Mashups on a plane

I am writing this as I fly home from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It was a good show to get the big picture of all the things under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella and all the heavyweights were there (IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, ) talking Web 2.0 everything in the Enterprise: wiki, blog, search, mashups, collaboration, and a few other topics as well.

It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that my favorite session was the ‘Enterprise 2.0 Mash-up’ panel. JackBe wasn’t on the panel (but of course we would have been happy to!) so I got the chance to listen closely to other vendors talk Enterprise Mashups. Here’s a few of the more interesting things I got to hear in the session:

• BEA showed off AquaLogic Pages. They created a blog, grabbed a SOAP data source, connected that to a Google map and then tried to grab a YouTube video to include in their mashup. Truthfully, it felt more like a user-driven portal builder. But I must admit it was still cool to see.
• Share Methods talked a bit about ‘office app’ mashups and a new mashup ‘standard’, OpenSAM (http://www.opensam.org), that includes things like WebDAV, ALE (Ajax Linking and Embedding), CGI, SSL, and a few other technical bits. The goal, an admittedly noble one, is to allow online apps vendors to interoperate and, optimally, be used together in a single cohesive environment. Not surprisingly, Share Method’s ‘product’ (does such a word apply to a mashed solution?), ShareOffice, seemed to include lots of other third-party apps within it.
• Rod Smith, IBM's VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, showed off QED with some of the neat weather info from Accuweather you might have heard about before. He was refreshingly candid about the time it took to build the demo (17 hours, including 4 hours of design time). And, unlike most of the vendors on the panel (or mashup vendors in general), put some emphasis on ‘getting mashup data from a SQL statement’. Good to know that at least IBM understands where most enterprise data originates.
• Near-Time talked about ‘cross-organizational’ collaboration, not something I often hear associated with the user-driven mashup revolution. But they did seem to have experiences in data-driven mashups.

I must admit I am surprised how different JackBe’s data-driven mashups are from the wiki-, RSS- and application-driven ‘mashups’ of other mashup vendors. The lesson, I guess, is a simple one: like ‘Enterprise 2.0’, the phrase ‘Enterprise Mashup’ is broadly used today. Caveat emptor.

There was also an interesting side-conversation about the ‘definition of a widget’ and what it would take to allow vendors to pass widgets around between themselves. This is a topic raised at the recent IBM Mashup Summit and while it ain’t a done deal yet its good to hear the mashup vendors at least talking about it.

And, in spite of the differences in the practice of the mashup vendors, the principles seemed to be all in line: simplicity, quick, and richly interactive. Now that’s something JackBe can agree on.

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Faster, Better, Stronger

Did you notice our blog has a new look? That's because this evening JackBe launched a new edition of its website. Normally, my cynical personality would respond to such an announcement with a ‘great, even more marketing sludge to ignore’. (I’m the guy who runs marketing!) But I expect this time it’s different because our new site isn't just more pleasing to the eye, it's easier to use and has a lot more information.

Most importantly, JackBe has set up an Evaluation Download of Presto, our Enterprise Web 2.0 Mashup Platform. It's an easy way to get started with enterprise mashups, SOA virtualization, and Ajax applications.

And, as we’ve posted in the past, we know it isn’t necessarily easy to wrap your arms around the 'Enterprise Web 2.0' thing. So we’ve added ‘Getting Started’ roadmaps for techies and non-techies.

We’ve also added new ‘See It In Action’ videos, new hands-on demos, new whitepapers, and some new case studies of Enterprise Web 2.0 in the real world. A complete list of new stuff can be found here.

Send us a note if you can’t find what you need. If you think it’s important, others might too. And isn’t collaboration what Web 2.0 is all about?

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Differences in 2.0's Continued

Wow, we received fantastic feedback on our the last post, Differences in 2.0's. In particular, we received emails asking for more clarification about the difference of Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. I created a pic (see below) that I hope will help.

First, let me attempt to relate Enterprise 2.0 to Ford, the car company. We could draw parallels to Enterprise 2.0 and what Henry Ford did with manufacturing. In this case we could say Ford created an 'assembly plant 2.0' which changed the core of the whole organization; organizational processes & relationships with said processes, the workforce, their roles, relationships with partners and customers, and how all of these parts interact with each other. This is a stretch but what I am trying to convey is that the core of the enterprise, down to how its business & peoples operate, changes and doesn’t resemble that of the organization before. This change resembles more of a social diagram tied together by Web 2.0 social tools and loosely coupled web apps capable of being composed or customized by each node at a moments notice to respond to whatever need arises using inputs(data & information) from around and out of the network.

[...pause after that mouthful...and we're back...]

In this stretch example, the change creates a Ford company that looks and operates much differently (better) than other enterprises around it still assembling cars the pre-Ford way. This is due to the relationships between the people, data, and the collaborative nature of the new organization.

I expanded a portion of this new picture to incorporate the two facets of Web 2.0 (The social collaborative paradigm shift & the Web 2.0 technology enablers that make this possible), how these once implemented correctly make up the Enterprise Web 2.0 infrastructure, and lastly how with the addition of a Enterprise collaborative paradigm shift, all make up Enterprise 2.0.

You’ll notice that the nodes here state ‘The User’ but this user could be one person, a team, or even a business unit. The connecting lines can be thought of as the social construct or Web 2.0 paradigm that I talked about in the last post, and the Web 2.0 bubbles as Web 2.0 technology enablers connecting Users with systems and other Users.

So, simply stated (I hope) Enterprise Web 2.0 is a technology solution made up of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is the organizational paradigm shift that leverages these solutions which, by EW2.0's very nature, must be deeply embedded in the organization to work, creating a much different 2.0 organization as a result. This transition takes time as the whole organization re-roots strategically around the embedded Enterprise Web 2.0 infrastructure. Now one could raise the point of why go through all of this -- benefits of Enterprise Web 2.0 adoption? But this is an entirely new post all of its own. Here are a couple of posts that might help if interested.

• The Age of Customization: Enterprise Web 2.0 is the perfect pair of pants!
  
• Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership
• Enterprise 2.0 meme map

I hope this helps. Although I am not a graphic artist, I think it pretty much summarizes the connection and relationships of all four 2.0’s we touched on in the last post sums up how I put all these pieces together. As always I am open and would like to hear your thoughts. mike@jackbe.com

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Differences of 2.0's

A lot of people ask us here at JackBe about the definitions and or differences between Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. So here are some of my thoughts simplified for a blog post.

Web 2.0 – There are two parts to this one which will make sense when I get into the difference between Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

1. Web 2.0 – the user-driven paradigm shift. Youtube, blogs, wikis, RIAs with greater self-service capabilities… all of these are examples of a paradigm shift from older HTML static, mostly one way communication of ideas and information to a new User-Driven web model which enables you and me to more easily contribute content, share information and collaborate with each other through the web.

2. Web 2.0 - technology enablers. This user-driven shift has been made possible in part by new or now accepted technologies and techniques which have gained greater penetration as web application tools. Such include: Ajax, proprietary RIA tools like Flex and Lazlo and now Silverlight, Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Ruby on Rail and other lightweight dev models, Web Services like REST and RSS, Mashups (data and visual) and Tagging. Of course this is not an exclusive list but I think you get my point.

Enterprise Web 2.0 – the Web 2.0 technologies mentioned above put into practice in the enterprise. For example: richer, more productive customer self-service apps, inter-department collaboration through bogs, and wikis. But simply ‘slapping’ these technologies into a rooted organization will not bring about the same successes and value that Web 2.0 apps have enjoyed in the public domain. Enterprises have too many constraints and need a mind and culture shift along with deep embedment of these 2.0 tools into its processes to have any kind of a definable impact.

Enterprise 2.0 – The Enterprise 2.0 is analogous to #1 above in that it represents a user orientated paradigm shift of the enterprise makeup itself. It embraces the decentralized organization built around disparate data and information with users empowered to create new information built around and on top of others ideas through sharing, and collaboration. An organic organization loosely designed and constructed to empower knowledge workers to do what they do best by giving them what they need, when the need it and how they need it by enabling them with 2.0 technologies and nurturing this new paradigm mind set internally. Here enterprises reap the benefits of 2.0 through network effects from its user’s contributions and collaboration and realize success that increases proportionally as more users contribute to the organism creating a potentially indefinable value proposition to stakeholders.

Each of these could be expanded in much more detail but why make it more complicated as this? If you have any thoughts please feel free to share or contact me. That is after all the point.

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