Archive for guest commentary
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)
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
by Dana Gardner
May 29, 2007 at 9:03 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Podcasts, Social Computing, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, guest commentary, innovator interviews
Reports in The Economist, New York Times, and PC World point to a stunning lurch in the sophistication and reach of recent nefarious online attacks. And the initial sniff test pulls up a whiff of state or large-scale organization sponsorship and support of these events.
They may well be a bellwether of what to expect. These are likely not loosely aligned hackers, but outright strategic aggression designed to influence politics and the behaviors of nations and large corporations.
As many of these articles allude to, the attacks problem will not get any better until the basic architecture and governance of the Internet technologies themselves are addressed. Band-Aids on 1,000 cuts only propels the ongoing Spy vs. Spy gamesmanship — only the stakes are fast escalating.
And so with that I dust off a sponsored conversation I had last year with Akamai Technologies co-founder and chief scientist, Professor Tom Leighton. In it he pretty much predicts — nearly a year ago — what we’re now seeing. His prescriptions are not easy, but they increasingly seem necessary. Read the transcript, or listen to the podcast.
Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect B2B discussions on the Internet and society.
Akamai's Leighton on cyber security [28:22m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download (1673)
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
by Dana Gardner
May 20, 2007 at 8:42 pm · Filed under
Enterprise Software, Podcasts, SOA, guest commentary
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
IBM helped the Eclipse Foundation score a huge hit with the Eclipse development framework and community. Now the software engineering target is even higher, but the methods and approaches are similar.
IBM will in June will unveil details about its Jazz framework and community for automation and governance of complex, collaborative application development processes. IBM will make elements of the Jazz community open, as well as interlace new Rational, Lotus, WebSphere and Tivoli products with Jazz.
Jazz is an innovation technology project by IBM Rational and IBM Research designed to help globally and organizationally dispersed development teams automate more of the development and deployment lifecycle. The goal is to integrate and automate among many back-end aspects of development to provide real-time information for managing projects, including those for services oriented architecture (SOA).
Not all the details on this major application lifecycle management update are out, but I had an in-depth interview on Jazz with Scott Hebner, the vice president for marketing and strategy for IBM Rational Software, that highlights the importance of Jazz for IBM, as well as a much larger development community and vendor ecosystem.
Here are some excerpts:
Jazz is a major investment by IBM to create an innovative, collaborative software development technology base. It will not only will drive the evolution of our product for future years, but it’s also going to drive the evolution of many elements of the marketplace.
Jazz is being brought to us by the team that helped to lead Eclipse. What they are trying to do now is automate the lessons of this proven, open-collaborative model that Eclipse represents. And so I think we have learned a lot about how to facilitate collaboration.
Eclipse did a lot on the client side, the user side, to integrate the desktop. You can think of Jazz as being a similar approach, but on the back end — or the server side — where the teams need to have the same ability to collaborate more effectively and to gain integration.
I think Tivoli is another important element here, in that, when we talk about lifecycle management in governance, that doesn’t stop at the delivery of the software that flows into your operational state. And many of the change requests that get created actually occur in an operational setting — from a user, for example. Right now there is a lot of labor cost associated with getting that change into the software development process, and to the requirements.
The more we can automate that and create collaboration that extends beyond just this core software development team, the more you can address labor costs and help customers in a broader notion of managing the lifecycle of their projects. And not only in delivering productions, but also in operations. Think of it as one massive lifecycle. This is the way it should be, right?
A part of the value of this technology is going to be greater collaboration and visibility into the process of software delivery. As I said before, you may have people that are part of broader teams in different time zones, different countries. They may be in different organizations in other companies that you are outsourcing to. And you want to be able to manage that as an integrated project, gain a lifecycle view of it. Then you will be able to manage it much more effectively, to get all those geographically distributed people in the projects to actually work together.
There is going to need to be some degree of hosting and Web access around Web 2.0 clients, or Eclipse clients, or whatever it may be. And if you think about that, in many ways it’s almost an internal software-as-a-service model.
The idea here is that you have visibility and gain collaboration into the software development process. And so what are some of the key value points that this technology will provide to customers?
I’ll tell you. The first one is that it will enable development teams to collaborate in real time, in the context of the work they are doing, and especially in globally diverse environments. The second thing is it enables projects to be managed more effectively by providing visibility into accurate, real-time project health information, effectively drawn from the actual work that’s going on. Obviously, there is a lot of reporting that goes around that.
Building on that, it automates traceability and auditibility my managing the artifacts and/or inter-relationships — across the lifecycle, which, as I was saying before, empowers the teams to deliver more value. So you don’t have to worry about managing auditibility issues and traceability.
The system will do it for the development teams. And, finally, I think the final key piece of value here is that Jazz provides a customizable process design enactment, a kind of capability for rules-based process guidance. It becomes a lot easier to automate, to find check points. It allows you to enact processes that take on the unique characteristics of how a team has been operating. It kind of evolves and changes and learns from what works and what doesn’t work. This is a very Agile, real-time, collaborative kind of model.
I look at it sometimes and I think, Is this going to enable a developer portal? Is it going to enable a business-process engine for software delivery in lifecycle management? Or is it an integration infrastructure for the different products and services that make up what customers think of as lifecycle management?
The truth of the matter is that it’s all three. It’s not just a portal. It’s not just a process engine. And it’s not just integration infrastructure. I think it’s really all three integrated together, optimized for software delivery in helping development teams collaborate more effectively. Again, keep in mind that Jazz is a technology infrastructure. It’s a base of technology that will then be used to infuse new capabilities, new integration and new value into our current portfolio.
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Listeners or readers of this podcast are invited to learn more about sponsored B2B podcasts.
Sneak Peek at IBM's Jazz [37:54m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download (511)
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
by Dana Gardner
April 3, 2007 at 9:50 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, guest commentary
Now that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is percolating up inside enterprises — sometimes as a set of strategic initiatives, but more often as discrete pilot projects — the human resources needs are surfacing along with it. If you’ve got the right stuff, the budding role of SOA architect could be a rocket for your career.
A large part of the conceptual definition of SOA requires groups, departments and individuals that used to do their own thing to now do a new collaborative thing. And that new thing often needs to be broadly organized, managed-governed — so the whole amounts to more than the sum of the disjointed parts.
Into this cultural and political shift toward more cooperation, improvement, sharing and “playing nice,” the coalescing definition of the SOA architect must emerge. Whereas IT architects often set broad and rather dictatorial edicts on what products and technologies may be used — and then enforce the purity of the data center against those edicts — the SOA architect has a much different role to play, based on early attempts to define the job.
Now, I’m sure this never happens at your company, but I’ve heard stories of software engineers, systems administrators, IT managers, data center operators, developers — and even users — who will nod their bobble-heads at new, feel-good initiatives like SOA (as it may appear to some). But then, in their actual work habits, they’ll just go right on doing what they like most, find familiar and have always done, usually without much focus on the other groups around them. I know it sounds ludicrous that people would behave this way, but it does actually happen.
And so in order to make significant changes in how people work, and use and extend technology, a great deal of selling and cajoling must be done — for a long time, with constant pressure. That’s change management on the human scale. A great deal of will power and leadership charisma will be required to make inroads toward SOA benefits.
This means that the architects of SOA must be as much evangelists and consensus-builders as technologists. They must be trusted and absolutely respected. Pointy-haired bosses ala Dilbert need not apply.
SOA architects must also balance short-term business outcomes with longer-term objectives aimed at maintaining quality and maximizing IT value. Too often architecture has been focused on discrete initiatives or infrastructure projects, such as server architecture or network architecture, rather than the broader IT perspective.
There also needs to be some standardization around methodology so that SOA architects act with common approaches. Otherwise, SOAs will lack interoperability outside the company walls, foiling extended-enterprise initiatives and nifty benefits like supply chain and distribution network efficiencies and automation.
Given this rather demanding job description, several standards groups and consortiums (and some vendors, too) are beginning to build structure around the evolving definition of SOA architect. You can get Oracle-certified, you can get Microsoft-certified and IBM-certified. Where do you go to become SOA architect-certified?
You won’t find them trained in the universities. I’ve talked to lots of people who say, “Yeah, we look at the computer science graduates coming up, but how many of these people really have had any training or courses whatsoever on broad architectural subjects like SOA?”
Here are places to look for understanding of the concept of SOA architect, and where certification and/or training resources can be found:
- The SOA Consortium was formed in February as a new advocacy group of end users, service providers and IT vendors to help the Global 1000 to adopt SOA.
- The Open Group in January unveiled an accredited professional association for Enterprise Architects to augment its certification programs around The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and the IT Architect Certification (ITAC) program.
- The Open SOA Collaboration group is defining a language-neutral programming model for enterprise developers based around Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO), and offers many resources.
SOA demands skilled people who are inspirational IT and business leaders with technical acumen and deep experience in the vertical business issues. It seems high-level developers may fit the bill as well as anyone.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
by Carl Frappaolo
March 29, 2007 at 1:52 pm · Filed under
Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, guest commentary
guest commentary
Let me start this entry by stating that I am one of the biggest advocates of Enterprise 2.0. I have written numerous opinion pieces on the powers of the Internet and the capabilities of tools such as SNA, KM, search etc. Nonetheless, I have to say that as I sat through many of the presentations at Fast Forward and read many of the entries in this blog I cannot help but feel that many are drinking the Kool Aid.
What am I speaking about? Well, many of the presentations and blog entries speak of Web 2.0 as unprecedented capability that will revolutionize business forever. I cannot help but recall how “web 1.0″ was touted as doing this (does anyone remember vortals?), along with numerous other revolutions - e-mail, EDI, groupware, KM, to name but a few - and I do mean just a few.
The powers of online collaboration, new approaches to search and content intelligence are powerful. But their powers are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Furthermore, they do not change most of the basic tenets of human psychology and business management (in this regard I side with Tom Davenport - see Experts Agree to Disagree). It is naive to think that Web 2.0 will take off all on its own, as so many other blog entries and Fast Forward presenters would have us believe. Indeed, this very blog site has a leader, orchestrated contributors, and a policy statement . Their role is not heavy handed, but it is there nonetheless. Any community needs an individual responsible for activity, ethics and relevancy. To allow truly free collaboration is negligent (I am speaking here of corporate blogs, not those blogs that are nothing more than the inane ramblings of “anyone”. Corporations need only look at e-mail and the degree to which it has complicated legal discovery to begin to understand the impact that blogs can have. I have worked with many regulated industries (e.g. pharmaceutical, defense), that share an implied culture of “watch what you write - not what you say.” The spoken word (not recorded) cannot come back to haunt you. But the written word, whether on paper or a blog, can. Business blogs need to be monitored. Rules need to be imposed. When I suggested this at an working luncheon at Fast Forward, someone challenged me stating “you do not trust your own employees.” How naive. Breaches in security, propriety and confidentiality come intentionally and accidentally. More importantly, we must ask ourselves, are corporate blogs records? Of course they are. Therefore they warrant the same scrutiny and management that any other potential corporate record does.
Perhaps this is why McAfee states “enterprises have to be convinced that the technologies are iron-clad secure and scalable.”
Secondly, and equally as important, corporations that want to maximize the return on Web 2.0 technologies need to control their introduction and availability, lest the “ugly portal in need of a taxonomy beast” raises its ugly head again. Consider this blog site. An individual new to the community may never fully appreciate the depth of knowledge that has been captured here. Navigation is limited to groupings by month and author. Contextual search is a feature that is difficult to “discover”. The power of the search tool is limited. It does not provide half of the functionality that was touted at Fast Forward. Web 2.0 technologies need to be orchestrated as part of an overall Information architecture, on an ongoing basis. As the needs and focus of the community change, so too should the blog site.
Analysts and technology providers that promise the powers of Web 2.0 without simtultaneously exposing the “dark side” – the need to align to corporate culture, to monitor and manage, to design and tactically deploy, do the market a great disservice.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
