Archive for June, 2007
by Jerry Bowles
June 28, 2007 at 2:55 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Web 2.0
The Enterprise Web 2.0 revolution has been a godsend to small and midsized companies. Inexpensive, web-based tools and services mean the little guys now have access to professional office tools that rival those used by the Fortune 500–at a fraction of the cost. Think Thinkfree, Zoho, Google Apps, and literally hundreds of other web office purveyors whose innovation and effort has made the web a more effective and friendly place for business transactions for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and their customers.
FreshBooks, provider of a popular online invoicing and time-tracking service now used by more than 180,000 business users, wants to make the web even friendlier. The four-year-old Toronto-based firm today released its API and opened the door for application designers, businesses, services companies, and users to integrate the FreshBooks’ billing platform into what it hopes will be an entirely new category of products, features, and solutions for enhancing and streamlining productivity, workflow, sales, CRM, project management, and invoicing.
Application/service integrators can incorporate FreshBooks APIs into existing and new products to extend functionality, including timers, project planners, and desktop widgets. Services providers, such as ISPs, Web apps, wine, book or other product of the month clubs, with an existing sales infrastructure can use the API to add a professional-quality billing component. Tech savvy customers can also integrate FreshBooks functionality into their current workflow.
“Over the last four years, we have learned a lot about what small businesses and their customers need in order to improve the workflow, customer service and billing process,” said Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks. “By making our API available, we’re helping other businesses enhance the process for delivering professional invoices over email and ground mail, efficiently tracking accounts receivable, cordially managing disputes, recording payment histories to ensure peace of mind for customers, and collecting payments online from customers.”
I spoke with Sunir Shah in FreshBooks’ Market and Communtiy Development yesterday and he told me the release of the API has three primary targets:
- import/export from existing applications, like QuickBooks.
- improving the workflow of our existing customers, through things like desktop widgets
- and the big one, providing a 21st century, professional quality invoicing and accounts receivable system for SaaS and other subscription-based services.
FreshBooks is already widely used by legal professionals, PR/marketing firms, advertising agencies, nurses, project managers, contractors, freelancers, consultants, virtual assistants, journalists, technicians, developers, web designers, graphic designers, and others who, among other things, love the idea of being able to bill clients the same day a project is finished rather than having to wait until the end of the month to squeeze an invoice out of a complicated spreadsheet or software-based accounting program.
This looks like another very smart move by our friends from the Great White North. The developers community is here.
by Dana Gardner
June 28, 2007 at 11:33 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Web 2.0
I had a nice chat with Rich Seeley at TechTarget this week on SOA and management, and he produced this story. The major theme of the article is that SOA forces a new kind of management, one that’s by necessity highly inclusive and crosses the borders of the emerging loosely coupled services landscape. A standardized fabric approach to SOA management that spans design, development and runtime — as well as the mixed services lifecycle (wide AND deep) — remains a goal, but not an easily attainable one for most enterprises and service providers.
Fellow IT software and SOA blogger Joe McKendrick had a post that factored this all into what may be holding SOA back at many organizations.
Not long after I spoke to Rich, I took a briefing with three other vendors that somewhat cheered me up about the topic. First Dan Potter, vp of marketing at WebLayers, re-energized my understanding of the role of policy-based management, and how SOA reshuffles the policy deck to include impacts on governance, registries and repositories, runtimes and processes. The recent IBM Rational Asset Manager announcement adds another major component to what policies may help coordinate, automate and extend.
Potter, who like me is a big fan of New Hampshire lakes right about this time of year, explained that WebLayers has some 1,000 pre-built policies that can be applied to SOA development, useage and extensibility. Nowadays, many organizations rely on peopled review boards and physical documents to admit and govern SOA components and processes. And that’s in design time, never mind runtime.
Such wetware/committee approaches just don’t scale well, are hard to repeat, and can not be applied well across the many tentacles of SOA penetration through the enterprise. The fruits of such labors remain largely outside of and separate from the architecture’s grinding gears and cogs.
Automating the review of artifacts and applying proven policies via visual interfaces for their use and inclusion, however, marks a significant step to technically managing loosely coupled activities comprehensively. Policy-based approaches — including wider adoption of WS-Policy — should become more common for SOA lifecycle management. But like the weather, a lot of people talk about WS-Policy but don’t do much about it.
WebLayers also had an announcement this week on its benefits in conjunction with Oracle environments. (Side note: How about those Oracle numbers?)
I also spoke this week with Ryan Martens, founder and CTO of Rally Software. Rally has some products that help development teams attain agile benefits, on the project, program and ALM levels. But what makes Rally relevant to this discussion is the way the products are delivered — they are predominantly software as a service (SaaS) offerings. And by being SaaS, development in fast iterations is far better managed, tracked, measured, and facilitated.
What’s more, Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 values can be quickly applied. Keep it allin the systems so the people and process can be better coordinated, leveraged and reused. As you manage your development activities online you can also gather and share as communities online — both communities of developers but also end users. Create a component or service and run it by a user focus forum as a blog or wiki (Rally prefers hives) before the build. Talk about feedback and iterative improvement.
Damon Poole, CTO at AccuRev, is promoting what he calls Hyper Agile — a mashup of lean and agile development principles. When I spoke with him this week, I learned his goal is to make agile mainstream. I’d like to see agile also go deeper into how SOA is managed and improved. Indeed, SOA should be a market driver in itself to Hyper Agile.
Get this: SOA could make Hyper Agile imperative for services development, which forces more need to manage and govern services, which then begs use of agile principles in SOA governance, which leads to better while looser coupling to operational demands and performance. And so on. We could see such an adoption virus. Again, we come back to people, process, and technology and how to make them work well together on a recurring and coordinated basis (wide AND deep).
Managing agile development workflow, I believe, has a bearing now on the SOA management discussion. Somewhere, somehow the data, control and shared best practices of a Rally approach, a Hyper Agile mentality, and a policy-based apparatus will coalesce into best practices that no SOA architect should ignore. It will provide significant value to the operators too. Policies may become the lingua franca of how these now disparate IT orbits become aligned and in ongoing collaboration.
Software development as a service elevates that role to more easily relate to policy-based SOA reviews and governance that then relates more to traditional management. The pieces are falling into place. People and process must now provide the mortar that binds refines, and standardizes.
This could become a major productivity boost to IT generally, and begin to knock down the higher ongoing IT costs dilemma that impacts us all. SOA is only as successful as its management.
by Jerry Bowles
June 27, 2007 at 2:39 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing
Is Linkedin in play?
Most of the recent flurry of reporting about Facebook has focused on the impact that its wildly successful foray into the world of adult membership is having on MySpace but there are signs that it is also having an effect on LinkedIn, the original social network for business users.
The signs are there, beginning with a series of executive changes being announced this week. Yesterday, the company named Steve Sordello, formerly of Tivo, as its new CFO. Tomorrow, it will announce that Patrick Crane, formerly of the Yahoo! Inc. Network Division where he headed up several key products, including the launch of Yahoo! Answers, is its new Vice President of Marketing. Crane’s mandate is to help head up LinkedIn’s first general marketing push with initiatives designed to build the community beyond its current eleven-million users. (Memo to PR people: if you want me to keep a secret, write “embargoed until …”) on the release.
More significantly, some Wall Street types I know and generally trust tell me that there are discussions going on between LinkedIn and one of the oldest and most respected family-run business publishers. (Okay, I’ll make it easy for you, McGraw-Hill.)
I think it would be a great move for both parties.
by Dana Gardner
June 27, 2007 at 1:51 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Web 2.0
JBoss.org and Red Hat this week took a significant step toward finalizing Red Hat Developer Studio with the introduction of the Exadel Eclipse plug-ins under open source.
Tony Baer has a good write-up on this.
Exadel contributed the plug-ins, along with Ajax4sf and RichFaces, to Red Hat last March with the goal of making high-end Eclipse developer tools available to the open-source community.
Red Hat, which sponsors JBoss.org, an open-source middleware community, says that Developer Studio will provide pre-configured tools “that will offer significant time-savings and value, making them more productive and speeding time to deployment.” Launch of that is set for later this summer.
In addition to the new Exadel plug-ins, the JBoss Tools project encompasses the former JBoss IDE project with Hibernate Tools, JBoss jBPM Tools, Drools IDE, JBoss Application Server Tools and new JBoss Seam Tools, among others. JBoss Tools will provide nightly builds and an Eclipse update manager for easy access to the latest versions of all plug-ins.
Developers can now download the plug-ins from JBoss Tools to compile a powerful IDE with rich tooling for Java EE and Ajax development. Eventually, developers will be able to subscribe to Red Hat Developer Studio, which integrates JBoss Tools into a tested and supported IDE for development on all Red Hat runtimes, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat seems to be finding the right mix on tools, and with the Eclipse community’s sizable wind in its sails. And, as we know, the runtimes usually tend to follow where the developer preferences point.
In other open source arena news, Covalent Technologies has set its sights on becoming a one-stop-shopping support company for Apache and other open-source users with its announcement of add-on support for a dozen additional open-source projects.
Since the Covalent founders, who helped develop the ubiquitous Apache HTTP Web Sever, packed their wagons with venture-capital cash and joined the tech-boom gold rush from Nebraska to California nearly seven years ago, the company has continued to position itself as a leader within the open-source community.
It now claims to support more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies and 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, according to its Wikipedia entry.
Among the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and other open-source technologies Covalent will now support are:
In announcing the new support offerings, Covalent quoted Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst at Redmonk, as saying, “With Covalent now offering commercial-level support for projects such as Lucene and Xerces, we could be seeing the next wave of Apache projects on their way to becoming household names.”
I suppose Apache incubation projects are often the talk of the day at the O’Grady dinner table. But some of us would still have a tough sell getting the kids the finish their broccoli while chatting about the shifting requirements for Lucene. More likely they will finish their greens IF I were to stop talking about them. Hmmm.
by Bill Ives
June 27, 2007 at 9:06 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I recently told a Story on User Generated Content within the Firewall that covered knowledge management closely aligned with business process. Enterprise 2.0 is certainly much more than KM but enhancing knowledge sharing is more of its many opportunities. When I was involved in implementing knowledge management efforts, pre and post web, I always stressed the need for alignment with business processes and the need to have the efforts measured by metrics related to these processes (e.g. call centers, sales support, product development).
I never saw a knowledge management or collaboration effort succeed with the “let’s build it and see what happens” approach. I can remember conversations with several CIOs who said that they build a discussion forum but no one used it. When asked about the business purpose for the forum or what processes it was aligned with, it was like deer in the headlights. The proliferation of early intranets and the chaos that resulted was also a bad byproduct of just letting the users have free reign.
There have been many posts on this blog and elsewhere about how Enterprise 2.0 is different than Web 2.0. Getting people to participate within their work life will be a greater challenge than in their free time. One way to succeed is to follow the practice of successful knowledge management efforts and align the initiative with a core business process and demonstrate how it improves this process. But is this the only way?
Many of the successful Web 2.0 efforts like YouTube and MySpace have provided a platform for individual creativity and did not seem to be concerned with specific use cases, or at least not locked into them. A number of firms have launched wikis just to see how they will get used. IBM Research several years ago launched its Blog Central effort to give employees a blog for whatever reason they wanted as long as it did not violate business policies. There were some very interesting and useful initial results but I also read a bit later that the 3600 blogs average less than 10 entries but then many may have just started by then. I do not know the status now. A more recent conversation suggested that there are 12,000 active bloggers within IBM (less than 5% of the firm but still a significant number). Of course, Enterprise 2.0 is much more than individual employee blogs but that is a piece.
Since Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have many more potential applications than knowledge sharing, allowing for open-ended use might be an effective strategy. It did not work for intranets but we are way beyond that now. If a firm had the resources and commitment, a dual implementation strategy would make sense. Do some pilots structured around business processes and allow for some user exploration and creativity. What do you think? What has been your experience so far?
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