Expert Predictions: Business Analytics in the (Not Too Distant) Future

From time to time we invite guests to share their expertise with us. Today we have a very special guest blog from Mike Lock at Aberdeen Group. Mike's research covers emerging Business Intelligence trends such as self-service BI, collaborative analytics, operational intelligence, and embedded BI.

By way of introduction, I can confidently say that Mike is one the analysts whose work we follow the closest. In particular, we live and breathe by Mike's work on Operational Intelligence, especially the results that describe the business impact of successful OI efforts.

In his post Mike shares his unique perspective on 2012 and what's in store for the Business Intelligence market. Thanks, Mike, for letting the rest of us peek inside your crystal ball!

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Four Predictions for 2012

As an analyst covering the business intelligence (BI) space, I spend a lot of time mired in the world of technology marketing. It's always interesting to observe the cyclicality of our most prized terms. 2011 saw an enormous amount of momentum in four of these terms, all of which have become unavoidable, both in terms of their visibility in the market, and the impact they are supposed to have on our professional and personal lives. These days, you can’t pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal, Ladies Home Journal, Information Week, or Us Weekly without seeing one or more of: mobile; social; cloud; and big data. While the terms are often considered separately, Aberdeen's #SoMoClo (Social, Mobile, Cloud) initiative is promoting the idea that they are inextricably linked as crucial elements of a next generation IT infrastructure.

As I think through my own viewpoint of the ever-changing world of business analytics, I can’t help but frame my thoughts around these four areas and how they will affect our ability to make timely decisions based on accurate business information. Looking into my crystal ball, and leaning, as always, on Aberdeen’s fact-based data, I’ve come up with four predictions for how the BI landscape might change in 2012...

1. Mobile BI will evolve further into mobile analytics. By most accounts, mobile BI is still in the “early adopter” stage. However, as Aberdeen’s recent Mobile BI research points out, the tablet is paving the way not just for increased adoption, but greater mobile interactivity. If we loosely define mobile BI as the consumption of business insight (i.e. reports, charts, dashboards) via a mobile device, we see a steadily increasing use rate among a variety of end-user types. While this functionality already exists on certain mobile platforms, I believe 2012 will be the year that mobile analytics – i.e. the creation of business insight (report & dashboard creation, mobile data query) will become more widely available, and gain traction among more mobile employees.

2. Social tools will enable greater external collaboration. I often (maybe too often) say that though there is a tremendous amount of value in business data, there's much more value in the perspective and interpretation of that data. Perhaps the biggest advantage social business capabilities offer in conjunction with BI is the ability to aggregate opinions and perspectives from decision makers both inside and outside the organization. Aberdeen research on Collaborative BI shows that top performers use social channels to spread analytical thought through multiple departments inside their organization, as well as to their “extended enterprise.” 2012 could see a substantial ramp-up in the use of collaborative tools (portals, IM, web feeds, social networking) to create stronger analytical links with customers, suppliers, partners, and other key stakeholders in the external value network.

3. SaaS/Cloud-based BI will gain major traction at the enterprise level. Across the business landscape there appears to be an ever increasing level of entitlement among business users that could either be a wonderful thing or an unmitigated disaster depending on the organization in question. Business users today simply expect to have the tools they need to make decisions, and while some are content to wallow in the self-pity of being underserved by IT, others are more than willing to circumvent technical decision makers to equip themselves with the right tools. Aberdeen’s research on Software as a Service (SaaS) BI, quite unsurprisingly, shows that small to mid-size businesses (SMBs – under 1,000 employees) are far and away the most likely segment to embrace a SaaS / cloud approach to BI, while the enterprise level (1,000 employees+) have been slower to adopt. With all the hype around cloud-based solutions, I see 2012 as a major stepping stone year for SaaS BI, where large organizations will move toward cloud / SaaS BI – either through large “salesforce-esque” deployments to the mobile workforce, or on a smaller departmental “land and expand” basis.

4. “Big Data” will fight “Business Analytics”, and lose. Why do companies capture and keep data? Is it for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and e-Discovery reasons? Is it to justify the cost of a large investment in storage arrays? Is it because they’re digital hoarders who can’t part with data of any kind? In my idea of analytical utopia, data is captured so that it can be transformed into something meaningful to the business. Compliance, scalability, security – these are all important aspects of any IT / data infrastructure, and surely you can’t do anything with your data without having control over it first. But what’s the point of big data for the sake of big data? As I explore in a recent benchmark report on data management for BI, business analytics allows a company to transform a fire hose of data into a stream of clean, relevant, and timely business insight, leading to enhanced business performance. I think in 2012 we’ll see the peak of the term “big data,” followed by a precipitous drop-off in its use, as it eventually gets swallowed up into the vernacular of business analytics, where it really belongs.

All of these predictions, one way or another, underlie what I think is the most visible and important trend in business analytics right now, and that is growth in the use and applicability of BI within more non-technical decision-making roles. With access to more data, and enabled by the emerging capabilities around social, mobile, and cloud, business users are displaying a greater appetite for business analytics than ever before. Will 2012 be a year that closes the gap between the analytical need and the capabilities provided? I sincerely hope so.

Michael Lock
Research Director & Group Leader, Technology Markets
Aberdeen Group
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The Future is Big, Live, Mobile and Limber

Futurecasting is one of my favorite things. My co-workers claim I rewrite the future on a daily basis and nothing makes me happier than predicting the future of the very industry that I work in.

I see 2012 as a ‘redefining year’ (and that’s not just because it could be our last): what was once a very staid, stable industry now includes more than 265 vendors, many with offerings that are much more than your typical ‘traditional’ data warehouse and reports.

BI demand remain strong but, from what the analysts tell me, the demand for the ‘traditional’ stuff is flat. Apparently most of the market growth in BI is what I’d call “New BI”, nascent but fast-growing categories that support more focused needs and emerging technologies.

With all of that in mind, I’ve decided to break down my predictions along the lines of a few of these “New BI” categories. I hope to follow up some of these general predictions with more details in a separate blog…assuming the end-of-the-world doesn’t happen first. Read fast, your days are numbered.

Big BI Gets Stolen

I predict the BI industry will steal the Big Data hype in 2012, calling it something like “Big BI”. This won’t be a developer-centric Hadoop approach, but rather about getting data into (Big ETL). They’ll move beyond the tactical Hadoop jobs and start looking into a new generation of Big Data systems such as Greenplum, Vertica, Cassandra, HBase and Hive. The No-SQL guys will create a swarm of Big Data analytic startups and, like many industry trends, create more buzzword-confusion along the way.

Mobile BI Wins the Goldilocks Award

We’ve talked about it for a while but I predict Mobile BI will truly take off in 2012. The ‘just right’ combination of form factor, availability and technology will make the iPad the fastest-growing BI dashboard deployment target – fulfilling a promise made long ago: immediate access to BI data, anytime, anywhere. And organizations will offer large subsidies so employees can buy their own tablets (ok, maybe this past part is just wishful thinking on my part).

Live Data Becomes the Majority

For a while it seemed that ‘Real-Time Data’ was destined to remain in the hands of pocket-protector-wearing scientists running non-stop stock-trading algorithms. I predict those days are over and a new generation of Real-Time Business Dashboards will go mainstream in 2012, connecting live operational information to tactical and strategic KPIs and Scorecards. These dashboards will make ‘old, dated data’ something that only a small minority will accept, and it will also expand the BI footprint into areas of organizations that never embraced the less-timely methods of traditional BI.

Analytics Get Limber

One of the most promising areas of is BI analytics, with great promise for true business insight of the past, present and perhaps even the future. But analytics to date seem to be over-structured, based upon knowing the questions in advance of actually seeing the data. Yep, I predict that in 2012 we move to a more balanced analytics approach, a kind of ‘Model Free Analytics’ that requires little (or no) up-front preparation like pre-built analytic models or data preparation. This new generation of flexible analytics enables organizations to dynamically analyze information as it’s happening.

Within these areas I see a lot of details left unaddressed. But it is clear that it’s come time for Business Intelligence to bend its structure a bit. Alternative information delivery models are here to stay and I’ll be back very soon to highlight how and why…time permitting.

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Mr. Mobile BI, Hollywood is calling...

[This blog originally appeared in eBizQ as 'Why Mobile BI? Just ask anyone in Hollywood'. We thought a quick repost might be appreciated by some of you.]

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Commentary - It’s tough to deny that most of us love our mobile phones (and iPads if you’re fortunate enough to have one). And within the office there is a huge rush to bring business applications to these mobile devices, with many organizations even adopting a ‘BYOD’ policy in an effort to get started as quickly as possible. And we’re not talking about basic apps like corporate email, we’re talking hardcore enterprise applications like Business Intelligence.

According to Gartner, one-third of Business Intelligence usage will be through mobile devices in just a few years. But other than cache and visual appeal, what are the practical benefits driving enterprises to put BI on tablets and smartphones? Plenty has been written about the risks and costs associated with Mobile BI. In spite of these concerns there seems to be a groundswell of demand. Why? What is driving organizations to make the plunge anyway?

The best way to understand the upside of a mobile-enabled BI strategy is to think like a Hollywood movie producer. You’ll see that Mobile BI has many of the things that make for a blockbuster movie: speed, power, money, special effects, and even super heroes. And each of these benefits apply to at least one of the major actors in the BI value chain: the ‘business’ end-users, the ‘tech savvy’ self-service users, the ‘black-belt’ specialists who really get deep into the details, the ‘support’ folks who keep it all running, and even the big-bucks budget-holding ‘producer’ who pays for it all.

Speed. End-users in particular are often focused on speed. The faster they can get access to their data, the happier they are. Mobile access can give them access to sales receipt trends while they are at the restaurant on Saturday night.

Power. There is a growing group of tech-savvy users, often ‘in the field’ or in the lower ranks, that prefer or even need a hands-on approach. Instead of relying on someone else to create their unique, specialized BI Apps and Dashboards, mobile access can give them intuitive, simplified tools to do it themselves.

Money. One CIO recently complained that ‘mobile access doesn’t displace ANY enterprise costs in the short term’ but he was missing the real ROI of mobile access. In the case of BI, mobile access adds to the reuse of existing data, security, monitoring, and network resources, giving the IT folks a better return on the software and hardware assets they worked so hard to help your organization acquire.

Special-Effects. Every BI champion wants his/her BI solution to be well-received. Even without the other benefits above, the rich visuals of mobile devices alone can greatly improve the value of BI data, which can lead to great reviews from the critics. And doesn’t every executive want a way to show off his/her new tablet and do it in a genuinely sexy-yet-business-centric way?

Super-Heroes. Many BI implementations have a team of super-hero-like ‘black belts’ that do the really arcane stuff. Mobile devices are another outlet for their work. As the BI audience grows through the Mobile channel, the needs for their services will grow as well. Without killing the metaphor too much, you are giving the black belts another target to throw kicks and punches at.

So, if you are trying to understand the real benefits of Mobile BI, think Hollywood, baby. Speed, power, money, special-effects and, yes, even super-heroes. See ya on the big screen!

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Is Your Mobile Business Intelligence Plan Aiming for only 25%?

Just last week my company announced the latest edition of our Real-Time Business Intelligence platform. The majority of the new capabilities focused on mobile access for Operational Business Intelligence needs. (Check out our new iPhone and iPad Apps on the Apple App Store).

In the months leading up to the release we took a very close look at the state of the industry. One of things that really left on impression on us was the '2011 Successful BI Survey' from the BI Scorecard folks. Among the many statistics was this: overall BI adoption is only at 25%. That isn’t exactly a sparkling number for a ~20-year-old industry.

There is an opportunity to take your BI beyond the 25% mark. However, before I share my bit of insight, I’d like you to try a little experiment. Close your eyes, think about ‘MOBILE business intelligence’, and then describe the picture that immediately appears in your head…

Does your mobile BI picture include the people you’ve already empowered with BI on their desktop or does it show people who have no BI today but might be served best by mobile access, a particularly location-independent group of employees like the always-on-the-run sales guy? Is your picture about a part of your organization that already has BI (such as the finance department) or does it show more active, moving operations like the loading dock, the warehouse, or the assembly line where BI might help but has been tough to deliver?

How you picture 'Mobile Business Intelligence' can tell you whether you are going to help 25% or 100% of your potential community. It can also help you understand where your biggest BI ROI might be hiding.

Are the people and business areas/problems that you pictured the SAME ones that already have BI on their desktop or in their portal? If so, you are missing a great opportunity. The potential of mobile BI is much greater than simply a new interface to your existing BI for your existing BI users, moving your BI reach well beyond the typical executive in a corner office suite.

As part of the rollout of Presto 3.2 we held a public webcast, ‘Mobile Business Intelligence: What, Why and How’. Our mobile BI team shared some of what we've learned in the past few years including best practices, tips, tricks, and pitfalls. One of the best parts was the discussion of the best places for applying Mobile BI, many of which seem to lie in the 75% 'don't have' camp today:

If your organization is planning a mobile BI implementation, ask yourself if you are thinking about the 'haves' (that 25%) or the 'don't haves' (the other 75%). The real ROI is in the completely unserved 75%, of course, because the improvements in their decision-making would be drastic, versus marginal improvements for that 25% that already have something.

So think outside the people and and/or business areas/problems that already have BI. The biggest ROI of mobile BI is in areas that have NOTHING now. These used to be the next-to-impossible-to-help folks because they were on-the-move or not-in-headquarters. Mobile BI removes those barriers. It’s time we finally aimed for 100%.

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Why I Hate "Self-Service"

OK, I confess. I don’t hate the idea of Self-Service. I love it, in fact. How else can enterprises deal with shrinking IT budgets and increasing IT backlog? As our employees become ever more tech-savvy, they can and should have more hands-on tools at their disposal. If organizations don’t supply them, Rogue IT will find less safe, less reliable, less repeatable ways to do it.

I know from first-hand experience that IT shops, at least the progressive ones, want to embrace Self-Service solutions. Taking some of the work out of their hands certainly addresses their budget and time-crunch issues. But even the most extreme Self-Service software solution leaves IT to do the ‘infrastructure’ work such as installing/configuring the self-service software, and integrating it with security and governance tools. In other words, IT builds the roads and business users drive their cars on them.

And that’s what I hate about “Self-Service”. It implies a complete lack of IT involvement. And this couldn’t be further from the truth. Unfortunately there are companies (and software vendors) without any real ability or inclination to deliver self-service to their user community and they perpetuate this misunderstanding as a way to defend or justify their self-serviceless approach. There are dictators and slow-adopters in every culture, and it can help to understand their true motivations.

Of course, Self-Service can also suffer from the opposite problem: Self-Service that is not self-service at all, and is still an IT-driven effort . How many times have you been given a few check-boxes on a report and had it called "Self-Service"? There is a perfect middle, if you will. In the case of Business Intelligence, Claudia Imhoff and Colin White paint a definitive, practical picture in their report 'Self-Service Business intelligence: Empowering Users to Generate Insights', summarized this way:

So maybe a better phrase would be ‘Hands On’ or ‘Business Friendly’. But one thing couldn’t be more clear: the future will mean more Self-Service for business users and they will get it one way or the other. It’s time we all agree what that really means and get to work on it.

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Change in business is constant. How about your Business Intelligence strategy?

We’ve written in the past about making the best of difficult, often chaotic situations. After the Snowpocalypse and the tsunami that tore apart Japan, it was hard not to wonder what would happen if a similar unexpected event happened even closer to home. Just a few weeks ago it happened.

Our little corner of southern MD/ northern VA area saw Hurricane Irene roar through the area, to be followed just a few days later by a once-a-century 5.8 earthquake, and finally by a big round of rain and flooding.

Thankfully, these events did not begin to compare to those in New Orleans, Japan and Haiti. But minutes after my office walls stopped shaking I watched major news outlets (like the WashingtonPost.com) slow to a crawl. Cell services were swamped and largely useless. And I wondered about the business impact of unplanned events like these.

While most organizations have conquered the repeatable, predictable information needs of their decision-makers, we see precious few that have adaptable tools to help them cope with change. Sometimes it’s a natural event, sometimes it a competitor, sometimes it’s a technology trend, and sometimes it’s the economy. Change is a given in business. So why do we think we can freeze our business intelligence solutions in place?.

Change is relative, of course. The pace of change in certain industries and business processes can be measured in years or decades (some accounting standards date back to the 14th century). But other areas in those same organizations are much more subject to more change, both self-imposed (new business ventures, new products, new regions) and from external forces (technology, regulation, economics, demography, and, yes, even Mother Nature).

As a Real-Time Business Intelligence vendor, the folks here at JackBe certainly appreciate change. JackBe helps organizations deliver business intelligence solutions in dynamic, changing environments. Our software helps them assemble information, from both inside and outside their organization, to create live Apps and Dashboards that give them 'the big picture' with the latest information available.

Our customers sometimes call these solutions 'situational awareness', 'operational intelligence', 'common operating picture', 'real-time monitoring' and even 'real-time business intelligence'. And we help them do it fast because speed matters, often talking in terms of days or even hours.

And I’m sure everyone would agree that the general pace of business seems to be accelerating. Even the rate of growth of data is growing, the Internet has effectively removed the competitive barrier to entry in many markets, and things just seem ‘faster’ than a decade ago.

Luckily, my gut feelings aren’t required here. The brainy folks at Aberdeen Research have studied this idea quite a bit, with some fascinating results. Here’s a perfect example from a recent report:


That is an astronomical growth rate on the demand for ever-faster answers. Needless to say, the tools you might have used just a few years ago might not be all that applicable today.

I had the good fortune to chat with Gartner’s James Richardson a few days ago and he put it this way: the ‘operational pace and tempo defines the tool you need’ (I am paraphrasing James; he said it much more eloquently). So what tools, processes and procedures do you have to address decision-support demands in the more dynamic parts of your organization?

How well does your Business Intelligence strategy embrace change?

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The Most Important (and Most Troublesome) Platform in Your Enterprise Today

MOBILE. Every day I talk with CIOs, Business Leaders, and IT Managers about their business intelligence needs. And almost every conversation includes mobile. IBM's latest 'Global Chief Information Officer Study' reveals that 3 in 4 CIOs have mobility solutions on their strategic shortlist.

If you are an enterprise IT guy, I am sure 'mobile' is a thought that keeps you up at night. There's an almost unlimited list of vendors, standards, formats, technologies, and features to mix and match. And the growth of all things mobile has been explosive, like the roughly 50 million tablets shipped in 2011 alone. I guess it's no surprise that it causes so much IT insomnia.

A few weeks ago I wrote a short article in IT Insider titled 'How Do You Manage Mobile?'. I touched on some of the issues you'll need to tackle when taking a bite out of the mobile pie: Native vs. Web Apps, iOS vs. Android, and, of course, Mobile Security. (If I had the chance to write the article again, I'd add the 'Phones vs. Tablets' debate as well.)

I don't think I conquered all of the issues in Enterprise Mobility in this article but it is certainly a starting point. Did I miss anything major? Let me know!

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What Can Angry Birds Teach Us About Apps in the Enterprise?

I just published a blog on eBizQ entitled 'Is Your IT Organization Ready for the Attack of the Angry Birds?'. Here's the TL;DR:

Apps inside the enterprise cannot get away with lax security and governance. There's authentication, authorization, and firewalls to worry about. There's access to enterprise systems such as SAP, PeopleSoft, MicroStrategy, and SharePoint, as well as all your trusty home-grown applications. And since you have to solve these riddles in a way that SCALES (i.e. not just for one App, but for hundreds), your distribution tool, i.e. your Enterprise App Store, has to distribute your Apps without breaking any of your security and governance rules. It's an easy requirement to overlook but a critical one.

And here's the rest of the story: I have a customer who has already tackled many of these issues (Qualcomm) and they will be sharing some of their successes and lessons learned in a free webcast later this week. You can register here.

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Going Commando with Your Business Intelligence

I'll just come right out and say it: when it comes to the use of Business Intelligence, we are taking the advice of the experts much too literally. The experts and deep thinkers of the BI world talk a lot about discipline in the form of 'control', 'structure' and 'process'. Unfortunately, this kind of guidance is often mistaken as ‘must be used in EVERY situation’.

We all know the world isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of place and this is certainly true in the world of business. Claudia Imhoff recently touched on this idea in ''Just-in-time' data is just fine for business intelligence':

The traditional thinking around business intelligence and analytics is that every piece of data must undergo thorough transformation and cleansing before entering the data warehouse. Today, this line of thinking has changed.

+1! Almost 15 years ago I read an article from the pithy folks at the Motley Fool, 'How a Startup Evolves'. Needless to say, the article stuck with me. The Fools were using Robert Cringley's book 'Accidental Empires' to give investment advice. But I think they really should/could have been talking about Business Intelligence tools: one-size-fits-all doesn’t work in military operations, in investing, and certainly not in the world of BI.

Cringley and the folks at the Fool broke military operations (and companies) up 3 'waves': in the first wave are the commandos (i.e. your typical startup), the second wave consists of infantry (your medium-size business), and finally the third wave are the 'police' (your mega-corporation). Thinking about your use of business intelligence, each wave would certainly have different data and tool needs. After all, commandos rarely use tanks, right?

But I'd go even farther, reminding organizations not to classify themselves in only one of these waves. The reality of business is even more complex than 3 simply waves, with more nuance: different parts of your business are at different stages. Some departments are akin to the 'third wave', very stable and oriented around repeatable operations (such as cashing a check or selling a hamburger). But other parts of your business are probably less predictable, like the dynamic 'first wave of commandos' of a military operation.

I appreciate these subtleties (and particularly that first wave of 'data commandos') because that's where my customers are. I often see organizations use tools and techniques in support of that 'first wave' part of their business that just aren't that adaptable. In spite of the fact that not every BI toolset is the same as the next (read the latest Forrester 'BI Wave' or Gartner 'BI Magic Quadrant' and you'll see what I mean), we regularly see companies giving solid-yet-slow-and-very-unagile BI tools to parts of their organization that really should be getting the nimblest, most adaptable commando weapons possible.

And that's where I think Cringley was really on to something. Not every tool fits every situation. The next time you think of being 'disciplined' about your BI, ask yourself if it's disciplined to do the same thing in EVERY circumstance. If you find that your one and only BI toolset is treated as the answer for every single BI need, there's probably an opportunity to arm your commandos, your soldiers and/or your police with better weapons.

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Is Your Intelligence VIRAL?

The world of BI is undergoing some much-needed change. Mobile, Self-Service, 'Big Data' and even some talk about something called ‘social business intelligence’. But in spite of all these emerging trends, one thing I do not hear at all is talk about BI that’s gone viral.

We all know what 'viral' is, right? It’s that cute video of the baby biting his brother’s finger (#5 on YouTube’s All Time Viewed list with 315 MILLION views). You see it, you watch it again a few more times, then you just gotta pass it on. You email it. Facebook it. Tweet it. Digg it. And the process repeats itself.

This viral thing is an every day occurrence in our personal lives. So why don’t we see more of this viral behavior in the world of the enterprise? What’s stopping Joe in Accounting from sharing his Cost Analysis report with everyone in his department, or even everyone in the company? Joe knows it’d save the company $2,323,412.10, but it'd require that everyone be on board. Sadly, Joe's report doesn’t go anywhere except his boss’ inbox.

Why not?

Yes, I know lots of BI is sensitive stuff. But ALL of it? I could argue that the biggest ROI from most business intelligence occurs only if its sharable and shared. For one great proof point, look no further that our own government, specifically Recovery.gov. Just a few days ago we hosted one of our best webcasts ever, 'Get Involved, Track Government Recovery Spending with Real-Time Intelligence’. Don’t let the title fool you, this was an event worth seeing.

I described the work of Recovery.gov to my co-workers like this: One government agency, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, created a single App (and a robust API behind it) that today powers real-time information for users/websites all over the country. You'll find Recovery.gov's flexible little App (pictured below) embedded all over the place, including the websites of the City of Philadelphia, the State of Michigan, the County of Yellowstone, and Senator Tom Udall, among many others.

Recovery.gov proves my original point: intelligence can be very viral. Noone at Recovery.gov had to deploy tech support to Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania or Montana. Recovery.gov started it. Then it went viral. And it continues to expand. And it was only then that it became truly valuable. This data could have stayed behind closed doors, available to a few government accountants and analysts. But it's real value is due to it's portable, configurable nature. It can be used anywhere by anyone. It’s an eye-opener.

Many of JackBe’s customers have asked us to help them do the same: enable a single group/department to expose their real-time intelligence as an API and/or App, so they can safely share it with their peers/partners/customers, and so those people can then use it however/wherever they want, and maybe even pass it on again. We are, in effect, doing what Social media guru Seth Godin described in his 2005 blog, 'What makes an idea viral?': we help our customers create a simple, visual capsule for their information. We are making viral intelligence.

So I’ll ask my original question again: why don’t we see more of this kind of behavior in the world of the enterprise? Is it culture? Maybe it’s the tools we use? Maybe it’s simply inertia, or history, or fear, or the compensation packages of the idea-creators? Maybe it’s a bit of all of these things. Regardless, I predict more viral ‘data flu’ in the future. I doubt anything can inoculate an enterprise completely from this new kind of BI.

Achoo!

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You Do What You Can

It has been just over a week since the earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated northern Japan. For the people of that country, it is a living nightmare. For the rest of the world, the least we can do is educate ourselves and find a way to contribute.

A co-worker and I have created a dashboard with consolidated information about the still-evolving situation in Japan. The dashboard has real-time news, tweets, photos, videos and, most importantly, a links to websites where you can get involved.


It may seem like terribly little in the face of such an enormous tragedy. But every effort, no matter how small, makes a difference. Just like we have for crises in New Orleans, Haiti, and New Zealand, we should do we what we can.

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Get Your Assets In The Cloud

You’d have to be living under a rock, a very remote rock, to not have heard something about ‘the cloud.’ If you need proof of the topic’s popularity (at least among marketers in software companies) you only have to look as far as Microsoft’s ‘To the Cloud!’ commercials. Here’s one of the many:

Even as a techy and a marketer of techy stuff to other techies, I am still not entirely sure what Microsoft is aiming to do with these commercials. But one thing is very clear: ‘the cloud’ is here to stay.

According to Gartner, worldwide cloud services (any products, services or solutions that are delivered and consumed in real-time over the internet) revenue grew 21% from 2008 to 2009. By 2013, Gartner predicts that cloud revenue will increase threefold.


Among the many uses of ‘the cloud’ is one I (and my customers) find particularly interesting: Data as a Service (‘DaaS’, in case you like acronyms). For those with a need for live data, the cloud is the perfect place to start.

Cloud data marketplaces like Xignite, and the Microsoft Azure Datamarket have thousands of licensable data sources available for mashing. Their like grocery stores whose shelves are filled with tasty information, prepackaged for easy serving in a mashup, a dashboard, or a spreadsheet. Other catalogs, like those at Data.gov and Recovery.gov, offer similar, more specialized data sets that are just waiting for the right user. These are more akin to the hotdog carts o street corners; just as tasty but with a smaller selection.

So, in a DaaS market you find a service you want and get an immediate access point to that data source. You can find all sorts of things that would compliment and enhance your ERP, CRM, or SCM data: get geo-coded demographic stats, live stock quotes, and even real-time basketball scores. And this type of ‘uber data catalog’ addresses a real sore point in many companies: decision-makers often spend half their time finding the right data before they can even act on it.

And where does the DaaS user go from there? Users can combine marketplace data with their own data, creating something that is greater than the sum of the parts. This can mean better data about an existing problem (imagine adding real-time commodity pricing to production plans for bread or semiconductors) or an opportunity to address entirely new needs (like MyGroceryDeals.com, an information-driven startup recently featured in the Wall Street Journal).

As a company that helps companies work with real-time information, JackBe is certainly no stranger to the cloud. Our customers use our Real-Time Intelligence software, Presto, to connect DaaS sources to their own unique information every day. And we’ve been running Presto on an Amazon EC2 instance for over 2 years, letting our 5,000+ community members use this sandbox as an easy way to jumpstart their work. My favorite App from our community? A consolidated news feed for veterinarians in the cattle industry in New Zealand. (Nope, I am not making this up!)

Recently JackBe worked with the folks at Microsoft to create an exemplar demonstration of a DaaS-driven App. The result is the Perishable Goods Shipping App, using data sources from the Microsoft Azure Datamarket. You can read all about it in Microsoft’s Case Study.

There’s certainly value in Data-as-a-Service. Does it have a place in your organization?

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Is It Time To Rethink the Definition of Business Intelligence?

A few weeks ago I, along with my sometime partner in crime, John Crupi, had the opportunity to sit down with some of the nice people at the Boulder BI Brain Trust (BBBT). There were some very big Business Intelligence thinkers in the room, including Claudia Imhoff and Barry Devlin. Walking into a room of big-wigs like this is never easy, but in this particular case I was more apprehensive than usual because we were going to discuss our interpretation (reinterpretation, perhaps) of the fundamentals of BI. And I wasn't entirely sure anyone would agree with us.

If you want the highlights from the discussion, check out John’s podcast interview with Claudia. For my purposes today, I'm going to cut straight to the end: I was wrong to be apprehensive. We went in thinking they’d call us BI heretics but instead we were greeted with open minds and enthusiasm – it was a healthy discussion about JackBe and its role as a provider of 'Real-Time Intelligence' software.

Does the definition of Business Intelligence need to evolve, expand, become more nuanced? If these caretakers of BI didn't burn us at the stake, perhaps the entire industry needs to adjust how we think of 'Business Intelligence'.

Here’s a great example: on the 25th anniversary of the data warehouse Colin White caught the attention of many when he blogged “Is a Data Warehouse still required for BI?” When you can pull data directly from authoritative sources - without caching/storing/copying it, instead providing live, ‘real-time’ connectivity – is a data warehouse still necessary? That's some radical thinking.

As a counter point to Colin’s datawarehouseless BI, Barry Devlin (the founding father of data warehousing, no less) brings up a good point in his blog “On Business Intelligence and Real-Time Intelligence”: data warehouses, although they can create delays in intelligence-delivery, regulate the validity of the intelligence produced.

“Does it make logical business sense to combine sources A and B? Does source A contain data from the same timeframe as source C? Does profit margin in source B have the exact same definition as that in source D?”

They both make valid points, so who's right? If I may be so bold as to assess the commentary from genuine experts like Barry and Colin, I think they both are. Is a data warehouse required in MOST instances of a BI implementation? Probably. But in ALL cases? Well…you decide. And that is the most important thing: what was once a ‘must-have’ is now simply a ‘must-consider’. The bedrock of BI isn't what it used to be.

And the data warehouse isn't the only example of the cracks in the traditional BI mindset. The entire spectrum of BI capabilities seems to be under assault by broad social and technology changes. Some experts (or vendors, at least) are questioning the importance of OLAP in the BI landscape. And there’s lots of new ideas and innovations that are being fitted into the BI space: social BI, complex event processing, cloud BI, and yes, even real-time intelligence.

In his recent blog “BI Changes in 2011, But to What?” Andy Mulholland (Global CTO at CapGemini) gives a great summary of the reasons behind this BI metamorphosis. In it he states “Traditional BI frequently leads to the identification of the need to act so the rest tends to follow, where as 'new' BI should be providing a continuous scanning capability showing what and where to focus on and then act.” According to Gartner, a “comprehensive and well-balanced BI platform” includes 12 capabilities:

Andy’s 'new BI' mission statement is a tall order and you have to wonder if the traditional 12-part BI architecture simply isn’t enough to fill it.

With all the evidence laid out on the table, it seems the definition of Business Intelligence is going to evolve one way or another. And so we think it’s time to ask you: What is included in your Dream Team Business Intelligence solution? Does your perfect BI include the old standbys like ETL? A data warehouse? Reporting? Analytics? Must it include new-fangled approaches like Social BI? Self-service? Real-Time?

In short, how do YOU think we should define Business Intelligence? Perhaps the right answer is much simpler than a list of features or a formal architecture. Perhaps BI is simply whatever helps you make the best decisions.

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It's Good To Be King

I love predictions. One part hype, one part guesswork. And they happen on a regular basis, so you can always count on having something to noodle, to agree with, to scoff at (or all of the above) at least once a year.

While I am not good at predictions myself, I appreciate those types of folks who have the confidence to anoint themselves ‘King of the Future’ and pour through the murk of their crystal ball to scry the secrets the rest of us are too thick to see.

Here at JackBe we’re blessed with not 1, not 2, but 3 very good prognosticators. By now I am sure you’ve seen the 2011 predictions from our CTO, John Crupi. Interestingly, John’s predictions raised the hackles of Dan Malks and Deepak Alur, our other great future-seers, because they weren’t terribly ‘serious’. Dan and Deepak quickly offered their own deep and serious thoughts on 2011.

But we all know there can be only one King. And so I thought I’d sponsor something of the ‘future competition’. I’m publishing Deepak and Dan’s 2011 thoughts here and we’ll check back periodically and see which King continues to reign.

Without further ado, here’s what’s in store in 2011 according to King Dan:

The Cloud, part 1: Cloud marketing continues to rage and we get more feature parity across environments. Amazon recently scored a victory when it lured Microsoft’s Federal Division leader to lead its cloud efforts, but Microsoft’s Azure cloud will continue to close the gap from a technology and infrastructure perspective in 2011, creating a real choice for organizations and developers who want to build cloud-based solutions.

The Cloud, part 2: The Microsoft Azure Marketplace will bring commercial credibility to its nascent cloud offering, but many organizations will demand higher level features, including simpler access to APIs, ability to combine and aggregate multiple services, and combine information from the Azure Marketplace with other high value Enterprise information sources, such as CRM, ERP, and SharePoint.

Business Intelligence: There’s too much BS in BI! Customers will continue to demand more dynamic approaches to BI. Lighter weight BI approaches won’t entirely eat heavy-weight BI’s lunch, but will continue to nibble away as customers insist on access to more up to the minute, dynamic information to support more timely strategic decision making.

Portals/ECM, part 1: SharePoint 2010 adoption will continue to outpace expectations. Enterprises are typically slow to adopt new infrastructure, but SharePoint 2010 will be an exception and will be adopted more widely than expected.

Portals/ECM, part 2: And because of #1 above…SharePoint ‘Sprawl’ will be a top 10 issue for organizations who rely heavily on SharePoint. With its ubiquitous adoption and “swiss army knife”-like promise, SharePoint’s blessing can also become its curse, if not strongly governed. Unifying information across your SharePoint environment and sharing information from SharePoint with other aspects of your Enterprise, including CRM, ERP, Java Portals, etc is a growing challenge that is gaining visibility, due to its growing bottom line impact.

Not to be outdone, King Deepak sees some similar trends and some new ones for 2011:

Enterprise Tablets: The iPad is going to be very prominent in the enterprise. See what Citrix is doing at http://www.ipadsatwork.com; JP Morgan already announced their iPad plans. Other tablets might follow soon, but for next year iPad will be king.

Enterprise Mobile: HTML5 will start making more inroads as the preferred technology for mobile apps. It will move native platforms into a niche (for gaming and some other applications).

Enterprise App Stores: Enterprises realize they want/need a one-stop shop App Store to manage all their apps (web apps, mobile apps, tablet apps, ...) instead of App Store per device/technology. However, adoption of Enterprise App Store will be slow.

Business Intelligence: BI will not be able to do "Real-Time" despite their marketing it as such. Many small/niche BI vendors will disappear this year.

Cloud: Enterprises finally start getting cozier with the idea of putting their data on the cloud, but will need security and governance.

Other Stuff: CoD White Ops will take over the video game world.

This is good stuff! And I see a common thread to most of these: dynamic, on-demand information. We're an information hungry society and these are the kinds of trends that can help fulfill that demand.

But there can be only one king. I can’t wait to see who wears the Future King crown at the end of the year.

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2011 Predictions: It's Really Time for Real-Time

This year I decided to do things a bit different than past years. Before placing my first bet on this year’s prediction list, I decided to wait and listen to what ‘the experts’ were saying about 2011 technology trends. I expected iRobots and Google’s first moon flight, but no one seemed to raise the ante. What I heard was a lot of the same; cloud, BI, mobile, tablets, virtualization and more cloud. I hate to downplay their predictions but most of what I saw was just a recap of IT topics-of-the-moment. At the same time, I reviewed my predictions from last year and there ‘it’ was, lucky number 7:

“2010 becomes the ‘Realtime’ Year. Enterprises want their information as fast and as realtime as the Web. BI vendors struggle to get to anything close to realtime and begin telling customers they need to begin looking at other technologies for realtime data, such as Enterprise Mashups.”

I may have been a bit too early and a bit too specific, but I am confident this is one topic whose time has come. We continue to go to work and use ‘warehouses’ of information that are stale, disconnected copies of our actual live, dynamic data. That’s an old design from the 1990’s and one we no longer have to live with.

I believe in lucky number 7 so much that I am making it the focus of ALL of my predictions for 2011. I am calling this the “Real-Time Edge”: getting real-time information to the user by leveraging the computing power at the edge (tablets, mobile, sensors, etc).

So, here it goes, my top ten 2011 predictions in real-time. (Trust me, you haven’t heard any of these before):

1. "iClouds" join Apple's "iFamily." Apple announces the “iCloud” specifically designed for iPad real-time intelligence Apps.

2. Gartner and Forrester face off in lengthly legal battle. Gartner and Forrester both formally announce a new real-time BI niche called Real-time Intelligence (RI). Unfortunately, both companies have a very public legal battle over whether ‘real-time’ actually contains a hyphen.

3. BI lacks tradition. IDC puts out the first “Traditional BI Vendors doing Real-time Intelligence” point paper which interestingly enough doesn’t list any traditional BI vendors.

4. Amazon ditches the Kindle for Robots. Amazon and Willow Grove announce the world’s first real-time OpenCV (Computer Vision) cloud processing engines that can be used with personal iPhones, Android, camera-based tablets and even robots.

5. Oracle attempts Real-Time Real-Time. Larry Ellison mandates that all Oracle software products include “Real-time” in their name. This includes renaming the only product that already has “Real-time” in its name: “Oracle Real-Time, Real-Time Decision Server.” Sounds weird.

6. Google renames Groupon. On April 1, 2011, Google announces a $10B bid for the new real-time GroupOn who just renamed themselves “RealOn.”

7. SAP thinks they're sly, in Real-Time. SAP insists all their products have been real-time since day one. No one believes them.

8. Microsoft bets on "Real-Time Steve." Microsoft announces “Real-time SharePoint 2011” and touts that that every single SharePoint instance runs in memory, letting anyone find any data in any SharePoint instance within 2.4 milliseconds. Steve Ballmer renames himself “Real-Time Steve”.

9. The Cloud Confusion continues. Everyone else announces a real-time cloud offering and calls it the “Real Cloud”. Unfortunately, no one really knows what it is. Sorta like today’s Cloud.

10. I'm suffering from a mid-life crisis. I get a “Get Real-Time” tattoo.

I wanted to add more but my calendar says I have a real-time meeting with a real-time customer. Happy Real-Time New Year!

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This Blog is Worth $800 Billion

The last 2 years have marked a historic period of significant federal technology milestones, including the appointment of Federal CTO Vivek Kundra, the Open Government Initiative and numerous other 'openness and transparency' efforts -- all of which underscores our government’s commitment to enhance visibility and ensure accountability.

Mr. Kundra said it best: "We've moved to a model of co-innovation, where the American people can help create value in a way that we've never been able to do before." One great example is Recovery.gov. This site is the US government’s one-stop-shop for reporting data of the $787 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) spending.

And Recovery.gov just got a major upgrade, transparency-wise.

A very innovative part of Recovery.gov went live last week. They call it the 'Developer Center', but I think it is very friendly to non-developers. It makes available the Recipient data (i.e. the people who receive ARRA funds for their projects) to the public as pre-built widgets and dynamic user-defined data feeds. The widgets are easy to ‘take home with you’. The dynamic feeds can help reduce the $800 billion in spending data to a more manageable, relevant data set that can be mashed with other data. It’s a great 1-2 punch.

Here’s a snapshot of a App Dashboard we built from Recovery.gov feeds using Presto Mashboard. It only took a few minutes to create:

There is a lot of value in the data provided by transparency efforts like Recovery.gov. But it's even more encouraging to see Recovery.gov go beyond a simple 'data dump'. Their take-home widgets (and the App Dashboard) illustrate how we can empower even non-technical users to obtain rich visuals and deeper meaning from complex data sets. We can empower the citizen developer to easily create and share dynamic Apps and Dashboards from the data.

Data is good. Easy, powerful tools to work with the data is even better. +1 for Recovery.gov.

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More Data Can Only Mean One Thing...

If you remember back in June, I was very excited about Microsoft’s invitation to run JackBe’s Presto on Azure’s cloud. In true Mashup style, we quickly assembled the ‘Open Government Azure Mashup’ showcasing Mashups and Apps that connect to Microsoft’s data sources including SharePoint lists, OData-based unemployment information on Azure cloud, published using the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) Toolkit, and Bing service.

We created a personalized dashboard on unemployment across the United States, assembling Apps and publishing these Apps as SharePoint webparts. Since then, the cloud continues its momentum with a strong emphasis on the value of an information ecosystem. The more relevant and valuable the information, the more valuable the resulting Apps and Dashboards can be.

We’ve always said ‘When Mashing your Enterprise, It Pays to have a lot of Friends’. But where will the cloud fit into this ecosystem? Well lucky for us, Microsoft has helped us answer this question by bringing a new dimension to the story with the recently announced ‘Azure DataMarket’. Azure DataMarket provides customers with a reliable, affordable set of data services, somewhat akin to companies like Xignite. Here’s how Microsoft describes the product on the Azure DataMarket website:

“The DataMarket section of Windows Azure Marketplace, formerly known as Codename Dallas, includes data, imagery, and real-time web services from leading commercial data providers and authoritative public data sources. Customers will have access to datasets such as demographic, environmental, financial, retail, weather and sports. DataMarket also includes visualizations and analytics to enable insight on top of data.”

And JackBe is working jointly with Microsoft to show just how powerful this approach can be. We recently worked in partnership to assemble a dynamic dashboard of Apps created from Azure DataMarket and other services. These Apps track a shipment of perishable food (we like to think of it as caviar) as it travels from warehouse to purchaser, incorporating location, weather, customer, and inventory information from different systems and services, all working together to ensure the shipment reaches its destination in time and that it stays fresh.



This collection of interrelated Apps also goes much further than just Microsoft’s Azure DataMarket. It incorporates many other Microsoft enterprise tools, including:

• Bing maps: with Navteq dynamic routing information and Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM on Demand customer data;
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Demand: customer order data, and real-time Weather Central information visualized in Microsoft Silverlight, this App also supports write-back capability to the Dynamics CRM;
• Microsoft SharePoint: aggregating information on delivery trucks and their locations;
• And from Azure Data Market services: dynamic fuel prices and geographically correlated fuel station locations.

We believe that seeing this disparate set of information in one single view so a company can accurately track their shipments based on changing conditions truly shows the value of a strong information ecosystem combined with a secure platform to quickly assemble and view live information. Yes we admit it, you can certainly do this today with existing applications but that includes toggling between 6-8 screens of information, raising the bar for mistakes and spending 20-30 minutes tracking each shipment. We see this everyday and we’ve learned from our customers just how inefficient this process really is. When any enterprise is faced with so many pieces of data in so many places, it can only mean one thing: they need a dynamic solution like this.

As I said earlier in the year, ‘it’s going to be a very hot Microsoft summer’. It looks like the heat will continue throughout 2010.

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Making Dashboards an 'Everyday Thing'

I think 'Dash' is the operative part of the word 'Dashboard'. Dashboards are intended to give business leaders a quick way to assemble a dashboard for them to better manage and understand their business. But there's a catch: often the data needed to create a USEFUL dashboard is spread out in different places. And we all know that IT is often too overburdened to spend time to create customized, unique dashboards datasets for different business users.

Consider this post by Michael Vizard at ITBusinessEdge titled 'Executive Dashboards as a Service'. He defines the opportunity, the problem, and the solution in one succinct paragraph:

"In an ideal world, every business executive would have his or her own executive dashboard to craft custom reports using files regardless of the application in which they were created. The problem with that vision is that the typical IT department doesn’t have time to develop a custom executive dashboard for every user."

And this is precisely the reason why we created Mashboard, a new part of Presto 3.0 that allows you to quickly build dynamic dashboards by connecting different visual Apps together to create unique workspace dashboards. Yes, I said 'dashboard', 'dynamic', and 'you' in the same sentence. I promise I am not just leading you on.

Of course you can do this user-created-dashboard stuff only if you've conquered the oh-my-goodness-I've-got-data-everywhere problem first. So Mashboard is the front-end of of our App- and mashup-making Enterprise Mashup platform, which takes care of all that. So the dashboard lifecycle is simple: 1. make all kinds of data sources 'mashable' - spreadsheets, databases, web services, news feeds, etc.; 2. combine the mashables into enterprise mashups (created visually using Presto Wires mashup-maker); 3. make the mashup into a sharable, use-it-anywhere App (using Presto App Maker); 4. get busy with Mashboard.

Mashboard also has some special sauce of its own. Yes, it lets you do the dashboard basics: take your Apps and lay them out in a dashboard form (we call them 'workspaces'). Better still, Mashboard lets you connect Apps with each other to make them interactive. Mashboard also lets your share and re-use workspaces from other users.

You don't have to spend gazillion dollars and years of integration work to get all this. The emphasis is on an ease-of-use that an 'end user' would appreciate. And, of course, IT will like this because all this is done under their auspicious enterprise IT architecture and all guidelines, with their rules for security and governance enforced by Presto.

In my [humble but admittedly slightly-biased] opinion, we should have made dashboards into an 'everyday thing' a long time ago.

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Does Your SOA Need an Enterprise App Store?

I just came across a great question that Peter Schoff recently asked on the eBizQ forums: 'How Would You Describe SOA in One Sentence?'. In response, fellow eBizQ pundit Joe McKendrick tweeted out "App Store for Enterprise" and then followed up those 25 characters with an interesting blog post, 'SOA in One Concise Sentence'. (Take a minute to give it a read, I'll wait right here for you.)

How neat! But I am sure that for a topic as large as SOA, and considering how passionate many people are about SOA (both lovers and haters), Joe's comment is sure to cause some concern. In fact, as you can see from the blog above, you'll notice some people already disagree with Joe. A comment by Peter Kretzman in the forum counters with this:

"SOA is nowhere close to an 'app store for the enterprise.' It's plumbing, not faucets. There is no 'app store for the enterprise' per se: that's a holy grail that's been sought for decades now. SOA is a mindset, a way of creating bunches of loosely coupled individual programmatic services that can be combined into applications. The notion of 'app store' implies that an SOA service is standalone (it's not, for the most part), or that users can mix and match and update them on their own (they might to some small degree, but most applications will still require planning, architecting, design, build, test, and deployment.)"

I am not going to argue with Peter here. However, I would like to try to explain what's happening in practice and why Joe's tweet makes sense, at least from one perspective.

Let's start with Peter's last statement: "Most applications will still require planning, architecting, design, build, test, and deployment." True. However, you don't always have the luxury of weeks or months anymore. Business often needs answers in hours and days. Apps are a perfect solution for releasing bite-sized features that work cohesively to provide a small set of integrated experience for the user. And Enterprise Apps bring the consumerization of this Apps phenomenon by combining the conciseness, portability and agility of Apps and enterprise mashups, and yet still leveraging the systemic qualities (security, scalability, etc.) of the existing enterprise architecture that has been set in place due to all the hard IT work (SOA or not) over the years.

So without getting philosophical about SOA, if one were to get more pragmatic, we really should consider ways we can meet user requirements by providing Apps in the enterprise. If there was a way to make existing data sources within the enterprise easily mashable, and yet not break any SOA or enterprise architecture rules in place, then that takes us one step closer to bringing the data to the users who need it when they need it. And once they are mashable, it becomes easy to 'mix-and-match' (as Peter puts it), without spending tons of time and effort on the planning, architecture, design, test and deployment.

As an enterprise software architect myself, I think this new approach is not disrupting to any underlying architecture, SOA or otherwise, but merely building on top and complementing it to make things happen quicker for business. And if you agree such mix-and-match is possible, it is natural to say you can put an App 'face' on it. The result is an Enterprise App Store full of Enterprise Apps.

So, while people may agree or disagree about "App Store for Enterprise" being SOA, there is one thing that is beyond a doubt in my mind: Enterprise Apps and the Enterprise App Store can bring SOA to the users. The Enterprise App Store provides a great solution to leverage all the IT infrastructure built in the name of SOA and finally make it useful to the business, bridging the last mile if you will. Holy grail sought after for decades it may be, but it is all here right now.

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Using Enterprise Mashups to Save Billions

I just came across a post from Joe McKendrick on ZDNet Blogs that caught my eye - Study: Increase data usability, save billions. Here's an excerpt:

"Researchers say data usability can be improved by focusing on the following factors:

• Intelligence of data “can be improved through the accuracy of the prediction, trends analysis, recommendations and profile matching/associations made by the associated applications. For example, what percentage of recommendations made by a business intelligence application results in cross-selling?”
• Remote access to data and applications is essential in an increasingly mobile workforce.
• Sales mobility “involves the ability of salespersons to use portable devices and applications to exchange information related to all aspects of a deal or transaction with a customer.”
• Improvements in data quality will result in improvements that “may come through better and timely decisions (which may increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and hence revenues), as well as fewer errors and rework, lower working capital requirements, faster receivables, etc. (which will lower costs).”

A 10 percent improvement can add up to big dollars. Researchers determined that if a median Fortune 1000 business (36,000 employees and $388,000 in sales per employee) increased the usability of its data by just 10 percent, it would translate to an increase in $2.01 billion in total revenue every year, or $55,900 in additional sales per employee annually." – End of excerpt

I find this is very interesting. But the question is how do you go about achieving this.

1. You don’t want to be spending millions to save millions.

2. You don’t want to take years to achieve these goals.

If you can afford to do either, then I suggest, you read no further. But if you don't have millions and don't have year, I'd like to share an alternate approach.

To me, enterprise mashups have been at this for a few years. Take remote access to data and applications for instance. It is dead easy for us to create a new enterprise mashup that wraps the existing data and applications, creates a specific usable view of that data, and then expose this mashup as a Web Service (SOAP or REST), using Apps to your end users and customers. This does not take years, it can be done in hours and days today.

Consider mobility. You want to not only create a more usable view of data, but in turn ensure that this data is available for your mobile users to interact with wherever they are via any portable device. This too is fairly easy to achieve using enterprise mashups.

Basically, enterprise mashups create that agility layer in your enterprise architecture to deliver concise, specific, usable data and applications to your users, without disrupting your current enterprise architecture. This new agility layer can respond rapidly to new business needs by changing the enterprise mashups and creating new enterprise mashups when required.

Enterprise mashups don’t solve the traditional problem of data cleansing in the traditional way…Extract/Transform/Load (ETL). That’s the whole point. Most customers can’t afford (time or resources) to cleanse data that way. I think that enterprise mashups thrive when conventional solutions become expensive and time consuming.

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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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