Interview

Demo

(As a side note, this is the first time we’ve used VideoPress to host videos. What do you think?)

Disclosure: Adobe is a client.

(Update, Dec 4th, 2009: I’ve added a transcript for the interview portion.)

Interview

Adam first tells us what FedEx Custom Critical does, and then we jump into a discussion of how they came to select the Adobe stack for implementation of their shipment tracking console. They not only chose Flex and LiveCycle for the rich interface, but also for the high-speed data transfer between front-end and back-end. Adam really likes the data management that comes with the stack, esp. being able to use “true push” to the client.

Transcript

Michael Coté: Hello, everybody here we at Adobe MAX 2009 in the lovely Los Angeles. Not Los Vegas and this is Michael Coté of course, with RedMonk and we’ve got a guest with ourselves. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Adam MollenKopf: Hi, I’m Adam MollenKopf. I work for FedEx Custom Critical and glad to be here today.

Michael Coté: I was talking with you little bit before the filming and we were going through the pretty interesting demo that we are going to see in a little bit, but for the first thing I’ve never actually heard of FedEx Critical, so could you tell people what exactly FedEx Critical is?

Adam MollenKopf: Absolutely; most of you are probably familiar with FedEx, the express, the ground, and the freight. Custom Critical is a unique part of FedEx that specializes in shipping things that are very time sensitive. So things that need to move from New York to Miami they would expedite it. So somebody has got an assembly line down or something we can move a part to fix that appropriately. We also do special care and handling. We do a lot of sensitive shipments for perishable goods and other items of that nature.

Michael Coté: So essentially you have — I forget the agent; you have an agent and they are kind of looking at a console and then all the various trucks are feeding into the agents view of something and then I guess you have customers calling in every 5 minutes, you know, to check on their shipment and wanting to know where it is or something. Is that the kind of typical scenario for a shipment that might be going around?

Adam MollenKopf: Exactly, so the things we ship are very high value. We need to know to the minute the location and what is happening on it at any given point in time and then intent of the application that we’ll show in just a minute is basically to detect abnormal events and present those to somebody to take proactive action on it before it becomes a bad situation, and to automate all the normal events. So when we get a position fix on a vehicle I am still going to meet the expected time of arrival. We don’t really want to nuisance an agent with that, because we have in the past, so we just want them to look at the abnormal situations expectation management.

Michael Coté: The system that we’d been talking about earlier was basically tracking a truck or whatever as it is moving along and I’m curios when you are looking at the requirements for what you were going to build, like, how did you come to the Adobe stuff? How did you make, like, an RIA essentially?

Adam MollenKopf: It was actually quite a long process to get to the Adobe solution and we finally found a good solution with Adobe. So we experimented with a number of other technologies for the last few years honestly. We tried this with [Java] Swing, we tried this with Ajax component vendors and had miserable performance and scalability issues with it in the past.

And just due to the sheer volume of the thousands of trucks that we are trying to ship and the thousands of trucks that we are trying to track and the shipments that are trying to track as well just the amount of volume was too much for those frameworks to handle.

Data services, LifeCycle, and a lot of the other Adobe technologies, Flex in specific, allowed for us to have a nice visualization of that, that was effective.

Michael Coté: Given those requirements what was it about LifeCycle Data Services, and Flex that, that fitted better than say, like, Swing or Ajax or something like that?

Adam MollenKopf: Well, data management was a big part of LifeCycle Data Services when we selected that. So being able to bind automatically to the client and bind automatically to other clients. So if you are an agent at Custom Critical and I am an agent at Custom Critical and we are looking at the same shipment and you modify something or something in field modifies it – the truck does something that causes a new state; being able to see that in near real time with very little latency was very important.

So both from a data management and from a push, having a true push technology which is something that has been absent in the past. So the RTPM, the Real Time Messaging Protocol is provided and a true push protocol that’s socket based up to the client.

Michael Coté: Right, right versus, like, HTTP or something like that, yeah.

Adam MollenKopf: The server, and the amount of data going back to the server is minimized, so it’s like an observer pattern. So the client just has an open socket and we push something he wants to observe as it changes. So we’re not killing our servers, and we have a lot less server requirements as far as the number of servers to support those.

Michael Coté: What was the development process like for when you — you said your went through several alternatives and then when you did settle on using parts of the Adobe stack for it. How long did that take and what was the process for doing it?

Adam MollenKopf: It was fairly quick with the Adobe stuff. So I got hooked up a couple of folks at Adobe and we basically did a couple of proof of concepts and it was fairly quick and actually we did most of the work on our own, it didn’t require a lot of Adobe assistance because it was pretty well documented and we were able to go in there and test out the two major features of that we were looking for. So the data management and push technology and honestly we had lots of experience trying it with other –

Michael Coté: Right, your requirements all fitted that, right.

Adam MollenKopf: Right, so it was pretty well defined and it was kind of like, well, we don’t have a solution. We still don’t have a solution and we came across Adobe and now we do have a solution.

Michael Coté: You guys are using this now and it’s finished and, like, what are your plans for it in the future?

Adam MollenKopf: To extend it, so — what we’ll show you here is just the start of what we are going to do. So there’s a lot of other areas that we are going to apply this to not only just shipment tracking but also how we price things to the customer, how do we analyze history, how do we analyze things over geography and time. Being able to reason both over space and time, add micro and macro views.

Michael Coté: So, I guess there is sort of new information about things you could sell your customers to put it one way; but you have a new understanding of things that — business practices that you were doing in the past that you can fine-tune and make up new products and things to sell to them.

Adam MollenKopf: Right, so actually some new revenue generating things that came out of this is our security surveillance. So being able to show our customer that we have almost like a Network Operation Center, but we have Security Operation Center that is basically tracking these things to this detail that puts a lot of ease to the customer’s minds when they’re shipping something very high value or something extremely sensitive, which is our specialty.

Michael Coté: Having talked about the demo so much let’s check it out.

Demo

In addition to the general RIA-ness, the special thing to note is the rules engine backing all of the predictions and analyzing sensor and geo data. Those create an interesting (and for FedEx useful) stream of real-time data to console of realtime data to churn over, expose in the RIA, and start making business decisions around.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored these videos.

In this screencast, I sit down with Genuitec‘s Brian Fernandes for a demo of their new Visual Query Builder. Brian walks through several quick examples of how the Visual Query Builder is used to explore, update, and even design a database.

Disclosure: Genuitec is a client and sponsored this video.

Part 1 – Console and Image Library

We start out with a quick history and overview of the ConVirt project and Convirture the company. Next, we look at the console for browsing physical and virtual machines, using it drill down into each to look at configuration and health metrics. Having browsed through existing servers, we start looking at how ConVirt helps you create a library of virtual images by creating templates. We see how you can use these templates – with all sorts of settings for the server, storage, network, and more – to create new virtual servers.

Part 2 – Management and Migration

Then we get into actual management, seeing how ConVirt manages not only the basic parameters for each virtual machine, but also the pools of storage and private networks. When it comes to provisioning, ConVirt also offers the optional intelligent VM placement that automatically figures out the best host to put a new virtual server. We wrap up by going over the ConVirt community and commercial support options.

Disclosure: Convirture is a client and sponsored this video.

In this screencast, Acquia’s Brian House goes over Acquia Search. We start out with an overview of Acquia, providing commercial support for drupal in addition to products and services like search. And then we quickly jump into the meat of the demo, the search service that Acquia offers around drupal. Bryan demonstrates the faceted searches and other “blocks” that help supplement and narrow down the raw search results. Through these browsing features, Bryan points out, site owners can do a better job of exposing the content they have, potentially driving in more traffic and usage. I ask Bryan what types of web sites this search applies to, public only, or private behind the firewall drupal installs? This discussion prompts me to ask Bryan about the use of drupal behind-the-firewall they’re seeing.

In the second part, we get into the administration tool where facets, blocks, and other search configuration takes place. Here, we go over the basic configuration of search, but then get into the settings for weighting taxonomies, creating the “did you mean” configurations, and placing the related blocks in the site.

Finally, we wrap up by seeing how all of this works on a real site, Bryan’s own site, The Beer Observer.

Disclosure: Acquia sponsored this video.

As with most open source IT Management tools, things get interesting with the plugin, or extension layer where 3rd parties and individuals can come in add new features.

The demo is divided into two parts. Be sure to click the full-screen version if you’d like to see a larger version.

Overview, Discovery, Inventory

Michael gives us an overview of ZipTie, including it’s origin and how it ties into AlterPoint‘s commercial product, NetworkAuthority. Ryan then jumps in to show us the initial discovery, admin setup, and poking around in the resulting inventory:

Jobs, Topology, Extending

Ryan continues by showing us how to setup scheduled jobs (like nightly configuration backups), the table based topology, and the Michael and Ryan go over browsing and using extensions and how to get ZipTie:

Disclosure: AlterPoint is a client and sponsored this screencast.

Overview

First, Managed Object’s Dustin McNabb gives us a short overview of the state of CMDB in Managed Objects view, and then does a quick intro explaining the ideas and goals of myCMDB:

Demo

Next, Abbas Haider Ali gives us a demo of myCMDB itself. He first highlights the main page with the tag cloud, communties, and activity stream. Then we get into navigating the relationships between each of the items the CMDB tracks and look over the reporting options that myCMDB provides:

Be sure to click the fullscreen button if you’d like see a larger version of the demo, or the presentation.

(Novell purchased Managed Objects in 2008.)

Disclosure: Managed Objects is a client and sponsored this screencast.

In this three part interview/screencast combo, we talk with Dennis Howlett, Darren Hague, and David Pollak about their work on ESME. Dennis and David spend time talking about how ESME came to be and their involvement, while Darren gives a peek at the code-base by showing us how he added search to ESME.

If you’d like a larger version, click the full-screen button on the viewer above.

For a demo of ESME in action and more info, check out the original demo video referred to in a recent post of mine

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Thanks to Dennis, Darren, and David for coming together quickly to record their segments!

Disclosure: SAP is a client and sponsored the above video.

As with all screencases, be sure to click the full-screen icon if you’d like to see a larger version.

Part 1 – Dashboards and Event Console

Erik starts us out by going over the dashboard and portlets page, which allows us to start dipping into the model and overall functionality that Zenoss provides:

Part 2 – Network Toplogy, Performance Graphs, and Reporting

We then finish out by going over the network topology that Zenoss discovery can find and then illustrate, taking a look at the detailed information available for devices monitored, performance graphs and checking, and finish up going over the reporting options Zenoss provides:

Disclosure: Zenoss is a client and sponsored these videos.

Check out the above screencast of a Twitter-like service built for “enterprise” use, ESME. It’s actually pretty impressive.

In this demo, allowing people to do time-shifted/near real-time trouble-shooting. While they manage to cram just about every buzz-technology into the short demo (Scala, AIR, and even cloud computing!), it’s actually a well done example of how something Twitter-like could be used in a company to do “real work.”

Also, it reminds us that when it comes to automating and enhancing collaboration – “Enterprise 2.0,” to be erroneously broad-stroking – anything beyond a shared, real-time whiteboard is probably too complicated and specialized to work broadly in business settings.

People in the SAP community came up with this project with much help from all several tangentially-SAP-y folks and net-people. Even more interesting than the technology itself is how and if SAP-proper would work towards knocking that trailing “E” off “ESME.”

See Marshall’s post and Oliver Mark’s post for more background and commentary. Also, it looks like something similar is up in Oracle-land.

Disclosure: SAP is a client, as is Adobe.