The Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog

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

2012-01-26T09:53:00.010-05:00

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
Follow me on Twitter

The Future is Big, Live, Mobile and Limber

2012-01-19T12:13:00.012-05:00

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.

Mr. Mobile BI, Hollywood is calling...

2011-12-29T16:04:00.002-05:00

[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!

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

2011-12-08T12:22:00.012-05:00

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%.

Why I Hate "Self-Service"

2011-11-08T14:57:00.012-05:00

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.

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

2011-10-04T08:55:00.008-05:00

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?

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

2011-08-04T14:30:00.006-05:00

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!

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

2011-07-11T17:30:00.006-05:00

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.

Going Commando with Your Business Intelligence

2011-06-30T11:47:00.012-05:00

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.

Is Your Intelligence VIRAL?

2011-05-11T08:53:00.013-05:00

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!

You Do What You Can

2011-03-21T09:14:00.039-05:00

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.

Get Your Assets In The Cloud

2011-03-09T14:33:00.028-05:00

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?

Is It Time To Rethink the Definition of Business Intelligence?

2011-02-10T16:35:00.027-05:00

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.

It's Good To Be King

2011-01-18T12:32:00.010-05:00

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.

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

2011-01-12T11:13:00.000-05:00

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!

This Blog is Worth $800 Billion

2010-11-08T11:30:00.024-05:00

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.

More Data Can Only Mean One Thing...

2010-11-03T10:43:00.027-05:00

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.

Making Dashboards an 'Everyday Thing'

2010-09-30T08:30:00.002-05:00

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.

Does Your SOA Need an Enterprise App Store?

2010-09-13T13:55:00.021-05:00

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.

Using Enterprise Mashups to Save Billions

2010-09-03T13:37:00.027-05:00

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.

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

How do you define an 'Enterprise App Store'?

2010-08-04T09:00:00.002-05:00

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!

What Would Steve Jobs Do In My Place?

2010-07-14T09:52:00.011-05:00

"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!

Introducing Presto 3.0: Freedom & Power for the User

2010-07-13T07:40:00.027-05:00

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!

More Clouds Looks Good to Me

2010-06-17T10:25:00.024-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

I Predict a hot summer of SharePoint and Mashups

2010-06-11T12:10:00.007-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mashup Security – Drinking Wine without the Hangover

2010-06-07T15:17:00.017-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When is a Dashboard More Than Just a Pretty Face?

2010-06-02T14:24:00.023-05:00

We’ve had a long-running survey on our Mashup Developer Community

that asks ‘Where do you think mashups are most relevant?’. And the clear winner, with 41% of the vote, is 'Dashboards and Decision Support Technologies', beating out options like 'Portals' and 'SOA'.

Message received! In fact I am happy to say that, with the June 2010 release of Presto (

version 3.0

, which we refer to as the 'Enterprise App Store' release), we will have an entirely new tool called Presto Mashboard. And I think that we've taken traditional dashboards and added a few spicy ideas of our own.

At first glance Mashboard might appear similar to

Google Desktop

, as an interactive ‘Web 2.0’ dashboard for web-savvy users to organize their Apps in customizable layouts. But Mashboard is also much, much more.

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

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

Mashboard also supports grouping sets of Apps that are brought together for a particular application or purpose. These groups can be shared, just like individual Apps, to other instances of Mashboard, or to popular enterprise collaboration destinations like

SharePoint

iGoogle

, or simply to a web browser. And I’ve already seen some great Mashboard-based solutions created by our mashup developer community, like the

Disaster Response Dashboard

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

Mashups in Action: Mashing Makes for Better Government

2010-05-20T12:34:00.009-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Much Freedom Does Your Data Have?

2010-04-01T15:12:00.024-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Agile is Your Business Intelligence?

2010-03-24T09:47:00.022-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take a look, start thinking nimble.

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

2010-03-15T15:23:00.055-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get your mashup app on!

Does Your Enterprise Suffer from the Stalactite Effect?

2010-03-02T12:03:00.024-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mashups in Action: Crisis Planning and Response

2010-02-11T14:54:00.011-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010-02-01T14:11:00.016-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010-01-20T15:49:00.012-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010-01-12T11:05:00.011-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mashups in Action: This Space Intentionally Left Blank

2009-12-15T14:51:00.013-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-11-23T10:23:00.015-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decision Time Frame: As quickly as possible.

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

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

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

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

Tree House Mashups

2009-11-05T10:27:00.012-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it comes to Enterprise Mashups…don’t listen to me!

2009-10-26T09:34:00.008-05:00

“Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience.” -- Denis Waitley

Over the last few months I have learned that a lot of my thoughts on Enterprise Mashups were wrong. And you must understand that this is a difficult thing to admit. As the company that invented the first Enterprise Mashup Platform, Presto, we were certain that we had all of the right answers to the question of ‘what is an enterprise Mashup and what kind of value do they create?’.

Most cognoscenti consider their opinions to be relatively unassailable when it comes to the topic on which they are experts. In my case, my belief in myself began to unravel in the most unlikely of places: on national TV. When I appeared on Fox Business Channel I was asked to explain what a mashup. As some of you know, I did not do a very good job at it.

So, as the saying goes, the first step in fixing a problem is realizing you have one. We knew that we didn’t have the best answers, so I had my team set out on a journey to discover better ways to share the mashup story through definitions, use cases and the like. We set out on what I called a “mash-about” (named after the aboriginal “walk-about”).

We tried many things to get the answers we needed. Some were innovative, some were wacky, some were unproductive, and all of them were at least a bit self-deprecating. Afterall, we were the experts and yet we were asking laymen to help us write our ‘story’. It’s crowd-sourcing at it’s finest, I think. And it’s been quite a revealing journey.

In our first effort, the "Beat the CEO” contest, we challenged people to provide a better definition. And the “Mashup “Tribe” (that’s YOU) came through with some great insights. There were metaphors, technical descriptions, short answers and long ones, and much, much more.

Next we hosted the “Explain it on the back of a business card” contest. Can you explain what a mashup is using only the whitespace on the back of a business card? I am happy to report that almost 100 graphics artists did. Who knew there were so many ways to describe a mashup by a simple picture?

Finally, we invested time in listening to our customers, our prospective customers, our partners, our competitors (some of them, at least), and the 3,000+ members of our Mashup Developer Community. There were literally thousands of lessons to be learned from the things they were doing with mashups.

And we took all this input and grouped it all into three areas of interest: ‘WHAT is an Enterprise Mashup?’, ‘HOW do you do create an Enterprise Mashup?’, and ‘WHY should an organization care about mashups?’. Since you’ve read this far, I expect you’d be interested in the results:

WHAT (is an Enterprise Mashup):

Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.

We tried to simplify the definition as much as possible so we focused on what we thought were the four most important elements:

Secure – We’ve written about the common secure requirements for mashups before. Without this set of capabilities, you’ll never get past the enterprise front door.

Visually rich – Mashups can certainly be published as a data service using a format like RSS or WSDL. But we’ve found that they more often end as visual representations (often personalized or customized by the mashup consumer) that lets users better understand the data and make informed decisions.

Actionable – The dictionary defines “actionable” as “relating to or being information that allows a decision to be made or action to be taken”. We’re talking about data that a knowledge worker can understand and which doesn’t require lots of processing.

Internal and external – Mashups provide aggregation and manipulation of information from many sources (inside and outside the firewall). Many people wrongly assume that they focus on one or the other when in practice they are typically a mix of both.

This definition usually lets people ‘get it’. And then their next comment is “OK, that sounds cool, but why should I care? Why would an organization invest time and money on this?”.

The “Mashup Tribe” was very clear in telling us that mashups let them solve what is often called “The Decision-Makers Dilemma”: Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. This Dilemma is created by a combination of 4 situations that can be found in just about every complex organization:

Data is frequently ‘siloed’ or isolated in data stores inaccessible to users across an organization.

Combining disparate data sources manually is labor-intensive, time consuming and error-prone.

IT rarely has the time, budget or human resources to address individual user’s needs.

The inability to securely share information with peers leads to redundant work and inconsistent results.

So, we gathered our thoughts to define WHY (do you need an Enterprise Mashup):

Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. Enterprise Mashups deliver new insights and enable better decisions through personalized access to the right, real-time information for the specific problem at hand.

In other words, organizations achieve value by allowing individuals to glean new insights by putting the right data together at the right time for the right situation. This empowers people with much better information about what they care, when it matters and in a way that makes sense to them.

These benefits peak people’s interest and it usually leads to the next question “what’s the best way to create enterprise mashups?” Rather than saying “buy my product”, we thought it of more value to describe the characteristics of a REAL Enterprise Mashup Platform (EMP), as there are many impostors who want you to believe that they offer 'Mashups' while in fact they offer something else entirely. So, we concluded that the following describes the benefits an Enterprise Mashup Platform has over existing integration and BI technology for creating mashups.

HOW (can you create an Enterprise Mashup):

An EMP is a technology suite that enables the rapid, collaborative, user-driven creation of Enterprise Mashups without the complexities, costs and risks of traditional information integration projects.

Like our definition of enterprise mashup, we focused on a few key components of an EMP:

‘rapid, collaborative, user-driven creation’ – Enterprise Mashup Platforms should allow users and developers to work together to rapidly create a mashup that complies with their business needs. This isn’t an IT-only effort. Furthermore, an EMP allows the re-use of components to get even faster results in future situations. Is there’s no re-usability of the mashups you are making, you are simply building another application silo.

‘without the complexities, costs and risks of traditional information integration projects’ – Mashups are designed to be quickly built, quickly used, and quickly shared. And they have an extremely small ‘footprint’ themselves, requiring no datastore but instead consuming directly from source databases/services/APIs/documents. That’s how you can avoid the ‘complexities, costs and risks’.

There you have it, the ‘What, Why and How’ of Enterprise Mashups. But don’t listen to me. Listen to hundreds of people who collaborated on our mash-about -- our customers, partners, and community members –- as they are the experts and they have taught us plenty about Enterprise Mashups. I am glad we were listening and I can promise you that this is one expert who will continue to do so!

OMG! We launched OMA and EMML!

2009-09-24T06:00:00.030-05:00

Today is an exciting day for us at JackBe. It is particularly exciting for our engineering team. Why? Walk down the memory lane with me for a minute...

About 3 years ago, we embarked on a mission to create a new kind of software which today we call an ‘enterprise mashup platform’. And as we started designing JackBe’s enterprise mashup platform (which we ultimately named 'Presto'), we knew the basic problem we needed to address was how to make data securely and easily accessible to enterprise users.

That's not an easy problem, of course. 'Easy' and 'secure' aren't often associated with each other. And enterprises are typically heterogeneous collections of data sources, data security solutions, data destinations; web services, portals, databases, spreadsheets, and much, much more. And as we considered the many different options we had to tackle this complex problem, we always came back to one fundamental concept that has proven its worth time and again:

A language is the best tool one can have.

So began our journey towards an 'Enterprise Mashup Markup Language' (EMML), a language specifically designed to address the needs of creating and sharing mashups within the enterprise...

In conceiving, designing and implementing the language, Raj (our chief architect) and I set out defining the key wants and desires and came up with the following criteria as a basis for EMML:

It should be declarative. So we made it XML-based.
It should leverage existing standards. So we used XPath and XQuery.
It should be domain specific to enterprise mashups. So we added features for user oriented activities.
It should be friendly to popular languages. So we allow the embed of Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and Groovy scripts.
It should be tooling friendly. So we made it interpretive for construction and execution on the fly. And extensible with your own meta-data.
It should be data neutral. So we made it work with all kinds of data from different sources.

While I will refrain from describing the complete language in this blog (instead refer you to the excellent documentation on EMML on the Open Mashup Alliance website), I would like to point out a few key features of EMML here using the following diagram:

As you can see, from each feature, and from the collection of all the features EMML offers, it a robust and powerful language for mashups. And over the last few years, EMML has become an important differentiator for Presto, our award winning Enterprise Mashup Platform. As part of Presto, since its debut, EMML has been thoroughly field-tested and proven. It is time to take EMML to the next level.

So now let’s return to the present and let me tell you why it is so exciting for all of us here at JackBe.

Today we launched the Open Mashup Alliance (OMA) to promote and foster interoperability and portability through an open mashup language. As a founding member of OMA, JackBe has contributed EMML to the Alliance and, indirectly, to the entire mashup community. Joining us (see this, this and this)are other industry leaders such as Adobe, Bank of America, Capgemini, Hinchcliffe & Co., HP, Intel, Kapow Technologies, Programmable Web, Synteractive, and Xignite.

So why I am so excited about giving away our vision and our hard work? Why would we want to give away one of our crown jewels? Because…

It offers an opportunity for our industry to converge upon an open language that aids interoperability and portability of enterprise mashups.
I believe that OMA offers a huge potential in enabling enterprise mashup adoption in the enterprise by promoting standard approaches and reducing risk and cost.
As a practitioner, I strongly believe in open and standards based approaches for new and emerging technologies and for enterprise mashups, OMA and EMML are it.
By contributing EMML to OMA, we will see a lot more innovation in this space by the members of the mashup community.
I look forward to working with other industry leaders who want to collaborate to ensure portability and interoperability for enterprise mashups.

Why should you care? I hope many of the above reasons are also the relevant reasons for you. As a vendor or a practitioner, I hope you share the excitement and passion for openness and collaboration in any technology. Check out what several industry leaders are saying about OMA and EMML and you will get a sense of why I am so thrilled.

As the enterprise mashup market evolves further, OMA will provide a platform to bring together different efforts around enterprise mashups into a collaborative alliance. If you are a mashup developer, programmer, IT developer, IT Manager, software vendor, or someone simply interested in enterprise mashups, join the OMA Support Group, check out OMA website and download EMML reference implementation and start participating now.

This is just the start of things to come. Mash On!

Mashup Devolution

2009-09-09T08:29:00.008-05:00

Last week JackBe hosted 3-day Mashup Training webcast series. We covered a lot of ground during the Training including the organizational value of mashups (more on that in another blog post), the way in which mashups fit into enterprise IT architecture, how mashups support the executive/analyst/developer, and finally, lots of examples of mashups in action.

During the Training we used our visual mashup composer, Presto Wires, to create/modify many of the mashups-in-action. Interestingly, it seemed that one of the more popular features of Wires was the capability to create 'macros'. Much like macro in Microsoft Excel, Wires Macros are user-defined mashup actions written in Presto's Enterprise Mashup Markup Language that add custom, user- or organization-specific functions that go well beyond the usual 'sum, merge, join, filter' options.

Can you imagine a mashup platform without this mundane-but-important capability? Every major programming/development language of the last 3 decades has had some form of callable asubroutine. Microsoft Excel has gone so far as put this power right into the hands of the non-techy spreadsheet-maker.

But, oddly enough, not all mashup platforms vendors seem to agree with me. Some don't allow the mashup-maker to create and/or share macros. Without Macros or some similar form of simple extensibility in a mashup solution, you are setting yourself back 30+ years. It's some odd form of software 'devolution'.

The domain-specific applications of macros are endless. One of our banking customers added a compound interest calculator as a macro. A data publishing giant added a 'linear data formatter' macro, whatever that means. You can easily imagine a cholesterol calcalutor (healthcare). A risk calculator (finance, insurance). A purchase-price calculator (any purchasing department). A delivery-time or shipping-cost estimator (shipping, airlines). Tax/interest calculator (any industry).

And Macros can cross organizational boundaries as well. JackBe's Mashup Developer Community has started a Macro Code Depot for our Mashup Developer Community (MDC) members where anyone can contribute Macros or reuse Macros created by other mashers. And we believe in Macros some much that the MDC is we're hosting a Macro fo the Month Contest. You can check out a brief video demo of a Macro in action on the MDC.

We've written a lot about the importance of reuse as a mashup best practice (here and here). And macros are a practical, rubber-hits-the-road example of reusablility. But Macros mean more. Macros turn a generic mashup solution into a mashup solution that fits the needs of your organization, your department, and your employees. This is about making a mashup platform in your mashup platform.

Macros are a must-have best practice. Got no extensibility in your mashup platform? Send us a postcard from 1965.

Mashups in Action: Stories from the Global Mashup Developer Community

2009-08-26T17:00:00.004-05:00

We are approaching the 1-year anniversary of JackBe's Mashup Developer Community. When the big date comes I expect we'll have over 3,000 members. That's 3,000 'Mashups in Action' stories eager to be told. As you would expect from such a big group of people, the goals of our Mashup Developer Community members are very, very diverse. And there are many lessons to be learned from their stories.

Our members come from 5 continents (43 countries) and all 50 US states. They use Java (54%) and .NET (33%). They are focused on Web development (17%), SOA (17%), Portals (5%) and a bunch of other technology initiatives. They are CIOs, Application Developers, Systems Integrators, and many other titles and roles. They work in Government, Finance, Higher Education, Healthcare, and lots of other industries. Their one common thread is the use of mashups in their day-to-day work.

We've started an informal catalog of the many ways in which our community members are using enterprise mashups in their organizations. Here are a few of my favorites (with monor edits to protect the privacy of our community members)...

...a project for a bank to help them understand how their company is performing globally and be able to make quick decisions.

...how [JackBe's] Presto works with the BackBase Platform...building a portal and needs sophisticated mashup like you have done for [a government website].

...GIS Manager moving to a web mapping environment that uses mash-ups and widgets.

...has a sophisticated data warehouse portal and would like to provide some simplified tools for the public to use to explore data. Integration with some mapping tools, hang out some RSS and GeoRSS feeds for folks to subscribe too, etc.

...using mashups to bridge the gap between small businesses and the internet and the mobile web...a good fit in these data federation – data integration efforts.

But there are a lot more stories. An entire planet of them. Every point on the map below is a Mashup Developer Community member doing cool enterprise mashup work. Some have detailed stories behind them and some are interesting simply because of their locale:

View Where in the World are our Mashers? in a larger map

Enterprise Mashups are showing value in many ways we would have never thought possible just a year ago. That's the REAL story.

What's your story? We'd love to have you join our global mashup conversation.

Why you shouldn’t be getting your ‘BI 2.0’ from your BI vendor

2009-08-21T12:06:00.016-05:00

InformationWeek recently reported that the total revenue for the 2008 Business Intelligence (BI) software market came in at $8.8 billion, with six vendors -- SAP/Business Objects, SAS Institute, Oracle IBM /Cognos, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy -- owning 75% of the market. The report also says that BI software sales experienced 22% growth from 2007 to 2008. The BI market appears to be a very healthy place.

And yet James Koblielus, Forrester’s BI Analyst, recently published a great blog and paper titled: Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence For The New Economy. In it he talks about the shift taking place in BI shops to a new “mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications.” He explains this shift by summarizing that “enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers.” In case you missed it, the meta-message from Forrester is simple: companies are looking for new ways to make faster decisions because their current BI solutions don’t deliver.

While I don’t agree that BI Mashups are going to (or should) come from the BI vendors, I certainly agree with Kobielus that change is coming. And I think that change will be based on enterprise mashups.

You only need to look at the speed with which companies are acquiring, merging, failing, and consolidating (sometimes all of these at once) to understand the intense real-time information needs of decision-makers. As this need increases, it won’t be today’s BI systems doing the work. Why? Current BI approaches are inflexible, fragile, costly, slow, and have little user-facing self-service capabilities. Don’t believe me? Go tell your BI team you want to create your own dashboard and share it with your department via Sharepoint. Prepare for uncontrollable laughter or utter contempt. Heck, the mere fact you have to ask an ‘expert’ to do it for you is something of a failure.

Kobielus’ use of the phrase ‘BI mashup’ is very telling. He supports his thesis with an outline of a ‘BI Mashup Maturity Model’ with levels from ‘Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications’ to ‘Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance’. And that’s where he loses me. What about this is 'Business Intelligence'? While reading this I could have sworn he was describing enterprise mashups! Sure, I understand the part where BI vendors want (and need) to embrace this ‘faster, cheaper, more flexible’ message or risk have their warehouses become nothing more than sources to enterprise mashup platforms (EMPs). But I think the more logical conclusion is this: the future of your BI system is mashups.

Yes, I am biased. But my customers, prospects, and partners aren't. In the last 3 years we’ve had countless BI-using organizations come to us with a need to address their more immediate decision-support requirements. Generally, they all want to bring more timely information to a wider-audience with more self-service, collaboration and secure sharing with peers. Yes, they want some of that data to be sourced from their BI systems. (BI systems are, afterall, very good at giving historical views of transactional information.) But their BI systems are not up to the task of being the entire solution. Fundamentally, real-time answers from real-time sources isn’t what BI vendors do. That’s an enterprise mashup. There are some other important differences as well. Take a peek at my comparison of the abstract qualities of BI and Enterprise Mashup Platforms.

I can also summarize the differences in another, more functional way. I took typical BI and EMP capabilities to create a visual comparison based on ‘audience reach’ and ‘number of dynamic data sources’. You can see that traditional BI is gaining in speed and audience reach by adding things like in memory cubes and “semi-self-serve” dashboards (it’s more like simple customization and personalization). BI is great at well-controlled reporting from a well-manicured warehouse or cube. But reach beyond that design tenet and you’re into enterprise mashup territory, I think.

Many organizations have a lot of resources invested in their BI system. And the $8.8 billion spent on BI last year certainly adds value to the enterprises that own that software. But the future of BI is about mashups. Your BI is an enterprise mashup enabler, not an enterprise mashup platform. BI has (and probably always will) have its place in reporting, forecasting and analytics. Just don’t try to force your BI to do what Enterprise Mashups do best: real-time decision-support. You want ‘BI Mashups’? Get an enterprise mashup platform.

Lessons from The Golden Hammer and The Mule

2009-07-17T11:40:00.014-05:00

'I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.' (Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966). Most college freshmen learn about the hammer. And we certainly know all about the hammer in the IT industry. By 1998 this worst-practice had become so common in IT circles, in fact, that the book 'AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis' immortalized this anti-pattern with the happy title of 'the golden hammer'.

Recently, Ross Mason, the CTO of open-source SOA tools creator MuleSource, wrote a great blog about the golden hammer problem in the world of the ESB. We feel his pain. As an emerging technology vendor ourselves, we are very eager to understand and share the best uses of enterprise mashup technology.

You have a fairly good use-case for enterprise mashups if you have a dynamic information environment that requires the real-time assembly of disparate data silos in a user-specific context for critical decision-making. But that's a bit of a mouthful. So what do enterprise mashups mean in business terms? I like the answer I got from a CTO at BlueCross BlueShield, the medical insurance giant: mashups '...create valuable and actionable information'. Recent examples we've seen include solutions for Situational Awareness, budget analysis, Recovery and Reinvestment Act reporting, clinical research, data packaging, and executive KPI dashboards.

Interestingly, we are also occasionally asked why can't an ESB can't do the job of an Enterprise Mashup Platform. ESBs and Enterprise Mashup Platform ('EMP', for short) have some similar qualities but they differ in one fundamental way: ESBs are decidely 'A-to-A' (application-to-application) and EMPs are 'A-to-U' (application-to-user).

ESBs emphasize features and qualities that support robust application-to-application integration and just don't have any true user-facing, collaborative capabilities. And I think Ross agrees: 'Mule and other ESBs offer real value in scenarios where there are at least a few integration points or at least 3 applications to integrate. They are also well suited to scenarios where loose coupling, scalability and robustness are required.'

In contrast, enterprise mashups are as much about viewing, rating, personalizing and sharing as they are about data assembly. Here at JackBe we think about mashlets, porlets, spreadsheets, and iPhone apps as much as we think about data-source virtualization, mashup transformations and standardized mashup interfaces. To paraphrase one of my favorite Gartner analysts, an enterprise mashup platform without meaningful capabilities to deliver the mashups to consuming users is simply not an enterprise mashup platform.

What this really means is that ESBs like MuleSource and EMPs like JackBe's Presto compliment each other very well. #5 on Ross's 'ESB Selection Criteria' list even says 'Do you need to publish services for consumption by other applications? This is a good fit for Mule as it provides a robust and scalable service container...'. And that's exactly where an EMP comes in! One of JackBe's best customers uses ESB-based web services instrumented with Web Services Notification to send data a number consuming applications, including Presto. Presto mashes the inbound data and delivers the mashup via mashlet to a user-facing portal in real-time.

As my 9th-grade shop-class teacher used to say: 'A good carpenter knows his tools'. Makes me wonder if Maslow was a friend of his.

A Week in a Blink

2009-06-12T09:47:00.013-05:00

It is never boring to work at a software company in an exploding software category. But this week the usual frenetic pace of the enterprise mashup market moved up an order of magnitude. If you blinked, you might have missed something juicy.

InfoWorld started the frenzy by publishing ‘Enterprise mashups gain traction at last’, an interview with John Crupi, JackBe’s CTO ‘Tech Titan’. And just yesterday, InfoWorld doubled down on enterprise mashups with a short op-ed piece from the intrepid David Linthicum, ‘JackBe is practicing safe mashups’. (You gotta love the title of this one.)

Anthony Bradley and David Gootzit at Gartner announced 3 new papers related to enterprise mashups: ‘Building a Business Case for Enterprise Mashups: A Gartner Framework’, ‘The Five Core Principles of Enterprise Mashups’ and an almost-published ‘A Gartner Reference Architecture for Enterprise Mashups’. (We’ll definitely be talking about these reports a lot more in future blogs.) And Anthony followed up his 3 publications with a detailed blog, ‘You Can’t Build a Business Case for Enterprise Mashups’.

And there’s more. Through a day-long series of Twitter tweets, the SD Times announced the winners of their annual ‘SD Times 100’ Award. The winners in their ‘Mashup’ category included JackBe, Serena and, a bit surprisingly, Tibco. We’re hoping the editors of the SD Times give us a bit of insight into the inclusion of Tibco when they publish the formal awards article on June 15.

Finally, I am happy to say that JackBe made it’s contribution to the week's enterprise mashup maelstrom. First, we released the Spring 2009 edition of our multi-award-winning enterprise mashup platform, Presto 2.7. And we simultaneously announced the Share Your Mashup Macro Contest. You can grab the free Developer Edition of Presto 2.7 and participate in the Mashup Macro Contest on our Mashup Developer Community.

What more could ya want in just 4 days? After all this, I can’t wait to see what next week is gonna be like. Don’t blink.

Smash the Silos, Mash the SOA, Share the Mashups…

2009-06-02T16:19:00.010-05:00

This is my first ‘back-to-reality’ blog in a while. With so much talk about Web 2.0, social networking, visibility, accountability and transparency, lately it’s easy to lose sight of some of the practical day-to-day problems we have to constantly address. And if there is one persistent problem that won’t go away (and seems to be getting worse), it’s software “silos.”

In the physical world, silos are nicely contained structures that hold and protect things from the elements. There’s usually only a single way in and single way out. In software silos contain data we need but also make it difficult to get at.

Sadly, too much software ends up becoming a silo. That’s because requirements almost always revolve around solving a specific set of business problems at a specific point-in-time. Later, as the business grows and requirements change, we end up with a bunch of siloed systems that don’t talk to each other and most likely never will. In the end, we’re forced into the Excel-based manual mashup based on multiple systems of record and a copy/paste approach just to get basic-but-important answers from the data deluge.

But it isn’t hopeless. The Smash/Mash/Share approach is a quick way to build on your current architecture and do it in an agile, forward-thinking way.

Let’s start by examining the real nature of problem through a real-world example from one of my customers (who shall remain nameless). Let me know if any of this sound familiar:

I have a ten year old HR system that contains valuable information I use every day. Suddenly I have a new requirement to match my HR data with my sales forecast data (and related production resource needs) to get a picture of my future hiring needs.

I can’t get at the HR data without going through clunky, ten-year-old application client-server UIs. I’m forced to copy and paste the data into Excel. Similarly, my sales data is in our new custom Sales Automation system, which is only Browser based and has no export facility.

And once all my copying/pasting is done, I have copies of data that are already beginning to diverge from the systems-of-record they were copied from. Any real projections I put together are instantly suspect.

And if you think your warehouse/datamart, portal, or middleware systems will solve this problem, think again. In my experience, they have become simply more silos.

You’re going to have to look to newer Web 2.0 technologies that are built around agility and speed and don’t require months and years of required IT development. Even ‘America’s CIO’, Vivek Kundra has started looking to Web 2.0 solutions for answers.

Fortunately, IT has been using Service oriented architecture (SOA) as an architectural technique to expose silos as services. This doesn’t entirely fix the problem, of course, because only a Java/Flex/Visual Studio developer could consume a SOA WSDL. Now you just have silos with nicely standardized doors. But it's a step in the right direction.

That’s were mashups fit in. I like to think of SOA as silo smashers and Mashups as SOA mashers. Deepak Alur wrote a great blog that described “mashables” as services (like the aforementioned SOA WSDLs) that have been made mashup-ready.

Last, it wouldn’t be ‘Web 2.0’ if we didn’t enable easy sharing and collaboration. Lately it seems that everyone has agreed the best way for users to see and share data is via Widgets. (Of course, widgets that sit in front of mashups are better called ‘Mashlets’).

So there you have it: Silos are meant to be smashed. SOA is meant to be mashed. And Mashups are meant to shared. Like this:

The Smash/Mash/Share approach results in an agile platform from which users can solve unforseen problems in a agile, open way. This kind of information ecosystem lets people create and share in a way that can ultimately result in a powerful network effect.

Silos: 0, Smashers/Mashers/Sharers: 1 (and then some).

Mashups in Action: Connecting the Sales and Marketing Dots

2009-04-23T12:47:00.005-05:00

A friend recently said I was the 'king of repurposing'. I am not entirely sure if he was referring to my blog about reuse as an important step in the Mashup lifecyle, or if he was was referring to my life-long quest to teach others how to reuse content (like this blog) whereever and whenever possible. Regardless, it reminded me to write this Mashup in Action blog.

As you might know, we have written a number of blogs about Mashups in Action over the last few years. A few of my favorites case studies include Thomson Reuters (part 1 and part 2), The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Accival.

But this Mashup In Action is special. It's MINE.

Like every good marketer, I want to help my sales guys find, nurture, and ultimately close deals. We use many media channels to do that and we have great metrics on the early parts of the process until the moment we hand the prospective customer over to the sale folks. Why? Because then we are focused on their problems, and our proposal to address them. We (sales and marketing collectively) often miss subsequent interactions our prospective buyer has with the marketing channels that got them interested in the first place.

I've seen this same disconnect occur in every organization I have ever worked for. So my mashup addresses this quintessential marketing-and-sales problem: matching prospects in the sales pipeline to their subsequent interactions with our marketing channels. Afterall, if you've got a deal in the pipeline, wouldn't you want to know that your prospective customer just visited your company's website? And what they looked at? And for how long?

Here's a recording of my Marketing-and-Sales Mashup given by JackBe's Deepak Alur on stage at the Web 2.0 Expo a few weeks back:

This mashup gives my sales folks some great intelligence on their sales prospects. It helps them understand what parts of the corporate website that individuals in the prospect company visited, what features/modules/functions they may have liked/disliked, and perhaps even what medium (video, print, blog, etc.) was the 'stickiest'. Equally important, it helps us marketing folks understand the real influence we are having (or not having) on sales prospects.

I know this kind of problem isn't universal. It is less prevalent in organizations that used highly-integrated all-in-solutions (like Eloqua, perhaps). But there always seems to be one more source of information you want to connect to the prospective customer. 'Just one more thing' is always on the lips of a good sales rep.

I love a good hypothetical demonstration as much as the next guy but nothing can match a real-world applications like these. Oh, and because of this, my sales guys love me. Now that is priceless.

Spreadsheet data is dead; not live. Don’t try to Recover(y) it!

2009-04-13T13:20:00.006-05:00

Whenever you copy data into spreadsheet you instantly render it 'dead'. In other words, you severed its connection to the source and in essence created copy of the real data. This may be fine if you’re doing historical analysis and trust that the data is valid. But it isn't fine if the data always changes and the source/timeliness of the data is as important as the data itself.

Here’s a great example: Recovery data. As part of the Recovery effort billions of dollars are flowing to the government agencies such as FDA, HUD, HHS, etc. These agencies get the money and distribute it. But they are also the ones responsible for reporting on the data internally, ‘upternally’ (a word I made up to denote reporting up the agency chain) and externally (to the public). Multiply all the agencies times the number of distributions times the frequency of data changes and all of a sudden the government has a major data problem.

Welcome to the ‘Decade of the Data’.

We know that this effort is being coordinated at www.recovery.gov and President Obama has appointed Vivek Kundra as Federal CIO. I’m a big Vivek fan and applaud his past efforts on data visibility work in the DC government. His zest for innovation and data transparency (such as Apps for Democracy) is inspiring in a public servant.

So like any good citizen, I went searching for the Recovery data and discovered all the weekly Excel Recovery reports. It’s great to see the data making it’s way to the public but I’m troubled by the notion of having this data put out as Excel. What happens when the data changes? Do I wait for the next spreadsheet that updates the prior spreadsheet’s data? It’s easy to see that this data is dynamic and ever-changing. Manual reconciliation just won’t do. Oh, since Excel is a manual process, mistakes in the data can easily make their way into the reports.

The problem is seductively simple: Spreadsheets are so ubiquitous and so easy to use we tend to use it for just as many wrong things as good things. Specifically, Excel is not the right tool to manage real-time data. Worse still, spreadsheet data is not governed, not secure and not easy to aggregate with lots of other spreadsheets. Excel fails to meet 3 of the ‘5Cs’ of enterprise mashups.

I think it is easy to define the exact characteristics we need for true Recovery data visibility across the entire government. And here’s why: when it comes to live data across multiple sources, the value in this data is not the individual set of numbers, but rather the ability to look at the data aggregated, sliced and diced, geographically transposed (i.e. on a map), temporally depicted (can you say timeline?), and any other way we need to see it right now. This means speed in creating and visualizing the data is just as important as access to the data.

And if you think spreadsheets, data warehouses or portals can do this, think again. My fellow blogger Chris Warner often talks about his 'Dead-and-Deadly Data Matrix’ that I think nicely lays out how other enterprise technologies fit into the ‘Live and Secure’ information management spectrum.

There’s really only one way to do this and that’s using enterprise mashup technology. Enterprise mashup platforms (EMPs) are built exactly for this purpose: to provide the fastest way to interact and visualize data from multiple disparate sources in real-time and safely. They do it in hours and days, not weeks, months or years. And EMPs plug directly into the authoritative data sources and provide the necessary security and governance to make the data available and visible internally and externally.

And true EMPs let you publish the mashups as REST/XML services as well as mashup widgets (we call them 'Mashlets') that can land in your 1.0 portal, 2.0 portals (like Netvibes and iGoogle), collaboration platforms (like Sharepoint and Jive), mobile devices (like the iPhone) and even back into Excel as a live data source. And that’s exactly what users want. They want to have the data and visualization where they work, not where we want them to work.

The ‘Decade of the Data’ is definitely here. Let’s just make sure we do it the right way.

Mashing Oracle without Oracle

2009-03-30T16:40:00.013-05:00

As an ex-Oracle guy of 5 years, I know that Oracle-bashing is an enticing pastime. As proof, consider how folks like Paul Greenberg and Dennis Howlett have recently taken Oracle to task for their general 'failure to innovate'. I am generally not one 'pile on' and I certainly do not wish Oracle any ill will (JackBe is a proud Oracle partner and, personally, some of my closest friends earn their livelihood there).

But I stumbled across Oracle's corporate blog site a few days ago and I must say that it truly surprised me when I couldn't find 'mashup' in their blog tag cloud. Sure, a few blogs mention the term, but there are precious few that give the topic any real attention.

Any dedicated Oracle-watcher knows that they have no product, or concise feature-set within an existing product, to enable the virtuous circle of mashups. Considering that Oracle is the leader in data-driven software and manufacturers much the data-creating, data-management and data-reporting products in the world, how can mashups NOT be on Oracle's radar?

Luckily, those who want to bring some mashup agility and efficiency into their organizations can get help from places other than Redwood Shores. I recently put a camera in front of Danny Malks, JackBe's VP of Application Platform and got him to walk through the fundamental value of mashup for Oracle-driven enterprises. Here's his 3-minute walk-through of mashups for enterprises that use Oracle (a little or a lot):

And I can tell you that Danny's example is just the tip of the iceberg. JackBe's Chief Oracle Mechanic, Karthic Thope, recently showed off a killer 5-part mashup that included Oracle Siebel, Oracle Peoplesoft, and Oracle E-Business Suite, all secured through Oracle's LDAP and all of it delivered to Oracle WebCenter. You can check out the 15-minute demo at http://www.jackbe.com/videos/JackBe-MashupsForOracle.mov (be patient, it is a very big video). This is, in my studied opinion, a true example of an enterprise mashup.

I know that some might say 'Oracle has that kind of stuff on its roadmap'. Perhaps. An organization of Oracle's size always has a lot of promise. But 'just wait' is no longer a workable reply and Oracle has a lot of things on its plate. I wrote about this simple quandry almost 18 months ago, asking 'how long do you wait while Oracle is executing on its massive product integration plans'?

And since that post, I think it is an understatement to say that our world has changed drastically. Now a 6- or 12-month delay can truly mean the difference between a company in the black and a company on the block. Organizations need to find a way to innovate in the fastest, most agile way today.

JackBe will be showing Oracle Mashups at Collaborate 09 in Orlando in May. Stop by our booth. We'd love to mash with you there. No waiting.

The Sharepoint Dilemma

2009-03-25T11:37:00.004-05:00

A recent ZDNet blog post from Dion Hinchcliffe entitled "Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly" discusses Microsoft SharePoint within the context of Web and Enterprise 2.0.

Frankly, outside the impressive adoption rates for SharePoint in corporate America today, the story ends up being mostly about the "bad and the ugly" from a feature perspective. SharePoint is good at some things and not so good at others, which is not unlike other products. When it comes to mashups, I think it falls somewhere in the bad-to-ugly area.

I think it is very important to realize, especially for an organization that is hoping to capitalize on SharePoint as part of their Web 2.0 initiatives, that Sharepoint's out-of-the box feature set simply does *not* support dynamic integration of disparate information sources, nor is it an open, cross-platform solution.

We think alot about Mashups and SharePoint here at JackBe. The dynamic integration capability of Enterprise Mashups is critical for leveraging SharePoint to its fullest. Not coincidentally, we are in the middle of a 10-part blog series on Mashups for Sharepoint that includes such topics as:

- SharePoint Mashups using standard SharePoint Web Parts
- SharePoint Mashups using Custom-built SharePoint Web Parts
- Using C# and ASP.NET UI Controls to build Mashup Applications in SharePoint

Presto, JackBe's Award Winning Enterprise Mashup Platform, lets you create mashups that are reusable within and across Microsoft and non-Microsoft environments, including reuse of the same mashups within SharePoint and your Enterprise Portal. These mashups are secure and governed, working within your company's access control and Single-Sign-On (SSO) infrastructure, and focus on user-driven solutions that support more rapid and more intelligent decision making.

SharePoint may not be the one-stop shop for your mashup needs but you can add enterprise-grade mashups safely and efficiently. You can try out Presto Mashups for SharePoint through our free Developer Edition from our Mashup Developer Community and be up and running immediately doing SharePoint mashups.

I encourage you to give Enterprise Mashups on SharePoint a try and let us know what you think! And if you'll be at SPTechCon (The SharePoint Technology Conference in Boston on June 22-24), stop by our booth for a demo and one-on-one tech-talk.

Defining Enterprise Mashups

2009-03-10T13:35:00.010-05:00

A few weeks ago JackBe’s CEO and Co-Founder, Luis Derechin, had the opportunity to represent the Web 2.0 industry on a major television network. When mainstream media outlets like Fox Business News start giving your product and your industry primetime coverage, you know you've passed a milestone.

During the interview, Luis was asked to describe ‘what that is’ and to give a ‘mainstream example’. Now I am not here to critique my boss (I am not that foolhardy). But I will tell you that Luis thinks he could have done a better job of defining enterprise mashups in a meaningful way for the uninitiated, non-technical business audience. So the boss asked his team to noodle it and that’s the topic I am interested in discussing here. How do you define ‘enteprise mashup’?
The simple word ‘mashup’ is complicated enough. You’d think with all the media and analyst coverage that there would be a simple, unified definition. Sadly, you’d be wrong on that one.

There are almost as many uses of the word ‘mashup’ as there are experts. And the term is all too common outside the high-tech industry as well. It’s popular in the world of music remix (this is where the word originated, in fact) but I’ve also seen it used by everyone from Sports Illustrated to the coupon-clipping Mashup Mom. I’ve even seen the word used on the back of a children's cereal box.

And it gets more complicated once you add the word ‘enterprise’ to the mix. When defining the enteprise mashups, it just doesn’t seem sufficient to say that ‘it’s a mashup in the enterprise’. A self-referential definition like that only seems to lead to more questions. It’d be more useful to have a self-supporting definition, I think.

Almost 2 years ago we went to great lengths to define a mashup. Today, with 2 years of enterprise mashup implementation experience behind us, we often say that enterprise mashups are:

‘Dynamic web-based applications that combine multiple data sources in real-time for increased awareness and improved decision-making while meeting the stringent governance and data security requirements of enterprises.’

Not bad, I think. But we need something a bit sexier for the next time we end up on TV. Remember, our goal is to craft something for the non-techy, the non-insider, the uninitiated. In a recent Twitter conversation with Web 2.0 Strategist Dion Hinchcliffe I gave him the 140-character definition: ‘Web 2.0 meets Excel’. His reply: ‘Now define Web 2.0’. Fair enough, we gotta find a definition that is not just for the insiders.

How about defining enterprise mashups by example? JackBe has no shortage of ‘Mashups in Action’, including projects in government (the Defense Intelligence Agency), publishing (Thomson Reuters), shipping/logistics (Inttra), and banking (Accival), to name a few. But I’d hate to use any single example for fear of having the listener pigeonhole enteprise mashups into one or two industries.

We could define mashups by exclusion. For instance, mashups are not ESBs, BI, portals or fancy spreadsheets. Enterprise mashups complement all of these technologies, certainly, but they have distinct qualities from these technologies that set them apart. Unfortunately for our purposes today, I think the list of 'nots' is too long and cumbersome to be a useful defining tool.

Last, there is the always the ‘do nothing’ option. In other words, we could use the now-famous (but somewhat paraphrased) quote from late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, ‘I can't define it, but I know it when I see it!’.

Somehow I don’t think my boss would think of this last as my best effort. So, let me punt it to you… How do you define an enterprise mashup?

-----------

Update 03-12-2009: We've had so many great responses to this topic that we started a 'Beat the CEO' contest on our Mashup Community: http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/blog/announcing-beat-ceo-contest. Define 'enterprise mashups' for the beginner. Our weekly favorites get a $50 Amazon gift card and the honorary title of 'Mashup CEO'.

It Pays To Be Virtuous

2009-02-11T16:57:00.010-05:00

We write about enterprise mashups on a fairly regular basis. But we'll be the first to admit that we're not the only ones spending our nights and weekends noodling enterprise mashups. The Mashup Tribe is a very big and VERY busy group!

Today we're very proud to have one of the Tribe as a guest blogger. Mike Ogrinz is an enterprise architect at one of the largest banks in the world and, more important to our purposes, author of the upcoming book Mashup Patterns.

In the process of writing his book Mike has spent a lot of time considering enterprise mashup implementations, best practices, and theory. In this post Mike takes a look at the 'virtuous' nature of mashups...

I’d like to start this post by thanking the staff at JackBe for their support and encouragement while I worked on my book, Mashup Patterns (which will be available in March of this year). John Crupi, JackBe’s CTO and co-author of Core J2EE Patterns, had both the forethought to register MashupPatterns.com and the generosity to transfer it to me for my book’s companion site. I’m appreciative for the loan of this space to talk with you about what I think are some of the exciting aspects of mashups.

One interesting topic I explore in my book is something I like to call “The Virtuous Circle of Mashups”. It describes the process whereby mashups can be perpetually recycled and enhanced to build even more useful solutions:

Experienced software developers will look at this picture and think, “That’s almost the same basic cycle that we’ve been following since the idea of reusable code was invented. How is this different than re-using objects, component libraries, or third-party widgets?”

Under traditional reuse practices, there is no requirement that the consumers of reusable code are themselves reusable. So reuse is actually sort of a dead-end for the broader community. In my “day job” as an architect at a major financial services firm, I constantly come across commercial and open-source packages that liberally poach from the FOSS (Free and Open Source) world without giving anything back. This is where mashups break the mold. Mashups themselves are inherently reusable as the basis of new creations.

How many times have you used an application and thought, “It would be a great product if it only did this one other thing…”? Now imagine if you were empowered to make that enhancement yourself. And further, imagine when someone looks at your solution and can make the changes that make the solution perfect for them. This is a level of reuse and customization that is unheralded in the world of solutions delivery. Sure; I suppose you could make the claim that theoretically Open Source aims for the same goal. But did I mention that mashups also shift the focus away from IT personnel and closer towards end-users?

The rallying cry around application architecture has been “separate your business logic from your presentation logic” for a few years now. The idea was to keep the code that implemented business rules from getting mixed up with the code for creating the user interface. But the problem with this model is that both of these assets still remained locked within IT. The evolution of this idea is to give control of the business logic to the people who know it the best: business users! Mashup products like JackBe’s Presto are making this possible by enabling power-users to create their own products.

As exciting as this is, it’s only half of the solution. Empowering everyone within your firm to build their own solutions can have tremendous benefits, but also a number of dangerous consequences. I have seen end-users create Excel-powered solutions that sidestepped all of the best practices IT has painstakingly developed over the years. New versions are passed (and changed) from one user to another with little or no regression testing or auditing. Often, the same solution will be implemented many times over as coworkers re-work the same problems (unaware that a solution already exists). For mashups to succeed in the enterprise, they can’t just accelerate the mistakes of the past.

I believe that one answer to this dilemma is a centralized mashup “hub” or “repository”, where the community of builders can share, tag, and rate one another’s solutions. These “folksonomies” are a hallmark of Web 2.0 and lend themselves to brining a natural order to the decentralized development mashups enable. If traditional software reuse focused on the economies of scale, then mashups focus on the economies of collaboration. A central hub will give your enterprise mashup environment some of the advantages of Crowdsourcing, even if two employees never work on the same solution. The benefit of cooperative tagging and rating activity helps ensure that only the best (quickest, most stable, etc) solutions are remixed as the basis for new ones. You can even mix your internal components with an external repository (for example, programmableweb.com’s API-enabled mashup catalog).

JackBe's Presto Mashup Hub (click to enlarge)

Naturally, there are other critical product features and capabilities that firms will have to evaluate as they investigate this space. But in order to reap the benefits of The Virtuous Circle of Mashups, some type of community solution-sharing environment is critical.

We're flattered Mike has let us publish his thoughts. We hope and expect he'll be back in the future with more! Until then you can find more posts from Mike on mashups and mashup patterns at MashupPatterns.com.

Government 2.0 is here. Are you ready to participate?

2009-01-27T09:15:00.023-05:00

When the maverick CTO of the District of Columbia, Vivek Kundra, announced the Apps for Democracy contest, I was intrigued for 2 relatively disconnected reasons. Personally, I cared because this was a great example of an innovative government that could truly impact me on a personal level. Better roads, better transit options, and better social services are all things I would appreciate in the place I have called home for the last 18 years.

But I had a slightly less selfish interest as well. ‘Open government’ was something that I had spent 2 decades helping nurture and I suddenly saw Mr. Kundra's Contest as part of a broad trend towards 'Government 2.0', where service to the citizen is made better through dynamic, adaptive '2.0' technologies.

This is why I am about to break one of my oldest, most definitive personal rules. The rule? As a long-time DC area resident, I try very, very hard not discuss politics or government (or the Redskins). This is such a politically-charged atmosphere that I always seem to find myself on the wrong end of the conversation. But I think it’s time to break my rule. Because I think ‘Government 2.0’ is here, in a big-and-nationwide kind of way, and I am eager to see it flourish.

For those who might have missed it, Apps for Democracy was a textbook example of a government entity putting ’2.0’ stuff to work in ways that would benefit the taxpayer. Using services from the District of Columbia 'Data Catalog', participants were asked to submit web-driven applications that used 'real-time data from multiple agencies to citizens — a catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations'. What parts of Web 2.0? Standards-based information services. Community-driven application development. Ajax. Mashups. Mobile computing. Even a diehard skeptic would have to admit that the variety of applications submitted to the contest (JackBe submitted a 'Carpool Matchmaker Mashup') shows that there is a great deal of potential in the idea of applying 2.0 to government.

And DC is not alone. Seattle recently launched an interactive ‘2.0’ citizen portal. There are some cool government-driven mashups in development for big agencies like Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF). And there are great regional and local 2.0-style government apps of note like the 'City of San Francisco Bridge Preventative Maintenance Program Web Application', 'City of San Mateo Master Address Database', and the 'City of Boston Redevelopment Authority: Web Based GIS Redevelopment Project Tracking Portal', among others.

Of course, as a mashup vendor JackBe is doing our part as well. Our work with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) on ‘Overwatch’ is entering it’s third year. Overwatch is one of the earliest mashups in government and the success of this early mashup project has inspired other mashup efforts such as the NSLDSS project by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) on behalf of the Joint Chief of Staff. And we’ve got mashup-driven efforts underway with a number of other government entities.

Considering the pressures we face as a nation, these efforts come none too soon. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that ‘…an [intelligence] analyst's query might scan only 5% of the total intelligence data in the U.S. government…’. That’s hardly the broad perspective you’d hope for and I expect the capability is even grimmer in government agencies that don’t have ‘intelligence analysis’ in their mission statement. It’s time every agency in charge of regulating or analyzing an industry or geopolitical situation make data access, information-driven insight, and true situational analysis a core competency.

Luckily, it appears that this service-through-innovation thing is going to have the support of 'upper management'. Obama the Candidate made good use of technology in his campaign. And with no apparent pause at all, the new media team of President Obama outlined three top priorities of the new presidential administration – communication, transparency and participation – on their very first day. We have a newly-defined ‘National Chief Technology Officer’ (and one of the leading candidates for this position is none other than Vivek Kundra). It even appears that President Obama is making a individual contribution to the cause by bringing a Blackberry with him into the Oval office.

Is Government 2.0 really here? Government certainly 2.0 seems to be on the agenda for the next 4 years. Heck, there's already a 'Government 2.0 Camp' and someone's already designed a Gov 2.0 t-shirt! So perhaps the real question is this: if Government 2.0 is here, how are you going to take part?

Do You Know the 34 Mashup Patterns?

2009-01-12T13:52:00.013-05:00

The folks at Programmable Web recently posted an interview with Mike Ogrinz, author of the upcoming Mashup Patterns book. His book will certainly help organizations understand the importance and possible applications of mashups in an enterprise setting.

The majority of Mashup Patterns is dedicated to describing 34 patterns grouped into five main categories. Every pattern includes case examples, a 'Fragility' rating, and a mapping to a 'Core' set of mashup abilities. Here at JackBe we live and breathe many of these patterns every day.

Mike concludes his book with some real-world case studies. JackBe is extremely proud that 2 of it's most interesting customer mashup implementations, the Defense Intelligence Agency and Thomson Reuters, are a part of this case study collection.

If you are looking into Enterprise Mashups, you'll want to learn more about mashup patterns. I'd propose a simple 2-step plan. First, buy the book (Amazon has it). Second, register for a live webcast with Mike as special guest on March 18. He is a great speaker and it will definitely be an entertaining and educational hour.

Web 2.0 in 2009: What's Out, What's In

2009-01-07T10:46:00.005-05:00

As a CTO, my boss tells me I am entrusted with ‘understanding market forces and business drivers to drive JackBe's technical vision and strategy’. So I am prone to trend-watching and predictions. In fact, I like predictions. And I think my 'Web 2.0 in 2008: What's Out, What's In' predictions were fairly good.

I should note that I think the end of the year is a fairly arbitrary time to consider ‘what’s next, what’s hot, and what’s dead-on-arrival’. After all, the Web 2.0 world changes everyday! Nonetheless, since it is what the rest of the world seems to expect, here’s what this '2.0 CTO' sees as OUT and IN for 2009:

Out: "Faster, Better, Cheaper", In: "Cheaper, Agile, Faster" (in that order)

Who doesn’t want “Faster, Better, Cheaper”. Well, it turns out, better isn’t always better, if the cost of improvement is high and the starting point is already good enough. Replacing “better” with “agile” and making “cheaper” the top-most priority certainly fits the economic climate. Managers want cheaper. And users want the flexibility to do things themselves and share it with others. And everyone wants faster. "Cheaper, Agile, Faster" seems like a no-brainer.

Out: Business Analysts, In: Mashup Analyst

With sincere apologies to those who have the title, what the heck is a 'business analyst' anyway? I know theoretically it’s a person who knows how to talk to the business and IT. But every year we induct more of the technically savvy straight into the business ranks. Many '2.0' technologies (like mashups, wikis, blogs, and some RIA widgets) are mature enough to let users create and share their creations themselves. So we'll start to see more titles like 'Mashup Analyst', 'RIA Specialist' and 'Wiki Manager' in the future.

Out: SOA by IT for IT, In: SOA by IT for the Business

SOA in the past has traditionally been done to 'reduce cost, increase reusability and provide standards based middleware for IT's use'. Because data is so valuable to the business, IT is now being driven by the business to make it’s SOA directly available to them. And it’s not just a nice-to-have, it’s a priority.

Out: Service-Oriented Data, In: Decision-Oriented Data

This is related (but not the same) as my 'SOA by IT for the Business' prediction above. SOA-enabled systems exchange data but because SOA has traditionally been created by IT for IT, SOA data hasn’t always been business (decision) centric. In other words, many SOA services do not exchange data that is human readable and more importantly in a state where users can use it for decisions. 2009 is the year that all changes. Following the path of consumer facing SOA services such as Amazon, Google and eBay, enterprise SOA systems will exchange data directly to (and from) the user or they will be passed over for systems that do.

Out: Better Business Intelligence, In: Lesser Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence made it on to Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic IT Technologies for 2009. I suspect that it isn’t BI in it’s traditional software sense that was the driver, but rather the strategic, enterprise-wide use of BI data. To gain more traction, BI will have to take more of a self-serve model rather than relying on IT do do it all. There are lots of things that are driving the 'BI 2.0' engine, including RIA widgets and mashups that use BI systems as data sources. It's a bold new world for BI, I think.

Out: SOA, In: SOA

We just can’t seem to shake SOA. We’ve been talking about SOA for almost a decade and for all intents and purposes we’ve been saying the same thing. But I expect that in 2009 that will change. Instead of talking about SOA as a tangible thing, we’ll talk about it as the only viable way to connect systems togeter and provide data to the business. Perhaps we'll go so far as to banish 'SOA' as a term and stick to 'service-enablement'.

Out: SOA-in-house, In: SOA-on-the-cloud

How many times do we hear “what are our sizing requirements for our SOA?”. The answer was always “it depends”, which resulted in weeks or months of analysis of hypothetical scenarios. The new answer will be “who cares, it’s on the cloud”. Seriously, all this sizing and planning is becoming so much less of an issue if the startup and operational costs of running more is so small. It costs more to analyze than to add another CPU or instance of Amazon's EC2! Who knows, maybe Amazon and Nike will team up on a joint marketing campaign called “Just Do It (on the Cloud)”. If so, I want credit for the idea.

Out: Dashboards, In: Mashboards

I think one of the underappreciated trends of 2008 was the dashboard. Every software vendors seemed to produce some sort of dashboard. But most of these dashboards were just fancy looking windows or portals into a single application. In 2009, we’ll see the same trend expand, moving beyond data coming from a single system. The result will be mashed up from multiple systems into what I often refer to as “mashboards”.

Out: Emailing Excel Spreadsheets, In: Mashing Excel Data

(This is a derivative of one of my 2008 predictions.) I would categorize data collaboration by emailing Excel spreadsheets as most successful software failure in the last twenty years. Imagine the billions of dollars spent copying and pasting data into Excel, manipulating the already-out-of-synch data, emailing them, and then re-assembling this information because it’s the only tool available to business users. I love that Google Docs is slowly hacking away at the sharing and collaboration aspect of this problem, but Docs are disconnected from the original data sources. Mashups tied directly to the data sources (this includes both Excel-bound data as well as primary databases/applications) can tackle this problem at the data source, and do it in a secure, governed way.

Out: Silo Bashing, In: Silo Loving

There is nothing pleasant about the term “silo.” It portrays images of things being locked up, impenetrable and self-contained. Sure, we can continue to provide proprietary hooks to our most valuable resource but it remains an expensive, unscalable approach. In 2009 I think we embrace our silos and learn to treat them as fact of life. In what way? SOA becomes the secret sauce that wraps these silos in a non-proprietary, standards-based access mechanism. This let’s silos become “mashable” and participate in the mixing and syndication with other disparate data sources. Long live the silo.

Out: Aligning Business and IT, In: Buying IT

If I read another whitepaper this year that talks about aligning business and IT, I think I'll throw in the towel and go into the wine business. Aligning Business and IT is a best practice that has been talked about for years now. If your business and IT are still not aligned, it probably ain't gonna happen in these tough times. So, it's time for drastic measures: Buy IT. Let IT do what it does well (secure and govern datacenter resources), while you (the business) buy (or lease/rent) your own mini IT group that builds your applications and mashups. This is what is often termed 'Shadow IT'. A corollary to this idea is buying your IT from outside the organization, aka SaaS. Either way, you'll get what you pay for.

Out: SOA Architects, In: SOA Social Workers

All software developers wanted to have “SOA Architect” on their resume at one time or another. But SOA has a very bad rep nowadays. There are many reasons why, but most of the reasons aren’t technical; they’re in fact social and organizational problems. Face it, most organizations have tons of 'data fiefdoms' and few of them are incented to share. Introduce the requirements to expose and share your SOA data outside of the firewall and across domains, and you’ve just exponentially increased your problem. But 2009 is the year that this all changes. I think a new breed of technologist (let's call them 'SOA Social Workers') will understand the technology and business but, more importantly, know how to work the politics.

Out: Salesforce.com as a SaaS, In: Salesforce.com as a Business Portal

How do you get your Salesforce.com users to have access to data inside your datacenter? The obvious way is to push your data into Salesforce.com. This might work for small data sets, but not for all the stuff that lives inside our monolithic apps like SAP, Oracle and Portals. In 2009 we will see companies beginning to dump their internal portals (because of IT budget cuts) and adopting Salesforce.com as their Business Portal. However, instead of uploading everything to Salesforce.com, they will be using RIA widgets to syndicate/embed their internal data/content to Salesforce.com. That's a savvy 2.0 approach.

When Looking for Answers...Follow the Money

2008-12-31T11:46:00.005-05:00

"Follow the money" is a common way experts rationalize human behaviors in economics, politics, crime and many other areas. This undeniable truth becomes even more relevant in an economic environment characterized by gloom and pessimism, such as the one we are currently experiencing.

It is with this in mind that we are proud to announce that in the midst of one of the most difficult economic scenarios in history, JackBe received $5 Million in additional funding from its existing investors to expand our sales and marketing efforts.

I have been asked by many people “how did you manage this in today’s economic environment?” Well, let's follow the money to figure out the reasons why…

The first clue in the money trail is based on the great promise Mashups have for making business cheaper and faster. With budgets tighter than ever, many organizations are turning to Mashups as a way to do more while spending less. Anthony Bradley at Gartner stated it very well in a recent blog post:

“…mashups may be one of the areas of innovation that continues to do well through the economic downturn. This makes sense as organizations looking to save dollars may look to mashups for a quicker and cheaper approach to integration and new app development.”

The second clue in the money trail is that JackBe has passed many notable milestones in 2008 as well: a ‘Best Enterprise Mashup Platform’ award, a major product release, a community for Mashup Developers, a free Developer Edition, and what we’d like to think is some industry-advancing thought leadership with some great partners.

However, nothing is more important than having new customers and delivering real benefits to them. Receiving the trust of enterprises who use the software we have created is the most vital clue in the proverbial “money trail”. It certainly confirms that there is much value and promise in what we do.

In my opinion, the money trail points out two notable facts. First, there is some tangible value to Mashup technology in the enterprise. But equally important, our customers are buying our software because of the fundamental shift in general enterprise technology from large-scale, monolithic efforts (ERP, CRM, custom applications and the like) to agile, dynamic projects that allow enterprises to take advantage of their existing infrastructure. And by doing so these organizations save time and money while achieving better operational business results.

I think that noted business author (and Member of the Mashup Tribe) Dan Woods summed it up nicely at a recent Mashup Camp:

"Mashups aren't doing things that are already being done by IT; they're doing things that users wanted but IT never got to. You won't get a new CRM system out of a mashup, but you will get a better CRM system that does things IT didn't have time to develop or know were needed."

As Dan noted in a column in Forbes, Mashups are being used by competitive enterprises to rapidly make improvement on their existing software ecosystems to add business value, without the lengthy and expensive projects of the past.

I think that by following the money trail of both investors and customers you can reach a simple but powerful conclusion: Mashups are good for business and they become even more valuable in a scenario where cost reductions and increased efficiencies are paramount.

You can bet that the trust from our investors, our customer's confidence, and the unique opportunity to make enterprises more efficient are the reasons that we will be working hard in 2009.

Mash on.

My Predictions for 2009: Nothing

2008-12-17T12:00:00.018-05:00

Every year I look forward to ‘the prediction season’. You know it. It’s that time of year when every expert, pundit, analyst and chatty blogger on the planet decides we need to hear their thoughts on the past year and what they think will happen in the coming year.

There are tons of examples. I’ve seen predictions about SOA (David Linthicum in Infoworld and Joe McKendrick in ZDNet), IT spending/activity (CapGemini and ComputerWorld), Content Management (CMS Watch), Business Intelligence (Enterprise Systems Journal and Intelligent Enterprise), and of course Web 2.0 (Fast Company). Gartner even has a Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009 where mashups made their list for the second straight year.

I admit, even JackBe has played the soothsayer. Our CTO, John Crupi, did a great job at the end of 2007 with his Web 2.0 predictions for 2008. And I hope he does it again for 2009. But I’ve decided to embrace my inner slacker. I’m predicting nothing. Literally. Instead, I’m going to crowdsource the problem to my Mashup Tribe (that includes you). Where do you think mashups will be in 12 months?

Of course I’m not a heartless taskmaster (in spite of what my son may say). I have some great source material for you. JackBe has spent the last 12 months talking with thousands of organizations and individuals about their perspective on mashups. And we’ve collected their responses to one simple question: Describe the business problem(s) enterprise mashups will address for you.

And in true Web 2.0 style, I’ve published over 1000 responses to this question in a nice mashup widget (we call them ‘mashlets’), which you’ll find below. (On the off chance that your browser has problems loading the Mashlet inside this blog, you can access it directly.)

Loading Mashlet - MashupUseCases2008.Mashlet. Please wait...

Put on your thinking cap and take a look. The widget has a nice filtering option (look for the 'Input' button), so try searching on common enterprise technologies like 'portal’, ‘soa’, and ‘dashboard’. But keep an open mind as well. I think you will be surprised at the broad range of responses. There's even some funny ones in there.

Then give me your thoughts. Where do you think mashups will be in 12 months?

Are You a Member of the Tribe?

2008-12-11T16:11:00.017-05:00

I just listened to Seth’s Godin new book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. Seth is an inspiring author/marketer and I find him to be one of the easiest-to-understand individuals about complex business topics today. His grasp and explanation of the complex problems facing organizations have made all of his books best sellers in the business world.

In his new book, Seth explains that Tribes are made-up of people who come together to support each other in endeavors in which they are passionate about. He says it like this:

"A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea... A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate." (Page 1 of Tribes)

People who make-up a Tribe do not necessarily belong to the same company, social group nor are they located in the same geographic place. In fact these individuals are not brought together by a single short-lived recruitment effort. Instead, they have congregated together over time by pursuing similar and/or complementary interests and creating an informal network to exchange information with each other. Seth goes on to say that PASSION is the thing that drives people to huddle with and find commonality with others.

In my case I am extremely passionate about Mashups in the Enterprise, like everyone here at JackBe. How else would you explain our 5+ years of effort and the many challenges we have faced and overcome? It is this passion that has helped bring us together from different backgrounds, leaving behind different comfortable jobs to jointly pursue the larger task of helping create a new category of enterprise software.

From this somewhat unique vantage point, we have seen and continue to witness the formation of a tribe of mashup supporters. It is this group of pioneers who started talking about Mashups before they were called “Mashups”. These people are the ones who found a way to combine information from widespread sources so that the combination means something to the end-user.

These people are the ones that end up explaining what a mashup is time after time, explaining the differences between a Mashup and Business Intelligence or ESB. It is this tribe of forward-thinking, innovative visionaries who have created a software category where others said none was necessary.

Seth also talks about using Web 2.0 tools to enable your tribe to communicate. In our case, we have found that the Mashup Tribe requires a place where they can meet other tribe-members and exchange views on all things Mashup. JackBe launched a Mashup Developer Community (MDC) a few weeks ago and we’re proud to say it has grown to almost a thousand members with members in dozens of countries including the USA, Brazil, Israel, Netherlands, Italy, France, Korea, Russia, Mexico, and India. The one thing – the ONLY thing – that is common to all of these people is their passion for Mashups and their desire to see Mashups fulfill the potential they hold.

Like any tribe, ours has its more prominent members. It is with great pride and pleasure that I can call out and recognize some of the “mashters” (mashup masters) of the Mashup tribe. They all deserve recognition for their work. Although I am sure, as Seth says in his book, few of them are in the tribe for the publicity:

Analysts and pundits like Anthony Bradley (Gartner), Oliver Young (Forrester), Dion Hinchcliffe (Web 2.0 strategist), David Linthicum (technology pundit, as he likes to say), Joe McKendrick (ZDNet, among other places), Lorraine Lawson (IT Business Edge), and the guys at Zapthink.

Thought leaders and authors like Larry Bowden, Dan Gisolfi, and David Boloker at IBM, Mike Ogrinz (author of the upcoming Mashup Patterns), Chris Thomas (Intel), Dan Woods (Evolved Media), Andy Mulholland (CapGemini and co-author of Mashup Corporations), Niall Cook (author of Enterprise 2.0), and Vince Casarez (Oracle).

Early adopters and supporters like Rich Barton (founder of Zillow), Brian Wilson and Tony Lucia at Thomson Reuters, Baltazar Rodríguez (Servicio de Administracion Tributaria), the organizers of Mashup Camp, Bob Gourley, Steve Willett, Bob Ware, and the rest of the Overwatch team at the DIA, Alejandro Vargas (Banamex Accival), Vivek Kundra (CTO of the District of Columbia), every submitter to the Apps for Democracy contest, Tim Hall and Marie-Paule Cellini-Odelier at HP, Abe Elias (Ext JS), Manuel Jasso (Wells Fargo), Mark Scrimshire (BCBS), Sean Kelley (Deutsche Bank), John Musser (Programmable Web), the guys in the CTO Office at EMC, Rigoberto Saenz (BBVA), the sharp-as-a-razor Kelly Shaw, and the organizers of the CSC Leading Edge Forum.

Of course I could never get to them all. The tribe is just too large to mention everyone. To the rest of you, and you know who you are, thank you. It is a tribe I am very proud to be part of.

Finally, I’d like to mention that you can download the Tribes audio book for free here and “The Tribe Casebook” from Seth's blog. If you are a reader instead of a listener, I’ll gladly send you a copy of Tribes (I have about 20 at my disposal); just send me a quick note at luis.derechin@jackbe.com. I believe in the premises of the book and in my own tribe so much that I truly want to share them with everyone.

On Ed Yourdon Presents: Mashups!

2008-12-04T18:45:00.004-05:00

I am big fan of Ed Yourdon. So I was delighted to see his presentation on Mashups (here). Discussion on this topic by eminent and experienced gurus like him are heart-warming and encouraging to me, since we at JackBe have been working in the area of Mashups to create a new kind of lite-middleware. I and my colleagues have often written about our work (for instance here and here).

What was not so encouraging to me personally was the fact that Presto, our enterprise mashup platform, did not figure in his presentation. Which got me thinking, no surprise really, there must be a whole lot of people that might not know or heard about us since we are such a small company compared to the likes of Google, Yahoo, IBM and Microsoft (which were featured mentions in his presentation).

So, to those of you who are not familiar with us, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce our company, JackBe and our product Presto, a pure-play enterprise mashup server platform built from the ground up for enterprise mashing!

At the core of Presto is our Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML), which we describe as a domain-specific language (DSL) for mashups. No other product or technology offers such a DSL for mashing, which has been greatly appreciated by our users and customers. Do check it out yourself and let me know what you think.

We also offer Presto to developers in a special no-cost Developer Edition. Mashup Developer Community (MDC) members can download and use Presto for free here (requires registration).

In Ed Yourdon's presentation, he mentions Yahoo! Pipes, MS Popfly, etc. I have heard some describe Presto as 'Yahoo! Pipes on steroids for the enterprise' since Presto's visual mashup composer (called Wires) allows you to create mashups that consume any kind of service / API including WSDL, REST, RSS, Atom, Databases, Excel spreadsheets and so forth. Pipes only deals with public RSS services as far as I know.

Presto also generates 'Mashlets', which puts a face (UI) in front of each mashup. Mashlets become the embeddable objects that can virally spread within and outside the enterprise (assuming the enteprise security policies allow them to share outside). All of this is done in a secure manner, which is why we are an enterprise mashup solution.

To better understand Presto at a high level, I had previously described the 3 artifacts of mashup process here. I hope this provides you some insight into our technology, and hopefully, you will get to try it when you get a chance. While doing so, if you do need any help, don't be shy to ask on MDC, the whole community is there to help!

Mash On!

The 5 Most Common Mashup Mistakes

2008-12-03T09:44:00.007-05:00

Mashups are a popular topic lately, in both IT and business circles. Gartner recently named them a ‘Top 10 IT Technology for 2009’. But if your organization is thinking about ‘getting mashy’, here are five common pitfalls that you can avoid with just a little education and forethought:

The ‘Fall for the Buzz’ Mistake: Misunderstanding what a ‘mashup’ is. Everyone wants to be associated with the hot buzzword and mashups are hot. Unfortunately, ‘mashup’ is a term that has also been used by vendors in areas like business process management, enterprise service bus (ESB), business intelligence (BI), and portals. So focus on the goal: mashups let you address just-in-time information needs by consuming and combining bite-size chunks of data, they run in ‘Internet time’ (i.e. seconds), they are usually relatively code-free, and they must make it easy to share with others. And there are, of course, a number of good independent software vendors that specialize in mashups.

The Self-Serve Mistake: Every few years we hear about tools that will turn users into developers. It ain’t true. Yes, users are becoming more technically savvy and self sufficient every day (we call them ‘Business User 2.0’). But we’ll need IT for a long time to come, acting it’s new role as ‘enabler’. In the case of mashups, IT will establish a secure, reliable, and robust mashup infrastructure through which end-users can get mashing. In non-technical terms, IT builds the mashup lab and the business gets to play mashup mad scientist without worrying about blowing up the building.

The SOA Mistake: Assuming you need an SOA before you adopt mashups. Sure, mashups put a business face on SOA, so to speak. And it’s easier for you to create mashups if there are a lot of ‘mashable’ (i.e. SOA-based) data sources. But the best mashup software can instantly turn databases and applications into mashable services. So don’t wait for that 5-year SOA effort to be finished before you start the mashup rollout. Use mashups to help you define the optimal SOA.

The Silo Mistake: Mashups that aren’t reusable fall into the same ‘silo’ trap as legacy software. Mashups are their best when a community of like-minded users are building upon each other’s work. As we’ve written in the past, this kind of network effect does not happen automatically. Your mashup solution must have some kind of infrastructure to encourage reuse, such as a mashup ‘hub’, also often referred to as a ‘repository’ or ‘registry’. You (and your mashup software) have gotta have one.

The ”Oops” Mistake: Thinking about security as an afterthought. Mashups can be based on business-critical data from your ERP system, your SFA system, your CRM system, etc. And, once created, they are often sent to many destinations (think portals, iPhone, and spreadsheets). You don’t want to find out your data has been compromised just because you assumed some kind of security was in place, do you? Your mashup solution must let mashup creators choose who they share with and the permissions. And the entire continuum of mashup inputs to mashup destinations need to be incorporated into your mashup plan. In technical terms, you need mashups that include LDAP integration and single sign-on support so they play nicely in your secure enterprise.

Understanding these common pitfalls can help your first (and your 50th!) mashup efforts be successful. Ignoring them will likely lead to mashup misery. Now get mashing.

[Reposted from Fast Company.]

Mashups can turn any Enterprise into a Superorganism

2008-11-24T16:11:00.001-05:00

A few nights ago I watched a very interesting piece on the Discovery Channel about ant colonies called ‘Ant Wars’. (Give me a few more lines and you’ll understand why this has anything to do with IT, enterprises or Mashups). I was awe-struck with the way that an ant colony behaves as one unified being rather than millions of individuals - some ants perform one function, which other ants use to their advantage so as to be able to perform their function more easily, and so on, and so on.

The commentator mentioned how scientists consider an ant colony to be a “Superorganism”. The Wikipedia, as usual, had a helpful description of the term: ‘A superorganism is an organism consisting of many organisms…where division of labour is highly specialised and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods of time’.

Without much apparent centralized coordination and without any one individual leader barking-out precise orders to the individuals, each ant performs their own task in what appears to be a seamless orchestration of actions towards the achievement of a much larger purpose – that of survival of the colony.

As I have said many times, I see Mashups everywhere. So I got to thinking that…

…with the adoption and use of mashup technologies, enterprises evolve into a kind of Superorganism where individuals create mashups to solve particular problems and by doing so create an environment of re-use where others can more easily solve subsequent, perhaps more complex, problems.

As the leading Mashup vendor, we are lucky to be a front-and-center witness to many cases where, with the use of our Presto Enterprise Mashup Platform, individuals in organizations are able to easily and economically take data from many different applications built by enterprise IT departments and mash it up with other services to solve their own problem. Then, those services are re-used and built upon by others to solve similar yet different problems.

This beautiful “ballet” of solution solving and application building happens with little planned coordination and appears to occur naturally without the central planning usually required. A Superorganism indeed.

Mashups : New and Agile way to Integrate

2008-11-13T18:52:00.003-05:00

I came across this interesting post: How Mashups Could Eliminate Integration Projects by Loraine Lawson. In a related post, she refers to John Crupi's article Enterprise Mashups Part I: Bringing SOA to the People which I would recommend to readers who want to understand JackBe's take on defining mashups. Anyway, Loraine's post led me to Ron Schmelzer's ZapFlash. Here are some excerpts of Ron's article that caught my eye, with my take on them.

Excerpt from ZapFlash:

A year or two ago, assuming that a mashup was a web browser-based, static, user interface composition of web-based functionality would be a reasonable presumption. But in the enterprise context, none of those assumptions necessarily hold – we might want non-Web access to mashed applications, we might want to change them regularly, and we might want to mash up information that exists below the user interface abstraction. For sure, Web mashups might embody the ideals of the original mashup concept, but we now have the desire to mash up a wide variety of IT resources from application to infrastructure to data that might be exposed with a wide range of interfaces – or without. And, it’s the desire to mash up information freed from the application that diversifies the mashup term to include the concept of the data mashup.

My take: This hits the point right on what we at JackBe have been saying all along about mashups. While some mashups are done purely in the UI/Browser, in the enterprise, such mashups need to be supported by a new tier, the mashup tier, which sits between the presentation and business tier. So enterprise mashups will have some mashing done in the client, but most of the mashing happens in server side where security, governance, policies can be applied before any mashing can happen in the client.

Another excerpt from ZapFlash:

There are many scenarios for composing data, but some are better suited for static, tightly-coupled, IT-driven, non-Service Oriented form. In fact, 80% of the value that businesses derive from data come from the 20% of fixed, highly optimized data integration approaches implemented over decades. In this realm, traditional data integration approaches retain high value. However, it’s the other 80% of data integration requirements, most of which come from the need to meet short-term, often ad hoc, integration requests that cause 80% of the problems. Anyone who has lived long enough in the enterprise IT space knows that business-driven requests for reporting, forecasting, analysis, or other interpretations of data can present significant complications and cost to the IT organization. The reason for this is that the IT organization is set up to meet the recurring needs of the business and not “situational” needs for information.

My take: This highlights another issue which we have been talking about at JackBe about the long tail & enterprise applications need which was so nicely discussed here by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Bottom line: Something new and interesting is happening in the enterprise architecture space. A new flexible and agile tier is being introduced in the architecture to meet the increasing demand on IT and add value to existing architecture, applications, services and data. Question is, are you embracing this inevitable change? If not, it's still not too late. :-)

[Cross-posted from my personal blog]

The 3 Parts of Mashing

2008-11-03T14:42:00.014-05:00

Deepak Alur, JackBe’s VP of Engineering, has outdone himself. He recently posted a great blog on our Mashup Developer Community entitled ‘Mashables > Mashups > Shareables’. It does a great job of distilling a mashup down to 3 fundamental parts. You can post comments to Deepak in our Community.

How exactly does the mashup process work? What does Presto really do? These are a couple of common newbie questions. I have had different explanations for this, but of late, I have narrowed down on the following elevator pitch (trust me, this textual explanation looks long, but I can explain really fast in person) that I have used successfully with other developers recently. So I thought I will share this with the community in case it helps others to understand the process and artifacts around enterprise mashups.

I found it easier to explain the whole mashup workflow using three terms: "Mashables > Mashups > Shareables". (OK, I confess, these may not be in the English Dictionary yet.)

As a mashup developer or user, we need to start somewhere. To me that starting point is what I call Mashables. These are things that one can use, invoke to get data and send data. Things like services such as WSDL based web services, REST based web services, RSS or Atom services, proprietary XML/RPC services, or even the conventional RDBMS tables, view and stored procedures. I would also include other items such as spreadsheets, XML documents and unstructured information on internal and external websites. These are the raw material for mashups. These need to be made Mashable! And this is exactly what happens when you 'publish' one of these things to Presto. It becomes a Mashable artifact that can be normalized, secured and managed.

And then comes the second thing called Mashups. I don't want to go into a philosophical discussion about what a mashup is or isn't. However, I think mashup is a user-driven, user-focused thing that encapsulates the kind of data processing and manipulation actions a user would normally do to turn any data into real information. Such actions include joining, merging, sorting, filtering, constructing, transforming, clipping, and so forth. And in Presto, a mashup is represented by an small file written using EMML (EMML is Enterprise Mashup Markup Language). EMML is an XML-based dynamic declarative domain specific mashup language. Again, a Mashup becomes this artifact which can be secured and managed just like the Mashables.

The third and final thing is the Shareables. Once you have Mashables, and Mashups, you want to be able to share them with co-workers, partners, friends, whoever. Shareables can be exposed as a service interface so others can use it as a REST or RSS or Atom or WSDL service. Another popular type of Shareable is what we call Mashlets, which are enterprise widgets that offer a rich interface to the Mashups. Mashlets are not full blown applicaitons, but can be small micro-applications that encapsulate a very specific functionality. Mashlets can be shared by publishing them on Wiki pages, blogs, websites, portal servers. You can even email a mashlet or call it directly from a smart phone like iPhone. Other types of shareables include mashups and services shared as REST urls, RSS feeds, data feeds, spreadsheets, email and so on.

There you have it. Now I can just describe Presto simply as a platform to securely create, publish, consume and collaborate with Mashables, Mashups, and Shareables!

Free Enterprise Mashup Software by the Developer, for the Developer

2008-10-28T08:41:00.005-05:00

We've spent the last couple years at JackBe designing and building our enterprise mashup product from the ground up. We’ve won some nice awards, introduced some genuine innovations (like our Enterprise Mashup markup Language, which just passed it's 1-year anniversary) and, most importantly, been blessed with some great customers.

And now we’ve taken our 2+ years of hard work and made it available for free as the Presto Developer Edition and our Mashup Developer Community (which we lovingly refer to as 'the MDC'). We want all of you to take Presto for a spin and let us know your thoughts.

One notable developer who has given Presto a try is Steve Graham, Senior Technologist in the Office of the CTO at EMC. He’s created an intriguing mashup that tackles some common issues in the datacenter. And I think Steve’s perspective is representative of many long-tail business problems outside the datacenter as well.

In his screencast of an enterprise mashup that supports IT/Data Center resource management, Steve points out that many problems in the data center require the synthesis of both modeled and non-modeled information. Additionally, Steve discusses how these sorts of mashups require a server-centric approach to support the joining of disparate information sources with the desired level of security and performance.

I certainly agree with Steve’s technical assessment. But he also underscores a broader point: organizations that have many systems will need solutions that can bring them together. JackBe is happy that our new Presto Developer Edition provides an answer...and it's free!!!

Mashup Recycling: Now this is Green IT!

2008-10-17T16:46:00.003-05:00

Sometimes ideas come from the most unlikely of places. Yesterday I got off an elevator and wondered if it was one of the energy-saving models that regenerates power. They ‘give back’, in a sense, making the next round trip less costly than the previous one. An instant later I found myself noodling this very same principle in the world of mashups.

Mashups can be used to build new mashups. They make the next mashup easier to create. It this is the very quality that gives mashups the majority of their ROI and separates 'once-and-done' custom mashups from long-term systematic mashup solutions that achieve a kind of fission via a community of mashers. And in my considered opinion, mashup reuse is one of the most important yet under-utilized qualities of mashups. I think mashup reuse needs it’s day in the sun.

Enterprise mashups can be built on raw data sources (SQL databases, for example) and more formal services (like REST and WSDL). But mashups can also be built upon other mashups, assuming your mashup tool lets you publish the mashup with some sort of callable service interface. So more mashups mean more raw materials to go into the next mashup, creating a kind of network effort. You’d think this might be a no-brainer but I frequently see mashup implementations that that have no reuse at all.

Most mashup vendors show a mashup lifecyle as a circle; the last arrow that closes the circle is the 'reuse'. But this kind of network effect does not happen automatically. Much like the best SOAs, mashup reuse requires some kind of infrastructure to encourage reuse, such as a mashup hub/repository/registry.

Much like the worst SOAs, it is easy to forget about reuse and end up with a bunch of point solutions that stand alone (and miss a lot of the real ROI value of the technology). I see lots of cool mashups that are custom-coded in Java or Javascript. Most of these essentially become a 'mashup silo', with no option for reuse of that mashup's service in the next mashup, particularly for mashers makers other than the original creator.

But technology alone doesn't equal mashup reuse. A second common stumbling block is a social one. You need to change mashup making behavior. Sure, most enterprises have a common organizational mission but that doesn't imply that these same organizations motivate their employees to explicitly think in 'reuse' terms. There’s no magic bullet in any software package that will do that. Mashup reuse takes knowledgeable, committed leadership that can take independent-minded people and make them into a community of mashup makers that look for reusable mashup inputs and strive to create reusable mashup outputs.

Much like real recycling efforts, you need a pro-active, systematic, persistent ecosystem-wide commitment for real mashup reuse. Keep it green, baby.

McKinsey Recommends Mashups for Managing in a Downturn...Sorta

2008-10-13T17:20:00.003-05:00

Like many other business managers, the current economic downturn has me wondering about how my strategy should change to meet new market realities. Because of this I have been reviewing different business periodicals and articles looking for advice. One of the best sources of managerial advice out there is The McKinsey Quarterly. For those who have not heard of McKinsey and co., Wikipedia describes them as “…widely recognized as a leader and one of the most prestigious firms in the management consulting industry. …”. The goal of their Quarterly is stated as “…to help business people run their organizations more productively, more competitively, and more creatively.”

The people at McKinsey have published a lot of great advice over the years, and understand that many managers are currently looking for reading material about best practices and use of technology during the downturn. They have created a section in their Quarterly titled “Managing in a Downturn” where their most recent article is a great piece that promotes the intelligent use of existing IT assets to create new revenue.

Is one of the most revered business consulting firms referring to the use of Mashups as a way for companies to get themselves in a better competitive position in this economic downturn?

The team who wrote the article mention that an easy to-do is to use and combine existing data assets to gain new insight and business opportunities:

Few companies have successfully capitalized on the explosion of data in recent years. Often this information, residing in separate IT systems or spread across different business units, have never been mined for insights that could add value. Small teams of business and IT staffers can find opportunities by combining a detailed understanding of business processes with straightforward analyses of consolidated data sets……”

Achieving what McKinsey proposes can be a very long and arduous process using old-style integration technologies or for those companies interested in getting results quickly, Mashups are the perfect solution to easily and quickly combine all sorts of data.

The article goes on to mention an example of how a Telecommunications company improved revenue by

“…building high-value but inexpensive links between multiple silos of information. Contracts DB, sales funnels, compensations systems, CRM data warehouses, and other siloed systems… it facilitated analyses that uncovered opportunities to improve revenues…”

Wow! We are also seeing this type of use-case but not only in Telcos. Healthcare and Government arenas are having great results in providing better data by cross-analyzing many distinct data sources.

I know some of you must be thinking “he sees Mashups everywhere” (I do after all work for the leading Enterprise Mashup vendor) but you may only be partially correct in that statement. McKinsey may not be using the term but they are certainly talking about the value proposition of enterprise mashups.