IONA 2 case

Preamble:

Leasing Pembroke Street from Crampton's (1995)

In 1991, Dr Chris Horn, Dr Sean Baker and Annrai O’Toole each chipped in £1,000 Irish Punts to bootstrap a business called Iona Technologies. There was no bank loan, no cash flow, and no Enterprise Ireland. I doubt anyone would have put up the money if they had even asked at the time.
They took an educated punt, building on the back of years of academic/industry R&D into distributed systems and programming, supported in part by EU Espirit research programmes.
One of the running jokes in Iona’s newsletter iContact was the management teams’ 3-year search in the wilderness for a business model, but the truth was, that they always had their eyes on the prize and were constantly tweaking the business model to the situation and demands of the market of the day. The way Iona ‘organised’ was the key. It was a young Irish company with a distinctly Irish culture. Small nimble close knit teams, everyone knew everyone and no one let formality get in the way of celebrating success or getting to the heart of a problem. As a place to work it was hectic, razor sharp, direct and fun. And Iona offered a launch pad to a new generation of home-grown technology entrepreneurs and leaders.

Obviously...

Iona’s product Orbix brought Iona success but Orbix was also successful because of the way the company was organised and the way it ‘organised.’ Professional services, delivering C++ and object oriented programming training to large multinationals like ICL brought in revenue. The profits from services when straight back into product development and PD delivered the product.Ultimately Orbix drove demand for further services and PS shifted from training to consultancy, integrating Orbix on client sites, understanding in the process how best to design and deploy mission critical cross-platform distributed systems, feeding this knowledge in turn back into better features and functionality for new versions of Orbix and its growing list of adapters, services, language mappings and platforms. Iona had an instinct for the business and economics of software networks a decade before the textbooks came out. They tuned their business model to the market. In a way the business model was built into the architecture of the product, linking software, linking firms, linking markets and people. The business model was evident in how they bootstrapped the market for their product. But the business model wasn’t Iona; Iona was the people, mixing at the coffee docks, the Wine and Cheese, the Summer parties, the Christmas party, catching up after work in McHaffey’s, Tonor’s, Kehoe’s, or Slattery’s. Welcoming someone back from a PS gig in Seattle, politicking Standards at the OMG, attending JavaOne or Iona World.

Product Development Culture 
Growth is good and profits are better but they have a cost. The cost for Iona’s Dublin headquarters was having to move premises nearly every year. From Westland Row to Pierce Street, to Percy Place, to Pembroke Street Lower, then the big split from Pembroke Street to St Stephen's Green. Stephen's Green would have been nice except that Product Development and Customer Engineering were housed in an old office block tucked behind a Georgian town house while the corporate functions had modern air-conditioned comfort in the building on Pembroke Street. But this was only temporary, Iona had signed to be anchor tenant in a modern tower block on Shelbourne Road. They even had naming rights, "The Iona Technologies Building." This last big move took place in 1999 but the environment was changing in other ways. The atmosphere of the company naturally shifted with each office move and each new employee. The company had been famous for its 'everyone knows everyone else' feel and exciting work culture. However a growing sense of community lost was increasingly apparent in conversation, the demise of the traditional ‘wine and cheese’ on the last Friday of the month was a symptom of this gradual distancing.

“What’s happening to the monthly ‘wine n cheese’? First it’s reduced to quarterly, and then half yearly... we need it for morale!” [PD engineer]

“The Iona wine and cheese was important, we need these opportunities to mix, to build spirit. Stop cancelling them!” [Anon]

Structure and Organisation
The company is structured around three main development centres (head office in Dublin, the US headquarters in Waltham Massachusetts, and Asia Pacific in Perth). Internally the company has hierarchical teams of software engineers and management organised around 24 product lines delivering to 3 main operating environments and 20 version variations and other platforms.

The Iona Product Development Process has four main stages: Planning, developing, testing & QA, and Launching. The project life cycle provides procedures for the development of products, covering the whole development process from beginning to end.

"Product Development is team-oriented. Teams have strong software engineering capabilities but also have product management, project management, customer service, business and other skills represented. Each team has significant autonomy and discretion on what products it develops, and has responsibility to describe why, when how and by whom the products will be built, licensed etc. Teams are ultimately responsible for product success, measured in market share and revenues." [The dev team guide]

Product Managers and others come up with ideas for new products that are then given to an engineering team. A proportion of the resources of the support organisation are also devoted to each product line, this includes dedicated customer support engineers with specialist product knowledge and assignees from other divisions dependent on customer demand levels if the support queue becomes unmanageable. Support engineers will sometimes join an engineering team in a planned manner during a development project to facilitate the transfer of technical product skill and knowledge to the rest of the organisation.

Orbix and ART
The company has experienced consistent continuous growth in market share, revenues and profit in recent years, however rapid corporate growth has led to a situation where product engineering and support has been staffed by as many engineers and managers as it takes to both develop, support and maintain the products. Orbix has morphed gradually over the years from a simple ORB supporting multiple language mappings and operating system environments (from Java to mainframe systems and PL/I) into a fully featured product architecture that reaches into object databases, messaging and transaction systems, media streaming, real-time (there is even talk of an Orbix Nano for chips). However, as the Orbix product architecture has grown, the numbers of engineers developing, supporting and maintaining the product has also grown. This has generated problems for management and interdivisional communication. The old Orbix team has grown to well over 50 programmers and involves 30 or 40 more in support and others in product marketing, documentation, and professional services.

The Orbix product line is the company’s 'cash cow', revenue-rich, mature products that 'only' require maintenance. Cash cows provide a steady income from license fees generated both by new customers, and renewed annual service or support fees from existing customers. In Iona’s case, sales of large site licenses with annual support contracts are a lucrative revenue stream. However the volume of support work from this large and expanding customer base is seen to be eating into the company’s profit margins. Investors want Iona to move forward, beyond the limitations of the original Orbix architecture, an architecture that has gradually become dated as the distributed computing industry shifts towards new technology paradigms like XML based application servers, web services, service oriented architectures and enterprise Java. The ‘top secret’ next generation ART project - started in 1996 in the Boston office - is expected to deliver a paradigm shift in function and performance. The ART team's goal is to build the perfect ORB to replace Orbix, a radically new architecture and framework for next generation ORB related technology.

Engineering Stress: 2000

Back to its roots, 2000 (image credit: Joe McCarthy)

Tim, Jan Willem, and Charlie styled themselves as IONA's ‘junior-management’ team – all of the pain, none of the power – all responsible for Orbix engineering or support. Between them they managed 50 engineers and three product lines. For some time they had been considering their situation and options, or at least the options under their control. There had to be a better way to organise the teams! Many of the engineers in Product Development and Customer Engineering were dissatisfied. Anyone who cared wanted to work on ART, the next generation Abstract Run Time architecture/product. Orbix release work in all its various flavours was seen as a dead-end. The workloads were horrendous, excessive overtime (unpaid) meant that people spent more time with colleagues than they did with their families. The company also wanted to bring in an engineer-on-call system for the out of hours support desk and but people were already putting in heroic efforts just to keep the software stable and customers happy. To top it off word was spreading that the Orbix team was going to become much, much smaller. Something had to break. Comments gathered informally from engineers gave a view of the problems they were dealing with.

“More inter-departmental cooperation please, people feel guilty asking questions.” [Anon]

“Get CE and Engineering teams working closer and get rid of the quick fix mentality.” [PD engineer]

“Outrageous workloads are destroying me, there must be an end in sight?!” [CE engineer]

“Product milestone dates come down from ‘on high’, the teams should estimate them, not some diktat.” [PD engineer]

“The company is a fun and challenging place to work, it’s challenging when we over-commit…” [CE engineer]

“We need workable processes to get us moving between teams and products.” [CE engineer]

It had become apparent that the cost and complexity of managing the large numbers of people involved in Orbix development and maintenance had reached breaking point and there were diminishing returns for simply adding engineers to the team. The company was grappling with the challenges of balancing time and attention. The resources available for new R&D,  even for ART development, were being dragged down by customer support for current products. Both the senior and junior-management teams were united in being prepared to consider radical and potentially unpalatable steps to address the problem.

IONA 1 case

Iona’s Genesis
"New York, 26th February 1997, 9.29am. The coming of age after six years of infancy. A Croke Park-pitch of a room, hundreds of computer screens replacing the light lost by blind-dimmed windows, replete with silently intense players grizzled beyond their age. The second-hand tranquilly rotates to mark the opening of the market at 9.30am, and the Lehman Brothers trading room explodes, keyboards pounding, phones shrilling answered with bronx cacophony. Our own stock opens its very first day up, our trading volume is good, and our initial public offering (IPO) on the US Nasdaq stock exchange is completed after a full year of preparation with our bankers, underwriters, analysts, and lawyers." (Chris Horn, 2012)
The narrative of Iona’s trajectory to success can be summed up in a sentence. IONA progressed from campus company in 1991, releasing Orbix in ’92, IPO on NASDAQ in ’97, and over the next 15 years spawning over 20 other spin-off companies before being acquired by Progress Software in 2008. The detail of IONA's history however is more complex and interesting (Baker, 2000).

Trinity College's Distributed Systems Group (DSG) was a small team of academics and engineers conducting research and development into the problem of inter-network computing architectures. The DSG had become a centre for excellence in distributed systems technology and more importantly in distributed object technology. Over the previous 14 years many of them had become international experts and built up a wealth of experience in designing and building distributed systems support platforms. Their research was supported initially by the college and then by the the EU through the (then) EEC Espirt research programmes. The leap from the academic to the commercial world was tempting as industries like banking and telecommunications embraced networks and internets.

Figure: Iona's Engineering division mission statement
IONA was formed in 1991, initially a Trinity College Dublin campus company, it occupied its first desks in rambling offices along Westland Row then spilling over into office space on Pierce Street. At its height IONA would eventually employ over 1,000 people around the globe, providing work for many of the academics, researchers and post-grads from the DSG but at the end of that first week as an independent firm only seven new employees marked the occasion quietly with a toast at Mahaffey’s pub.

IONA's founders of the company all came from this environment of academically led technological innovation and they were active contributors to the process of defining standards-based distributed object technology.

“[T]he start-up had three staff – Chris Horn, Sean Baker and Annraí O’Toole. But it had no bank balance, no marketing budget and no physical assets... On the other hand, the founders of Iona did not need to make a complete break from academic life or their incomes as lecturers. They could reduce their teaching time over three years, while they built up the company.” (Sterne, 2004)

From the beginning Iona attracted gifted technologists and programmers, many of whom went on to establish their own companies or lead innovations in other organisations and the open source movement. Inter-networked software was at the heart of Iona's value proposition and Iona's engineers recognised and took early advantage of the possibilities of the net. Iona’s Justin Mason set up one of the first 100 servers on the new worldwide Internet. www.iona.com became the first non-academic Irish website (Mason, 2009) and Iona’s software could be downloaded on-line via FTP access – a radical departure from the conventional thinking that software products came in boxes. Three years of steadily building up a business model (and a business plan) saw the organisation fund itself through C++ training and consultancy services. The professional services work, delivered initially to the Irish divisions of multinational technology firms like ICL and DEC, delivered unexpected benefits; it grew object oriented skills and knowledge, producing both users for Iona’s products and a cadre of skilled engineers many whom would subsequently work for Iona.

At its official launch at Object World in San Francisco in 1993 Orbix 1.0 defined and led the international trend to internet enabled computing by being the first to market with its release of a commercial implementation of the CORBA standard running across Windows and the three major Unix operating systems (Durham, 2001). Distributed systems arise organically in (and between) organisations because they allow specialised divisional applications to interoperate via standard interfaces with other applications running anywhere on the net. Iona’s Orbix technology allowed software to work together independent of the computer operating systems or hardware platforms they ran on. Iona was also surfing the wave of the most recent paradigm shift in software architecture; object oriented design. The beauty of Iona’s approach to ‘object oriented’ was that its Orbix product could ‘wrap’ legacy software in a future proof, compatible ‘object’ layer thereby enabling firms to retain and maintain their huge investments in so-called legacy systems.

Orbix, Iona’s implementation of the CORBA specification, consisted of a software development kit (SDK), a daemon (computer service) and set of run-time libraries (libs). Orbix was also the technology used at the core of Iona’s growing family of internet centric products and services.

The CORBA standard enabled applications to deliver network interactivity ‘by design,’ at the same time as it future proofed legacy applications by wrapping them in an Object Oriented front-end. Object orientation could be layered over any system regardless of whether their underlying design was procedural, functional, or just plain ancient. Iona’s Orbix SDK (Software Development Kit) and the Orbix orb (an Object Request Broker daemon and libraries) enabled programmers to easily design distributed programs using IDL (Interface Definition Language), which enabled software object interfaces on one system to call and interoperate with objects on distant systems. Iona also provided language mappings to C++, SmallTalk, Java, Ada, and OLE (enabling access to Visual Basic, Delphi and Power Builder environments).

CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is an open independent specification for distributed software architectures based on the object oriented interface paradigm. The Object Management Group (OMG) manages the CORBA standard.

Friday Night at Toner’s
I was in Toner's pub as usual on Friday night to catch up on the after work banter. Tonight the talk was all about the recent jump in the share price and where the NASDAQ was headed. The share price had become the 'icebreaker' ever since the IPO (initial public offering) in February last year. Toner’s was also the debriefing venue of choice for Iona’s Professional Services (PS) engineers when they returned from international duty on customer consultancy ‘gigs.’ PS work was viewed as something of an elite job, but one that carried incredible pressure to perform and deliver on customer sites. Iona’s Dublin-bound engineering teams relished these informal debriefings of PS’s field trips away from the tensions of the office. They presented an unvarnished view of client projects; what they were doing, how well they did it, what worked, what didn’t, and Orbix product quality or features were never far off.

These discussions played an essential part in making sense of the market for product managers and the engineers, if only because PS engineers in ‘the field’ were usually isolated behind a client’s corporate firewalls and multiple layers of military level security, so live feedback was impossible or severely restricted. Being on a client site demanded absolute commitment, technical nous and frequent heroics but the PS crew got to be on the front-line of some of the most exciting software engineering jobs in the world; Boeing’s distributed aircraft configuration system DCAC/MRM (Newcomer, 2006) and Motorola’s IRIDIUM global satellite telephony service (Computergram, 1994) in Seattle, Washington State, and Phoenix, Arizona, respectively to name two. These were cutting edge international computer engineering crucibles and their trajectories were shaping the Orbix feature list, releases and fixes.

DCAC/MRM is Boeing’s Define and Control Airplane Configuration/Manufacturing Resource Management systems.

IRIDIUM now an independent company, was developed by Motorola to deliver a constellation of over 66 satellites providing seamless mobile telephone communications across the globe.

I was listening into one of these heroic tales now. It was gripping if you understood the jargon; “debugged, compiler, ridiculously large IDL, memory leak, o/s patch, hot fix.” Mark, the PS engineer, had resolved a major issue from California by collaborating with James from Customer Engineering (CE) and Pierce on the product team back in Dublin. The Dublin crew had worked through the night on a patch for Orbix 2.3c that Mark downloaded at 2am local time and installed in the operations centre of government contractor research outfit. Exciting stuff if you enjoyed that kind of thing, but it was annoying me immensely. The problem shouldn’t have occurred in the first place it was PREVENTABLE!

References:

• Baker, S. (2000) The Making of Orbix and the iPortal Suite. ICSE 2000. Limerick, Ireland, ACM.
• Computergram (1994) Motorola Admits to Deal with Iona on Iridium. Computer Business Review. (link)
• Durham, J. (2001) History-making components : Tracing the roots of components from OOP through WS. IBM. (link)
• Iona Technologies (1997) Best of Breed Products: On time everytime. Dublin, Iona Technologies.
• Mason, J. (2009) jmason.org. (link)Dublin.
• Newcomer, E. (2006). Iona Technologies. (link)
• Sterne, J. (2004) Adventures in Code: The Story of the Irish Software Industry, Dublin, Ireland, The Liffey Press.
• Horn, C. (2010) Be Inspired. Be an Entrepreneur, DIT Hothouse 'Be Inspired' Seminars (link) 

Data General equipment

"Downtime is the worst of all possible times... Data General, the company that engineered the anxiety out of computers" 

The EMC Westborough Data Centre closes; EMC acquired Data General in 1999 (link).

An earlier model, the Eclipse MV/2500 operating microcode diagnostics; courtesy of Stephen Merrony (link).

Some video footage of a Data General Nova and disk assemblies in operation; courtesy of Andre Schaefer (link).

Running CEO on a Data General MV/4000. CEO (Comprehensive Electronic Office software) was a productivity suite (word processor, mail, display, print, calendar, filesystem, etc); courtesy of Tommy Mademark (link).

This ad from the archives highlights the crucial role that Data General computer systems had in issues of national importance in Ireland; courtesy of Internet Lurker (link).

Kenneth Meates has one of the most awesome responsibilities in all of Dublin, Ireland...

The Eagle project was eventually christened the MV/8000 by Data General's marketing group (Kidder, 1981). The Eclipse MV/8000 was Data General's first 32 bit mini computer.

See from 6' into the following video (link) where Tom West (Senior VP Systems Development) refers to the launch of the MV/8000 on April 28 1980 before bringing us through the following decade of computer development at Data General.  He outlines the evolution of subsequent generations of Data General computers leading to the launch of systems using a single chip microprocessor (MV/5500 & MV/9500).

Cinema and Documentaries on working in software and high-tech industries

Expanding on a list of key documentary and cinematic views of working in software and high-tech industry (more ideas from Codemate's post).

Triumph of Nerds 1-3
by Robert X Cringely

Something Ventured
by Dan Geller

id software history
by machinima.com

Pirates of Silicon Valley
by Noah Wyle

Revolution OS
by Linus Torvalds

Coding Culture
by Gautam Sonti

Aardvark'd: 12 weeks with Geeks
by Lerone D. Wilson

Indie Game: The Movie
by Merge Games

The Social Network
by David Fincher

Designing Interactions - the inverviews (2007) by Bill Moogridge (on Vimeo)

The Pixar Story (2007) by Leslie Iwerks

Connecting: a documentary about UX and ID (2012) by Basset and Partners, and Microsoft Design (on Vimeo)

The Design Makers - Inside Ford Design (circa 1960s) by the Ford Design Centre
by the Ford Design Center

Helvetica (2007) by Gary Hustwit

Objectified (2009) by Gary Hustwit

Coded Bias (2020) by Shalini Kantayya with Joy Buolamwini

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Some questions worth asking:

• What is it like to actually work in a development environment?
• How do designers manage?
• How do you manage designers?
• What is it like to manage these projects?
• Is this really what the work is like?
• Why is development work like this?
• What style of managing works well in these kinds of production settings?
• How are decisions made?
• If not decisions, how does new learning or mutual understanding occur?
• What does 'mutual understanding' mean here?
• Does does software development necessitate complete involvement if not obsession?
• How many people do you need to be successful?
• Is it necessary to invest your identity into designs?

Product vision and product team

A seminar with Colm Lyons, Founder and Managing Director of Realex Payments, describes aspects of high-tech development and entrepreneurship, reflecting on his experience starting and growing Realex. Monday March 12 at 4pm in UCD's Active Learning Lab.

Video from his interview for UCD's Leaders Insight Series.


Connect with Realex:
ie.linkedin.com/in/colmlyon
www.twitter.com/realexpayments
www.Facebook.com/realexpayments
www.youtube.com/realexpayments

Exercise: a 30 second video

"I like the UCD because..."

Goal
To get 'hands-on' experience creating a video presentation.

Instructions
You have 30 minutes to produce a 30 second video.

1. Form groups, at least one member of each group to have a laptop computer on the wireless network.
2. Each use your own smartphone with video function
   
3. Announce the objective
• To create a video "I like the UCD because..."
• Completed video to be 30 seconds duration or less.

Tips First try producing the video in a single take (to avoid merging different shots or doing complicated edits). Planning a video... Start by brainstorming different ideas in the group. When brainstorming:

1. Let each member provide 2 or 3 ideas, capture each ideas with a post-it notes.
2. Suspend your judgment until everyone has stated their idea.
3. Next build on ideas, some ideas will be put aside at this stage.
4. At all times be aware of your own and other's personal safety.
5. Criticise the idea not the person.
6. Use serial discussion, everyone has a turn, no one person dominates.
7. Consider taking on roles but keep it democratic.

Producing a video Videos have a beginning, middle and end so consider writing a brief script. Assign roles...

1. to write the script.
2. to plan the shots.
3. to film.
4. to act.
5. find/create props.
6. to edit.

Do dry runs!

Perhaps you might

• Upload your video to Vimeo or YouTube?

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Further reading

• Storyboarding is also used as a user-design technique for systems development. For examples see The Importance of Storyboarding Your iPhone App by Josh Clark and Storyboard technique for software projects by Adam Musial-Bright.
• Reynolds, G. (2008) Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, Berkeley, CA, New Riders.
• Sawyer, B. (2009) The Learner's Journey in Practice. (blogs.oreilly.com)
• BBC video editor (link)
• Camista screen recorder (link)
  
• Quick and Easy Video with a Flip Cam (dspace.ndlr.ie)
• A Guide to Student-Generated Videos(www.studentgenerated.com)
• MINO HD FLIP CAMERA USER GUIDE (dspace.ndlr.ie)

Here's my pitch for you to 'storyboard' and some tips on how to do it. Storyboarding from Allen Higgins on Vimeo.

Why video presentations?

There are considerable challenges associated with the recent shift to large class lecture modes. Challenges surround the balance between the two extremes of teaching/learning design: from student-centred to teacher-centred learning. Student-centred learning becomes less feasible as class sizes increase. The predominant model for teaching incorporates student contributions to continuous assessment predominantly focused on classroom presentations and/or written reports. In addition lecturer provided materials are mainly in the form of slideware, complemented perhaps by a set text or reading list, and possibly combined with associated practical sessions in tutorials or workshops. However reduced student engagement is an inevitable consequence of lecturing to large classes of 150+ students coupled with reduced availability of tutoring resources.

The argument for video presentations
Video presentations address two gaps in the current situation facing taught programmes in the University. A shortage of time to listen to and discuss student presentations in class (noting that presentations also often overrun the allocated time). A shortage of digital media targeting specific curricula (University students may also contribute valuable sources of new research and analysis). We also aspire to provide students with 21st century communication and presentation skills encompassing digital media technologies (video, graphics, audio etc) beyond the basics of slide-ware tools. Exposure to video presentation enables students to develop personal competencies in digital media production and delivery. Student and lecturer generated digital media content has the potential to complement the taught components of our degree and masters programmes.

Video presentations can enhance student engagement and involvement by structuring the student's own hands-on experience by preparing independent research and presentations for on-line delivery. Digital capture and production tools also empower a students' ability to plan, design and create their own showcase their research projects. An anticipated benefit is that students will also acquire a practical understanding of advanced communication and media production.

Finally, locally generated material (in particular local Irish content) has the potential to make a pedagogical contribution that reflects and disseminates the unique situations and experiences (cases) of (for example) firms in Ireland. This sort of richly illustrated, enacted and narrated media associated with the goals of a particular course may inspire and challenge following classes and also perhaps be of interest to a global community.