Last week we had a processor failure on a multi-processor box, and found ourselves in a downward spiral, one that lasted about 5 hours.

Before I get into the details, I want to offer an apology to those customers who were impacted (due to the distributed nature of our service, no single fault affects everyone). We take great pride in our operation, and we do know that our customers – and their partners, who may or may not be our customers – depend on our service.

This interruption, honestly, was not supposed to happen. One of the virtues of a multi-processor box is that – in theory – you can lose one without losing the server (not blaming the hardware, just didn’t want you to think we don’t have redundancy). But of course, that is why we have the ability to rollover to additional servers – which we did.

This is when the “spiral” became very visible… Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting blurb from SDTimes about a forthcoming study of software projects.  If you’ve been in the industry for any length of time you have probably had the “only 16% of projects succeed” statistic thrown around at seminars, meetings, etc.

 Well, now 35% of projects are succeeding – take that!  Sure, that means that 65% are still being labelled failures, but that is really a glass half-empty way of looking at it.

At the risk of endangering the careers of many software development process improvement gurus, Read the rest of this entry »

(A weekend post).  I like to tell my kids that you can know where you are and still be lost — and this weekend I proved it, at least momentarily.  Despite owning two GPSes, I didn’t have one with me and didn’t need it.  I had become “mis-directed” in one of those suburban neighborhood mazes that characterize the part of Montgomery County Maryland in which I live.

On either side I had my choice of addresses (that is the knowing where you are part), but no idea how to get back to I-270, which had to be very close.  So I did what every self-reliant individual would do, reached for my Blackberry.  Some time ago I had installed the Google Maps client for Blackberry and was able to enter where I was and where I wanted to be and get a very accurate map (two rights and a left had me back to the highway).  The interesting thing here is that my Blackberry is not GPS enabled, I just typed in an address from where I was instead.

If you haven’t tried the maps from your phone/Blackberry, it’s worth a look.  Thanks to millions of dollars of commercial infrastructure, you can avoid having to roll down your window and ask the way back to the highway….

I’ve had a series of meetings with large financial institutions over the past couple weeks, and with those guys security is always first on the agenda.  I wanted to share a couple observations based on those meetings…

First, these guys are dead serious about security.  They are extremely sensitive to how critical it is to protect the data they are entrusted with, and they think about it.  We almost had difficulty transferring a powerpoint document because the machines have USB key policies to prevent non-encrypted data from being taken off of computers.  I think most IT people try to build secure systems, but I have never seen an industry that was so intense and knowledgeable about it (for the record, I do not work with government or defense contractors, and I would expect a similar intensity).

As an operator of the largest e-commerce network in the world, we are pretty familiar with the data and communications security issues — but the financial institutions face a different “security” world, government regulations, which is the second face… Read the rest of this entry »

For the past year, we have been working with a company called Covast to connect their B2B Suite product (built on Microsoft BizTalk) to the GXS Trading Grid.  The idea was to build a highly functional connector using a combination of AS2 (for moving files back and forth) and web services (for everything else).  We selected AS2 for file movement because both companies have a lot of AS2 business, and it was popular with customers.  We chose web services because most of what we wanted to do was not addressed by widely used document standards — and we felt that we could also leverage some existing web services already deployed on the Trading Grid.

Our initial concept was to allow a company that had installed Covast’s product (which we also resell…) to do all of their Trading Partner administration (add/update/delete, request relationship, etc) as well as their document tracking, from within the B2B Suite interface.  Our assumption was that they would enter some info about a partner and then query the service for them.  If located, the profile would be sent back to populate the software, and a trading relationship would be requested.  Almost as an afterthought, a service was implemented to pull all the partner data connected (via relationships) to the customer — mostly to provide a tool for synchronizing the software and the service.

Well, I still have hopes for the original model, but that is not what our joint customers are doing!  Read the rest of this entry »