Google wave and the enterprise

Came across a very interesting BPM prototype on top of Google Wave. Ever since its announcement, Wave has created quite some interest in the enterprise world on how it can change the way real time collaboration works, specially from the PLM perspective. Coming to think of PLM, where I come from, I have seen a relative reluctance from the PLM vendor community in jumping onto the latest innovations that happen around in the IT space, although off late things are changing for the better.  My exposure to SAP has been very limited and i had formed an opinion that SAP is at least a generation behind in providing a better usability to the user community. Off late I am forced to change that, based on a few prototypes and new releases that I am seeing around.

Coming back to the above prototype, I believe , this should at least, set the trend in terms of  filling the so called technology gap that exists in the PLM product space, if not a direct impact. You can catch the video here.

Leveraging Virtualization in PLM Data Migration

It has been quite some time ago that I read about how NYT was able to make use of Hadoop in conjunction with EC2 and S3 services from Amazon to convert an approx 11 million articles from TIFF into PDF.  The same analogy could be drawn when doing a datamigration involving millions of objects and the associated(which can be conted in gigabytes) documents. Usually the way forward would be to use one of the vendor provided migration scripts which would be essentially a half baked wrapper around a crude migration solution, in short a piece of trash with little practical sense.

Leveraging the enormous scale that virtualization can provide would be  made feasible by forming a clever data segregation strategy around the inherently inter related nature of PLM data and associated physical files. The idea would be to identify the smallest unit of work(at a part level or even at the BOM level) which can be stateless and then weave the virtualization strategy around that.

I hope this strategy can be feasible in bringing down the execution time by a considerable margin, which can change the way data migration is being done till now.