SpringSource Cloud Foundry is Launched
Continuing their push integrating Java and cloud technologies, SpringSource today announced the acquisition of CloudFoundry and its release as the SpringSource Cloud Foundry. From the press release:
[SpringSource Cloud Foundry] is a new Enterprise Java Cloud offering that enables developers to deploy and manage Spring, Grails and Java applications within a public cloud environment ... Cloud Foundry is based on SpringSource’s recent acquisition of Cloud Foundry, Inc., an Oakland, Calif. - based software company. SpringSource Cloud Foundry is built on the innovative open-source Cloud Tools project and extends SpringSource’s solutions for building, deploying and managing Java applications to take full advantage of the power of elastic cloud computing. Cloud Foundry, now incorporated into SpringSource’s product line, launches and automatically scales Java web applications in the cloud with a few clicks of the mouse......Benefitting From SpringSource’s Solutions The new SpringSource Cloud Foundry offering leverages the strength of proven SpringSource technologies that accelerate the entire build, run and manage Java application lifecycle. SpringSource’s lean approach to software is ideal for creating applications ultimately deployed in the cloud. More than two million developers rely on Spring, the de facto standard programming model for enterprise Java applications. SpringSource’s tc Server, based on Apache Tomcat, the most popular application server with 68 percent usage across IT organizations, provides a lightweight container ideally suited for deploying Java web applications in the cloud. Within the next 90 days, the freely available SpringSource Tool Suite will offer direct deployment of Java applications—through Cloud Foundry—into the public cloud.
Hyperic CloudStatus, the first service to provide an independent view of the health and performance of public clouds, provides SpringSource Cloud Foundry with cloud health monitoring data. In addition, SpringSource Cloud Foundry users receive Hyperic HQ-powered functionality to provide deep and transparent insight into application performance and service levels. Hyperic HQ integrates closely with Cloud Foundry’s technology to automatically scale cloud deployments based on an acute understanding of how the applications are working and interacting with other IT resources...
The Cloud Foundry acquisition comes a week after VMware agreed to buy SpringSource itself. InfoQ sat down with SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson, Javier Soltero Vice President - Management Products, and Chris Richardson Cloud Foundry Creator to discuss the recent events.
Soltero and Richardson first gave a brief overview of CloudFoundry. They noted the it can best be described as an orchestration that takes a Java web application, preps it for the cloud (at present EC2), and then handles deployment and auto scaling. The current offering supports Spring and Grails via tcServer. Future enhancements will add support for the Spring Tool Suite, Roo, Maven, etc. The current developer preview is free, only requiring an AWS account to provide access to EC2. New features will be added towards of the end of the year supporting SLA and other features. However the functionality present today will remain free of charge.
In comparing CloudFoundry and Spring's vision to other platforms in the space such as basic EC2, GAE, and Azure Soltero made a number of observations. On one side he said there are walled garden setups like Force.com that are not pure Java web applications. GAE also has a whitelist of API's. On the other hand basic EC2 "provides all the ingredients of a delicious meal but you have to cook it yourself". Spring CEO Rod Johnson stressed the fact that SpringSource wants to transparently enable developers to leverage cloud technologies while minimizing the disruptions on their day to day developer and the architectures they are developing.
Johnson also commented on the recent acquisition of SpringSource by VMware and how it impacts a variety of angles of their business and the Spring ecosystem. SpringSource will operate as a independent division of VMware that Johnson will lead. He said it is likely that being a part of VMware will allow the SpringSource division to increase resources. Such increases are likely to benefit not only cloud related API's but other areas of Spring. Johnson also highlighted the fruits of consolidation of technologies such as CloudFoundry and Grails into the SpringSource portfolio. The Spring Tool Suite will soon be gaining support for deployment to Cloud Foundary. SpringSource has also been able to recently add first class Grails and Groovy support to Eclipse.
Posted in: website seo | Tags: cloudfoundry springsource cloud springsource cloud foundry foundry eclipse grails groovy highlightAgile Adoption: Projects Should Dive-In, Organizations Should Toe-Dip
Hearty debate abounds about whether agile adoption is better done in a gradual "toe-dipping" manner or with an all-or-nothing "head-first dive" approach. Johanna Rothman says do both: projects should dive all-in, while organizations should take it gradually.
In 2 recent blog posts, Plunge In (For Projects) and Small Steps Are Good, Be Careful What You Call Them, Johanna posits that people need to take all-in approaches to adoption of agile at the project level. In essence, she takes a hard line that doing things like working in timeboxed iterations or doing continuous integration, while likely to improve your situation, does not mean you're doing "agile". And further that you are setting yourself up for failure if you call this agile:
...if you call something agile, please make it agile. If you dip your toe into it, you have not made the commitment. If you vary your timeboxes depending on whether you finish work in the timebox, that’s not agile; that’s incremental development. You can say, “We’re experimenting with incremental development. We choose to vary the length of the timebox so we can practice getting to done. Maybe after we practice it for a while, we’ll fix our timeboxes and see how that works.”
That’s perfectly reasonable. I encourage you to do so, if you haven’t tried incremental development yet. But don’t call it agile. It’s not.
Soon after, Rothman presented a third post that ultimately suggests the opposite when it comes to organizational levels of agile adoption. She suggests that managers take a more gradual approach to changing administrative structures across the organization:
Moving to agile for the entire organization is a non-trivial problem. The zeroth step is the project. The first step is the project portfolio. Then comes the really hard work: the human systems are the next step. Once you’ve moved the human systems back to helping the employees, now you can attack the money systems. (One of my clients is trying to do the money systems first, and that’s not working. There may be some give-and-take here, with the money and human systems.)
Managers, it’s ok to dip your toe into agile for the management systems, as long as you take a coherent piece and commit to agile or lean for that piece. It’s not ok to dip your toe for a given project–commit to agile for a project, if that’s right for you. And, commit to learning about agile and lean management.
In essence, Rothman says over this short series of posts that doing agile well requires a level of discipline that not all projects are prepared for. Choose which projects are ready, and transition them fully; but, worry not about transitioning all projects or the whole organization all at once, think 'gradual' when it comes to that. What do you think?
Posted in: website seo | Tags: organizational agile agile adoption ultimate essence gradualA Career in SEO? Smart move.
Multi-Disciplined
A good search engine optimizer combines the skills of different disciplines. Fortunately, being weak in an area doesn't automatically exclude you from doing SEO. You simply need to recognize this area of weakness and team up with someone that complements your strengths. Together, you become a powerful force. And if you check your ego at the door, this joining of skills gives you an opportunity to learn and better yourself.
The Scorecard
Few tasks come with a scorecard letting you know exactly how you're doing day-to-day. SEO is different though. The search engines and a web site's rankings in search results acts as a scorecard. Have a bad score? Change tactics or update your strategy. Have a good score? Make note of what you did and add it to your tool set. This objective feedback from the search engines is quite nice to have.
Satisfaction
The most satisfying part of SEO for me is comparing search traffic and seeing that there's an obvious up trend over time. Put this data in to a graph that compares the before to the after and you have a powerful communication device that resonates with everyone all the way to the top of the food chain.
SEO Skills are Scalable
If you've only optimized small sites you may be worried that there's something you don't know when it comes to large sites. While SEO efforts for large sites does require a little more administration and management, the small site skills are quite transferable. This is a good thing because the path to bigger and more complex projects is open to you as long as you're prepared to step in to the fray.
Financial Backup Plan
If you spend your days doing SEO for clients, you're actually benefiting in two ways. The first is that you're being paid for your work. The second is that you're actually developing a skill set that you can use to develop a backup income stream. If you spend a little of your time every day applying SEO best practices to your own sites you will eventually have an asset that can be monetized in many ways. This income may never replace your main income, but it can certainly come in handy should you ever be fired, laid off, or otherwise find yourself unemployed.
Wrap-Up
So there you have it. Five reasons why I think that doing SEO for a living is good thing. I leave it up to you to decide if these 5 positives out-weigh the 5 negatives I mentioned earlier. And as always, I welcome comments whether they be good or bad.
6 Tips for SEMs to Survive a Recession
Even if you don't own property and don't often pay attention to economic-related news, you can't possibly have missed credit woes that many financial institutions are dealing with these days. Not just in the US, but across the globe. But things in the SEM world are just peachy so why worry about such things, right? Well, having been a web developer prior to the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, I highly recommend you prepare for a day when SEM jobs became hard to come by and new contracts all but disappear.
The first thing you need to accept is that companies don't necessarily react to bad times in a logical way. The PPC folks would argue that their PPC campaigns will never be canceled because they all have a positive ROI. SEOs are no different and they would argue something along the lines that SEO delivers free traffic and so who would be foolish enough to scale back efforts? Politics, panic, fear, nepotism, and a whole host of other things can conspire against you and leave you without a job. If you accept this possibility, then hopefully you'll be open to the following suggestions. For those "old timers" out there that have seen a dip or two in their professional lives, feel free to add your suggestions via the comments form.
1. Diversify Your Skills
To make it harder for you to be laid off, you need to make yourself more useful than the next guy relative to your compensation level. The more you're paid, the more value you need to bring to the table. First and foremost, you should be GREAT at your primary responsibilities. Beyond that, having some secondary skills could go a long way to increasing your value (perceived or real). For example, if you're an expert SEO that also has some PPC experience, web development experience, or even sales experience, you're in a much better position than if SEO is all you do.
2. Get Involved
Have you been dragging your feet when assignments come up that are outside of your job description? Now is a good time to change that approach and get involved. Similar to diversifying your skills, diversifying who you work with and what you work on will make you a more valuable resource. Just be careful to not take too much on. Whining about having too much work to do and missing deadlines isn't going to work all that well.
3. Save Some Money, OK!?
This isn't so you can retire early. Instead, having some backup funds will help you avoid acts of desperation such as jumping ship just when things are turning around or completely moving out of SEM which will make your resume look weaker when the market rebounds. As is often the case with investing, hanging on while others are panicking can result in great opportunities.
4. Have a Backup Plan
A backup plan for what you can do when you can't do SEM should seem like an obvious suggestion. What may not be obvious is the quality of life bonus you get from having such a plan. When you can go to work in the morning knowing that even if you get there and management has changed the locks without telling you, you'll still be able to pay the bills goes a long way to eliminating stress that would otherwise weigh on you day in and day out.
5. Additional Income Streams
A co-worker once asked me if every SEO dreams of building web sites while sitting on a couch and making thousands of dollars via Google AdSense. I laughed and said, "yes". AdSense may not be right for you, but surely there's something out there that is of interest that you can use to earn some side money. The key is make it something that doesn't rely on others paying you e.g. consulting on the side isn't the a good choice, but running affiliate programs is. An alternate income stream probably won't disappear at the same time as your primary income stream so it'll help smooth out any transition and allow you to, as in item 2, avoid the same acts of desperation. Need an example? Check out Gyutae Park who is an SEO by day and money-making blogger by night. Need more ideas? Check out this list from the DoshDosh blog .
6. Establish Your Network Now
The more people you know, the more likely you'll be able to continue working at the things that interested you. It's important to build this network before you need something though. No one likes to get an e-mail from someone who hasn't said a peep to you for over a year, but who now needs a job. Participate in the community that piques your interest and build some equity today while things are good. That community could connect you to the right people in troubled times in a way that going through recruiters and using job boards can't even come close to equaling. In addition, if your current employer is already paying for you to go to conferences, make the most of the networking opportunities.
Posted in: website seo | Tags: tip sem survive recession diversify involve backup plan additional stream money dollar establishReasons Why SEO and SEM Teams Should Work Together
Keyword Expansion via SEO
A lot of SEO work results in traffic from the long-tail of searches. That is, a properly optimized site can bring in a lot of traffic in small amounts for a very, very large number of phrases. This list of long-tail words is an excellent source of ideas for what can be used with PPC campaigns. This can be particularly effective if a site is ranking well organically in one search engine, but not in another. When this situation occurs, the list of words from search engine A can be used for a PPC campaign on search engine B.
Long-Term Cost Savings from SEO
It's inevitable that every PPC campaign will contain high-traffic terms that cost a lot per click or high-conversion terms that don't quite offer the return necessary to justify their cost. With such words, SEO could be the answer to significant savings. For example, rather than spend $10,000 for 2 months for these high-cost terms consider instead turning off the campaign and pouring the $10,000 in to optimization efforts to attract the same traffic organically. Yes, deactivating the campaign for 2 months is going to result in short-term loss of revenue, but the results from the successful optimization effort will be many months or even years of "free" organic traffic.
Decrease in Per Click Costs
Recently Google made public some changes to their AdSense program. These changes include the addition of a quality score that is used when determining the cost of an ad. This quality score will mean that two exact ads will have different costs depending on the quality of the destination page. Although there are many factors that will be used to measure the quality of the destination page, most of these factors can be influenced by SEO. In fact, improving the quality of a web page as perceived by the search engines is pretty much what all SEO is about. So if you use SEO to increase the quality of your site, you will end up reducing the cost per click of your ads.
Posted in: website seo | Tags: keyword expansion keyword expansion long-term cost saving decrease p2p paid to click