As we've mentioned in the past in this blog, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is a JackBe customer and an avid adopter of Web 2.0 technologies. Just this past week I had the pleasure to speak on the CTO Panel at DODIIS Worldwide Conference in Chicago, the IT show sponsored by the DIA. It only took a few minutes on the exhibit floor to appreciate the emergence of Web 2.0 as a important initiative in government.
One of the mandates of John Howard, Deputy Associate Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (the title is very telling in itself!), is that users need to get information in their hands as quickly as possible without government red tape getting in the way. Executive mandates aside, the interest in Enterprise Web 2.0 within this community is not very surprising when you consider that Intelligence analysts are defacto Tacit workers. They are a great example of ad-hoc workers that do something different every day and benefit from correspondingly dynamic and adaptable supporting software systems.
Specifically, this community has shown great interest in using Ajax as an interaction technology and SOA as a business functionality-sharing technology. There's also a lot of buzz around mashups because, I believe, they see the value of ad-hoc integration. Two other issues that were frequently discussed were security and governance. How does an organization, government or not, support common credential authentication and propagation? And these aren't merely rhethorical questions. We heard one speaker give a great practical example: they will support DEERS, a DOD X.509 common credential and attribute service, which is key for any workable multi-service consumption or mashup use. As each service has its own set of user credential, users would have to login to each service which would be unusable.
And like a lot commercial enterprises, the DOD is struggling with other strategic issues related to Web 2.0 technologies like SOA. As the CTO from JFCOM put it, they are already experiencing "SOA silos". Best practices and implementation rubrics are becoming crucial to avoid these kinds of problems. That might sound obvious but most of the big SOA vendors want to own the entire stack and 'integratation' often stops at their own product set. As Scott McNealy (CEO of Sun Microsystems and a keynote speaker at the Conference) said, "Integratable" is important. I couldn't agree more.
As always, the DIA (and the DOD in general) has a lot to teach us commercial folks.
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A 2006 survey by Evan Data described the adoption of Ajax as higher in areas outside of North America. Perhaps like some of you, I regularly think that the technology world revolves around the United States. But once I got this idea stuck in my head, I started seeing evidence of the worldwide appeal of Ajax everywhere I looked.
Certainly, my own company has its share of Ajax customers outside of the good ole USA. And about half of the visitors to our website are typically from outside North America. JackBe's 'Ajax Best Practices' paper has been downloaded hundreds of times by people from as far away as Brazil, India, China, and New Zealand. Why the trend? I think can summarize the collective wisdom of many of JackBe's customers by saying Ajax can help address thorny application deployment problems in remote areas of a company. Well-tuned Ajax applications are easier to deploy and can run much faster than typically-chatty client-server apps. In other words, a well-designed Ajax application can make a remote office into a viable business location without the need for on-site IT staff or heavy application deployment tools.
What's this mean to Ajax buyers? Philosophically, it just reinforces the idea that the Internet has all but eliminated the distance between sellers, buyers and ultimate users of Web-based technologies like Ajax. Practically speaking, I think this trend means many things. It should certainly be a reminder that your users can realistically be from anywhere on the globe. And on the flip side, you need to be open to the idea that your best Ajax partner/provider/implementor might not be (or need to be!) from Manhattan or Seattle.
We are now officially in a global village. Ajax is both part of the reason and one of the proof points.
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Like every solutions provider, JackBe tries very hard to share practical uses of its software and real-world success stories. I recently got a note from one of JackBe's Project Managers, Dr. Jerrold Prothero, and I thought it was a great example of Ajax 'moving beyond the technology' and moving into real-world business use:
This week, the RFID industry is holding its major conference, RFID World, in Dallas. You’ve probably heard about RFID. It’s basically “barcodes on steroids”, the next generation of product-tracking that is currently revolutionizing the supply chain industry.
RFID allows product information to be read automatically in bulk from a distance. For the first time, it makes it practical to get detailed, real-time information about where things are as they move from manufacturing through distribution to retail outlets. RFID dramatically increases supply chain visibility. And the technology is now in mature adoption, with RFID tag prices having dropped 60-70% over the last 12 months.
An intriguing new marriage is now starting to emerge between RFID and Ajax. RFID makes product information available; Ajax makes it possible to visualize and interact with this information over the web. IBM gave an RFID World presentation, 'Edge Computing Platforms - Innovative Capabilities through Item-Level Visibility' that discussed this theme and referenced JackBe software as an example of what is possible.
When you think about it, the potential for enterprise-grade Ajax environments in supply chain applications is huge. Products such as those developed by JackBe promote the ability to maintain situation awareness, by supporting rapid configuration and presentation of live data feeds; information sharing, by supporting a secure common workspace for information display; and collaboration, by supporting information update with governance controls. All of these issues are critical for the supply chain industry, with its reliance on extensive and fluid partnerships spread around the world.
Ajax and RFID. Let the games begin!
Of course, a short blog post probably doesn't do this topic justice. If you'd like to chat more on Ajax and RFID, you can reach Jerrold at jerrold.prothero@jackbe.com.
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Well, the craziness that is AjaxWorld East 2007 is over. But it was crazy in a good way. JackBe was a sponsor of the event for the second time and it was certainly worth it. It was a very well-run show and certainly a good example of how a well-executed and focused event can positively influence the growth and evolution of a technology and an industry. Jeremy, Carmen, Megan, Lauren and the rest of top-notch staff at Sys-Con have our compliments. They certainly make every effort to create a worthwhile event for vendors and attendees alike. We hope and expect the recordings of the conference presentations (including 3 by JackBe execs) to be online within a few weeks. Bonus points to you if you can name any of the gentlemen in the pictures from the show.
My corporate take on AjaxWorld is that it is definitive proof that Ajax as a technology is certainly growing up and doing so fast. As one attendee put it, ‘our Ajax baby is growing up’. Many of the common concerns about Ajax in years past are now being addressed, including issues like off-line support, security, and real-time messaging. These deep-dive technical questions were nicely balanced by big picture questions about the kinds of solutions that have been implemented and the business benefits that resulted. I’d say that the Ajax industry is moving through its ‘gangly teenager’ years quickly and is already looking towards its future as an adult.
On a personal note, I must say it was great as always to have the chance to shake hands (and even drink beer, in a few cases) with founders, CTOs, and big thinkers from movers-and-shakers like Cynergy, Dojo, Tibco, Helmi,Backbase, and IceSoft. Sure, some are competitors and normally I’d prefer you didn’t even know they existed. But putting my competitive hat aside for a few seconds, I think this is one of the overlooked qualities of this growing industry: it is still very personal. You can meet them, pick their brain, and get a real feeling for the solidity of their technologies.
So, after all this, what's next for JackBe? The Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco at the Moscone Center, April 15-18. This event isn’t focused on specific technologies like Ajax but more on the broad set of technologies/functionalities that sit under the ‘Web 2.0’ banner and the opportunities that they enable. Sticking to the Web 2.0 theme, we will be highlighting our work on Dash, our dynamic interface for user-driven mashups, and Edge, our virtualization and mashup server. If you are a west-coaster and want to come chat with JackBe in person at the Expo, we can help save you a bit of money. Go to http://www.web2expo.com/pub/w/53/register.html and, when prompted, enter code ‘webex07exb’ to get $100 off the normal registration fee. (If you are a student or government employee, there are other discounts available as well.) We hope to see ya there.
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