Check it out -

- Cheers

There have been quite a number of prominent technology leaders using the phrase the “post-pc-era”, IMHO this statement is more industry hype than it is substance. In the technology and gadget space though, I’m not sure that substance or lack thereof has been enough to stem the tide in the market desire for new, shiny more powerful thinga-ma-gadgets.

I bought a tablet specifically to test the theory of whether or not it was a device whose legitimacy could be justified even if I already owned a smartphone, a laptop computer, and several desktops at home, which I assume most persons that would even consider purchasing this device already do have.

Just to be clear, the only tablet that I’ve own and used thoroughly is the Asus Eee Transformer (TF101). I possibly tested all the Android tablets on the market before making this choice and I’ve played a bit with Apple’s iPad 1 & 2 only briefly, but I think I’ve seen enough to have an opinion on the matter which is that I don’t think they are necessary.

This is not to say that I don’t think that there aren’t use cases for such devices, which brings me to my next important point. Consider that both Apple and Google (we can throw, RIM, and HP in there as well) have have deliberately decided to evolve an Operating System (OS) designed for phones into their respective tablet operating systems. Microsoft on the other hand has a different perspective and have for some time been saying that the tablet is the next step for the personal computer (and we all know why – Windows). Microsoft has had “tablet” devices for some time, but never seemed to get the touch input and user experience just right. In less than 5 years, the industry has pretty much standardized on touch based interfaces for smartphone technology, doing away with the stylus while making leaps in mobile processors, battery, screen resolution and finger based touch and gesture tech.

Thanks to a number of companies, in the last decade alone, I believe that we have gone through rapid evolution in our ability to conceptualize and use technology specifically in the mobile space. Apple for example, in hindsight, has almost deliberately shepherded us through respective generations of the iPod, iPhone and iPad mobile devices. Touch input on our devices is now far more natural than using keys and other input methods and is accepted as the input method of choice for smartphones. It was only a matter of time before we made the made to screen bigger … and voila we have a tablet.

I think that touch based computing devices absolutely have a place, what I don’t believe is that they are blown up mobile devices, I prefer to take the position that they are touch based appropriately size PCs. I recall a story from my boss that was particularly impactful maybe 10 years ago as he described his daughter interacting with her learning program on the computer and attempting to touch the screen as it was the natural thing to do for her … well I certainly think we’ve succeeded at that, check out the clip below:

2 year old “speaks” iPad fluently

There is a long standing desire for greater mobility and we’re trying to find the sweet spot, after all the industry have gone through several phases, room sized mainframes, the personal computer, laptops, netbooks, etc. to the point where we have extremely light machines at our disposal that can rival many desktops in their processing power. That being the case, what software is powering these devices? Currently it’s mostly software designed for our phones.

My experience using my Honeycomb tablet has not been a smooth one. I got one that is pretty much just like a laptop/netbook so that I could use it as both a media device and a mobile productivity tool if desired, and while the experience is an interesting one, the device is simply not as productive as a laptop/netbook – both in software and using experience. I suspect that it may simply be an issue of the software applications that I choose to use on the device, but either way – for the money that was spent, and the comparative maturity of the PC platform compared to the tablet’s mobile powered OS, Android, I think I’d be better of with a laptop … but the people that change the world aren’t turned off by a few inconveniences … so I chose to power through with the device.

This post has been sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks, so, I’m just going to shoot it out and follow up with a part two on some of my other thoughts on this …

I’ll leave with a video of the CEO of ASUS talking about the Transformer tablet. In this clip he mentions that they (Asus) are much aware that the computing device space is changing, the laptop/netbook space is changing and their designs and devices are a response to that change as they attempt to find the sweet spot between tablets and laptops.

– Cheers

ASUS Chief at AsiaD –

Resources:

This is also an interesting read:

http://www.phonedog.com/2011/11/03/how-can-google-expect-developers-to-make-decent-android-tablet-apps-if-they-can-t-lead-by-example/

– Cheers … uhh again?…

For those that have read this blog before, you know that my greatest area of competence is actually on the Microsoft technology stack, and I would hope that the posts thus far have not been interpreted as vigorously defending Microsoft but really more of an exploration of whether or not Microsoft Technology is as bad as people say and seem to think they are. In my own humble opinion, Microsoft has some damned good technology. In some (more like many) areas where it is widely agreed that they have fallen short, but what tech company hasn’t? (Name one, I dare ya!). In any case they have also made significant strides forward and improved e.g. Relational Database (SQL Server 2008 R2, Enterprise Server (Windows Server 2008 R2), Mobile Phone OS (Windows Phone 7+) just to name a few, but is the brand so damaged that they cannot recover? The answer may actually be “YES” unless they can really do something to resuscitate the Microsoft and Windows bands, specifically in the consumer market – these concerns have been expressed my many others.

I have had several discussions with colleagues at the office on this topic in which I agreed that the Windows brand is damaged but I don’t think that I completely appreciated the extent to which it was/is. This may be because I’ve always functioned from the software engineering side and not always the consumer side. Even so, I’ve been burned by some of the Microsoft consumer, none more so than the old Windows Phone OS. The thing was pretty good for its time, in the days where the Palm ruled the pocket and Symbian and other feature phones were the platforms to beat. Then the first generation iPhone came along and totally changed the playing field, Android devices started showing up and at that point I was holding on to my HTC S710 hoping that Microsoft would see the light and do something … anything …

Windows Phone really does deserves a look, as a matter of fact, having recently purchased an Android device, I think that the Windows Phone experience is superior and have absolutely no reservations saying that. At first I used to questions whether or not the platform would survive – I’ve been to about 15 mobile stores now, and only two of them carried Windows Phone devices (that were not yet updated to Mango). Interestingly they were BestBuy and not carrier branded stores. More on that in another post…

In the mean time, ponder this photo … it’s the scene at every outlet that I’ve been at … Android devices are make up 95% of what’s on the shelves …

Look out for another on a similar topic soon…

– Cheers.

Having been in the Harvard district recently, where some of the movie was based, I was really able to connect with the underlying ‘vibe’ of the movie and one of the things that excites me most of all is this … it is largely possible to start the same type of business right here in Trinidad and the region in general — but we have to see the opportunity and seize it. I am very encouraged by the number of companies that I see on a continuous basis being started here in Trinidad related to software and other forms of technology. We seemed to have had fairly good computer related training here in Trinidad, but in my many years here, I have seen a number of companies struggle and heard many others complain about the ability to get technology related businesses going.

I read things at times that can either encourage you or discourage you … but as a Trinidadian we also have a tendency to, as we like to say, get “bad mind” which essentially means that we become resolute and determined to push through in spite of what others say or what the indications … uhh … indicate =)

I recently came across “TechCrunch Cribs” videos and was really encouraged to see what startups actually look like. I recall speaking with an accounts teacher years ago in one of my accounting classes and in one lesson she said, “Okay, so we’re going to start a business. How much do you need to get started?”, my response was “75 thousand”. I thought this was modest actually, where as she was shocked. Since then I have been questioning and paying attention to a tendency of mine to over prepare before I get started on something…

Not sure if you guys use justin.tv, but I’ve been using this online streaming service for a while now and found it really interesting to see their “crib” at the following link:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/tc-cribs-inside-the-escheresque-home-of-justin-tv-and-socialcam/

Check out some of the other TC Cribs videos and tell me that you don’t get charged up about doing what you love and doing it the way that you wanna do it!?

dictionary.com’s second definition of a Startup

adjective

of or pertaining to the beginning of a new project or venture, especially to an investment made to initiate such a project, as in a commercial or industrial enterprise: high start-up costs.

Eric Reis defines a startup differently. His lean development methodology is one that I think extremely applicable in our context

Eric Reis @ RailsConf 2011

Also have a look at Eric Reis’ interview on TechCrunch here http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/14/lean-startup-eric-ries-tctv/

According to Eric Reis

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty

Startup = Experiment

Eric believes that the true purpose of a startup is not to make money, but rather to learn how to build a sustainable business around a particular product or set of products. This certainly changed my perception of the “startup”.

Another description of a startup definition that I found interesting comes from Paul Graham in his November 2005 blog post on “How to fund a startup”

… isn’t the consulting company itself startup? No, not generally. A company has to be more than small and newly founded to be a startup. There are millions of small businesses in America, but only a few thousand are startups. To be a startup, a company has to be a product business, not a service business. By which I mean not that it has to make something physical, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than doing custom work for individual clients. Custom work doesn’t scale. To be a startup you need to be the band that sells a million copies of a song, not the band that makes money by playing at individual weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Again, these definitions help to crystalize what it means to build a startup. Go check out his post. Fair warning though, it is pretty long.

In thinking about starting a technology product based business, I’ve always thought about a couple of very specific problems

ISSUE	POTENTIAL SOLUTION
Funding	I believe that there are more local companies willing to invest in local IT startups. As I mentioned earlier in the post, I have come to realize that you can start small and grow as necessary. The respective costs of several requirements for tech business is now very affordable, these include: - Broadband connectivity (very affordable now) - Office productivity tools (Google or Office 365) - Website & Product hosting services (many options) - Computer hardware (very affordable in TT) - etc
Market	Many articles list a fairly large market as a key ingredient for a startup. Well, two things; firstly, according to the lean software development methodology, a startup’s focus should first be to build a great product then ride that product to success which leads to the second point which is that when that happens, internet companies have the global internet as their market place and can then make arrangements to market in the valley or other cities in the world as necessary.
Scaling	Scaling up and down with user demand is critical when shifting gears from startup mode into profit and delivery mode. In the past this usually meant heavy investments in Hardware and Software and the relevant building, power and human resources necessary to support them. Now we have the Cloud. While it not perfect, it certainly takes a whole lot of the burden off of small companies attempting to compete in the larger market with the bigger fish who have far deeper pockets.

These are some of the challenges that startups face. It may be that I’m being a bit naive regarding the nature and the amount of challenges that startups face, but I’m about to beta test these theories myself. I’ll be sure to let keep you guys in the loop.

I hope I’m not the only one that’s excited about the possibilities to building very successful companies right here in the Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean, and as always, I’m extremely interested in getting feedback from you guys on what you think about this topic.

Take a few minutes and leave a comment =)

Cheers.

Things were rather slow in the telecoms space here for quite some time, but I must give credit to the government and various businesses in the region for getting the industry going as quickly as they have. I’m not sure whether the primary catalyst was competition, government regulation or business innovation, but things certainly have gotten a whole lot better.

It would be remiss of me to not give a shout-out to FLOW (Columbus Communications) whose introduction into the market absolutely transformed the cable television and internet broadband market. This certainly caused the competition to (or at least attempt to) dismantle its monopolistic mind-set, but let’s get back to the point of this post…

I have been waiting for the introduction of smart (or at least smarter) phones into the Trinidad & Tobago mobile market for a long time. I wrote an unfinished blog post some time ago about what, in my opinion, would be required for smart phones to really take flight here in T&T. These were -

1. Clear roadmap for mobile broadband
2. Carriers aggressive pursuit of partnerships with smart phone manufactures
3. Availability of locally relevant content
4. A more robust mobile infrastructure
5. Communication of a vision driven my research into emerging technology and shaped by customer needs

It seems as though at least some of these requirements have been met in the Trinidad market by at least one carrier. I’m not sure if it’s just that I’m not paying attention, but I don’t see any response from Digicel to the “Smart Phone Push” that we’re seeing from bmobile. I do believe that a response from Digicel in the smart phone arena would be beneficial to the consumers.

bmobile seems to be hitting the market pretty hard with a slew of smart phones and some ‘interesting’ pricing plans to go along with them, but, I’m not sure that they’re actually hitting the right balance between price and value. This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks, maybe a lot more, but since then I’ve seen TSTT reduce the price of their iPhone offering quite a bit. A tweet from our friends over at TriniBerry.com highlights the concern –

@TriniBerryTriniBerry.com

Is the iPhone 4 not selling well enough in #trinidad? thats a big price drop! http://fb.me/1cT9o033t

What do you guys think?

I think it has gotten to the point where they are offering the device for free now. I must admit that their pricing scheme was totally crazy to begin with, but to be fair, I also thought that Trini’s would be willing to foot the bill for a “smarter” mobile experience …

Getting back to the focus of this blog post now… Is this yet another opportunity for local and regional software engineers to start building mobile applications that are more relevant to our locale than the apps found in the respective Android, Apple and Blackberry marketplaces? I certainly think so.

If you were to head over to alexa.com and take a look at the most visited sites from Trinidad and Tobago, you’d find that some of the most popular sites visited include Facebook, Google, Youtube, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Wikipedia, Blogger, MSN, Trinidad Express, twitter, etc. (visit the link above to see the complete list). Our local newspapers are in the top 15 (if you exclude the Google duplicate .tt vs .com in the list). In my opinion, this alludes greatly to my point that there is a market for local content, be it news or otherwise (trinituner is at ~ #22).

Reports from the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (TATT) showed Mobile voice subscriptions with mobile internet service has grown by 72% from June 2009 to June 2010. I just checked out the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago site and found that the 2011 report has been posted.

You can find these reports @ http://www.tatt.org.tt/

The Q1 2011 report shows an overall increase of 29% in mobile internet subscriptions from Q1 2010 to Q1 2011. This is pretty aggressive growth – developers and businesses should take note.

Does this indicate an opportunity to target the mobile (web or native) market? I most certainly think it does. There are some companies doing pretty well in this space, most notably TriniBerry. With such a creative and talented resource pool in Trinidad, I think it’s high time to take full advantage of this opportunity.

Looking forward to your interesting feedback.

Cheers.

2011-07-17 10:57 PM: Added AsJson API operation as requested from a reader.

I know that I have been writing quite a bit of “general” posts, but I think that I should put up and early disclaimer that the latter part of this one will be a bit on the technical side, however, I think that that can be of interest to non-technical folks out there.

For those of you following me on twitter, for the last week or so I’ve have been playing around with some code that would bring a bit more “exposure” to the trading data coming out from the Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchange. So, let me build this story up properly…

For a  long time, particularly since the invention of computer and telecommunication networks, software engineers have been trying to make it easier for different computer programs built using different technology stacks, running on different hardware, to share information. There have been numerous attempts in this area with quite a bit of success and many continuing challenges. For those of you out there that are reading this and aren’t software engineers, the industry has gone a really long way to solving this problem, and one of the most significant components of getting us there was … you guessed it … the web.

The “web” (this is pretty loaded term, so I had to throw up the air-bunnies ) has vaulted the need to share information to a whole new level, and not just information between people but information between computer programs. It’s so pervasive today that most of us don’t even know it or those of us that do generally don’t think about it. You don’t think about the fact that when you log into Windows Live Messenger and see images or even chat with your friends on Facebook that a bunch of completely different computer systems are communicating with each other, same goes for internet back games, online PC games, online Console game, and the list goes on…

Financial systems are also a key area that can benefit from data exchange between computers and ultimately between people. I’ve been working on a project for a couple of years that needed up-to-date information from the Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchange (TTSE) on a daily basis. Luckily the TTSE now has a website where anyone can get information about the day’s changes after the trading has closed. That said, there are a couple of ways that this problem can be addressed from on my end:

1. Have a human enter the data after visiting the TTSE website
2. Get the required information “programmatically” from TTSE system

With option one, there is the possibility that we can inject human errors, forget to enter the information, not to mention the fact that we actually need a human “resource” to do this every day … so there is an obvious bias to being able to directly interface with the stock exchange in some way. There’s just one small problem here – the TTSE has deliberately decided to actively support programmatic information sharing … which they currently don’t do.

What I have been working on (currently without their direct support) is a way to provide this programmatic interface so that other computer applications can make use of their information without the need for human intervention.

I’ve built a couple of “web services” for experimental reasons that provide several methods of accessing data from the TTSE. The manner in which I implemented them was the initial reason I started this post, but I think I’ll deal with that as well as explaining to the non-techie folk what Web Services are.

Couple of weeks ago I built a simple proof-of-concept (POC) bit that allowed you to get an RSS feed of the information on the stock exchange. This old POC can still be found here:

http://cordelllawrence.com/rsssample/

This weekend, I finally got some time to completely nerd-out and with a couple of late night coding sprints, I’ve completely re-written the app to do a whole lot more, and to do it better:

The new base URL is: http://cordelllawrence.com/stockmarketservices/ – (This currently just bounces you back to this page since I haven’t yet created a project write up + documentation etc. … but read on!)

The API’s are RESTful (I’ll explain in a later post on web services), which means that using the API’s is as simple as making a web request … for the non-techies –> typing in a URL in the browser and hitting enter or clicking on a hyperlink.

From the base URL identified above, the URLs to access the services are as follows:

What this mean is that developers can go to the following URLs and get the trade information from the TTSE:

Note the addition of the specific “API call” at the end of the base URL.

However, that isn’t all folks. All of the operations identified above support the following optional parameter list:

What all of that stuff up there means, is that if you would like to get the trade data for the 1st of June 2010 as a CSV you can go to the following URL:

http://cordelllawrence.com/stockmarketservices/Feed/AsCsv?date=2010-06-01

The same pattern can be applied to any of the API calls and multiple parameters can be used in any order as long as they are properly delimited by the ampersand ( ‘&’ ) character. Here is an example to get trade data as XML on a specific date with only changed items:

http://cordelllawrence.com/stockmarketservices/Feed/AsXml?date=2010-06-01&changesOnly=true

The AsHtml?styleUrl parameter is an interesting one. Try using it without the parameter and then try using it with a sample style that I have provided. To make it easy I have provided the hyperlink below:

http://cordelllawrence.com/stockmarketservices/Feed/AsHtml?styleUrl=http://cordelllawrence.com/stockmarketservices/Feed/Style

The parameters all have default values, as the API matures and * if * you guys think it interesting/useful enough to make use of it, then I’ll provide comprehensive documentation. What this means for developers is that you can easily inject data from this service into you own website and style the information such that it is consistent with you website. Cool huh… well I think it’s pretty cool.

I could go on a bit more about this, but I feel like the length of this post is getting out of hand … so I’ll start wrapping up …

According to their website (http://stockex.co.tt) in the Trading System section, the TTSE has moved to an electronic platform some time ago:

On March 18th 2005 the Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchange Limited implemented an Electronic Trading System replacing the manual open outcry system which was used at the Exchange since its inception in 1981.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could actually programmatically interface with this system and not have to “hack” a solution to this problem? Well hopefully someone from the TTSE will see this and get some ideas about how it can help drive Trinidad and Tobago towards a more information-driven society.

So, for all you coders out there, have fun with API’s and feel free to drop me a line at developers@cordelllawrence.com if you have any comments or suggestions as to how they can be improved or any bugs that there may be.

PLEASE NOTE: These APIs are not supported by TTSE and there is no guarantee that I will absolutely have the time or resources to continue working on them, so I strongly suggest that you do not use these APIs on your production systems. If you wish to do so, contact me via email or by commenting on this post so that we can discuss further.

Cheers,

Cordell Lawrence

I know, I know … I haven’t blogged for a while. I have like 3 unfinished entries that I need to wrap up some research on before I post them and get clobbered by readers calling me out on what could potentially be a really uninformed opinion… There are some keen readers out there y’all.

However, this afternoon, I decided to fire up my software development IDE and rip out a couple lines of code for an idea that I have been toying with for a bit. I realized though that Visual Studio 2010 Express MVC3 project didn’t have complete HTML 5 intellisence and it didn’t recognize some of the tags that it auto generated … and I could swear that I had read something about this. Turns out that I had … check it out!

We are pleased to announce the first Web Standards Update for Visual Studio SP1. It updates the HTML5 intellisense and validation to reflect the latest W3C specifications…

While my update was installing, I decided to drop a quick entry about it. Check it out – Good stuff… will let you guys know if it actually makes a difference in the coding process. This update should be pretty cool since it address both the VS2010 professional line of products as well as the free VS Web Developer 2010 Express tool set.

The Visual Web Developer Team blog discusses it here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2011/06/15/web-standards-update-for-visual-studio-2010-sp1.aspx

Cheers.

For quite some time I have felt like the Hotmail / Live Services team have not been maximizing the use of SkyDrive functionality. I really like the online Hotmail interface and prefer it to Google’s Gmail (I’ll be interested to hear what people think of the two), but Gmail does have a couple of things on Hotmail.

This improvement goes quite a way to make my Live Services that much better. Having been “in the Microsoft camp” for such a long time, the current strategy seems familiar, i.e. evolve the ecosystem, not just the technology. It probably has become a priority to evolve these services with the advent of Windows 8, and Windows Phone 7 “Mango” on the horizon. Foley certainly thinks so in her article here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-relaunches-revises-skydrive-its-dropbox-competitor/9759

Check out the video below:

Improvements of the SkyDrive Service Demonstration

What new and interesting things will come of these new services? – Couple months back I wrote an entry titled “Where is you data stored?”, I think this becomes even more of a consideration as these services become more user friendly. It’s super easy to consider the Cloud as an accessible and low cost backup system for your personal and maybe even your work files … I think we need to be aware of the fact that there are repercussions to this

Anyways, enough doom and gloom – Enjoy the improvements to the service!

- Cheers

Mike Angiulo doing a demo of ‘Windows 8’ to hardware partners

- Cheers

From my admittedly superficial research on the topic area, I encountered some interesting information. It would seem that the heated arguments about which language/platform is “better” has largely subsided with what seems to be tremendous respect in the industry and quite a bit of innovation in one form or another happening on both sides.

The information shared by one of my readers highlighted a very important issue, which is:

The Application (and other) Servers that already exist in the enterprise plays a big role in the choice of a development platform.

This point was also raised by a software firm in their paper which can be found here. Having only worked with SMBs (Small/Medium Business) in my career, it wasn’t until I read this in my current position, understand the investment that goes into Enterprise grade systems,  that I was able to fully appreciate this statement. In the “Enterprise” scalability, performance, reliability, uptime, robustness etc. aren’t just words on paper, they are real measurable performance indicators that you have to validate against before you solutions are approved.

In my short time at my current job, I’ve heard many stories of vendors pulling our team aside and offering some earnest advices that running our systems on Windows Servers/Platforms would be a mistake. I found this quite interesting and heard enough stories like this to not simply dismiss it as vendor bias, but from what I had been reading, I was under the impression that the Windows platform had done significant work and was in fact gaining some respect in the enterprise space… the next logical step for me was, can I find current information to validate either position.

I found some information from ITIC here (http://itic-corp.com/blog/2011/04/itic-2011-reliability-survey-users-give-ibm-aix-v7-windows-server-2008-r2-highest-security-marks/), which genuinely surprised me:

IBM AIX v7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Highest Security Marks
Nine out of 10 — 90% — of the 470 respondents to ITIC’s 2010-2011 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability survey rated the security of Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 R2 and IBM’s AIX v7 as “Excellent” or “Very Good.” This was the highest security ratings out of 18 different Server Operating System distributions (See Exhibit below).

I went back on the site (which is a little be messy IMO), but found several reports which showed that Microsoft was pretty much at the bottom of the list behind other Unix and Linux operating systems but over time, has showed steady improvement. This previous report was on security, this is one (http://itic-corp.com/blog/2011/01/ibm-stratus-hp-fujitsu-top-iticgfi-software-hardware-reliability-survey/) speaks to reliability:

For the third year in a row, IBM AIX Unix operating system (OS) running on the company’s Power System servers scored the highest reliability ratings among 19 different server OS platforms – including other Unix variants, Microsoft’s Windows Server, Linux distributions and Apple’s Mac OS X.

IBM seems to be the alpha dog in the enterprise with it’s AIX Unix based systems. However, in the third paragraph it goes on to say the following:

Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 served up the biggest surprise in the survey, scoring impressive reliability gains and making it one of the top three most reliable, mainstream server OSes. Windows Server 2008 R2’s reliability renaissance is especially impressive since Microsoft’s Windows Server OS noticeably lagged behind the majority of the UNIX, Linux and Open Source distributions in the ITIC/Sunbelt 2008 and 2009 Server Reliability surveys. This was particularly evident when it came to chronicling the most severe Tier 3 outages which typically last for four or more hours, involve data loss and require multiple members of the IT department to perform remediation.

An overwhelming 92% majority of Windows Server 2008 R2 users experienced less than one or one Tier 3 outage per server, per annum followed closely by the 90% of respondents using IBM’s AIX 7.1 who said they experienced one or less than one severe Tier 3 incident, per server per annum.

Interesting information isn’t is? I urge you to read through the report and come up with your own conclusions.

ITIC wraps up their report saying this:

In summary the ITIC 2010-2011 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey findings indicates that all of the server operating system platforms have achieved a high degree of reliability. However, the IBM AIX 7.1 operating system, followed closely by Windows Server 2008 R2, HP UX 11i v3 and Novell SuSE Enterprise Linux 11 are the top four most reliable server OS distributions.

While I went in search of this information with some expectations, I was more than a little bit surprised at this particular result. I expected Microsoft be doing better than people claimed, but to be ranked #2 right after IBM and before Enterprise Linux distributions which I had heard quite a bit of statement about (i.e. vs. Windows) is no small feat in my humble opinion.

It may still be too early to make any real claims, but it certainly looks promising for IT pros as the report claims that all operating systems showed marked improvement but at lest now when you say that you’re running Windows Server as your server OS, your enterprise counterparts won’t be pointing and laughing anymore … or at the very least, won’t be justified in doing so.

Just wanted to raise two things in wrapping up:

Firstly, one reader called me out on my last article siting the need for information from more “reputable” sources. I would be extremely grateful if my readers would share any relevant information that they come across on this subject.

Finally, I know that I’ve only dipped my toe into the water, but now I’m interested to see how SQL Server 2008 R2 and IIS7 are holding up against the likes of Oracle 11g Database, IBM’s DB2 and WebSphere products, etc.

- Cheers