Author Archive
by Dana Gardner
July 30, 2007 at 11:10 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, IBM, Podcasts, SOA, Web 2.0, innovator interviews, mashups, open source
Read a full transcript of the discussion.The notion of a world wide web that anticipates a user’s needs, and adds a more human touch to mere surfing and searching, has long been a desire and goal. Yet how closer are we to a more “semantic” web? Will such improvements cross over into how enterprises manage semantic data and content?
Our expert panel digs into this and other recent trends in SOA and enterprise IT architecture in the latest BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, volume 17. Our group also examines Adobe’s open source moves around Flex, and how UDDI is becoming more about politics than policy.
So join noted IT industry analysts Joe McKendrick, Jim Kobielus, Dave Linthicum and Todd Biske for our latest SOA podcast discussion, hosted and moderated by yours truly.
Here are some excerpts:
I saw one recent article where [the semantic web] was called Web 3.0, and I thought, “Oh, my Lord, we haven’t even decided that we are all in agreement on the notion of Web 2.0.”
[But] there is activity at the World Wide Web Consortium that’s been going on for a few years now to define various underlying standards and specifications, things like OWL and Sparql and the whole RDF and Ontologies, and so forth.
So, what is the Semantic Web? Well, to a great degree, it refers to some super-magical metadata description and policy layer that can somehow enable universal interoperability on a machine-to-machine basis, etc. It more or less makes the meanings manifest throughout the Web through some self-description capability.
You can look at semantic interoperability as being the global oceanic concern. Wouldn’t be great if every single application, data base, or file that was ever posted by anybody anywhere on the Internet somehow, magically is able to declare its full structure, behavior, and expectations?
Then you can look at semantic interoperability in a well-contained way as being specific to a particular application environment within an intranet or within a B2B environment. … The whole notion of a “semantic Web,” to the extent that we can all agree on a definition, won’t really come to the fore until there is substantial deployment inside of enterprises.
Conceivably, the enterprise information integration (EII) vendors are providing a core piece of infrastructure that could be used to realize this notion of a Semantic Web, a way of harmonizing and providing a logical unified view of heterogeneous data sources.
Red Hat, one of the leading open source players, is very geared to SOA and building an SOA suite. Now, they are acquiring an EII vendor, which itself is very SOA focused. So, you’ve got SOA; you’ve got open source; you’ve got this notion of a semantic layer, and so forth. To me, it’s like, you’ve stirred it all together in the broth here.
That sounds like the beginnings of a Semantic Web that conceivably could be universal or “unversalizable,” because as I said, it’s open source first and foremost.
If we build on this, it does solve a lot of key problems. You end up dealing with universal semantics, how that relates to B2B domains, and how that relates to the enterprise domains.
As I’m deploying and building SOAs out there in my client base, semantic mediation ultimately is a key problem we’re looking to solve.
The average developer is still focused on the functionality of the business solution that they’re providing. They know that they may have data in two different formats and they view it in a point-to-point fashion. They do what they have to do to make it work, and then go back to focusing on the functionality, not really seeing the broader semantic issues that come up when you take that approach.
One thing that’s going to happen with the influence of something like Google, which is having a ton of a push in the business right now, is that ultimately these guys are exposing APIs as services. … They’re coming to the realization that the developers that leverage these APIs need to have a shared semantic understanding out on the Web. Once that starts to emerge, you’re going to see a push down on the enterprise, if that becomes the de-facto standard that Google is driving.
In fact, they may be in a unique position to create the first semantic clearing house for all these APIs and applications that are out there, and they are certainly willing to participate in that, as long as they can get the hits, and, therefore, get the advertising revenue that’s driving the model.
[Google] is in the API business and they are in the services business. When you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. … You start providing access to services, and rudimentary on-demand governance systems to account for the services and test for rogue services, and all those sorts of things. Then you ultimately get into semantics, security, and lots of other different areas they probably didn’t anticipate that they’d get into, but will be pushed into, based on the model they are moving into.
… Perhaps Google or others need to come into the market with a gateway appliance that would allow for policy, privilege, and governance. This would allow certain information from inside the organization that has been indexed in an appliance, say from Google, to then be accessed outside. Who is going to be in the best position to manage that gateway of content on a finely-grained basis? Google.
Read the full transcript for more IT analysis and SOA insights. Produced as a courtesy of Interarbor Solutions: analysis, consulting and rich new-media content production.
BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, volume 17 [49:11m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download (710)
by Dana Gardner
July 30, 2007 at 8:29 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, SaaS, Web 2.0, mashups, open source
TIBCO Software is easing the way for Ajax component interoperability with the donation this week of its core Ajax message bus technology to the OpenAjax Alliance (OAA) Hub project. TIBCO announced the donation today, at the same time as it released its PageBus, a related open source product.
What’s in it for you? Well, besides the technological benefits, developers could walk away with a 50-inch plasma TV or a 30-GB iPod, if they enter — and win — the Ultimate Mashup Ajax Challenge.
PageBus applies “publish and subscribe” message bus programming patterns within the context of a single Web page, allowing communication among multiple Ajax components. This allows developers to create composite applications from reusable parts and services. All of this is designed to reduce development costs, improve interfaces over HTML and increase business agility.
The message-bus approach solves one of the key problems that comes from combining increasingly sophisticated composite applications. As the number of composite applications and mashups increase, the programming — and needed event-driven reliability — required can increase exponentially.
What’s more, creating client-SOA applications becomes easier because the same conceptual architecture — publish and subscribe — is used for both rich Internet client (RIA) activities as well as for compositing backend services. TIBCO says it has large banks and other users delivering mission critical, real-time data through SOA backends to scads of Ajax-enabled components on RIA clients.
Users get a quick, rich experience, while developers and architects gain flexibility and speed-to-deployment. TIBCO gains by riding the wave of increased demand for back-end SOA integration and messaging infrastructure to support the RIA ramp-up.
TIBCO, as a member of the OAA, is working with more than 70 companies to standardize key aspects of Ajax. The OpenAjaxHub 1.0, the group’s first specification implementation, aims to provide Ajax interoperability through the publish/subscribe interface. The specification will formally be out in about six weeks, but the code is now at Sourceforge.net.
PageBus is open source and can be downloaded. It’s also shipped as part of the TIBCO Ajax Message Service.
The above-noted mashup challenge is a developer community project to build the world’s largest mashup using PageBus and TIBCO’s General Interface. The contest runs through September 30, after which TIBCO and co-sponsor Artima will award prizes for the best entries.
by Dana Gardner
July 27, 2007 at 9:11 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0, mobile
Looking over the reports from the Microsoft financial analysts gathering this week in Redmond, Wash., I’m reminded of baseball … modern ballparks in particular.
Far as I know, most major league baseball teams have been profitable for many years, many decades. Most of the teams in large cities are doing better than ever, in spanking new stadiums.
What’s different now is the explosion of advertisements, endorsements, sponsorships, hucksterism and crass visual commercialism. Whether you attend a game or watch one on television, there isn’t a time or place where you are not treated to literally dozens of commercial pitches while you try and figure out the real pitches.
Why on Earth would people who love baseball, or even just tolerate baseball, allow such a plastering of advertisements across their consciousness (and perhaps unconsciousness)? Well, because they don’t have a choice, of course.
Baseball, like Microsoft (and soon, Google?), is a monopoly. There are few if any real choices for most anyone who wants to watch a major league game but to incur the ad wrath.
And that’s why it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft starts injecting scads of ads through their “software plus services” portfolio. That’s right, when you open your online (or offline or hybrid-line) applications for a spreadsheet, word processor, email, calendar, ERP interface — just like you’re now thoroughly accustomed to on Web pages and services — there will be ads. Lots of them. Targeted right to you as an individual or business (or both) with your pre-analyzed budget to spend in anticipation
Local, state, regional, mobile, location-based, keyword-oriented, and fuzzy-warm branding types of ads. All over your visual perimeter — just like at the ballpark — you’ll be served up ads, ads, ads while you toil away to offer more cookie crumbs of insight into what the next ad should be that you see. Attention!
The implications for this, of course, are enormous. If Microsoft and the other services providers — for they will all have to follow suit, just like each ballpark followed the other — can better target these ads to you based on your relationship with them and the technology cauldron that forms from your use of “software plus services,” then all the other providers of platforms for online ads will be sunk.
We used to have the division of church and state between media editorial and advertising, but what of the division between technology and advertising? There isn’t one. You may think you own your PC (vendors would differ) but you don’t own the servers that toss up your “software plus services.” You want to play ball? You gotta look at the ads. You gotta see the craplets.
Reminds me of the line from fictional Southie strongman Frank Costello in The Departed: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me.” You, dear readers, will be a product of the environment that your “software plus services” provider wants for you, based on what’s good for their investors.
Even, over the next 3 to 10 years, as the newspaper business thinks it can reinvent its paper-based revenue streams from the Internet, in comes the IT vendors. These “software plus services” providers will — from start-up of the first craplets when you turn the thing on until the last mouse click before you die — have you pegged. They will know what you want before you do. No other entity can better match ads to users than a combined IT platform provider and online services provider whose business is based on advertising revenue. The marketers will finally have the tools they’ve always wanted.
And so those other media company web sites that dish up the highest-quality content, that provide top-line fourth-estate journalism will do okay (we hope), but the largest ad dollars growth will go to those “software plus services” providers that can give the advertisers the best on-target and metrics-based match-up between buyers and sellers. And then the IT companies buy the media companies, and then they buy the telecos and cable and mobile providers. Nice and tidy. On stop shopping to get inside of your head/wallet.
Who to blame? No one. It’s inevitable. Government regulators could scarcely keep up, even if they will and budgets existed. If Google and Microsoft don’t do it someone else will. Mark Cuban thinks those alternatives could well be the local broadband providers, and he’s right … but only for a time. Once the total online ad monopoly kicks in, it will be a digital Standard Oil on steroids with no Sherman Antitrust Act.
Is Google the white knight and Microsoft the evil empire? Nope. Just like in any good vs evil saga (Star Wars?) both sides need each other desperately. For the better that Google does in making ad-based online applications and services work acceptably, the easier it is for Microsoft to inject that model into its current stable of software, and present it as … services.
And the more successful (could they be any more successful?) that Microsoft is at providing PC applications and services locally, online or both, the easier it is for Google to make its SaaS alternatives look good enough. These two massively and globally influential companies will ratchet each other up to the level of the modern-day ballpark. It’s not either-or, it’s both Microsoft and Google propelling the shifts in the market to ad-based everything online, including your business applications, including your high school yearbook.
We are all just going along for the ride. For many of us, we think we get the functional services cheaply because the ads pay for the “software plus services.” But when was the last time you saw the price of admission tickets to a ball game fall as they hoisted yet another billboard up over left field?
It won’t be ad-based revenue or subscription. No, it will be ad-based revenue and subscription. Has to be. We have no choice.
by Dana Gardner
July 23, 2007 at 10:37 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, SaaS, Web 2.0
While enterprise architects (EAs) and services oriented architecture (SOA) architects are often at loggerheads today, the two will working hand in hand toward the same goals in a matter of a few years.
“In five years I don’t think there will be SOA … it’s all going to fold back into enterprise architecture,” said Dave Linthicum, CEO of Linthicum Group, in a keynote address today at The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioner’s Conference in Austin, Texas. “SOA is a subpattern of EA.”
In effect, he said, SOA is just good EA. The goals for each are ultimately the same: To get better at building agile IT architectures and to make change the number one requirement for IT.
But that’s not what you’ll find on the street. In many cases those planning SOAs are not in synch with those that are keeping the trains running on time, so to speak, inside enterprise datacenters. Linthicum pointed out that there are currently “two worlds out there,” enterprise architects and SOA archirtects, with one working up from the existing IT landscape and the other working down, respectively, from the larger concepts of agility, reuse and orchestration of service points.
“There’s not a lot of synergy, and even some fighting,” said Linthicum. “The EA guys don’t get full implications of SOA, and SOA guys don’t get how SOA meshes with existing enterprise methods and standards.”
Into this Babel, many if not most CEOs think that IT is holding them back. The business leaders want to change automated business processes much more quickly.
So many business leaders are open to SOA. They cotton to the idea of IT easily adapting and becoming agile, they encourage reuse, they want independent change management. The idea is to “orchestrate” rather than integrate, and to “configure” rather than develop said Linthicum.
At the same time, CEOs need for all the parts that are currently running to keep running. Hence the need for deeper understanding and cooperation between the EA crowd and SOA crowd.
So what are the next steps to make EA and SOA act in concert? How can the will of the organization at large be cultivated to support the $7 million to $10 million needed for even a medium-sized business to meaningfully implement SOA?
Linthicum recommends that IT leaders see beyond the SOA hype, to encourage enterprise architects to become advocates for positive change that embraces SOA principles and methods. He also says that SOA must play well with and embrace such mega trends such as SaaS, Web 2.0, application modernization, datacenter consolidation, and semantic data management.
“See the emerging web as a resource,” Linthicum extolled the crowd of some 300 IT leaders and architects. “The lines are blurring between enterprise apps and the web.”
Conceptually IT professionals are on board about SOA … how to get there is the rub, he said. There remain too many “bad practices,” such as selecting technology before knowing SOA needs, not sticking to EA best practices, not creating a strong business case for SOA, using wrong people, and suffering from a lack of influence and political strength in the organization.
“Don’t select technology too early, don’t get caught up in the hype … look to the data issues and semantics first … Keep your vendors working for you. The smarter you are the more successful they can help you be,” said Linthicum.
by Dana Gardner
July 22, 2007 at 11:05 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Podcasts, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0
The Wall Street Journal on July 2 contained an excellent story about how economists view U.S. businesses’ prospects for the coming months. The story explains how businesses are facing higher energy, food, and labor costs while needing to hire more workers — all of which mutes general productivity.
The story says:
If they can’t pull off a resurgence in productivity, businesses face a tough choice: Raise prices or live with reduced profit margins. Judging from their outlook for corporate profits, the forecasters believe that many … will choose to split the difference.
That means raising their prices some and living with lower profits, too. This is quite different from the most previous business climate where consistently rising productivity and tame inflation allowed for ongoing record profits.
However, there is another aspect to this somewhat bleak assessment. The next business cycle will demand that many companies focus on efficient top-line growth so that they can maintain profits, even as productivity slackens.
Many businesses may be constrained in how they can grow revenues, perhaps because they only supply a static region or supply a shrinking customer base. Most businesses, however, can find new ways to sell their goods and services in more places — especially by better use of the Internet. That’s because the Internet is and will continue to be a marketer’s most powerful tool.
If the past business climate was about productivity as a means to profits, and the Internet was a benefit, then the next business cycle is about revenue growth and finding new markets as the means to fiscal health. And that means that the Internet becomes indispensable. The better you know how to leverage the Internet for your business the better off you will be as an individual — for your current employer or the next.
Interestingly, the need to find efficient ways to increase the market for goods and services comes just as advertising — a traditional way to grow revenues — is in transition. Many businesses are re-evaluating how they advertise, spurred on by Google, viral marketing on the Web, and better use of community outreach and online communication with customers, partners, and prospects.
In observing IT vendors in how they reach markets in novel ways, I now see four major thrusts (and a further diminishing role for traditional advertising). The four major go-to-market avenues are:
- Traditional inside efforts. This means creating a compelling web site, a great sales force (inside, outside, direct and channel), strong ecommerce applications, downloads and other online distribution means, and super customer support. This will not change.
- Traditional outside efforts. This means advertising through new and old media, marketing promotions and events, email and direct marketing, and PR/AR/IR. This section may well see resources shifted to the two newer categories …
- Viral. This means creating content and conversation, blogs/podcasts/videocasts, or reacting to content and conversation, such that online awareness is understanding is generated about your goods, services, and image, via the social networking effects on the Web. This is and should continue to grow significantly, probably funded by the previous ad budgets.
- Search. Through all of a business’s efforts, they should focus on making their values and knowledge easily accessed via Web, and more discretely searched through the keywords and phrases that best bind it to their users and communities. This will be the more effective way to grow the top line revenues for many companies for some time. Again, look for traditional ad budgets to fuel this arena, too.
So if you are associated with a business they sees the landscape as the country’s leading economists do, and you recognize you must grow both current and new markets — to spur more revenue and business volume — and that you must do it efficiently, do yourself a favor. Right now pretend that you are a customer or prospect of what you sell.
Now, go to Google or another major web search engine. Search on some terms that might come to your mind as you begin a research or informational journey on what your business supplies. Focus on the problem that your online prospect will have, and the solution you bring to them. Does a search on one lead to the other? Does a question about to fix what you fix actually point to how to evaluate and/or acquire that fix? Right now, online?
It should. What you should see there in the top search results on the left, or organic side, are the fruits of all your marketing efforts:
- Your website, your product and service descriptions, pricing and how you beat the competition in value, the means to contact a sales rep, a click-through to purchase option, or more direct help.
- The freely available trustworthy informational assets on the problem-solution set that defines your business value, including conversations, media write-ups, third-party endorsements, interviews, and blogs … anything that your communities generate about you.
This is how new revenues and market opportunities will be born most productively. When the going gets tough, a business’s online marketing gets going.
Like many, you will also buy search-based advertising, based on those essential keywords, that create more ways for those seeking you out as a business to reach your website, product information, sales and support, and solutions. But when you want the most bang for the fewer bucks, the organic results pay best and longest. Invest in them now.
What’s also interesting is that the investment, and — more importantly — the return on the investment you and your clients make in organic search results will remain strong in nearly any macro business environment. That’s right, whether the business cycle is in profit growth mode, revenue growth mode, recession, depression, boom times or flat — your best ticket to keeping the accountants happy is bringing in leads and sales organically, via search-inspired research and inquiry.
So my prognosis is that the ways in which the Internet can assist companies have evolved well during the past 10 years, but the coming business climate — no matter what climate it is — is where Internet marketing will be needed the most. And the future, no matter what the world economy is up to, will also deliver the most value and power through the reach of the World Wide Web.
by Dana Gardner
July 16, 2007 at 1:14 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, IBM, Microsoft, SOA, open source
Further banking on SOA as a consolidation strategy accelerator for enterprises, IBM on Monday announced its intention to acquire DataMirror.
The Markham, Ontario-based DataMirror provides real-time data capture and delivery across a broad range of data sources — including IBM’s own DB2, Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server — and allows altered data from such sources to be fed into the popular IBM Information Server. The goal: real-time integration and delivery of data deltas across a variety of sources to then reach a variety of applications and services.
The approximately $161 million acquisition, if approved, will thereby extend the reach of IBM’s Information Server and give businesses faster access to data for making business decisions, responding to market demands, and rapidly identifying new business opportunities. The acquisition continues a fast-paced (for IBM) buying spree, almost as active as Oracle’s over the past several years, although IBM tends to buy smaller companies that augment its strategies, rather than buy its way into new businesses wholesale.
Data and access to data is the lifeblood of any agile big businesses. According to IBM, the DataMirror technology captures data changes as soon as they occur and delivers the changes and new data either to other business processes or the enterprise service bus (ESB). This makes it an integral part of an SOA strategy.
IBM Information Server currently processes data from DB2 databases, but what DataMirror brings to the party is its technology works with a wide variety of other databases, sitting on top of the other processes, and can capture the data without slowing the performance of those operations.
So the inclusion of the DataMirror technology into its “Information on Demand portfolio” will allow Big Blue to cast a bigger umbrella over more types of real-time data for distribution and processes-updating capabilities. That means a more comprehensive SOA infrastructure capabilities set that spans data services with transactional and presentation services.
IBM said the acquisition will move their information-on-demand strategy closer to the master data management “holy grail” of providing one view of the customer — the total and correct view.
This acquisition also therefore further amplifies the vision that management of meta data about data (aka master data management) is the keystone of the future for enterprise software infrastructure vendors. By making data free yet coordinated, IBM can position it’s Information Server and IBM’s Dynamic Warehousing offerings as the best-of-breed data management environments for gathering, distributing, and also analyzing real-time business activities. The value continues to move up an abstraction from the core RDBs.
As an example of how the real-time capture and delivery can aid business development, DataMirror pointed to a telecom application, in which a client company can detect when customers are running low on pre-purchased minutes, allowing the company to contact the customers in advance about purchasing more time, thereby increasing sales and preventing customers from experiencing a loss of service.
You have to wonder whether IBM will also extend what DataMirror does into open source databases — from mySQL to Ingres to perhaps even SaaS applications and/or repositories. Such a move could allow IBM to become the all-data-for-all-purposes-oriented leader (more “open” than Microsoft or Oracle) — while still protecting its DB2 franchise (for now). Being inclusive at the data management level is more important than protecting an installed base, right?
Among the other benefits of the combined platform will be:
- Production and e-business integration
- Real-time event detection
DataMirror currently has about 2,200 customers, about 60 percent of whom are also IBM customers, as well as 15,000 licenses. The company and its 220 employees will be integrated into IBM’s Information and Platform Solutions business unit, and IBM said it intends to retain DataMirror’s Toronto-area development center focused on heterogeneous data capture.
The acquisition requires approval from DataMirror’s stockholders, as well as regulators, and the deal is expected to close in the late third quarter of this year.
by Dana Gardner
July 15, 2007 at 10:58 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, IBM, Microsoft, SaaS, Web 2.0, mashups, open source
Information technology is now entering an unprecedented era of rapidly expanding development productivity. This is because of two unassailable facts: The number and types of people who can actively participate in software development are expanding, while — at the same time — we’re seeing a rapid compression in the effort, cost and risk of taking applications and services from concept into full production.
Put these trends together and we enter a fertile new era of diverse applications and services creation, one that offers developers more choice on how to build, and offers architects more choice of how to deploy (including broader use of web services and hosting to the “cloud”). The trends auspiciously portend less risk for businesses, both for entrepreneurs and enterprises alike, to innovative in ways that more easily bring applications to markets via the Internet.
The entrepreneurs are groking this all just fine, while the enterprises are quickly recognizing that they face new upside benefits as they adopt so-called Enterprise 2.0 approaches. Such development process improvements as “application lifecycle management 2.0“, open source development communities such as Eclipse, and a widening embrace of Agile development practices are quelling enterprise IT leaders’ fears of development project misfires.
In the mostly consumer-facing Web 2.0 arena, the ongoing mash-up of the definitions of developer and entrepreneur among start-ups allows for a flowering of innovation with relatively low up-front costs. If an application or service doesn’t work in gaining wide use and appeal, these innovators keep on changing it until it does. Google is a prime example of this tinker-to-success mentality.
Other accelerants to the ease-of-development trends are the wide embrace of open source tools, preference for rich Internet applications (RIAs) approaches (highlighted by the recent Microsoft Silverlight unveilings), and openly available APIs for myriad ecommerce and social networking Web services from the likes of Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft.
I’m also seeing a variety of new automated development workflows and requirements gathering approaches that bring non-developers increasingly into the act of defining, adjusting and implementing applications. These folks are not coders, but they are keen on business transformation via re-engineered business processes. The more tools that close the gap between process efficiency knowledge and the implementation of such productivity enhancements via IT, the more that talented non-developers will deeply exploit IT for their business goals.
A prime example of such tools and approaches is One Team Technologies, a Chicago-based start-up that walks non-geeks through a series of menus and choices — selecting new options based on the roles and choices of the creators — to design database-driven, potentially mission-critical applications. I think venture capitalists ought to use this technology and approach to incubate even more innovative start-ups, and create more business process-focused applications that can be delivered quickly to dynamic enterprises and markets.
And while this trend toward design automation and inclusion of more non-coders into development makes sense for start-ups and Web 2.0 greenfield innovators, the fruits of this broadening portfolio of possibilities will soon benefit SMBs and enterprises as they embrace software as a service (SaaS) and on-demand delivery of applications and integration services. SaaS also accelerates the ability to mash-up and use the services provided from communities of functional interest and from vertical industry niches. That is to say that those hosting organizations interested in proving on-demand applications will increasingly provide the tooling to create and adapt applications all the more appealing to more businesses.
The road from application service innovation to full production, as I mentioned, is already rapidly compressing. A great example of this compression effect comes from Bungee Labs’ Bungee Connect offering, which debuted at Web 2.0 Expo. Another way of describing Bungee Connect is software development and deployment as a service (SDDS). Bungee Connect combines the virtues of online web application development with a near-real-time test and debug capability and with a click-to-host service that — now here’s the rub — costs the developer next to nothing to get into full production.
Here’s an offering that recognizes that new business models that vastly expand the universe of web services players is what the web is all about. The Bungee Connect service began allowing beta use access on May 1. Developers may register to participate in the early-access beta program.
Bungee Connect gives developers WSYWIG, drag-and-drop, rich Ajax interface creation tools online. Those familiar with scripting and web applications development can begin creating web applications from a library of Bungee functions, or create their own services, or mash-up ones from a core of providers: Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, Real Networks, Windows Live, PayPal, and eBay.
The cost for the use of the tools, testing, and then hosting is free, and the subscription cost for the at-scale hosting only kicks in based on the use of the application by end users. Low use means low costs, and high use means a predictable measure of the proceeds goes to the development and hosting service. The hosting business stays with Bungee as the grid services provider while the applications ramp up into a sustainable business. Bungee collects rent — so to speak — based on use of the underlying infrastructure. Pay as you grow.
The net effect of these trends and examples is that the time, cost and risk of going from design to full production are deeply compressed. We are entering a period on unmatched applications, services, and media creativity.
Shouldn’t you and your company be a part of it?
by Dana Gardner
July 12, 2007 at 12:48 pm · Filed under
Enterprise Software, SOA, open source
Red Hat has cemented another large stone into the foundation of its Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 5.0, expected later this year, with the announcement of middleware solution EAP 4.2.
EAP 4.2, the company’s most comprehensive enterprise platform, weaves JBoss, Hibernate, and JBoss Seam into a single (integrated, tested, and certified) platform for Java applications. The new direction is an outgrowth of Red Hat’s announcement in April that it had decided to split its efforts into the traditional JBoss.org releases, following the traditional model, and the JBoss.com enterprise releases, for which Red Hat will sell support.
Key components in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2 include JBoss Application Server 4.2, Hibernate 3.2.4, JBoss Seam 1.2, and JBoss Transactions 4.2.3. It also sports embedded Apache Tomcat 6, a web services stack, support for ful J2EE 1.4 services with extended support for the common Java EE 5 features.
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2 has been certified on different operating systems, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, HP-UX, Solaris, and Windows; Java Virtual Machines from BEA, HP, and Sun Microsystems; and databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres SQL. It will also be available in seven languages.
Red Hat is moving closer to a full SOA infrastructure offering.
by Dana Gardner
July 12, 2007 at 8:29 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Podcasts, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0, open source
Read a transcript of the discussion.
In my work covering enterprise application development and deployment strategies, I often find myself also witnessing a sea-change in how software providers market their values. Software has always been a challenge to market, and many of the most innovative thinking in online marketing has come from the software industry.
I’m now seeing four distinct legs of support under the software marketing bench: 1) traditional internal marketing (web sites, downloads, product literature), 2) traditional external marketing (advertising, events, webinars, lists, email, newsletters), 3) viral (blogs, podcasts, videocasts, community sites, social media), and 4) search (all of the above plus tagging, sharing, community, relevance).
I’m also seeing a hastening shift from the second leg to the third and fourth, in terms of investment and expected return. Companies are moving the emphasis from traditional media to social media.
Creating and distributing good content is essential to all these activities, and accelerates the movement to social networking and community development. I recently had a podcast conversation with Sam Whitmore, editor and proprietor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey, in which we discuss these themes along with the burgeoning role of RSS, community, conversations, and search.
Together we wonder whether the “public” relations community will soon gain a new cohort, the “search” relations person. It’s a new way to reach the public, the right public, and on the public’s terms. Their search terms. Search is the new media. [ADDENDUM: Here are two other podcasts I've done on search, one with ZoomInfo and the other with FAST Search and Transfer.]
Here are some excerpts:
We’re now getting people to understand the concept of “You don’t have to browse anymore.” They still search, of course, probably more than ever before. But you think about the two ways … that people get their information now, it’s either through RSS syndication, or through search. And it’s almost quaint to think back about, “Yeah, I think I am going to go through my bookmarks and see what I haven’t visited in a while.” I don’t know anybody who does that anymore.
The idea is to start thinking strategically about your content. Instead of having thousands of people around your company, each creating their own content without much interaction about it, without much coordination about it — but perhaps a lot of overlap and a lack of reuse — adding to more of a case of redundancy. And that goes for everything from mimeographs to RSS feeds, and all in between.
But when you think about content more strategically — and can plan for and create core content that they can be reused and extended across different uses, like marketing literature, the documentation you provide for your services and products, your advertising, as well as your communications with your investors, with analysts, with press — you create more of a coordinated core set of messages and documents and content. And we’ll be seeing more audio and video increasingly in this mix.
If a company can create this content core and allow people to use it and make it accessible — in the same way as with the development of software tools and components — you can better control your costs; you can control better your message because more of your messaging will be in sync, because its all coming off of the same core.
Any company that has a strategic direction that they are taking their business to should say, “What are the keywords that relate to our future? What is the content we can create that will drive recognition from those keywords of our value, specifically as an individual company? And how can we create an ongoing process by which we’re feeding that algorithm machine over and over again to retain that high ranking?”
That to me is marketing 2.0.
I think that these IT trade titles and these people that are being rapidly disintermediated, they need to figure out how to get some of their content to rank well in generic search environments. And that brings us back to SEO and the fact that you can subscribe to RSS search results and these people really are getting hammered.
The way you go about a whitepaper is you do research, you get information and you do interviews — primary research. And what is an interview? It’s a discussion. Why not just create a great discussion with the experts and put that up, instead of putting it into some sort of a turgid-prose, 80-page tome that people only read the executive summary of?
Why not give the long tail its due and put up a series of five key discussions with the experts you would have interviewed anyway for the whitepaper, and let people either read the transcript or glance at the executive summary of each individual interview or discussion, and then pick and choose? To me that’s just a better way to learn. And it also, by the way, is a lot easier for the experts as well as the authors. So it really is a discussion.
Read a transcript of the discussion.
A podcast conversation with Sam Whitmore on marketing 2.0 [44:27m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download (568)
by Dana Gardner
July 10, 2007 at 9:29 am · Filed under
Enterprise Software, SOA, open source
IONA Technologies’ acquisition of LogicBlaze last April has culminated in the announcement this week that IONA’s providing a coordinated array of open-source products available under the new FUSE family.
Based on projects hosted by the Apache Software Foundation, the FUSE components will provide messaging, SOA connectivity, and service enablement for a variety of IT environments. All are interoperable with Artix, IONA’s commercial SOA infrastructure.
When it announced that it had acquired LogicBlaze, IONA leaned heavily on the fact that the deal included SOA heavy hitters Hiram Chirino, Rob Davies and James Strachan, who have impressive resumes and were undoubtedly key to IONA’s support strategy with the new FUSE products.
IONA said at the time “LogicBlaze’s employees are respected experts in the open source community, and are key contributors to the most popular open-source projects related to SOA, including Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix.”
Does the latest announcement mean that IONA is dumping Celtix in favor of the FUSE ESB? That’s the question that Jason Stamper of Computer Business Review Online put to Larry Alston, IONA’s general manager of open source. It’s just the opposite, Alston told Stamper:
“To say that would be plain wrong. Celtix had become CXF in Apache, and CXF is one of the underpinning projects in FUSE, too. If anything, we’re fusing Celtix and LogicBlaze.”
The assemblage of these components rationalizes and streamlines the open source SOA approach that IONA is banking on to grow its traditional and the emerging SOA businesses. The components provide an on-ramp for a variety of types of users, developers, and architects. The variety of offerings allows flexibility on adoption paths, to find the right fit for SOA infrastructure, while leveraging the benefits of an Apache open source license and community.
IONA FUSE consists of:
- FUSE ESB — Based on the Apache ServiceMix project, FUSE ESB is built on the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification.
- FUSE Message Broker — Based on the Apache ActiveMQ project, FUSE Message Broker is a JMS-oriented messaging platform.
- FUSE Services Framework — Based on the Apache CXF project and formally known as the Celtix Advanced Service Engine, the FUSE Services Framework is designed for service creation, integration and reuse of technical and business service components.
- FUSE Mediation Router — Built upon the Plain Old Java Object (POJO)-based Apache Camel project, FUSE Mediation Router provides a lightweight, rules-based and transport-neutral routing and mediation engine that leverages Enterprise Integration Patterns.
IONA is also offering several support models at different pricing levels, ranging from 8/5 technical support to 24/7 support for enterprise mission-critical projects in production, and also ranging from per-incident pricing to unlimited support.
A new Website for the FUSE community — open.iona.com — features user forums, wikis, tutorials, sample applications, and documentation for spurring on FUSE adoption. The site also features downloads, access to tooling, and early access to additional project code.
Disclosure: IONA is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect B2B podcasts.
by Dana Gardner
July 10, 2007 at 7:46 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Videos
Unaccustomed as I am to reviewing animated short features, the latest installment of “Greg the Architect” squarely tackles the confusion many enterprises encounter over SOA.
Throughout the clip we are left hanging on an emotional cliff, trying to decide if Greg can focus on SOA rather than be overcome by myriad nonsensical distractions from vendors and industry analysts. [I'll drop the price of that ROI assessment to $9k and guarantee delivery in 14 months.]
Greg the Architect is a creation of TIBCO Software. In the latest installment, “Focus Pocus,” Greg, a long-suffering enterprise architect, desperately needs a vacation, but he’s sidetracked by Jerry, the CIO, and dragged to a SOA conference at the Biscotti Center.
I don’t want to reveal the thrilling conclusion, but let’s just say it involves a colleague, a small mountain of turgid white papers, and a clever subterfuge by our hero, Greg.
In Focus Pocus, Greg’s performance comes across a little stiff, although that may have a lot to do with the fact that all characters are portrayed by GI Joe-type action figures (Thunderbirds?).
Enterprise architects may see themselves as a little more flexible than that. If the producers want to win over architects, claymation may be the way to go (Gumby?). Let the architect bend a little to adapt to the situation. And your little pony, too.
Greg started out as part of the SOA Now Journal, also produced by TIBCO, and he now has his own Web site (fan club?), where viewers can see past episodes and download “fun stuff.” A social SOA network in the making.
Perhaps TIBCO should consider a virtual reality game where users could put Greg through some grueling IT paces, sort of like Toontown Online meets Second Life meets the corridor outside a typical CIO’s office. Flying white papers that land anywhere but on your head would cost 20 life points. Data cleansing stations could renew his energy. The registry/repository lounge could be where text messages are shared with end users. The player with the shortest requirements list at the end wins. [No charge for that consulting, BTW.]
by Dana Gardner
July 9, 2007 at 10:08 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Podcasts, SOA, SaaS, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, innovator interviews, mashups
Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: Cape Clear Software.
Take SOA and SaaS to their natural maturation and adding more interoperability and integration into the online services mix becomes inevitable. When standardized services come from a variety of sources, then a variety of means to connect them makes more sense, too.
So when will we see the first signs of integration as a service?The answer, it turns out, is now.
As the use of Enterprise 2.0 mashups sweeps the IT industry, the concept of converging enterprise services has expanded to hosted munging of business applications and back-office functions.
Why not then extend SOA itself by embracing more integration services that help vendors, ISVs, and service providers bring more elements of business processes together, too?
The budding notion of “integration-as-a-service” allows enterprise business leaders to “shop around” for their services, regardless of hosting, and opens up the prospect for a thriving new ecology of services and integration models for mission-critical activities … not just for maps and widgets. The advancement to SOA for many companies may well be accelerated by more choices on means of on-demand connections, both inside and outside the organization’s own IT boundaries.
I recently conducted a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion with Annrai O’Toole, CEO of Cape Clear Software, on the eye-opening prospects for integration as a service. Early adopters are already outsourcing aspects of integration.
The implications are staggering: Business operators and entrepreneurs create and amend complex processes and workflows through a simple point and click interface that prompts integration that’s executed on someone else’s infrastructure. Pay by the use or general subscription. Retain control over data and ID management.
Here are some excerpts from the discussion:
A couple of factors are driving this. First, it’s the whole technology maturity thing. Six or seven years ago, the standards around Web services were in their infancy, and people didn’t have a lot of experience with them. Because they were young, unproven, untested, and lacking in key bits of functionality, people didn’t really want to go there. Technology is one element of it, but there are a few more important elements driving it as well.
One is a secular trend toward simplicity and flexibility. At some levels, this has been driven by teams through virtualization. Storage and processing power are being very quickly virtualized. Applications are being virtualized, with software-as-a-service, on demand. There is a long-term shift by customers, who are saying, “We don’t want to own complex infrastructure anymore. We’ve been there, and done that. We want something else.”
We had an RFP come in – and this isn’t all that unusual – from someone looking to do a big SOA initiative. It was – and I’m not joking — a 111-page RFP.
Customers look at the choices available to them, and say, “Do we want to do all this big SOA integration on our own by buying these complex things, or are we prepared to look at alternatives? And, do those alternatives have any reality?” They do, and many companies are shying away from these big, complex initiatives.
You can sit in a room with a bunch of executives, both from the business and IT segments and, say, “Hosted integration is a good idea,” and they’ll know that. We’ve got some proof points around it. Most notably, one of our marquee customers in the software-as-a-service base is Workday. The PeopleSoft founders got together to rebuild an ERP application, but this time on a hosted basis. Read the rest of this entry »
BriefingsDirect podcast discussion with Annrai O'Toole, CEO of Cape Clear Software [41:15m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download (634)
by Dana Gardner
July 8, 2007 at 11:01 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Podcasts, SOA, Web 2.0, guest commentary, mashups
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
How good of a match-up was the recent Software AG acquisition of WebMethods? Was is strictly a geographical sales force synergy? Or will webMethods become the de facto R&D arm of Software AG while the parent firm’s legacy cash flow sustains the movement toward SOA? Are the mutual product sets well aligned to provide a fuller SOA suite offering? All of the above?
We posed these and other questions to our panel of independent IT industry analysts in a recent BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition roundtable podcast discussion. We also delve into the ongoing heavy-breathing between SOA and Web 2.0. Should governance by done by wikis, for example? Is this mashup of SOA and Web 2.0 a weekend dalliance? Or a love affair for life?
Lastly, we sink our collective analyst teeth into the notion that SOA — gasp! — is being hyped too much. Some of us actually thing the opposite.
So set your SOA compass to “I” for insights and join us for another 50-minute discussion. Feel free to listen, subscribe via iTunes (search on BriefingsDirect), or peruse the full transcript.
Not a SOA junkie? Well then just take a peek at some of the highlights here.
Our analyst panel for this edition of the podcasts consists of noted IT industry analysts and practitioners Steve Garone, Joe McKendrick, Jim Kobielus, Tony Baer, and Todd Biske. I was your host and moderator.
Here are some excerpts:
On SAG-webMethods …
I think that webMethods has been looking for an exit strategy for some time, because basically they’re trying to build up their SOA platform story. The fact is that large corporate customers are going to be nervous with a $200 million company. They’re probably a lot more comfortable with a company that’s closer to one billion, if they’re looking for a platform play.
One of the challenges that will be before Software AG, and I think an indicator as to whether they are successfully getting the message out to their customers, is how they handle this transition with BPM. Obviously, having an internal product is going to be a lot more attractive than having to partner for it.
It’s pretty clear that from a geographic standpoint it’s very complementary. Actually, it’s more complementary from a product standpoint than many there have been there willing take credit for. Software AG … is very strong on legacy modernization of the whole mainframe-based setup products for development, databases, and so forth.
WebMethods is very strong on integration, BPM, and the whole SOA stack registries. There is some redundancy with Software AG’s products, such as the whole Crossvision Suite, but I think that from a technological standpoint webMethods is stronger on BPM, the repository, and all of those SOA components than the company that’s acquiring it. There definitely are a lot of synergies there.
So, you’re saying that webMethods is ahead of its time, and Software AG might be behind the times, and so together they are going to be on time?
This smacks of a good sales and channel match-up, and they might run webMethods as a subsidiary for some time. Then there’s also this balance-sheet issue, where Software AG has recurring revenue. It’s got an old cash cow to continue to milk, and that gives webMethods an opportunity to be funded and financed — without the vagaries of a quarterly report to Wall Street — to pursue the larger brass ring here, which is SOA.
On SOA and Web 2.0 mashups …
Let’s just leave the Web 2.0 definition off the table and look at the issue of any of these new activities, whether it’s social networking or rich Internet application interfaces or whether it’s taking advantage of more semantics and BPEL as a process relating to Web activities instead of just as a publishing medium. Let’s just say, “All of the above” for defining Web 2.0 and how this relates to SOA.
Gee, maybe wikis would be a good concept for how people manage their SOA services. It’s sort of an open source, open collaboration approach to policy and use of services and their agreements.
Wikis and the whole Web 2.0 repertoire of collaborative tools can be very valuable in this upfront design, modeling, simulation, and shoot-the-breeze aspects that are critically necessary for design time. But runtime SOA governance really depends on clear-cut policies, designs, data definitions, and so forth that have been handed down by the policy gurus, and now are governing ongoing operations without ambiguity.
In that case, you don’t necessarily want any Joe Blow to be able to overwrite the policies and the business rules that are guiding the ongoing monitoring, management control, or security of your SOA. Read the rest of this entry »
Recent BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition roundtable podcast discussion [53:43m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download (743)
