The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

Without a doubt, Steve Jobs will be missed.

A co-worker and I were discussing today how Steve Jobs had pushed himself well beyond the norm by staying CEO of Apple as long as he did.  We had no idea that today would be the day that he passed on.  As someone that grew up in the technology age, I have made my career based on the world that was shaped in no small way by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

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Like many other people that enjoy schadenfreude, I try not to look like I am just slowing down to look as I pass a traffic accident. And when I hear that a big company’s server has issues on a big announcement day or launch, I have to go and see.

I just browsed over to apple.com and this is what greeted me. (more…)

To be honest, my first encounter with Linux was less than enthusiastic.  I remember that I attempted to install a Redhat 1.5 on a IBM Aptiva, P75 computer.  After a virtually incompressible installation process where the installation asked me for information like the pitch of my monitor, I finally ended up with a very useless Linux installation.   I had picked odd things for my partitions and re-installed Windows 95.

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Design patterns is a software engineering concept where abstract solutions to abstract but common problems are described, and used so that solutions to problems are consistent and dead ends are avoided.

Basically, there is an approach to solving a problem that is successful. Following the pattern creates a solution that works and is stable.

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To paraphrase a quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune, “The Data must flow.”  And in the same sense that spice was the life blood of Arakis, the flow of data is the life blood of any e-commerce integration.  In the past I have talked about how RFID technology can be used to enhance the flow of data.  In an e-commerce supply chain it can give more up to date information as to where products are located, and thus what state they are in. (more…)

In the news, LANSA White Paper Tackles Supply Chain Synchronization.  I came across this on itjungle.com.  LANSA is a provider of business systems that are database centric.  You can register to get the whitepaper at this link.

But in a quick recap of what you will find in this whitepaper, Nahid Jilovec talks about the historical progress of B2B and some of the triumphs, roadblocks, and challenges that B2B as faced over the years.  But then he goes farther and describes Supply Chain Synchronization as containing three phases; Connection, Communication, and Collaboration.

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Looking for innovation in Supply Chains isn’t hard to do, and it can have a great impact on the efficiency and therefore profitability of a business and market.  One place that greatly impacts the success of an integration is the desire to  build something new and sexy.  I rant sometimes about companies or development teams I have seen go down this path to their own detriment.

But today I want to tell you about a company I heard about that has created new efficiencies through integration efforts of a part of business you may have thought was already integrated.  The company is  INTTRA.  And instead of coming up with an untried technology, INTTRA used a combination of existing technologies to do something new. (more…)