How do you define an 'Enterprise App Store'?

Lately everyone here at JackBe have been very focused on the latest edition of Presto and all it's cool App and App Store features. We've hosted lots of webcasts, given tons of demos, briefed a lot of the media. And while I admit a certain bias, I think Presto 3.0 with its emphasis on user-driven Enterprise Apps and a user-centric Enterprise App Store has been well received.

But Apoorv Durga, the Portal and Web Content Analyst at CMS Watch, recently wrote 'JackBe's App Store is interesting but not new'. He's not wrong, exactly, but I think he's missed the point. He emphasizes that 'App Stores' can deliver great 'time to market' through reusability and ease-of-use (I agree!) but then quickly condemns most past/present products on these qualities. And that's where I think Presto 3.0 really is different.

In my last post I talked about how Presto 3.0 provides all the necessary tools and infrastructure to create Enterprise Apps and Mashups. We made every step of the 'Enterprise App Lifecyle' easier, from the beginning (secure registration of Mashable information sources), to the middle (easy and secure creation of Mashups), to the end (creation of Enterprise Apps from your Mashups/Mashables. And what I promised at the end of that post was more gory detail on what happens AFTER the Apps are made. In other words, the Enterprise App Store.

I've decided to define an Enterprise App Store for you by example. Where do Apps go after they are made? How do users use them? How do user shares them? I'd like to give you a guided tour of the Presto 3.0 Enterprise App Store and ultimately I hope you'll agree that the Presto App Store is like the Portal 'App Stores' (in Apoorv's article) as much as my car is like my kid's bicycle: similar in intent, fundamentally different in design and implementation.

Submitting Apps: Apps get into the Presto 3.0 Enterprise App Store very simply. Apps are created by power users or developers and then submitted to the App Store Manager for publishing to the Store. Anyone who has permissions to create an App can submit it, but only the App Store Manager (there can be 1 or more persons in this role) is authorized to allow an App into the App Store.

This is a very important step in the App lifecycle, I believe. As one banking enterprise architect put it, the Store Manager 'keeps your App Store clean and safe'. Your enterprise can set the guidelines and standards that App creators and submitters must follow to successfully publish an App to your enterprise App Store. If the App Store Manager decides an App is not ready, for whatever reason, they can send the App back to the creator with comments for further development or modification. Once these issues have been successfully addressed, App creators can resubmit their Apps for consideration to be published to the App Store.

Using Apps: What can you do with Apps in the App Store? Once you find an interesting App, if you have the right permissions, you can instantly use it. You can work with any number of Apps simultaneously at any time. Every App you open is shown in the 'Open Apps' gallery, and we maintain the state of all open Apps so that you can multitask and switch back and forth between Apps without losing your data. Once you are done using an App, you can close it.

Making Apps Personal: If you like an App and anticipate using it frequently, you can add it to the 'My Apps' gallery in the App Store. My Apps lets you add your own twist to the App: customize the App with you own settings (login information, colors, search parameters, etc.) for your very own personalized App. A single App can become dozens of customized Apps for region, data ranges, subjects or whatever parameter(s) you want to personalize.

Sharing Apps: What about sharing? You can easily share an App with other users in the App Store. You can also share with others outside the App Store via email or instant messaging. You can also rate, tag and send comments to the App creator.

Embedding Apps in other sites: You can put your App in other webpages. You get the embed code for an App and stick it into your iGoogle page or your Wiki or web page or even your portal server. You can also publish Apps from the App Store to your Microsoft SharePoint instance as native Web Parts. The point is, you can deliver the App to where the users work and need it - in their wiki, portal, web page, SharePoint, etc. on their desktop, mobile phones, iPads, etc.

Making the Apps secure: All the Apps published in the App Store are secured by authentication and authorization policies configured in Presto by your security expert. Every App can be configured to provide universal access or, if configured, to require the user to authenticate themselves. This can help provide Apps with contextual data or capabilities, if needed. Furthermore, all the data sources consumed by the Apps are protected via Presto security for authentication and authorization. Sharing is secure as well, rest assured. Even if you share an App with me, unless I have the correct permissions, I won't be allowed to actually use the App.

So, do I think this is a typical App Store? Not in the slightest. The Apps aren't made, shared, or used by IT with the business people in mind. The business people are the makers, the sharers, and the users. This empowering model is one I've rarely seen formalized in the way Presto does. And that's the part I think Apoorv missed in his post. I am sure that once he gets his hands on Presto, he will surely come to notice all these differences that make our App Store a whole lot different than just a portal server or a gadget server trying to be an App Store.

However, I do agree with Apoorv that, by adopting an Enterprise App Store, you enhance your organization's time to market. What's different here is that you can harness and unleash the power of your end users with domain knowledge and let them solve their business needs with self-made or self-discovered Enterprise Apps. And your Enterprise App Store can be the last mile to get the data and new functionality to your users when they need it, where they need it, and how they need it!

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What Would Steve Jobs Do In My Place?

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."

-Steve Jobs

While growing up every kid wanted to ‘be like Mike’ (Michael Jordan that is). For a while even I had the dream. It took me a little while to figure out that a 5’11” guy who spent his youth playing soccer had almost zero possibilities of picking up a basketball at 16 and being the next Jordan. Alas, I had to come back to reality.

Now it seems that everyone in the business world wants to be ‘like Steve’ – Steve Jobs that is. As the iconic leader of Apple, Steve seems to get it right all-of-the-time (OK, almost all-of-the-time). He isn’t just a visionary who foresees a need and fills it. He creates products that fundamentally change people’s behaviors and creates demand, in essence creating new markets. Steve is a kind of modern corporate hero who, through his determination and vision, has taken-on companies much larger than his and has come-out way ahead. And if that isn’t enough, the guy is COOL too.

His company’s list of firsts goes way back. Steve and Co. created the modern PC market when Apple introduced the Apple II in 1977 and the first GUI OS in the Macintosh in 1984. But it’s his most recent accomplishment that I find the most interesting. More recently he has created order in two of the most disjointed industries in the world – the music and the mobile phone industries– by engineering some of the most brilliant and user-friendly products in the world: the iPod and iPhone. In fact, he is now creating new markets and gaining more fans the same way, by offering the revolutionary iPad!

But as much as I admire Steve, I have always thought that he is far more in-tune with the consumer space and I had never considered that his ideas would be applicable in the enterprise world. So it was somewhat of a surprise to me that, upon performing an analysis of the enterprise software world where our customers live, I realized that the challenges in this world were so large and so disjointed that only a Jobs-ian solution would suffice to make it better. I decided we needed to be like Steve.

Let me describe the enterprise world as I see it and some of the challenges my customers tell me about every day:

- User’s demands for personalized information or reports continues to grow,
- Datasets that exist in unconnected internal, external and cloud systems are exploding is depth and breadth,
- IT budgets are shrinking and IT backlogs are growing,
- Market conditions are chaotic, with neck-snapping changes in information needs,
- Security and governance concerns grow with every public data breach.

In short, business has to deal with more information than ever at a faster pace and the traditional support offered to it by the IT group is shrinking or non-existent. Can you imagine being asked to make effective, timely decisions in this kind of chaos? It’s tough and it will only getting tougher!

In order to keep-up, organizations have dealt with this chaotic environment by attempting to make IT more agile and responsive through the use of different approaches, such as: SOA, Agile Development, Virtualization or Cloud computing, to name a few. The thought is that, by making IT more agile, the business user would be better served.

But the people implementing these solutions forgot to account for the fact that the velocity of change has made it nearly impossible to respond to the overwhelming demands from the business. So, even when IT becomes more agile, the queue of requests for custom reports or dashboards continues to grow. Alone, none of these approaches can fully deliver on the promise of enabling responsiveness for the enterprise.

So we got to thinking that the Jobs-like solution in the enterprise would be to turn the tables and make business users part of the solution instead of seeing them as ‘the folks IT creates software for’. Why not let business users create their own Apps that access and mashup data from legacy systems and the Web? And why not let them share those Apps with others to use them through an ‘App Store’?


And so I am proud to say that the latest release of JackBe's Enterprise Mashup Platform, Presto 3.0, is delivering on that idea. Presto now powers Enterprise App Stores (an App Store inside your Enterprise) that allows business users to create Enterprise Apps both visually and programmatically and then share them. This certainly is not the only improvement/enhancement to Presto in our latest release but the easy-to-use App-making tooling and the easy-to-use App Store are the most visible aspects of our end-user empowerment.

I like to think about our Enterprise App Store in a way I imagine Steve would think of it (if he were focused on the enterprise)…I can even see him on stage giving this speech: “We are being pressed to get the enterprise software industry to push more power, choice and freedom to the business” he would say. He would then announce that “We have created an easy to use App Store front that is easy enough for a CEO to use and in addition we offer the tools to allow the individual’s power to be used for their own benefit and the benefit of others.”

I am very happy that our Presto Enterprise App Store will empower our current (and future) customer and give them the power to create and freedom to choose Apps that help them respond to today's rapidly changing business environment.

Thank you for the help, Steve!

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Introducing Presto 3.0: Freedom & Power for the User

You might have heard that version 3.0 of Presto, our award-winning enterprise mashup platform, was announced just last week. The driving design premise of this release of Presto was simple but challenging: Organizations want to harvest and unleash the creativity of their ‘business developers’ and enhance the effectiveness and productivity of their end user communities. This is what you, our customers, partners and community members, told us.

With that in mind we focused on bringing enterprise data ‘out of hiding’, so to speak, by putting it in the hands of the users, while still adhering to enterprise IT architecture standards for security, governance, portability, and integration. I am happy and excited that most of the new features and enhancements that made their way into Presto 3.0 emphasize and support this goal.

Now that the product is launched, I thought some of you would appreciate a recap of some of the most important innovations in Presto 3.0. Here's my list of the biggest and the best. I'll leave it up to you to decide how we responded to your needs...

-Tripling your power: You wanted more powerful capabilities in Wires, our visual drag-and-drop mashup maker. We enhanced our current blocks, and are introducing several new power packed blocks for easier mashing and leveraging the underlying features of the mashup platform. We went from 7 blocks in Presto 2.7 to around 25 blocks in our new version of Wires! New blocks include: Loop, Document, Select, Group, Document, CSV Generator, Data Decorator, Transformer, Mapper, Average, Counter, and more.

-Making you richer: You wanted rich visual views on your Mashups. So we reengineered our product to provide lots of rich visualizations out of the box, and let you apply to them your mashups to create ‘Apps’ (we used to call these ‘Mashlets’). The result is a wizard-driven ‘App Maker’ with lots of rich viewing options that can be configured with no coding. And more of these visualizations will be added in the near future.

-Helping you connect the dots: You wanted easier way to create collections of related Apps and even quickly wire Apps together to create a sophisticated integrated multi-App workspace. We are introducing Mashboard, a powerful drag and drop web based environment to assemble and wire several Apps, again with no coding necessary to make it all happen.

-Letting you get under the hood: If you should need to customize these Apps, whether created using the wizard-driven App Maker or the powerful drag-and-drop Mashboard, you can simply open any App in a new web based App Editor, and edit your App specification, CSS, JavaScript, HTML. The App Editor also allows you to upload and download complete Apps as a package, so you can further customize and code in your own favorite tools (Sencha, Aptana, Dreamweaver, XCode, etc).

-Helping you build bridges: You wanted to mashup Microsoft SharePoint lists and to share your Apps by way of SharePoint. We’ve introduced a new add-on called Mashup Sites for SharePoint which allows you to do just that: consume SharePoint lists into your mashups and to publish our Apps back to SharePoint as native WebParts. You can read more about this in Dan’s post from a few weeks back.

-Making it simple to get around: You wanted an integrated experience with an easy-to-use user interface, instead of myriad of disconnected tools and utilities. We present you the Presto Hub, which integrates all the different tools and components of Presto into a centralized location.

-Giving you more choices: You wanted more easier way to develop, test and publish mashups. Many of you found the jump from visually mashing up in Wires to coding EMML in our Eclipse-based Mashup Studio, a bit too high. So to make it easier and quicker to develop most of your EMML-driven mashups, we are introducing a new web based EMML Mashup Editor ‘lite’. Our Mashup Studio will of course be still offered since it comes with many power features for EMML developers.

-Helping you give your stuff away: Finally, the best part. You have been building Apps over the years with no central place to host them. Sure you could distribute them by embedding them anywhere or publishing them to your portal server. However, we need a place where all these Apps are made available to the user community in your enterprise so that they can easily find, use and share these Apps. We call it the 'Enterprise App Store'. (More on the App Store in my next post.)

And these are just the highlights! Presto 3.0 represents a massive improvement in capabilities, moving from a simple toolset that creates mashups to an integrated environment to handle the entire lifecycle on a Enterprise App, from ‘feeds’ to mashups to App to the App Store.

I hope you’ll agree that Presto 3.0 makes great strides towards our goal of empowering users to make, use and share the Apps that they need, while letting IT make it safe and secure to do so. We’re quite proud of Presto 3.0 and we’re eager to hear what you think!

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More Clouds Looks Good to Me

I recently spoke with the folks at MSDN and Microsoft’s Channel 9 about our Azure Cloud initiatives. This is better than an entire box of Fig Newtons. (If ya know me, you know how big of a deal that is.) How'd we get here? In March, JackBe launched Presto 2.7, and since then over 5,000 mashers have been building mashups with Presto 'in the clouds'.

And some of these cloud mashups are impressive. One mashup in particular caught our attention, earning 'mashup of the month' on our Mashup Developer Community. The 'Broadband Applicant Geospatial Mashup App' presents a view of how the government could potentially allocate billion in federal dollars to support the extension of Broadband infrastructure and education across the nation.

The success of our cloud-based Community Edition caught the attention of one of our most important partners, Microsoft. They invited JackBe to connect Presto to Microsoft's Azure cloud. We jointly decided to showcase mashups that connect Azure data sources such as SQL Azure and OData with other public, private and cloud-based data sources. (We went the extra mile and published these Azure mashups as native SharePoint web parts with a few clicks of the mouse!)

The result is the 'Open Government Azure Mashup', with labor statistics and related labor news on a country, state, and even county level. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is exposed through the OGDI toolkit, Azure hosts the exposed data, and Presto mashes the exposed data with other third-party sources and delivers results as personalizable widgets, including ESRI-driven maps. It's a mashup of partner technologies as well as cloud data.

So, as I mentioned, our efforts caught the eye of the folks at Microsoft's Channel 9 and I recently had a chance to discuss Mashups and the Azure Cloud with them. As soon as we get our upcoming Presto 3.0 release out the door, I will begin work on an even deeper level of integration between Presto and Azure. As I keep saying, it’s going to be a very hot Microsoft summer.

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I Predict a hot summer of SharePoint and Mashups

Back in February, I wrote about our Microsoft partner certification, which came about as a natural side effect of the synergy between Microsoft's SharePoint and JackBe's Presto as a best of breed Enterprise Mashup environment. I also noted that big things were soon to come in this space and wanted to take this opportunity to fill you in on some exciting new developments.

Our goal at JackBe has always been to make it easier and faster to build secure, dynamic mashups with disparate information sources. One common scenario is the desire to combine Microsoft and non-Microsoft information, such as bringing together SharePoint list data with external, non Microsoft information, such as an issue tracking system like Remedy or a CRM system, such as Oracle Siebel or SalesForce.com.

There are two sides to this equation, though, with one being the data side and the other the visualization side. We want to rapidly mash these disparate information sources that can come from anywhere (the 'data side') and to publish the resulting apps anywhere (the 'visualization' side). SharePoint is unique as it is both a source of information and a publishing destination, uniquely positioning it as part of an organization's mashup ecosystem.

In our soon to be released Presto version 3.0, we are enhancing our SharePoint mashup integration to make it even easier and quicker to mash SharePoint. As you would expect, this improved self service covers both sides of this equation, with improved capabilities both for mashing SharePoint information as well as for publishing your mashup apps in SharePoint.

Users will now have enhanced support for simple point and click access to their SharePoint list data and improved drag and drop support for utilizing this SharePoint data for building mashups in a visual, web based environment.


Additionally, single click publishing of mashups into SharePoint as native web parts makes it easier than ever to share and collaborate with mashups within and across SharePoint instances.


I am a strong believer in the value of an App Store for the Enterprise.
For those of you with SharePoint in your org, you are one step closer to realizing this vision, since you have a powerful collaboration portal for sharing your apps.

SharePoint and Presto are a best of breed Enterprise Mashup environment and about the closest thing to an "App Store in a box" going today.

Exciting to be sure. But things are about to *really* heat up with SharePoint 2010 recently out the door and Presto 3.0 on the horizon…it's going to be a long, hot summer!

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Mashup Security – Drinking Wine without the Hangover

I'm a new addition to the blogging team here at JackBe, so let me briefly introduce myself. I’m an architect and application layer security guy specializing in enterprise application development. My 20 years in the software security industry includes a lot on interesting experiences, much of which I relied upon while co-authoring a book on security, Core Security Patterns.

Patterns are very common in software. As my friend and co-author, Ramesh Nagappan puts it, you see a lot of the “same old wine in a shiny new bottle”. But patterns aren't bad, per se. They allow us to reduce complexity by using references to the old when talking about the new.

And every so often you get surprised, with a NEW wine in the bottle. I was lucky enough to get involved with Mashup technologies at JackBe and I am finding a whole new wine in dealing with the security issues that surround enterprise mashups. I know you're thinking 'security is dull' but I assure you this is an exception. (That's a security joke, by the way.)

At the heart of security, you still have to deal with authentication, authorization, confidentiality and non-repudiation. In the older technologies, everything was hosted, client-server, or peer-to-peer; one-to-one relationships. In these types of approach, when a client authenticates to the server (via sockets, CORBA, RMI, HTTP/s), they use an ID/password or other credential token that maps one-to-one with that server.

Now, with Mashups, we are confronted with one-to-many relationships, where clients will need to supply (and servers will need to manage) multiple credentials that will be passed to back-end services. In addition, the struggle of providing and enforcing authorization also becomes more challenging as you mash different services with different authorization requirements together in one application. We really are dealing with a new flavor of wine and not just the same old wine in a new shiny bottle.

In my book I remember writing hundreds of pages on the various aspects of security. Luckily, here I think I can sum up the Mashup Security issues in 5 key patterns:

--- Authentication to multiple backend services with different credentials, authentication protocols;
--- Authorization to multiple backend services requiring attributes from disparate sources;
--- Bridging point-to-point protocol security mechanisms such as SSL;
--- Extending compliance rules and regulations out to the cloud;
--- Understanding the implications of your data being used in new ways.

In it's simplest form, it looks like this:


While these challenges are new, the wine is still wine and we can leverage existing security patterns as is, or possibly by extending the existing pattern strategies. For instance, we can systematize the authentication to multiple backend services by encapsulating existing authentication mechanisms in ‘Mashup Secure Profiles’ that propagate authentication credentials to the backend services in the way that they expect.

Mashup Security Profiles would provide us the ability to allow the Mashup server to store credentials across disparate backend services, manage the login sessions to those services, and thus improve the overall experience of the Mashup user. It would also let us codify the best practices for all of our access types, saving us development time and even improving our overall security. I am happy to report that Mashup Security Profiles are one of the new security features of Presto 3.0, the ‘Enterprise App Store’ release, coming out at the end of this month.

Mashup technology does present a new wine in a new bottle. Of course, there is still risk of the same old security hangover. Luckily, here at JackBe we are used to dealing with security and new challenges and are readily extending the old security patterns to meet these new challenges. I’ll write in more detail about how we extend these patterns in future blogs.

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When is a Dashboard More Than Just a Pretty Face?

We’ve had a long-running survey on our Mashup Developer Community that asks ‘Where do you think mashups are most relevant?’. And the clear winner, with 41% of the vote, is 'Dashboards and Decision Support Technologies', beating out options like 'Portals' and 'SOA'.

Message received! In fact I am happy to say that, with the June 2010 release of Presto (version 3.0, which we refer to as the 'Enterprise App Store' release), we will have an entirely new tool called Presto Mashboard. And I think that we've taken traditional dashboards and added a few spicy ideas of our own.

At first glance Mashboard might appear similar to Google Desktop, as an interactive ‘Web 2.0’ dashboard for web-savvy users to organize their Apps in customizable layouts. But Mashboard is also much, much more.

A screenshot of Presto Mashboard, the drag-and-drop way to create sophisticated App Groups.

Most importantly, Apps in Mashboard aren't static reports showing individual data sources. The Apps are mashup-driven: dynamic, customizable views of many sources, mashed and transformed to specific needs. A lot of power in a little package.

Mashboard also supports grouping sets of Apps that are brought together for a particular application or purpose. These groups can be shared, just like individual Apps, to other instances of Mashboard, or to popular enterprise collaboration destinations like SharePoint, iGoogle, or simply to a web browser. And I’ve already seen some great Mashboard-based solutions created by our mashup developer community, like the Disaster Response Dashboard.

I think the previous generation of dashboards were great for their time. But with the opportunity to create dynamic, flexible mashup-driven Apps rapidly and in a visual environment, I think the next generation of dashboards is more than just a pretty face.

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Mashups in Action: Mashing Makes for Better Government

Even before President Obama took the oath of office and issued his now somewhat-famous Transparency Memo, we saw a rise in the demand for information the general public could see. After almost 2 years of focus, transparency has become staple on every federal agency’s to-do list.

We’ve said it before but it probably bears repeating: technologies like JackBe's Presto Enterprise Mashup Platform certainly have a role to play in initiatives like these. Next week, in fact, we’ll be at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington DC and the DoDIIS Worldwide Conference in Phoenix talking about some of our mashup efforts.

Though JackBe works primarily with the agencies themselves, we also see citizen-developers use the Developer Edition of our Enterprise Mashup Platform (available at www.jackbe.com/dev) to create mashups based on publicly-available information. For example, a while back one of our community members built a Crisis Dashboard in response to the earthquake in Haiti. More recently another community member developed a Broadband Applicant Geospatial Mashup App. It is a great example of a purpose-built mashup.

The Broadband App presents a view of how a government agency could potentially allocate federally-funded dollars to support the extension of Broadband infrastructure and education across the nation. This collection of mashups provides deep insight into the companies, locations, projects and loans/grants requested to fulfill the Broadband promise.

Once the basic criteria are selected, several interconnected mashups display information, including:

• Broadband Plan Dollars: Shows the total dollar amounts requested for Broadband infrastructure development, non-infrastructure education, applicant loans and applicant grants needed to fulfill the Broadband promise.

• Filter Broadband Applicants: Allows users to filter Broadband applicants by state, project grant amount, project type and organization. The results are displayed on a map with additional information about the company contact and project title.

• Applicants Details: Provides more detail on the applicant's project description, type and grant/loan requested.

• Org Project Funding Chart: Displays the percentages between the total project cost, the requested loan amount, the requested grant amount and any monetary difference the applicant funds. The chart reflects what project amount would be funded by the government and what project amount would be funded by the applicant.

This App is a great example of how mashups can be applied to an important public issue. It’s more impressive when you remember that is was a citizen-led effort. Mash on.

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How Much Freedom Does Your Data Have?

I had the good luck to attend Carnegie Mellon University during the days when Raj Reddy’s Robotics Institute was testing the Terragator and the Mars Ambler. It was fascinating to watch the ‘gator wander around campus (always followed by a couple of PhD candidates, of course) and even more fun to make bets on how far up the hillside the Ambler would get before it flipped.

It was during my undergraduate ‘Introduction to Robotics’ class that I first learned about the concept of ‘degrees of freedom’ (DOF). DOF is defined as ‘any one of the number of independent ways in which the space configuration of a mechanical system may change.’ In short, how many different directions can an object move? For example, the human arm has 7 DOFs, where the shoulder gives pitch, yaw and roll (that’s 3), an elbow allows for pitch (1 more), and a wrist allows for pitch, yaw and roll (3 more). The leg/foot together have a whopping 30. Today some robots have up to 20 DOF and a few are even teaching themselves about their own DOF limits.

I think degrees of freedom can be applied to enterprise data as well. I would propose these 7 degrees as my ‘EDDOF’ (Enterprise Data Degrees of Freedom) thesis...

• Speed – How fast can you get to the data? i.e. If you need if today, regardless of where it is, can you get it ‘on demand’?
• Agility – How adaptable are data sources to the various people who use it? i.e. Can anyone add a new source or a new view on an old source ?
• Depth – Is the data just the most recent, or does it also include past/historic/archive data too?
• Width – What types of data can be accommodated? Old stuff like VSAM? Mainstream stuff like SQL, REST, or SOAP? Newish stuff like JSON or RDF?
• Control – Is the data subject to all same security protections as the source(s)?
• Currency – How ‘in synch’ is the data with the source(s)? i.e. Is the data produced from the source(s) with every request?
• Expression – Is the data easily shared with others and coherent to them in its presented format?

Using these criteria, I think we can produce a meaningful DOF measurement for some of the more popular information-manipulation technologies:

But already the 'data theorist' in me sees areas for refinement and expansion of EDDOF 1.0. For example, this EDDOF is somewhat human-biased. More or other measures might be better applied when the data needs to be only machine-readable. Also, I think we might improve on this relatively crude model by adding gravity/weight to the more important DOF based upon the task at hand. Afterall, the arm far surpasses the leg if you want to scratch your nose but comes up short for pedaling a bicycle.

So the next time you work with a database or a spreadsheet, I recommend you think like R2D2 and ask yourself how many degrees of freedom does your data need to help you reach your goal? And, more importantly, how well does it achieve that freedom?

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How Agile is Your Business Intelligence?

[This is something of a 'live-blog'. Yesterday I had the chance to watch a webcast on 'Nimble Business Intelligence' and I jotted down some of my favorite highlights from the presentation.]

You know 'BI', right? In a recent report Gartner described Business Intelligence (aka BI) as software that delivers 13 capabilities: Reporting, Dashboards, Ad hoc query, Microsoft Office integration, Search-based BI, BI infrastructure, Metadata management, Development, Workflow and collaboration, OLAP, Advanced visualization, Predictive modeling and data mining, Scorecards. This dirty dozen featureset certainly covers a lot of functionality and all of it is for 'decision-support'.

But considering the high failure rate of traditional BI projects, maybe BI alone isn't enough. In a webcast titled 'Nimble BI: Enterprise Mashups for Agile Intelligence', BI expert Seth Grimes addressed what he thinks is an under-served area of decision-support: agile or 'nimble' intelligence that supports the more dynamic decision-makers. And like the title of the event says, enterprise mashups are the way to get your agile intelligence.

Early in his presentation Seth showed a bunch of 'composed' dashboards from popular BI vendors, created by one group for consumption by another group. He emphasized the word 'composed'. And then he emphasized it again. There was very little about them that were 'nimble', he said.

'Flexibility, self-service, speed-to-insight'. These are the fundamental elements of ‘Nimble Business Intelligence’, according to Seth. Given the reasons for BI project failures, these qualities would certainly help avoid some of those issues. One of the audience members seemed to violently agree when she called self-service the 'Holy Grail', lamenting that 'adding a column to a ResultSet for a BI app requires an entire spin through the waterfall SDLC'.

Seth emphasized that self-service means 'dynamic data access', 'visual' tools’ and ‘no ETL’, but also pointed out that the sources for these self-service solutions should be the same ones that feed the BI solutions you have today. Of course, I wholeheartedly agree that 'information agility' goes hand-in-glove with a self-service solution, like my buddy John Crupi recently wrote. Although Seth didn't say it, I expect one of the reasons for this is the ubiquitous IT backlog. 'Backlog' and 'agility' are archenemies, it seems.

Of course, Nimble BI isn't a panacea for all that ails BI. One savvy audience member asked about data quality and how Enterprise Mashups might fix or exacerbate that issue. Truth be told, Seth somewhat agreed, pointing out that 'bad data' certainly gets more common when you use open sources from the Internet. But mashups, he said, could be used to 'explore your data quality issues' and ultimately improve your data quality.

Toward the end, Seth gave a recap of what he believes enterprise mashups deliver, value-wise. I'll quote him verbatim, since I don't think I could say it any better:

Seth then concluded with a very important point: Enterprise Mashups do not replace BI solutions. They sit side-by-side, complimenting each other. Certainly, Enterprise Mashups can consume BI services and make part of mashup solutions. And the opposite is also true.

In the end, I left feeling that Enterprise Mashups perhaps deserve a place in the BI practioner's recipe book. The recording and slides from Seth's entire presentation are available on our Event archive. Seth has also written a bit of this topic, with a whitepaper on 'Nimble Intelligence: Enterprise BI Mashup Best Practices' and a blog asking 'Is It Time For NoETL?'.

Take a look, start thinking nimble.

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Have a problem? There's a mashup app for that.

You know 'apps', right? Those easy-to-pickup, easy-to-use, easy-to-share mini-applications that you can get through your phone, your portal and even your desktop.

I am a big user and an even bigger fan of apps. So I was quite excited to meet my first app creator last week. By day, Jon Conway is a consultant and a member of our Mashup Developer Community. By night, Jon creates apps for the iPhone, like iPotato and iPoke the Hibernating Bear.

I knew how to consume apps, how they were distributed and socialized. But after I chucked a few iPotatos I realized I had finally a representative of the ‘other half’ of the lifecycle of an app. Now I appreciated where they came from.

That's when a post from Dion Hinchcliffe, master of all things '2.0', really came alive for me. Dion believes the app store is destined to move into the enterprise. He recently wrote about the opportunities and issues associated with the application of the app store model in the enterprise. Here's the summary, in his own words...

The premise of an app store model for enterprises is simple: By removing the middleman, the famous bottleneck between the business and IT demand can be reduced in many cases. Application backlogs can shrink, consumption of internal and external IT resources will increase, and fierce competition to provide the best solutions to niches can greatly improve overall quality (the long tail of IT argument), all while reducing costs.

In case you’ve missed the whole app phenomenon until today, the most important part of the app isn't the app itself. It's the place where app users (like me) and app makers (like Jon) exchange these magical nuggets of productivity, entertainment and utility. The folks who do the marketing call these places 'App Stores'.

They are simple online marketplaces that make it easy to find and select/download (and in some cases pay for) the app. Blackberry, Nokia, Microsoft and Palm all have app stores for their mobile devices. Google just launched their Apps Marketplace, presumably for browser apps. The Apple App Store is the most prolific of the bunch, with over 100,000+ apps and over3,000,000,000 app downloads. Yes, 3 billion. That certainly sounds like a model that works.

But the model is somewhat different in the enterprise. Where will the apps in the enterprise app store come from? The title of Dion’s blog gives the answer: ‘The Enterprise App Store And Self-Service IT: How SOA, Saas, And Mashups Will Thrive’. ‘Self-Service IT’ is shorthand for ‘they get created by the people who want and need them’. In other words, they won't necessarily come from the ‘software people’ or ‘IT’.

Unlike the consumer world, the apps makers and the app consumers will be the same people. They’ll get created in visual mashup-making tools by your techno-savvy business users (and their line-of-business developers, perhaps), for themselves, and then shared with others like them.

Let me give you a working example of this enterprise app store thing. JackBe has begun a ‘Mashup App Store’ experiment with the launch of our Presto Cloud (Community Edition). The premise is simple: Presto Cloud (Community Edition) is a shared version of our Presto Enterprise Mashup Platform (on Amazon’s EC2) that lets users create, share, and reuse mashup apps with each other.

And our experiment would be incomplete without a ‘Mashup App Store’ showroom for the folks who only want to browse/use the mashup apps, not make them. So we’ve create a ‘Mashup Wall’ in our Mashup Developer Community where you can browse, comment, rate (and, yes, download, if you want) the mashup apps created by the users of the Presto Community Edition.

We're going to treat this as a ‘perpetual beta' and all of this is simply ‘Mashup App Store 1.0’. There’s more to come. Try it out and share your feedback in our Community Forums.

Get your mashup app on!

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Does Your Enterprise Suffer from the Stalactite Effect?

A recent survey by Accenture of 1,009 Fortune 500 managers found some truly surprising results.

That’s not a great track record. But WHY? We spend $20 billion a year on databases, reporting tools, marts and warehouses, cubes and OLAP and much, much more. After 4+ decades of information technology advancements, how can we be so wrong so often?

Any honest 'expert' (if there can be such a thing on this topic) would probably admit that we are less-than-good for many reasons. I'd like to add an often-overlooked candidate to the list. It’s something I call the 'stalactite effect'. We all know what stalactites are, right? Those long pointy things that hang from the roofs of caves, formed as calcium carbonate-laden water drips over them. On any given day, you'd see no change. But given enough time they can become massive. (The biggest in the world is thought to be a 27-foot monster in the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon.)

In the enterprise, your water drops are your documents, like budget spreadsheets and project plans. Any one document/drop isn't likely to be a huge loss information-wise. But take what you create in a year, add what your nearest cube-mate creates in a year, maybe what the other 17 analysts in your department create in a year and you start to see wonderful stalactite of information. And it's all completely inaccessible to anyone but you. Enterprises like this literally exist in a data cave with lots of drip, drip, drip.

Is the stalactite problem something we just gotta learn to live with? Certainly not! Some very interesting approaches to these ‘micro-silos’ have emerged recently. For instance the Excel Services in the upcoming Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 allow you to use and publish Microsoft Excel client workbooks on the SharePoint Server. And on top of this they’re adding features that provide multiple users with the ability to edit any workbook simultaneously; a ‘Slicer’ feature that is a new type of interactive GUI filter; and a REST API that is a client server software architecture/protocol that defines workbook and how to access them.

Of course, Enterprise Mashups can also help. JackBe has tied spreadsheets directly to our enterprise mashup server through our Excel Connector and Server API. A user can make a workbook into a mashable service right from the spreadsheet itself. The user can also refresh the mashable service at any time. And the reverse is also true, where a user can create a workbook that is directly based upon a live mashups. This is a great roundtrip solution. Want to see it in action? Check out the recording of our 'Mashing Microsoft' webcast. During the webcast we mashed Excel (as well as Project files and a few other things) in real-world scenarios like project management and financial analysis.

This approach to the stalactite problem can be perfect if an organization is losing valuable data on a drip-by-drip document-by-document basis. The document owner contributes the document into the ‘mashup cloud’, tags it, describes it and sets all the right access controls on it. After all, who knows the spreadsheet better than the person who created it?

It’s time enterprises got out of the data cave.

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Mashups in Action: Crisis Planning and Response

This might sound like the opening narrative of a bad disaster movie but it is true: It snowed again today. A genuine blizzard. And this just 2 days after a record-setting snowfall that shut down the region. Schools in the area are closed for a week or more. Some local governments are recommending residents stay at home, which isn't a bad idea considering many gas stations have run out of regular gas, and some grocery stores and restaurants have run out of meat. They say we might get hit again this weekend.

Unfortunately, it's not a bad movie. It's true. And for anyone living in the Mid-Atlantic, you and know I both know I can't do it justice. Sure, 3+ feet in 4 days isn't that much for Buffalo, or Minneapolis, or Chicago (where they NEVER cancel school for snow, apparently). But in a region where the ANNUAL snowfall averages 20 inches, 36+ in a few days is a SNOWPOCALYPSE. It has truly been challenging.

But in my more honest moments I know that this forced respite from my lousy daily commute is nothing next to genuine disasters. Consider Haiti. The series of earthquakes that hit this beleaguered country on January 12 killed hundreds of thousands, and left hundreds of thousands more without the simple benefit of a roof or a regular source of food. The experts say recovery will take a decade. I doubt most of us will ever truly understand the depth of this disaster.

By most accounts the basic step of getting critical search-and-rescue teams, medical supplies and food into Haiti has been difficult, at best. Could such a need have been planned for? Many experts doubt it. But could we help the aid associations and government agencies in their response to the crisis? Absolutely. And the role model for us all should be people like Dan Hudson.

Dan volunteers locally in the Washington DC area. And in addition to his traditional volunteer work, he went another extra mile and used his mashup skills to create a 'Crisis Communication Dashboard' of feeds from places like Twitter, Flickr, CNN, Yahoo and the US Geological Survey (USGS). It paints a good picture of the situation on the ground. And I think his work is immensely powerful, with the result being much more than the sum of its parts. Any organization attempting to address situational awareness needs could learn from Dan's approach and his results.

And then there some crisises we can and should plan for. Here’s another powerful example. At the request of one inspired government executive, we created an 'H1N1 Flu Preparedness Mashup'. The combination of dynamic on weekly flu statistics (from the CDC) with state-by-state employee staffing levels is a truly unique tool for managers to assess the impact on offices and the specific services they provide. If agency has people in a 'red' state (i.e. with 'wide-spread activity'), you could reasonably expect a noticeable impact on productivity. And I think you can imagine the same type of application in areas like supply chain management, product pricing, and product inventory planning, too.

I don’t want to sound preachy, but I think we all could do more for situations like these, both in preparedness and response. I’ll leave the specifics up to you. But I’ll use my bully pulpit to make one strong suggestion: donate. The American Red Cross is accepting donations for Haiti Relief in a number of different ways, whether it's time, money, or goods. And for those of you that know how important time can be in a crisis, you can simply text “HAITI” to 90999 from any mobile phone to donate $10 to ARC relief efforts. My family donated. And we wish we could do more, we truly do.

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We're Certified (and It's All Thanks to Microsoft)

As the leader in the Enterprise Mashup space, we work hard everyday to expand the scope and value of our platform as we solve critical business challenges. One very active area of interest is mashing information to/from Microsoft applications like SharePoint, Excel, Project, Dynamics, and SQL Server. Many of these productivity tools are ubiquitous and they contain some of the most relevant and useful information in an organization.

We have learned a lot about mashup solutions in and around Microsoft's business products in the last year or so. One great example is the synergy between Presto and Microsoft SharePoint as a best-of-breed Enterprise Mashup Solution. Interestingly, this use-case came from our customers and partners. Our blogseries "A Developer's Guide to Mashups and Microsoft SharePoint” began as a small skunkworks effort that ended in a 10-part series and Mashups for SharePoint is one of the most-popular special-interest areas in our Mashup Developer Community. That's a pretty clear message.

And now we are a Microsoft Certified Partner. What's that mean to you? In the words of JackBe's Co-Founder, Luis Derechin, it "allows our customers and partners to confidently grow their SharePoint implementations into an enterprise-wide collaboration and decision-support platform". Let me tell you what that means in practical terms.

Using our Enterprise Mashup Platform, Presto, and Microsoft SharePoint, you can pull information from Excel Spreadsheets, .Net Web Services, SQL Server (and other relational databases), SharePoint lists, REST services and RSS/Atom feeds, and non-Microsoft enterprise apps, such as Oracle Siebel, Salesforce.com, or PeopleSoft, to name just a few. For all these Microsoft and non-Microsoft information sources, you can securely consume, combine and share this information as syndicatable widgets and apps. These apps are easily surfaced as native SharePoint web parts, Java Portlets and Google gadgets to name a few, and they can be rapidly and securely published to any web friendly environment.

All this can be accomplished today, which allows for extremely powerful Enterprise Mashup Solutions for both Microsoft and non-Microsoft environments. But we're not done yet. As the guy in charge of our SharePoint integration efforts, I can tell you confidently that the future is very bright when it comes to Enterprise Mashups in the Microsoft SharePoint space...so stay tuned for more big things from JackBe in the near future!

And you can always check out the latest Mashup for SharePoint demos, videos, how-to guides and sample code on JackBe's Mashups for SharePoint site. Mash on!

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It’s Time for CIOs (and McKinsey) to Get a New Playbook

Jeff Hammond at Forrester recently wrote an article in Information Week about ‘What Developers Think,’ which recapped the results of a survey Forrester did with Dr. Dobb's.

They asked ‘more than 1,000 platform-agnostic, programming-language-independent Dr. Dobb's readers’ a lot of things and then identified seven trends that could have major implications for IT strategy. The summary of the results says it all:

‘Software developers are adopting new technologies or techniques including RIAs, virtualization and Agile development. They're using and contributing to open source projects, and challenging the conventions that underpin the way enterprise software and tools are built and sold. This transition will accelerate as developer tech populism takes hold and drives the adoption of new development approaches related to cloud computing, scale-out architectures that can accommodate change and mobile Web applications.'

Great stuff! As a manager of these folks, your message couldn’t be clearer: you need a different gameplan than the long-term, high-risk approaches you’ve used in the past. Scrum is in, the waterfall model is out. But just when it seems IT is going to shake off the reputation as a group to work ‘around’ and not ‘with’, McKinsey goes and fumbles the ball in ‘Data to Dollars’ (you’ll have to register on their site to read the entire 8-page paper). To me it reads like a ‘How NOT To Guide’ for CIOs.


The intent of this paper is certainly worthy: ‘Chief information officers have a chance to expand their influence as the mediators between business requirements and IT capabilities.’ And, at first glance, I was pretty sure they were going to talk the same talk as Jeff Hammond. Replacing the old top-down, big-bang playbook with one that emphasizes speed and agility. Boy, was I sorely disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a McKinsey-hater. Long-time readers know I’ve quoted their work before. And in this case McKinsey gives good lip-service to getting the ‘right data to the right people.’ But the core of the paper simply describes a complete top-to-bottom rebuild of your information architecture. In other words, McKinsey believes that if what you have sucks, you should go and re-architect the entire thing AGAIN.

In 2 pain-staking pages they describe a model project that is a freakin’ HUGE effort (excuse my hyperbole). It includes, among other things, a new data warehouse, a system-wide data quality effort, new application-to-application integration, interface rebuilds of existing applications and a new highly-structured reporting system. And all of it built by good ole IT for the benefit of the users.

I know of some organizations that might benefit from old-school top-down, big-bang decision-support efforts. But if I were a CIO today, I’d think twice before throwing a Hail Mary pass like that. This isn’t the fast, responsive approach your users want or that your developers are adopting. Today’s IT offense needs to be nimble and quick.

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10 for 2010: I Predict Google Gars, Apple Books, a CNN Moment and More

[I originally published this post on my 'Enterprise Mashups in Action' blog at eBizQ. I got some great feedback and decided to repost it for the loyal readers here. I hope you find it as interesting to read as I found to write.]

It's that time (again) when 'arm-chair visionaries' like me sit back and attempt to predict the next 12 months of technologies. In preparation, I did a quick search to see what others predicted for 2009. Some were better than others. The more conservative prognosticators predicted a Twitter growth explosion and growth in interest in Cloud Computing. Edgier predictions included 'email will die' and 'WiFi will be ubiquitous'. And of course there were some things no one predicted, such as Amazon digital book sales would outpace paper book sales on Christmas Day 2009. But overall I think the 2009 predictions were pretty conservative and unexciting, perhaps due to the looming recession.

However, as the US economy is starting to stabilize and we have a year of pent up technology cabin fever, I predict 2010 will be a technology innovation 'hockey stick year' (that visionary-speak for exponential growth). So, with that high standard in mind, here's what my crystal ball tells me:

1. Apple brings sexy back to books. Apple releases the 'LiveBook'. It looks like a 7" iPhone but it's meant for traditional book reading and the newly created Apple iPub publishing platform. LiveBook not only let's you interact live with books using iPhone touch gestures, but let's you interact with LiveBooks using text, live video, interactive widgets, social networking and collaboration. You can also write you own LiveBooks and publish via my iPhone Apps.

2. Enterprise Mashups have a 'CNN moment'. After one federal staffer creates a mashup that uncovers millions of dollars lost to Medicare fraud, Wolf Blitzer asks, 'Why doesn't every government employee have this at his or her disposal?' President Obama asks: "Is this the technology to connect-the-dots?"

3. Gartner turns back time. Realizing Enterprise Mashups went from Cool to Useful, Gartner puts Enterprise Mashups on their 2011 'Technologies to Watch' list. And using their previously-unknown time-shifting powers, they also retroactively insert it into their 2010 Watch List.

4. Enterprises shift from 'Me' to 'We'. It's no surprise that the key to increased employee productivity is to reduce cost and time needed to make important decisions. In 2009, there was much talk about "customized" data and widgets so users could make decisions faster, aka 'Me.' In 2010, the focus will be on collaboration and group decision, aka 'We.'

5. Google gets into the auto business. Google launches a solar car company called Google Cars which quickly becomes known on the street as 'Gars.' Gars aren't for sale; they are free to use. Gars are equipped with a 360 degree camera used for Google Street views and powerful WiMax Mesh antennas. Both inside and outside are live ads based on Google's new Geospatial-based ad auctioning system. You reserve a Gar for use for a period of time and pick it up at one of the 'Garplexes'. Your reservation priority is based on your Google points which are in turn based on how much time you spend with other Google products. Whether it's Google Droid, Gmail or Google Docs, you're always racking up points and earning the right to drive a Gar.

6. The BI industry learns to copy but forgets how to read. The big BI vendors see the impact agile, self-service technologies (like Enterprise Mashups!) are having on their customers and launches an all out assault trying to minimize mashups as a 'feature' of their massive BI systems. Unfortunately, they never read the Innovators Dilemma and fail to see that they are overshooting the market and Enterprise Mashup vendors are silently taking away BI Mashup market-share.

7. TIME Magazine names 2010 the 'Real-time' Year. Enterprises want their information as fast and as quick as a Google web search. Everyone knows it (but maybe the BI guys) and in recognition of this TIME also names Speedy Gonzalez as Person of the Year, although they say he 'isn't as fast as he used to be'.

8. Oracle acquires 9,782 more companies. This prediction doesn't take much insight, truthfully. Unfortunately, one of these 9,782 companies went out of business three years ago and another they already acquired two years earlier. I also predict Larry Ellison is not pleased with this.

9. Microsoft sells more SharePoint. (Yes, I know, I am prescient.) In 2010 Microsoft sells more licenses than all other software from all other software vendors combined. This drives Gartner to release the 'SharePoint Magic Quadrant', only to later realize Microsoft is the only one on it. Bill Gates is quite pleased with this and Larry Ellison is not.

10. The DIY folks form a union. In 2010 Generation Y-ers form the 'Open Self-Service Alliance' touting 'We can do it ourselves,' demand that IT support them, rewriting the 80/20 equation to be the 20/80 equation.

That's my top 10 or 2010. Love them, hate them, critique them, but remember where you heard them first. Good luck to all in this tech-packed New Year.

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Mashups in Action: This Space Intentionally Left Blank

They say ‘less is more’. When it comes to enterprise mashups in action I think that NOTHING may be the best example you could give. Let me tell you why.

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with an executive from a nationwide homebuilder and the conversation came around to the inevitable, ‘what do you do for a living?’ topic. I replied that I worked for a software vendor and left it at that. (I am not a huge fan of pushing my technology, company, or product on the unsuspecting or unwilling.)

Then my dinner companion amicably asked, ‘what kind of software?’ and I replied, ‘enterprise mashup software’. He hadn’t heard the term before and that’s when he asked my all-time favorite question: ‘what does it do…can you give me an example?’. Given that my CEO has been down this road, I had a huge selection of anecdotes, examples, case studies and metaphors to choose from. So I gave him a few examples from my customers that I thought he might be able to relate to.

It became clear that as many examples as I gave, he wanted something that he could EXACTLY relate - something that solved the type of problems he, as a home-builder, has to deal with every day. Where to start a project, where labor or customer demand might be in flux (and why), and so on. So I crafted a credible mashup example that combined housing prices, interest rates, population and employment statistics, and building material prices. My custom-crafted mashup-in-action example seemed to resonate with my dinner companion but to me it still somehow felt insufficient. But it wasn't until yesterday that I figured out why...

I came across a comment in a new whitepaper (written by Hinchcliffe and Co. on behalf of the Open Mashup Alliance) entitled, ‘EMML Changes Everything: Profitability, Predictability & Performance through Enterprise Mashups’. It has perhaps the best explanation of why simple examples are insufficient and perhaps misleading for a broadly-applicable technology like enterprise mashups. After giving an example (related to staff-utilization), the paper goes on to state:

However, discussing such typical uses for mashups might be missing the point. The mashup's strength lies in discovering the atypical, in exploiting data in new ways. The fact is, any information your business needs can be analyzed with a mashup, often more quickly, with minimal effort, and at much lower expense than hiring consultants or using traditional and more time-consuming SOA approaches to do the same work. Rapid experimentation with data leads to invention.

In short, every specific enterprise mashup example misses the [perhaps more important] point that enterprise mashups are good for whatever use the users find. Mashups are genuinely applicable to areas as diverse as situation intelligence, real-time business intelligence, classic decision-support, and lightweight application integration, to name a few. Every day we get more great uses and examples from our partners, our customers, and our mashup developer community members. And I am sure we haven’t even begun to cover all the possibilities.

Each new wave of technology goes through the, ‘what is it good for’ phase and the world of enterprise mashups is no exception. JackBe has certainly done its part with examples in the form of long case studies, short case summaries, YouTube videos, live demos, our long-running ‘Mashups in Action’ blog series, and even a ‘Build an Example’ contest. But perhaps the next time I get asked to ‘give an example’, I may give the best answer of all…and leave that spot on the form blank.

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Let's Put an End to 'Swivel Chair Integration'

I originally published this post on my 'Enterprise Mashups in Action' blog at eBizQ. I got some great feedback and decided to repost it for the loyal readers here. I hope you find it as interesting to read as I found to write.

Ending the Reign of the Swivel Chair: The Biggest Business Problem Enterprise Mashups Solve

Interactive Data Corp (IDC) published a report a few years ago titled 'The Hidden Costs of Information Work'. In it they reported that 'searching for and analyzing information both consume 24% of the typical information worker's time'.

IDC referred to these areas as 'relatively straightforward candidates for better automation'. I couldn't agree more. And with the volume of data doubling every 18 months, I'd venture to say this statistic is getting even worse. We're not getting less silo'ed, we're actually becoming more silo'ed. With all the mergers and acquisitions and SaaS offerings we've heard a continuous flow of horror stories of multiple systems managing everything from accounting, marketing and sales to customer support.

In short, we're not getting any better at helping our knowledge workers do their job. Instead these critical thinkers resort to "swivel chair integration," going from screen to screen (or if you're in the browser, tab-to-tab) copying and pasting data from one system to another. Not for data entry, but rather lookup and correlation to turn the data into information that supports their decision-making.

Of course, if these source systems were integrated, they wouldn't have to "swivel." But the reality is the systems they rely on are not integrated and with ever-shrinking IT budgets they never will be. And as IT gives these problems less attention, I think these important decision-makers are getting squeezed a little more every day, with more and more of their critical 'decision time' being replaced by simple 'gather' time.

In fact, I believe that silo'ed systems are so ubiquitous that many organizations have simply given up trying to integrate them. But our knowledge workers still have to make decisions based on all this data, so what do we do?

Luckily, silo'ed data needed for informed decisions are a sweet spot for new, '2.0-style' information technologies like enterprise mashups. Enterprise mashups are tuned to easily and quickly gather data from many systems and presented in order to allow for real-time decision making. Here is a real-world example that follows the basic enterprise mashup pattern (extrapolated from a popular 'Data Center Mashup' video by Steve Graham, a major contributor to Apache Axis and now a Software Architect at the University of Chicago):

Problem: The IT Support team spends a significant amount of time analyzing software errors, trying to determine if the source of the problem is hardware-related, software-related or an end-user issue. The team needs better insight into the status of hardware and software assets on the network to help correlate these assets with the error tickets. The issues may be reported or discovered by the users, via SNMP traps, in application or hardware logs, or a combination of the three.

Example Data Sources:
1. HP Operations Manager: for gathering SNMP Traps for network monitoring
2. BMC Remedy Service Desk: for managing trouble tickets and incidents
3. Custom application #1: with all hardware server related information and IPs
4. Custom application #2: with all software assets and server deployment information

Decision Time Frame: As quickly as possible.

Impact: The longer it takes to isolate the problem, the more time, money and opportunity will be lost. Depending on the 'mission criticalness' of the software, the impact can be severe.

Solution: Real-time enterprise mashups tie directly into all four data sources, with a mechanism support engineered to locate information via IP address, server name, software system name and trouble ticket numbers. They then use information to filter and correlate from these sources and present information via a dashboard that shows the correlated network, hardware and software errors associated with each trouble ticket.

If you look at the above description and had to sum the problem up in a short statement, you'd probably say something like "The support engineers need data from multiple disparate systems to solve their problems. Since these systems are not integrated, they will have to do a lot of manual work to analyze the data across multiple systems. Let's make sure they all have swivel chairs!"

Hopefully, you get the idea. Enterprise mashups are a great way to solve the age-old integration-by-swivel-chair problem. Let's let the swivel chair return to its 'trusty but boring office companion' status.

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Tree House Mashups

From time to time we invite guests to share their skills and experiences with us. Today we have a guest from within JackBe, Shawn Pike, who has dozens of conversations daily with our partners, our customers and our prospective customers. In his inaugural guest post Shawn shares his unique perspective on mashups and the 'leverage whatcha have' notion of mashups in the enterprise.

It always amazed me the personal projects that my father’s construction partner Dennis would undertake at his home in upstate New York. As a ten year-old boy, I remember marveling at the mammoth of a tree house he had built for his three children, which rivaled any but the Swiss Family Robinson attraction at Disney World. Do you remember the tour?

I remember the crazy collection of ladders, ropes and slides used as entrances or exits; the different tiles adorning parts of the main room; the stools and desks for studying and the shelving for books; the cupboard holding midday snacks, screened windows and a working door. I was too busy exploring the place to hear my father ask about the materials and cost. I certainly heard all about it later.

On the ride home, my father made sure to drive home the point of Dennis’s true ingenuity and genius; nearly the whole tree house had been constructed with materials he already had or could get for free. He was famous for leveraging what he had and improvising instead of running out to the hardware store. Nowadays I can't help but think of the enterprise mashup world and the propensity of mashups to leverage current data and systems, instead of building from scratch.

Over the past year, I have spoken with thousands of the top executives in the commercial and government sectors about their current methods of application development and heard repeatedly about the lack of budget and resources. Curiously, never have the expectations been higher as the users demand even more timely and accurate data to make quick and informed decisions. No doubt we need more people with the “Dennis mentality” in the IT world to meet these new organizational challenges.

We just had a financial system meltdown where the absence of real-time, situational awareness no doubt contributed to the catastrophe. Our government is pursuing the greatest transparency and accountability initiative in history. Our militaries face asymmetrical threats where intelligence is the game-changer. And the demand for organizations to collaborate is greater than ever before. How do we meet these challenges with limited budgets and resources in an economic atmosphere where organizational employees are cut or forced to work less in order to save money?

Mike Ogrinz, the author of Mashup Patterns, Mike Orgrinz, recently wrote in a blog, “Legacy resources are everywhere, and they can easily be incorporated in today’s new mashups.” I couldn't agree more! I think the enterprise mashup paradigm starts on the right premise: stop thinking 'big and new' and start looking at your current stock of assets. Enterprise mashup solutions provide a way to leverage your current architectures, working with your existing data (whether internal or external to your organization), live natively in your current security infrastructure, and connect to the plethora of reporting and analysis tools you likely already have, all in order to innovate for much cheaper and faster than the common start-from-scratch methods. No assets should go unconsidered.

Enterprise mashup solutions (like JackBe's Presto) provide the easiest and safest way to quickly put together creative and dynamic applications for your users without interrupting your current IT operations. When the smoke clears from the economic downturn we presently are foraging through, I am guessing the IT organizations standing tall will be the ones with leaders who have the “Dennis mentality” and an EM solution in their tool kits.

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