence and sustainability they can trust, to understand and deliver mission critical systems. The full cost of enterprise software is naturally not only the actual license cost but also the investments needed to integrate it with other corporate applications and enterprise data. There is the cost of staff training, not only for the user screens, menus, features and functions, but also for the training of the IT operations staff so as to ensure smooth and efficient operations, and no critical outages. Before making all these investments, a customer wants to ensure that the solution is likely to be valid for some considerable time, while still being maintained and evolved as needs dictate.

In general, risks arise if the system becomes uniquely tailored for that particular customer. Forking of the product source code base by the vendor – a separate derivative version of the source code for each customer – is dangerous, and makes the vendor vulnerable to unviable maintenance costs and skills shortages. It is even worse, of course, should the vendor, or an acquirer of the vendor, drop the product line, or even go out of business completely. A source code escrow account, negotiated at the time of the product commitment, and triggered by a dramatic change in the vendor’s business, is sometimes used to mitigate risk of vendor viability. Nevertheless, very few customers are comfortable with the prospect of having to adopt a substantial foreign code base as a result of a nuclear meltdown.

An enterprise customer in general seeks a vendor who understands the customer’s industry and specific business. The vendor has either verifiably delivered similar solutions before or, if the customer is prepared to be an early adopter, is willing to extend and modify the product – without forking the code base – and work with the customer to deliver competitive business value, despite the risks involved. The professionalism and competence of the sales engagement, particularly the comprehension of the solution by the pre-sales team, are thus vital to establish trust and reassurance.

How does open source play in this arena ? Naked open source – source code downloaded from an internet repository – is usually of little value in an enterprise, except for low value routine commodity utilities such as document format converters. However a number of software vendors package open source with service such as product distribution, maintenance, support and training. Comparatively few of these companies currently have a field organization which is capable of professional sales engagement to rigorously define and commit to the likely business value.

Forking of the source code base is as fraught with risk as it is with a closed source vendor, and clearly should be discouraged and avoided. Having multiple distinct copies of the same open source technology is not helpful. However in my view, the bigger risk is the loss of talented committers to the code base. Although the source code is open and available to all, in most open source projects in practice there is in each case a small number of committers who do the real work. If those committers stop maintaining and extending that code base, then the project quickly stagnates. A committer may stop because of a change in her job responsibilities or the pressure of the day job. But more likely, a committer may stop on a particular project because she feels she has learnt enough from that project, and there is a more exciting new project and new technology starting elsewhere in the open source community.

In my experience, enterprise customers are always keen to understand a vendor’s product roadmap. An appreciation of what likely new releases, with what additional functionality, over the next couple of years, help reassure that the vendor is committed and has a vision for its competitive development, but also help the customer to plan with respect to internal projects and priorities. However, it is in general quite rare to be presented with a road map for an open source project, going out over a couple of years or so, because in general there is no long term responsibility for the project.

In some, but certainly not all, open source projects, the legal ownership of the intellectual property can be opaque. Sometimes, projects include components which were partially supported by the public funds, and jurisdictions can have different perspectives – for example many European Union funded projects typically have an expectation, as a first call, of commercial exploitation. Sometimes, projects include dependencies, or even “cut’n’paste” of code originating from other projects or even from text books. Sometimes projects are forks of others. And sometimes, a closed source vendor will cast doubt on the legitimacy of some open source, as most recently Steve Ballmer did as a result of the Novell partnership. These factors tend to cause enterprise customers, particularly those publicly quoted and under the current regulatory environment of Sarbennes-Oxley and 404, to reflect on the appropriate use of some open source. I am aware of enterprises which proactively take steps to purge open source from their organisations unless there are legally enforceable contracts in place from a vendor warrantying the ownership and responsibility of the associated source code.

Where does this all leave enterprise customers and open source ? Enterprises with a strong technical capability will occasionally embrace open source and assume responsibility for maintenance and extension themselves if necessary. Occasionally, an enterprise will contribute its own open source efforts to work with the community at large. But most enterprises, to the extent that they have a development organization at all, prefer to dedicate their internal resources to helping their business units gain competitive differentiation and advantage.

Now, I hope I haven’t left you with the impression that I reject open source for the enterprise. My emphasis is rather what an open source project should do if it is to be successful in the enterprise. And those thoughts are driving the current “ambidextrous” strategy of IONA, with both our closed source Artix product, and our open source Celtix project. In particular, the commercial investment in Celtix by IONA provides a reasonable guarantee of long term commitment; a product roadmap and direction; a supply of skilled committers; clear legal and IP ownership, with contracts as enforceable as those for closed source; consulting and training services; and the option, should you want it, of commercial grade maintenance and enterprise support – including a free 30day trial period of support. We are also building community support for Celtix initially by contribution to ObjectWeb and subsequently contributing to Apache’s CXF project. Other open source initiatives are also considering Celtix at this time.

Why does IONA provide both open source and closed source forms of similar technology ? Artix has certain enterprise features, including for example support for high end and mainframe technologies, which are currently absent from Celtix. It is an application of the old 80/20 rule: 80% of the customers will use 20% of the potential of the technology – and by implication 20% will need at least 80%. Celtix and Artix play to each segment. And one further consequence is that we are seeing some early adopters of Celtix move on to also subsequently adopt Artix. To re-emphasise above: “we first sell them a 1-series or 3-series over the internet, but later they’ll want a 5 or even 7 series which they will want to buy from us face to face. And they are all part of the same brand”.

Why would any entrepreneur chose Ireland as the headquarters for her global start-up ?

I’m not a spokesman for the Irish Government nor any of its myriad of agencies and civil servants. But that was the question which we discussed over dinner last night, quite robustly it must be said, between members of the US based team for Enterprise Ireland (EI) and some of the 30 Irish based IT CEOs attending the Leadership For Growth programme. This one year programme is organised by EI and the Irish Software Association, together with the CLG Executive Coaching, some experienced Irish technology business coaches, and hosted here this week at the Stanford Graduate Business School from where I write this blog entry.

I think any business visitor to Ireland today will be confused by the image which the country presents. On the one hand, Ireland appears to be thriving, with evidence of strong economic growth driven by a combination of indigenous and multinational companies. Dublin, Galway, Cork and Limerick are all exciting cities, with young and dynamic societies. On the other hand, there is clearly so much which is broken. The physical transport system is still very poor indeed, with long commutes, and highways which are frequently car parks. The health system seems to be a black hole and, despite larger public investment as a proportion of GDP (currently abut 6%) than many other countries, appears to fall very far behind what is available elsewhere. Labour and housing costs are expensive. The corporate legislative environment is onerous and burdensome. Personal taxation, with the top tax band at 41% is moderate compared to other European countries but the tax band threshold is quickly reached by most professional staff.

Joe Macri, an ebullient Australian friend, and the current head of Microsoft in Ireland, spoke forthrightly recently that the sole reason that multinationals stay in Ireland is to avail of the low corporate tax rate of 12.5%. Past advantages have been eroded by international competition: it is no longer the quality of the Irish workforce, or cost competitiveness, or the telecommunications infrastructure, or anything else. If he and the American Chamber of Commerce are right, then clearly Ireland needs to grow its own indigenous companies and entrepreneurs to sustain economic growth as multinationals in due course move elsewhere.

Michael O’Leary, of Ryanair, is probably the most outstanding CEO which Ireland has yet produced. Ryanair is now amongst the most profitable and largest of the global airlines. Peter Conlon – himself a highly experienced technology entrepreneur – nominated O’Leary at dinner last night as the role model which Enterprise Ireland should adopt, and I think Peter is correct. And there are others who come to mind: Liam O’Mahony, CEO of CRH, a company which has global presence through outstanding execution of M&A; Eddie O’Connor, CEO of airtricity, ironically having far more success with wind farms outside of Ireland – such as Texas – than at home; and Liam Fitzgerald of United Drug, who has built a highly regarded company. Noticeably absent from my list above is of course global Irish ICT companies, and that’s part of what the Leadership For Growth programme aims to solve.

I believe that Brand Ireland is now internationally very strong. Ireland is a neutral nation. It is now well on to its commitments to donating 0.7% of GDP for third world aid, made at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, which has further raised its international political profile. It is also important to recognise that Irish aid is not tied to trade requirements, as is frequently the case for some other western governments. Ireland boxes above its weight at both the UN and European Union institutions. Ireland is the home of the “celtic tiger”. The consequence of Brand Ireland is that being an Irish company opens opportunities for global business, whether it be in the US, or China, or Saudi Arabia, or Israel, or Brazil – pretty much wherever. Without wishing to be geo-political, frankly I believe that certain other national brands are now extremely damaged in the global community, creating obstacles for their own entrepreneurs to undertake business and opening opportunities for others, such as the Irish.

I also pointed out last night that the substantial investment in world class R&D in Ireland, by Science Foundation Ireland and industry, is now also creating entrepreneurial opportunities for new global businesses. As chair of the CTVR initiative, there are clear global leadership positions emerging in cognitive radio, dynamic spectrum management and trading, and terabit per second laser technology. There are further significant global advances in, for example, bio-diagnostics, nanomaterials, the semantic web, and alimentary pharmabiotics amongst the other Irish Centres for Science and Technology. Such world class research will be exploited by visionary entrepreneurship.

It is also remarkable how the composition of the work force in Ireland has changed this decade. The Polish, Chinese, Latvian and other communities are significant. While these nationals are visible in the hospitality service sector, a visitor to Ireland might not realise how many professional grade staff there are amongst the new immigrants, including in particular the ICT sector. Ireland is also has quite a number of start up companies founded and run by immigrant entrepreneurs, and I believe that some of these entrepreneurs may well emerge as global leaders. The strong linkage to other, frankly lower cost, economies which the immigrant communities create, are enabling relatively easy off-shoring opportunities to globally compete with world class products, of Irish based innovation, with high value propositions.

Ultimately, the striking observation is that the most successful world class entrepreneurs based in Ireland, have done so despite the challenges: the physical infrastructure, even the physical location of Ireland, the cost challenges, and the frequently dysfunctional civil service. The Irish have historically been the “under-dogs”, and rise to the challenge. Ireland has now become culturally deeply entrepreneurial, with a deep “can do” attitude swelling in its national psyche.

I know a German CEO who relocated herself from Munich to Dublin last year to found her global company, which is based on a highly innovative and insightful use of web 2.0 social community technology. Watch out for Anna Kupka and Ammado. I suspect there will be many more like her.

When I was a kid, my sister and I loved sharing our toys and playing together. She had a farm, with farm buildings and fenced fields; a hospital, complete with a helicopter landing pad for emergency cases; and a dolls house, whose front swung open to reveal a hidden world for miniature furniture and figures. I myself had a garage, which had an inspection bay and an elevator for the cars; docks, with piers and cranes and ships; and an airport, with runways and a passenger terminal, and tiny fuel trucks and baggage carts. We would sprawl ourselves across the play room and build our town, playing as gods as we moved people and animals and freight in our virtual world, from the farm to dock to the airport to the hospital. Of course, we had to try and ignore the differences in scale of our toys – her dolls house dwarfed everything – as well as the bumps and crevasses in our roads, where the edges of the bases of the toys butted up against each other.

In those “black and white days”, as my now 10 year old daughter calls them – the days before colour TV and lcd flat panels – there wasn’t a lot of plastic, and wonderful kits like Lego™ had only just begun appearing. Now my own kids can build towns from Lego kits, with consistent scale across all the buildings, unless of course they choose to make one building much bigger than the others. The roads all smoothly meet up at the junctions, and Lego people and animals and freight all appear wonderfully realistic as scenarios are enthusiastically played out for Dad’s benefit.

What is even more wonderful about toys such as Lego is that children’s fantasies can be cultivated, as they themselves design and construct their own buildings and vehicles and systems, using their imagination to mimic and extend their worlds. They are not limited to the pre-designed model described by each Lego instruction sheet or booklet. Indeed, my teenage son shares designs with his friends, sketching out their own instructions, and photo-copying them for each other. I googled to see whether there is a web site somewhere where people can share their designs and instructions with each other – I could find a few (such as http://staff.science.uva.nl/~leo/lego/ and http://www.telepresence.strath.ac.uk/jen/lego/ and Lego’s own http://factory.lego.com) but no single aggregation: now, there’s an idea if someone hasn’t already done it.

In 1992, when I started building Orbix v1.0 - our CORBA implementation - with John Moreau and Bridget Walsh, the software community was talking about the novel concept of object oriented programming, and some proponents certainly drew parallels with construction kits such as Lego. If civil engineers build using pre-fabricated components, and kids build complex buildings and systems from re-usable Lego bricks, then why can’t the software industry build using a portfolio of re-usable objects and components ? A decade plus later, I guess today we pretty much have learnt this lesson, and much of our complex software artefacts are constructed using re-usable components and common design patterns.

In the “black and white” days, toys were complete. A dolls house was a dolls house. A toy garage was a toy garage. You couldn’t re-assemble it to build something closer to your imaginary perfect garage. A decade ago, software applications and indeed operating systems were likewise monolithic. Sure, you could configure products like SAP R/3 and SVR4, but you couldn’t delve inside them, learn from them, and build systems which were closer to the perfection you craved for your organisation. Today, open source, and software componentisation, has changed the industry, and so you can now assemble and build tailored – and even generally useful – software yourself.

However, now the interesting thing, I think anyway, is where is our – I mean the software world’s – equivalent of those Lego instruction sheets and booklets, those photo-copied personally designed instructions for new models ? Software design patterns are not really the same thing: a software design pattern gives a “how-to” elegantly solve a commonly occurring scenario, regardless of what you are actually building; a Lego instruction sheet, whether direct from Lego or invented by one of your friends, tells you how to build a complete and finished model.

That’s why I got very enthusiastic when Mitch Sonies and Henrik Lindberg approached me last year to talk about Buckminster and Cloudsmith. Buckminster is open source technology which they have donated to the Eclipse foundation -- although Buckminster is not dependent on Eclipse, a “headless” version also exists. A specific software configuration is captured in an RMAP and CQUERY. I like to think of a CQUERY as akin to a Lego instruction sheet, with the RMAP saying which Lego blocks are in which containers and bags. An CQUERY captures, both explicitly but also implicitly by transitive closure, all the necessary software components – other completed models and even individual bricks – needed to build a fully complete system, or component. Given a CQUERY and RMAP, Buckminster then can actually go ahead and build – or “materialize” in Buckminster parlance – the artefact so described, for you on your machine.

Now, you might say, gee Chris, ‘make’ systems have been doing that even since before you were a developer back in the 90s. Well, Buckminster is a bit more than that. What if you want to build something that depends on components from different software repositories: some repositories inhouse in your company or on your own private computer, and some remote across the internet. What if these repositories use different formats – CVS, maven, clearcase ? What if there are version dependencies between the components ? What if there are alternative repositories for the same component ?

Some of the Eclipse projects are looking very hard at Buckminster, and I understand that some have already adopted it. I think there will be quite a bit of discussion about Buckminster at the forthcoming eclipsecon conference. But I don’t want you to think of Buckminster as an Eclipse-based Java-centric tool. Because it isn’t. Back to the Lego analogy – as well as Lego, not only is there Duplo from the same company, but also construction kits from Young Architects and Brio and Imagibrick and others. In our software industry, we’re similarly plagued by different core technologies, leading to bumps and cravesses as you try to butt together one completed system with another. Buckminster at least solves the problem of defining and materializing useful configurations of software – regardless of the technologies – Java, PHP, C# or whatever - used.

One of the most frustrating things about the software industry today, I think, is that although it is much easier now to build interesting new artefacts and systems from re-usable components, it is quite difficult to communicate these configurations and fit them together with other peoples’. Linux distribution vendors, such as RedHat and Ubuntu, do a fine job selecting a specific configuration of several thousand software components, and warranting to a greater or lesser degree that they should all work together. But, sometimes creative developers have different configurations that they seek, or want to define, share and publish to the world. Can interesting new virtual distributions be rapidly defined, communicated and materialized ?

Gee, welcome to my blog, thanks for stopping by.

A little about me: electronics engineer, then got into software. Co-founded IONA back in Feb. 1991, along with Annrai O'Toole and Sean Baker. Was CEO from then until 2000, including taking the company public in 1997. Came back again as CEO in 2003 and stepped down for the second time in 2005.

Today I’m Vice Chair of the Board, and have no executive role. In practice, I attend our board meetings – typically twice a quarter, one physical and one by concall. I take part in strategy discussions, including our merger and acquisition plans. From time to time I’m asked to meet customers, and always enjoy doing so.

Since stepping down from an operational role in IONA, I’ve got myself involved in a fair few other activities. I have an interest in China, and founded the Ireland China business organisation back in 2000, although today I have no longer have any committee involvement. Together with Nicole Bernard I co-founded, and chair, Slisiar which provides business services to companies entering the Chinese market. We have a small team in Beijing – Nicole is resident there – and have clients not just in the IT sector, but also for example in wind farms, the building materials industry, and agrifoods. Pretty much regardless of a sector, the challenges of trading with China, or establishing a business in China – hiring, legal authorisations, channel and partner development, etc – remain similar. I visit China a few times each year.

I also co-founded and am non-executive chair of Cloudsmith, along Mitch Sonies as CEO and Henrik Lindberg as CTO. Cloudsmith is very virtual – Mitch is in Manhattan, Henrik is in Stockholm, I’m in Dublin and we also have a small team in Prague: but skype and our internal wikis and blogs keep us together. We raised private finance for Cloudsmith over the summer of 2006, and started operations just in October 2006, and will launch its initial – free - service to the world wide developer community round about Eclipsecon 2007. The Cloudsmith guys have already donated open source technology to eclipse.org in the form of Buckminster and Cloudsmith will add some interesting services later this year.

Last November, I agreed to become non-executive chair of LeCayla. LeCayla was founded a few years ago by Conor Halpin, who created and managed our CORBA mainframe business in the late 90s. LeCayla is private, and venture capital backed by Trinity VC. It is a very interesting play in the “software as a service (SaaS)” space, and offers billing, rating and metering technology for software ISVs who want to build a new business model using SaaS. LeCayla’s technology can be bundled with an ISV’s software package, and then when installed inhouse on end customers machines, can monitor actual usage (driven by whatever business rules the ISV wishes) and securely report this for billing purposes. SaaS is typically positioned – eg by salesforce.com – as the combination of remotely hosted software and pay-as-you-go. LeCayla’s technology enables pay-as-you-go but the actual software can either be remotely hosted or inhouse.

In 2006, I became involved in a couple of projects for Trinity, from where we founded IONA back in 1991. The bigger of these is one of the seven national centres for science and technology (CSETs) in Ireland. I’m chair of the woefully named – I didn’t chose the name! – centre for telecommunications value chain research (CTVR). Participants in CTVR are seven universities led by TCD, together with Bell Labs Ireland and Lucent-Alcatel, and some smaller participation by Xilinx and EADS. It’s a big project and working in areas as diverse as photonics systems for terabit ethernet, cooling technologies, corrosion and failure research, ultra wide band antennas, and software and cognitive radio. The key theme underlying and guiding the research is identifying leverage points in the global telecommunications industry – in its value chain – for which successful new research could have a highly disruptive impact and create entirely new business opportunities. Donal O’Mahony is centre director – the CEO – of the project and is doing a fine job co-ordinating such an ambitious inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional nationwide academic-industry initiative. One of the very exciting aspects of the project is the license granted to it by COMREG, the Irish telecommunications regulator, to allow experimentation of ultrawide dynamic frequency techniques for cognitive radio on the national electromagnetic spectrum: the only such license granted anywhere in the world.

A second project at TCD which I chair is the Science Gallery. This is the ground and first floors of the new ship-shaped building at the corner of Pearse street and Westland Row. The Gallery will open later this year, and will be free to the public. It will be a venue for discussion and debate on scientific issues of interest to society: for example, global warming, the MRSA super-bug, avian bird flu, radiation from mobile phone masts, and so on. It includes exhibition space and a theatre. We have just appointed Michael John Gorman as the first CEO, and Michael John is putting his team together for the official launch and opening later this year.

I have been the chair of UNICEF Ireland for several years, which fund raises from the Irish public and commercial sector on behalf of UNICEF world wide. We also actively advocate on childrens’ issues to Irish Government, and have been successful in for example getting the Government to allocate a considerable proportion of its investment in HIV/AIDS work for children. Maura Quinn has been the CEO since 1996, and is stepping down next April having rescued the organisation from near bankruptcy in 1996 to the multi-million euro business it is today. We have just concluded our search process for her replacement but we have not yet announced who is the new CEO, who will start her work in April.

I’m also currently acting as a business coach to six CEOs of Irish software companies. They were allocated to me by Enterprise Ireland under its inaugural one year mentoring programme for 30 CEOs, together with Stanford Graduate Business School and with CLG Executive Coaching. In practice, we meet together monthly for peer discussion, and I naturally keep in touch with each of them on their strategic issues.

I guess that’s about it. I do also have occasional meetings of the IBEC ICT management committee; and with Vinny Cahill and David Abrahamson as an advisor to the Dept. of Computer Science at TCD on the research and teaching programmes.

Every day, and every week, is different. Sometimes I have a lot going on. Sometimes not. I work from home a lot, and avoid going into the city if I can. I’m usually travelling once a month or so, although from October to December last I don’t think I had a single trip. Right now, I’m just back from Beijing and Shanghai last week, in Dublin and Cork this week, and heading for Stanford next week.