Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Virtual Fabrication Saves It All

Is this just another instance where the word 'virtual' is being coined to attract readers' attention?

No.

It was October 2004, I was sitting in my office, drinking coffee that I made myself using the coffee machine I acquired from my colleague next door, who was no longer with us. Normally, when I am just sitting and drinking coffee, without having much to think about, I find it somewhat boring. However, this was not just one of those moments. I had something better going on then; I had just come out of a meeting with my manager and his team where we had just discussed a business problem at hand. I was thinking, this could be the moment I have been waiting for, until then – working on one of the hardest problems. When the story ends, I admit that I had not encountered a harder problem in the short 7 years of professional career as a technologist.

When I solved the business crisis, I had created a ‘virtual enterprise’ to host and run nearly 70 unique applications on over 4 dozen mid-to-high end servers. The enterprise is called: Virtual Fabricator, a Factory model, based on Unified Modeling Language (UML), meta-models and open standards that has, since 2005, been used for IT Systems, Applications and Infrastructure development, testing and qualification. Additionally, the Virtual Fabricator has a powerful framework of software components that provide a fully simulated instance of a Manufacturing Fabricator that provides absolutely the latest capabilities (tools and know-how) for end-to-end IT validation (functional & performance) and business process emulation & validation.

At the end of 2005 the Virtual Fabricator was nicknamed “vFab”. Today, I hold 7 pending patents and 1 granted patent and 2 publications. I do not want to bore the readers with my technical accomplishments. However, I do want to share with you the breadth of technical dimensions I had to study and apply the learning to solve the business crisis.

Briefly, I applied the following technical dimensions in creating my Virtual Fabricator Enterprise, over a span of 3 years:
  • Event-based logic (triggers, simulation, emulation)
  • Distributed computing (agents, architecture)
  • Business process execution system
  • Meta-data modeling for data reconstruction and transmission
  • Markup language (XML like) for business process execution and validation

Today, the Virtual Fabricator is an enterprise that is available 24x7x365. With nearly $500K in resource funding over 3 years, I have used it to facilitate corporate growth to the amounts of $25 or greater on year to year.

The corporate growth at IBM’s Technology Group (TG) (http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/) as Ihave described here has come through introduction and successful adoption of following programs:
  • Agile transition from heavier waterfall development process
  • Test driven development of developed applications
    • Automated testing framework that is built-into vFab
  • More prosperous strategic plan aligning prioritization of corporate developmental programs with resource availability

To summarize, project accomplishments also helped IBM win the Top FAB award in 2005 (http://www.semiconductor.net/article/200662-2005_Top_Fab_IBM.php).

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