chris horn's blog

There’s an interesting interview with Niall McCullough, architect, yesterday in the Irish Times weekend magazine, about the new version of his book “Dublin: An Urban History” (unfortunately the Irish Times online is only premium paid-for content so I can only give you this url to the article). There’s also an interesting web site, giving additional histories of Dublin and the patterns which have shaped it at www.reflectingcity.com.

One of the things which I had not realized about Georgian Dublin is that the buildings, which of course are a part of our heritage, were apparently in general not built to last! The article says: “Based on a land-lease system, the terraces and squares were designed to stand for the lifetime of the lease, usually between 40 and 100 years, whereupon they would be torn down and built again.” Perhaps this is one reason why the Georgian Society has had so many challenges in trying to preserve the best of Georgian Dublin for us and for future generations.

Earlier in the last week, I was in Liaoning province in north east China, for Sli Siar, for discussions relating to the “Five Points, One Line” strategy to re-invigorate one of the old industrial parts of China. As you probably know, Chinese government policy (until recently) is that land is only available for lease, and is owned by the State. The lengths of leases are set by national law, and vary between 40 and 70 years, depending on the land use: residential, commercial, industrial etc. In fact, China has been through various land reform policy changes: the 1946 reform in which land was expropriated from the landlords and equitably distributed to individual households in rural villages; the collectivisation period during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s in which land was grouped into shared communes; and the current system introduced in the late1970s during Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. I say “the current system”, because in fact just last month, the National People’s Congress passed a new property law, after many years of deliberations, which recognizes the status of private property including land. In my own experience, urban planners and developers today in modern China in general expect their buildings and developments to survive the length of leases of the land on which they are built.

Then on Friday, having traveled back to Europe the previous day, I was with some folks from IONA, visiting one of our customers in the financial services sector, in Zurich. The meeting was with their senior architect – let me call him Tom. Tom is responsible for their group-wide, global IT architecture, and the meeting was to discuss SOA strategy. One of the very interesting points he and I discussed was that there is a sense in the enterprise IT industry, that at long last, we collectively in the enterprise software industry are “building to last”.

As an aside, I do wonder whether “architect” is the appropriate title for somebody like Tom. I tend to think of civil architects as professionals who design buildings. Rather somebody like Tom is really an “urban planner” – he presides over the current and future infrastructure of an entire software city, on which individual applications – buildings – are built.

Anyway. With previous middleware technologies – DCE, DCOM, CORBA, J2EE, etc – and with all due respect to those thousands of technologists world-wide who worked to create these technologies, I think there was always an expectation amongst senior architects (urban planners ?) and IT visionaries, that each of these technologies would fade in time. Sure, each might be strong enough to last for a decade or so, but business logic and applications that were built to exploit any one of these technologies were constructed in the expectation that a more modern, better middleware technology, would emerge within at most a decade. It was perhaps like the relatively short land leases of Georgian Dublin I mentioned above: build your artifacts in the expectation of re-building them a few years later. And so the middleware world proved to be,

Tom postulated that, at long last, enterprise software architects (urban planners ?) can be like the Victorians of over a century ago: laying down infrastructure – whether it be urban water supply, underground and metro train networks, or even sewage pipe networks (what is the best analogy for middleware ? – I leave it to your personal prejudice!) – that will last for a hundred years or so. Is SOA the end of middleware as we know it ? Isn’t SOA good enough to give us a stable infrastructure for at least a hundred years ?

Well, my view is yes, I agree that it is but with one proviso: one has to construct a SOA based (urban-like, city) environment in the expectation that middleware technologies will in fact continue to evolve and change. SOA may mark the end of middleware as we know it, yes Tom, but its chief contribution in this context is its meta-level. In the same way that metadata in a database allows one to reason and manipulate the underlying data, so should a SOA system enable one to reason and manipulate the underlying middleware.

SOA capabilities in frameworks like Artix and its open source companion Celtix allow a de-coupling between business logic and services, and the underlying middleware. In particular, future middleware technologies can be inserted into such frameworks. The meta-level capabilities enable dynamic re-configuration, including for example interface versioning, data versioning, retooling and end-point guardianship.

With SOA, we have indeed reached the end of middleware as we know it, and can now enable enterprise applications which can be built to last.

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.