I know I am stirring an eagle’s nest.

I may be branded as a mad guy. I don’t have a technology background. Talking on a subject I do not know and more so to suggest such adventurous or atrocious idea is not normally acceptable in the market place. All of us feel comfortable with maintaining status quo in our lives in many areas though they may need totally unconventional approaches. This is mainly due to inherent human nature to avoid risk taking.

Well. Coming back to the topic of this blog – is it possible to build an application with more than one technology and if yes, how. I am not talking about using different technologies for different functions within the same application. That may be already available.

As an investment banker and presently with a focused and leading technology solution provider, I have come across couple of front office trading systems which are built on a particular technology. When we need to draw upon some information from external sources or systems built on totally different technologies, we propose and build suitable interfaces to interact with such external systems and they just sit outside the trading systems. This should be the case in other applications and industries as well.

Well. When this is possible, why not build an application with more than one technology. This thought has been hunting and hurting me for quite some time.

I am not sure whether there would be any immediate advantages in building such an application supported or facilitated by more than one technology at the same time. But I definitely feel this may prove to be an innovative idea to provide solutions in other business and scientific applications which may need in-built multi technology support.

Well. I leave it to the technology experts to take this forward.

I had recently an opportunity to go through the interview granted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist of Google and Professor of Information Sciences, Business and Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Thanks to The McKinsey Quarterly dated 30^th Jan 2009.

According to him despite widespread business acceptance and adoption of Web, some managers still fail to grasp the economic implications of cheap and ubiquitous information on and about their business. He says it is imperative for managers to gain a keener understanding of the potential for technology to reconfigure their industries. He compares the current period to previous times of industrialization when new technologies combined to create every more complex and valuable systems and thus reshaped the economy.

He further claims that we are in the middle of a period of combinatorial innovation. We see a period where we have Internet components, where we have software, protocols, languages, and capabilities to combine these component parts in ways that create totally new innovations. The great thing about the current period is that component parts are all bits. That means we never run out of them. We can reproduce them, we can duplicate them, we can spread them around the world, and we can have thousands and tens of thousands of innovators combining or recombining the same component parts to create new innovation. It’s a situation where the components are available for everyone, and so we get this tremendous burst of innovation.

Now let us come back to our discussions on building an application with more than one technology. At the very base, this may make our process better, faster, cheaper.

Any takers?