Archive for SaaS
by Joe McKendrick
November 2, 2007 at 11:46 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Podcasts, SOA, SaaS, Web 2.0
“They’ve turned SOA into a huge infrastructure project that takes years to come to fruition, and in the meantime, the business people don’t get much of a look at what’s going on. In a way, Web 2.0 is the business peoples’ revenge.”
-Phil Wainewright
EbizQ’s Krissi Danielsson has published a great overview of my panel discussion with industry luminaries Phil Wainewright and Dana Gardner on “SOA and Web 2.0: Mashups, SaaS, and Collaboration: Putting the Pieces Together.”
Dana and Phil agreed to disagree on the speed of the Web 2.0 and SOA convergence — Dana sees the two paradigms as “complementary,” and noted that many of the Web 2.0 techniques around rapid front-end application development can be considered a form of “Guerrilla SOA.”
Phil, however, cautions that Web 2.0 may be too uncontrolled and ungovernable to blend in with more deliberate and planned SOA methodologies. “I think it’ll be a few years before Web 2.0 and SOA really coexist,” Wainewright said. “Web 2.0 is so ill defined and people are still using it to experiment rather than with a definitive purpose.”
Both Phil and Dana agree that the combined forces of SOA and Web 2.0 will be tremendous market disruptors.
Perhaps SOA and Web 2.0 can both be categorized as Web-Oriented Architecture, or WOA. Dana put it best when he suggested that WOA perhaps should be called “Watercooler-Oriented Architecture.” After all, is this not where the REAL communication and information gets exchanged within organizations? “The social nature of Web 2.0 technologies tends to increase the sharing of experiences and wisdom as well, almost making a Waterfountain Oriented Architecture, ” Dana pointed out.
My Web 2.0-SOA panel discussion, as well as the other eight sessions that were part of the “SOA in Action” conference, are archived for on-demand listening here. (Free registration required.)
by Rob Paterson
October 23, 2007 at 3:38 pm · Filed under
Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, Michael Yon, Public Media, SaaS, Social Media, SocialText, War, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Thanks to a reader – Rob Lantz – I have discovered the Ernie Pyle of our time.
[photopress:yon_featuredimage_1.jpg,full,centered]
His name is Michael Yon. Michael works for no paper and lives off donations. He is writing the most compelling material of the conflict in Iraq.
Here is a taste – gripping and so human – so different from CNN
Off course the official Army hates him – but as you can see by this article – the guys love him. He is a real warrior, was in the Special Forces, who can pick up a weapon when it all goes wrong as it does in this story.
What’s really like on the ground for both US Troops – now moved out of the Green Zone and into the community – and for the Iraqis who live there – what do both really need from each other? Here Yon shows us a view not seen before by “Real” journalists who read the press releases in the Green Zone.
Without a paper behind him – he can tell the truth. The more we can publicize his work the more the truth can be told – a glimpse of the “Paper” of the future?
by George Dearing
August 4, 2007 at 9:54 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Web 2.0
If you’re not, take a look at a recent document I received from Scott Niesen, head marketer at Attensa. If you don’t know Attensa, you’re in for a treat. Their new feedreader tool sits nicely inside Outlook and brings a unique spin to feed reading via their “River of News” view and AttentionStream™ technology.
“Through ongoing analysis of AttentionStream™ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, Attensa displays feeds in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader. Subscriptions can be displayed in a “River of News” view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds”
And Scott and I had a good exchange about sharing some of Attensa’s inner RSS workings. When I told him I should just blog the whole document, he quickly fired back, that “marketing is all about experiments and a little risk.”
Well said.
Cross-posted on WOW Feed
by Joe McKendrick
July 31, 2007 at 5:40 pm · Filed under
Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Mashups, SaaS, Web 2.0
All major technology projects require a Return on Investment calculation that presumably shows the company making more money as a result of the implementation than it put into it. Of course, the “hard-dollar” numbers make for an easier sell to the C-level executives.
The problem with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, of course, is that the benefits delivered are “soft” benefits; there are few examples of hard numbers to show ROI.
New research out of Forrester says these hard numbers are hard to come by. (InformationWeek report here, InfoWorld report here.)
As I noted in a previous post, the vice president of engineering of Google and the CIO of McKesson both acknowledged at a recent presentation that Web 2.0 is, at this stage, unmeasurable — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t delivering value to the organization.
The Forrester report acknowledges as much, noting that there have been some tangible business benefits seen, such as a drop in support center calls because of rich Internet applications or a database system replaced by a corporate wiki. But the greatest advantages are seen in softer benefits, such as business efficiency and competitive advantage.
Forrester’s survey of 275 executives finds that 63 percent of those surveyed use total cost of ownership, ROI, or internal rate of return to measure the value of Web 2.0 tools.
The executives rank instant messaging as having the most value to their organizations. At the bottom of the list is blogging. IM was rated by 37 percent as delivering “substantial value,” while only 11 percent rated blogging as such.
One potential flaw in the study (at least from what the articles say) is that it limited its area of study to RSS, podcasting, wikis, social networks or blogs. These are the important communication tools of Web 2.0.
However, it would be interesting to see a study of the perceived value of the information processing platforms engendered through Web 2.0 — such as mashups or Software as a Service. Are executives having more success determining hard-dollar ROI from these approaches?
by Dana Gardner
July 30, 2007 at 8:29 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Mashups, Open Source, SOA, SaaS, Web 2.0
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.
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