Who is Person of the Year at your Company?
When it comes to software, these are interesting times for both techies and non-techies alike. Witness Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2007: "You". This is a savvy reference to users' interaction with "the new Web" or "Web 2.0", with...
"...community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution."
Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace. Exciting stuff to be sure. Not to mention Flickr, Google Maps, Twitter, Pandora, Last.FM, digg, del.icio.us and the multitudes of other Web 2.0 sites out there. Hard to argue with the idea that these sites are changing the way we interact with technology and the resulting benefits. But one important aspect of this "revolution" that the Time feature fails to point out is that this transformation is currently restricted almost entirely to the consumer space. The benefits of this "world-changing" experience largely disappear as these same users enter their corporate workplace each day and use their business applications.
In the workplace, instead of sharing these next generation Web experiences, users typically find themselves interacting with different siloed software applications that are often poorly integrated with each other and whose UIs do not enable the sort of interactivity, configurability, and customization they desire.In this world, it might be more accurate to say that the corporate ERP system or the ubiquitous-but-annoying Portal software is 'pe
rson' of the year! This is not to disparage the vendors of these software packages (much), but to highlight the fact that change often comes more slowly to the corporate environment and is limited or throttled by these tools.By now you know well that our goal at JackBe is to bring the benefits of Web 2.0 to the Enterprise and make "You" (The User) the person of the year inside the workplace. Our approach to bringing the benefits of Web 2.0 to the Enterprise is to create the premier Enterprise Mashup Platform (which we call Presto).
At JackBe we believe that Mashups are user-driven, user-focused and ad-hoc in nature. But as we've discussed in the recent past, what differentiates our approach to Mashups from what you'll encounter in the consumer space is an approach that embraces (yet does not displace) existing Enterprise infrastructure and middleware. And as heterogeneous, disparate data sources are the norm, enterprise mashups must meet the need of bringing these hetergenous sources together elegnatly. Finally, I can attest personally that any good Enterprise Mashup Platform must also be built to deploy securely (with the proper governance and access control policies) and safely (with capabilities for high-availability and real-time monitoring).Remember, we're no longer not talking eye-candy technology to connect restaurant listings with Google maps. We're building solutions to critical, often sensitive, business needs. Serious features for security and safety are unsexy-but-vital capabilities you've got to have in your Enterprise Mashup platform.
If you are a Enterprise Architect in a Fortune 2000 company, these are capabilities to live by. I'll be discussing topics like enterprise mashup security and reliability in great detail in my next few posts. And that's the kind of stuff that would make YOU into Person of the Year in your company.
4 comments:
You raise a good point. The big players like Oracle, BEA, SAP are hoping that Web 2.0 will be a feature upgrade for their existing products. All us upstart Enterprise 2.0 vendors are betting that taking advantage of these new technologies will require a whole new platform.
Chris,
Agreed...the key is that this emerging platform must provide the sort of ad-hoc, situational application development environment that allows Enterprise mashups to be developed with enough ease to make them viable (the biz unit value prop) and in a way that embraces (not displaces) existing Enterprise infrastructure, including Security, Identity Mgmt, Policies, Services, Registries, etc. (the IT value prop).
Dan I am worried that a growing number of companies are growing weary with the massive and expanding complexity that is their IT.
Surprisingly many of the companies we build solutions for don't have a very robust enterprise infrastructure. Even if they have put in the money to build up some elements of it, a large portion of important data is not (and may never be) connected in ways that make it meaningful / useful to mash up type applications.
There has to be a smaller, faster, lighter way to just grab the data you need for the mash up, and get it into a form that you can make use of it though AJAX or Flash.
Bruce,
The desire to address the very pain you mention is one of the key drivers for our having built Presto, our Enterprise Mashup Platform, in the way we have...Not only does Presto make it easy to consume SOA-enabled infrastructure, but we can consume any artifact of high-business value, since as you point out, lots of valuable data may not be service enabled.
Additionally, Data in Presto are mashable *across* data source types, so Presto can consume and mashup data from WSDL-described SOAP and XML-based services, as well as data directly from an Oracle DB, a REST-based service that returns JSON, a Java POJO, a .Net web service, an RSS feed, a spreadsheet, email, etc.
Subsequently, these mashups are available via our open, lightweight API to any client application, be it Ajax (using JackBe's powerful frameworks and tools), or Flash/Flex, or Silverlight, or [insertFavoritePresentationTechnologyHere]
Thanks for your comment.
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