STEVE CASSIDY
Steve talks to database pioneers making it possible for farmers to hire tractors on demand and is bedazzled by a new piece of Lenovo hardware.
If there was a prize for the happiest CEO, Progress Software’s Yogesh Gupta would win hands down. He has numerous reasons to be happy, not least of which is heading a $400 million software company with 1,500 employees and the same number of clients – the vast majority of whom are in the software business themselves.
We sat down in the midst of the Progress convention for 2019, when I would normally expect to actually get the least value out of a chat – but, in a distinct break from the norm, Yogesh wasn’t just using me as a rehearsal for the keynote or a chance to demonstrate his ability to stay on-message. Instead, we had a wide-ranging conversation covering the responsibilities of a software company in the 2020s, the nature of cloud architectures when people are starting to think about microservices as a more likely solution than traditional software development – and curious facts about Progress.
Such as: not a lot of people know that Oracle is a big user of the Progress database connector software. For
those who are enterprise software architects (or their finance directors), this might come as a shock: Oracle is famous for its autocratic approach to business, along with a trail of strongly worded, loudly presented product claims and statements. Yet it happily passes through licences for a thirdparty utility at the heart of its customers’ workloads.
From the contents of my inbox, you could well imagine that I’m a database aficionado. The sector certainly has a lot of stories to tell – or rather, the same story, just with a few different brands round the same basic events. Someone bought a smaller company; someone else got some venture capital money; a customer didn’t screw up a project. None of these help any of us distinguish one business from another, which is why I prefer to do as much face-to-face as I can get. All of a sudden the stories become wildly divergent and out come real experiences from the real world.
For Progress, the story came from chatting to random delegates at breakfast, rather than a message
from the board. Some of them were supporting code written over 25 years ago, for accessing databases with an even longer operational lifetime. These objects (there being no other widely accepted jargon term for exceptionally old computer software or data) probably have an open-ended life expectancy. In a million years’ time, on whatever quantum substrate they might be residing, they could still be working.
The whole system has to be an easy-living, properly built, wellsupported whole and stay that way for decades. The assumption of so much IT thinking is that new automatically drives out old. Yet, quietly at a golfing resort in Orlando, here was the proof that there are ways to keep databases in the long term.
New demands do bring new challenges, though, which is where Hello Tractor comes in. Much of the most intriguing customer stories (or customers of customers in this case) came from this well-heeled development startup.
Hello Tractor looks like a technology pilot exercise by John Deere, the huge US farm equipment maker, and a little business called IBM. I met with one of the prime movers, who had decided to leave the lush, tropical paradise of Uganda and fly all the way to the lush, tropical paradise of Florida to point out that farming across the world is by no means a simple or uniform business. Hello Tractor is almost Uber for farmers in developing countries, allowing them to book a tractor from a nearby scheduler/brokerage expert on their smartphone, without having to go to the expense of buying their own (probably ancient, polluting and unreliable) piece of machinery.
This makes little sense until you factor in several apparently unrelated observations. The first is that farms in both Africa and India are not a continuous, neatly fenced-in piece of land – they can be patchworks of scattered, unrelated fields growing different crops at different times of the year. And, by temperate-zone standards, the crop yields can be extraordinary, if you can manage the accompanying risks.
Demand for tractors can get frantic, so you need to represent a schedule of bookings in an intricate and mobile-capable way. There are few desktop PCs in this demographic – it’s all going to be done on phones. There’s often not much bandwidth, either (although I have seen that many developing countries skipped the lower-grade deployments that are common in the richer nations and jumped straight to an all-4G, allsmartphone architecture).
The nature of the project here is, therefore, to give farmers in the middle of a field the ability to book a tractor for a half-day the following week. That’s enough to set them up for the rest of the season, leaving only lighter-duty activities.
The quiet triumph for Progress is that it has been acquiring and integrating a number of toolkits for data presentation, so that developers can slot in modules that allow difficult, presentationally awkward challenges to be shown on a phone screen without losing faith from the main product, the central database. That’s both a commercially astute and a simple demonstration of how to ride trends in software in the longer term.
Meanwhile, as we congratulate ourselves for getting this stuff right, out in the blazing sun there are a lot of chugging, ploughing, harvesting machines that would not have been available to their current users any other way.
Lenovo gets edgy
After the Progress convention, I headed down to the south of Orlando for a Lenovo event. I bridged the weekend and sneaked into Disney’s posh Swan and Dolphin resort with Cape Canaveral’s sand still in my beach shoes. I don’t think of Lenovo these days as much aside from the supplier of a whole dynasty, an entire phylum, of black laptops.
Which is crazy really because Lenovo has the world’s largest chip fabrication and motherboard assembly plant – not just recently but for ages. The world’s largest. Even if that’s built on the back of supplying the world with carbon-black ThinkPads, that’s pretty impressive. And, in common with Progress, the DNA of those ThinkPads goes back to what must have been a seminal time in computing 25 years ago. Lenovo celebrated 25 years of the ThinkPad last year, beating PC Pro to the milestone by only 12 months. I still fondly remember my ThinkPad 760 – the one with the DSP-based modem and a keyboard that popped up on little springs, not the crazy one where the keyboard flipped out sideways. That, model-spotters, was the 701C.
After acquiring the server-building part of IBM finally in 2014, there are clearly a lot of irons in the fire for Lenovo. I was expecting to see and be excited by the big reveal – yes, a fully folding PC, with a wraparound screen on the inside and a nice grippable cover on the exterior. It looks fabulous, and if it manages to overcome the problems that have plagued Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, I will be in the queue to buy one. But it’s going to be well into 2020 before you or I can do that.
For me, the big deal wasn’t the folding PC. It was a cast-alloy black box, with a pair of cellular antennas at one end and Wi-Fi ones at the other. There is room for an expansion card or two and a whole slew of very recognisable ports in this box: it’s an edge server.
Edge servers are ruggedised, miniaturised server-grade machines, capable of living in a relatively dirty
“The assumption of so much IT thinking is that new automatically drives out old”
“Your software limits of yesteryear are blown away by modern hardware”
location such as a tyre bay or a harbour master’s office. Somewhere that might not ever get full, highspeed cloud access and that, consequently, is going to perform better with a local server. For an old server freak like me, edge servers look like the cloud business admitting the elephant that’s not in the room. Yes, those guys who proposed all of that centralised, on-demand-only horsepower as the fix-all for every company’s woes have turned the world upside-down again and started to imply that actually we should stop centralising and think about what we can do at the edge.
I already know what I can do at the edge – it’s where I’ve always been as a consultant. What excites me is that this is a completely new server form factor. Small to medium businesses have been treating every server they get as if it had been designed to be rugged and resistant to environmental extremes, even the ones that these days sell for £129 on eBay. And now they have one.
The ability to mount one of these edge devices on, for instance, your garage wall, loading bay, warehouse, barn or canteen counter is a great leap forward for my kind of customer, because, these days, the horsepower equation is a done deal. All of that straining to get a machine that’s big enough to run Exchange in a small business is irrelevant to the company that has the biggest chip fab in the world. If you have enough sites or deployment points, Lenovo will custom-make for you.
I realise that’s the other end of the telescope from considering using edge servers in small businesses, but the point remains the same. When we went up to the cloud it was to solve problems with unused CPU cycles, hot and hungry servers and everincreasing datasets. A decade and a half of development has happened since that apparent crisis, and the results are that your software limits of yesteryear are comprehensively blown away by modern hardware.
Incidentally, don’t think that Lenovo has been the one shooing us all onto the cloud. Until now, that is. I can say this with some confidence, since it was announcing a plan to become the world’s largest vendor of compute cycles over the next few years. That’s planet-scale jargon for big data centres, selling space and thinking time on their machines to the highest cloud horsepower bidder.
In retrospect, it seems incredible to think that Lenovo hasn’t been in this business before now. Of course, there’s a bit of bait and switch here because IBM hasn’t exactly been lax in the server centre business in the past few decades, and there’s a product slide effect between it and Lenovo. But movements such as microservices and serverless deployments are going to get quite a shot in the arm once this kind of additional firepower is made available. As long as the US/Chinese trade war doesn’t put it all out of reach, of course.
The NASA PowerPoint guy
Not every invite is as high-powered as Progress or Lenovo, though. Much further down the pecking order was a low-key hipster-audience show in deepest Hackney. This piqued my interest because of the promise of NASA’s head of creativity as an interviewee, which sounds pretty cool, especially after my sandyfooted weekend around NASA’s Florida backyard.
The event was something of a puzzle, being evidently a cooperation between Adobe and Microsoft, mostly bigging up tools for creatives, especially Surfaces with the pen and dial control add-ons. The bigger Surfaces interest me greatly, but there’s not much hardcore evaluation you can do while the devices are being used to present art installations rather than the more traditional, interactive tools us older people are used to.
I was as bemused by the venue as I was by the rocket scientist. The last time I was in the Truman Brewery, some three decades ago, we were evicted by 60 policemen and the incident made the traffic news, such was the resulting disruption. The exhibition was in a labyrinth of whitepainted naked industrial spaces, as if to further draw the eye to the Great Creative Stuff on the various sizes of touchscreen sprinkled around.
The NASA man completely floored me with his answer to the first question: he paid his own way to attend. He’s not from the shorts-andRay-Bans, white-zinc-noses East Coast bit of NASA I was exploring. He’s from JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab, which is over the other side in California. His main interest and responsibility is in helping scientists publish their results, preferably in ways that are comprehensible to as wide an audience as possible – even though his aim was more inside the organisation than outside. There is such breadth of topic in NASA that he’s kept busy – not just in volume of materials required, but also in complete paradigms for thinking about subjects in physics, cosmology, astronomy and even earth imaging.
We chatted about the ways in which his role overlaps with ours at
PC Pro for a little while – the difference between going all graphical or trying to stick to a text description applies to networks and rockets in apparently quite similar ways.
I guess in the slightly strange world of marketing to young, hip creatives, having NASA’s PowerPoint guy on hand is a coup, and making him pay his own ticket is a philosophical victory. After gazing at Pad 39 through binoculars and browsing the gift shop for SpaceX T-shirts, I hope they at least buy him a London souvenir or two to say thank you.