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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