As De La Soul taught me in 1989, themselves passing on the teachings of the scholar Bob Dorough, three is a magic number. When it comes to data, particularly when attempting to understand and crystallise requirements, and design a solution to meet those requirements, the three-pronged framework I often use can be distilled as:  Store Manage Use In diagrams I will draw those as bottom-up layers with storage providing the foundation, management of the data/storage overlaying that foundation and access/utilisation overlaying that. This isn’t revolutionary, people have been using similar terminology to talk about data for years; old as it is though, it’s just as useful today as it was way back when. So, the framework we use to evaluate has held firm; however, much has changed with what it is we are evaluating.  Compared to just a few years ago there are many more systems creating much more data; shed-tons...

“Every company is a software company” I read an article a little while ago which praised Domino's for their technology innovation, using them as a reference to support the assertion that every company is a software company; shortly after I read a barbed reaction article where the responding author vented his frustration at this type of description, pointing out that “No, Domino's are an effing Pizza company…”. Now I hate pointless slogans as much as the next man but in this instance, I think the angry technologist was missing the point. Yes, the phrase “Every company is a software company” is rubbish but the point the original writer, along with a growing number of commentators are trying to make is that tech and business are now inextricably linked. We’re fast reaching a point where the boundary between an organisation and the technology which underpins it is impossible to define. Maybe a...

If you haven’t heard yet, Ethos Technology recently entered into a distribution agreement with Pure Storage; “happy” would be somewhat of an understatement… Someone asked me the other day “Why Pure?” - apparently “Er, ’cos they’re awesome!” wasn’t a sufficiently detailed response Answer take two: I spent many years as an Infrastructure Architect and anyone who’s worked with me for any length of time will have heard me talk about the core principles which I keep front of mind whatever it is I’m designing: Simplicity Efficiency Flexibility Obviously, these mean different things dependant on the scope of the requirement, the tools available, environmental factors, integration considerations etc. but giving these principles focus and attention throughout the design process has stood me in pretty good stead over the years. What I realised when we started Ethos was that this lens can be used more widely than I’d first appreciated; something the most...