Wow, two big weeks in a row for enterprise software. Last week was all about the now-passe Oracle/BEA/Sun/MySQL acquisitions. This week is another big week for enterprise software: IBM announced ‘Lotus Mashups’ at LotusSphere this week.
This is a major milestone for ‘Web 2.0 for the Enterprise’. Sure upstarts like JackBe talk about this stuff. But when leading-edge technologies like enterprise mashups are productized by a tried-and-true software provider like IBM, you know that your conservative, non-early-adopter type of CIO has gotta ask ‘what’s that and do I need it?’. I think Ian White at ComputerWeekly summed it up best: “Using browser based technology Mashup will enable internal and external business objects to be deployed and connected by end users. This will create a new generation of self service applications defined by end users and connecting processes and data at the glass in a way that suit the business not just IT. Potentially this is a very exciting announcement.”
And this should also be a wakeup call for the rest of the big enterprise software providers who don’t have a concise enterprise mashup offering (I’m talking about companies like SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, CA and HP). Soon these guys will realize what IBM already knows: enterprise mashups are the face of a SOA platform for the business user. How can you not have that as part of your enterprise software portfolio?
IBM’s Rod Smith and David Boloker have been spearheading mashups at IBM for well over a year and we grudgingly admit they’ve done justice to the concept (we like their alphaWorks QEDWiki site). And we think JackBe and IBM are not just aligned in its marketing-speak, but also aligned in our overall architectural view of the enterprise mashup space. Check out the architectural similarities between Lotus Mashups and JackBe’s Presto. It's qualities like this that [we think] make mashups enterprise-ready and enterprise-grade:
- Lightweight and server-based;
- Built around security and governance;
- Dynamically driven;
- Consumes multiple data sources;
- Gets data to the user quickly;
- Let’s the user tag, search and share mashups.
You probably know that IBM has five major software brands: DB2, Lotus, Tivoli, Rational, WebSphere. If you know what these brands encompass then you’d probably agree it makes sense they’re putting mashups under the Lotus brand. Lotus is the most ‘user-centric’ of the 5. And I think it is also a testament to the fact that enterprise mashups can actually be about the user, not the developer or some back-office middleware software. This is, of course, exactly what we mean with our now semi-infamous tagline, ‘The User is the Killer App’.
And we hope that continued focus on the business user can remove some of the FUD (that ‘fear, uncertainty, and doubt’ for you non-warrior types out there) concerning user-facing/user-driven Web 2.0 technologies like enterprise mashups, wikis, and blogs. I think Ross Mayfield expressed these concerns best: “The new [Lotus Mashups] tool gives users an easy way to build composite applications that they can share with others and publish to their own or a shared workspace. One analyst said he wondered if IT administrators would be concerned by the possible security and management implications that may arise.”
While we at JackBe agree there are issues like security and governance to consider (and we’d like to think we have a pretty good handle on them), the real impediment to ‘user-driven’ enterprise solutions seems to simply be our 25+ years of inwardly-focused IT efforts. This makes it easy to forget that the average business user is more-and-more technically-inclined and self-sufficient every day. You can thank the constant flow of consumer-type sites like FaceBook, Digg, and NetVibes for that. ‘Born Digital’ has an entirely new meaning now.
So, if you are a Lotus customer, congratulations! You have something to look forward to. But, if you’re like many companies who don’t have Lotus, come give JackBe’s Presto a look.
I can't wait to see what next week brings...
Read More...
Summary only...
I am writing this as I fly home from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It was a good show to get the big picture of all the things under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella and all the heavyweights were there (IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, ) talking Web 2.0 everything in the Enterprise: wiki, blog, search, mashups, collaboration, and a few other topics as well.
It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that my favorite session was the ‘Enterprise 2.0 Mash-up’ panel. JackBe wasn’t on the panel (but of course we would have been happy to!) so I got the chance to listen closely to other vendors talk Enterprise Mashups. Here’s a few of the more interesting things I got to hear in the session:
- BEA showed off AquaLogic Pages. They created a blog, grabbed a SOAP data source, connected that to a Google map and then tried to grab a YouTube video to include in their mashup. Truthfully, it felt more like a user-driven portal builder. But I must admit it was still cool to see.
- Share Methods talked a bit about ‘office app’ mashups and a new mashup ‘standard’, OpenSAM (http://www.opensam.org), that includes things like WebDAV, ALE (Ajax Linking and Embedding), CGI, SSL, and a few other technical bits. The goal, an admittedly noble one, is to allow online apps vendors to interoperate and, optimally, be used together in a single cohesive environment. Not surprisingly, Share Method’s ‘product’ (does such a word apply to a mashed solution?), ShareOffice, seemed to include lots of other third-party apps within it.
- Rod Smith, IBM's VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, showed off QED with some of the neat weather info from Accuweather you might have heard about before. He was refreshingly candid about the time it took to build the demo (17 hours, including 4 hours of design time). And, unlike most of the vendors on the panel (or mashup vendors in general), put some emphasis on ‘getting mashup data from a SQL statement’. Good to know that at least IBM understands where most enterprise data originates.
- Near-Time talked about ‘cross-organizational’ collaboration, not something I often hear associated with the user-driven mashup revolution. But they did seem to have experiences in data-driven mashups.
I must admit I am surprised how different JackBe’s data-driven mashups are from the wiki-, RSS- and application-driven ‘mashups’ of other mashup vendors. The lesson, I guess, is a simple one: like ‘Enterprise 2.0’, the phrase ‘Enterprise Mashup’ is broadly used today. Caveat emptor.
There was also an interesting side-conversation about the ‘definition of a widget’ and what it would take to allow vendors to pass widgets around between themselves. This is a topic raised at the recent IBM Mashup Summit and while it ain’t a done deal yet its good to hear the mashup vendors at least talking about it.
And, in spite of the differences in the practice of the mashup vendors, the principles seemed to be all in line: simplicity, quick, and richly interactive. Now that’s something JackBe can agree on.
Read More...
Summary only...
[As a preface to this blog, I want to give my apologies for being away from blogging for the last few months. I've been busy creating Enterprise Mashup software here at JackBe. Now that our software is production-ready, I'm looking forward to getting back to posting regularly and getting your feedback on my development efforts. Deepak.]
I was at the Mashup Ecosystem Summit organized by IBM at their offices in San Francisco last week. Our CTO, John Crupi, and our Chief Architect, Raj Krishnamurthy, also attended with me. It was an interesting mix of people from different backgrounds and companies all converging on the concept of Mashups. Jeff Nolan (ex-Teqlo, ex-SAP) gave an interesting talk about his experiences in a starting up a mashup company. Some notable points were: (lack of) availability of APIs; Do-it-yourself Data Formats; Performance can be a challenge; Need for strong visual composition tools; Lack of Standards. I think these are questions that this group will be able to tackle over time. (At least, I hope!)
At one point during the end of the meeting, someone asked: "What really is a Mashup?". This led to a brief but inconclusive discussion. Which goes to show how nascent this field is that even among the experts in the industry, there is still some uncertainty about how to define and qualify a mashup. (Coincidentally, JackBe has a webcast coming up on May 23 on this very topic: 'Enterprise Mashup Bootcamp: What, Why and How'. You can register for that webcast here.)
I managed to slip in a question at the Mashup Summit about how the group feels about Composite Applications which were a hot topic a year or more ago and how they relate (or not) to mashups. Predictably, there wasn't a big desire for this discussion. However, my own personal take is as follows. We in the SOA software industry have been busy implementing SOA in the enterprise over the last few years in our architecture and IT infrastructure. This effort in SOA has largely ignored the end users, and mostly focused on the IT and business stakeholders. Composite Applications are, in a way, IT efforts to provide integration of data, services and processes. While there has been a proliferation of services around the internet/intranet, users have no good tools to use them to do their job more effectively. Therefore, end users do not see much direct benefit of SOA or services or even composite applications.
These SOA/services/composite applications efforts are now undergoing an (r)evolutionary transformation. Enter mashups. And enter the users! The integration is now happening at a higher level in the application stack, much closer to the user. (This is also what Dion Hinchcliffe points out in his blog, where he talks about the 5 styles of mashups.)
There was also some question/opinions about security and how to govern mashups. I think there is no need to be overly paranoid about this. However, service access control is still important in an enterprise world of mashups. Consider that today users are already doing mashups, whether you like it or not. They are doing this mostly in their heads or in a spreadsheet, mostly manually and mostly in a tedious and time consuming way, and in a not-easy-to-replicate-or-teach manner. If the users have access to the data, you don't really have control on what they do with it in their heads or spreadsheets. So, why not make it easy for the users to do this, faster, more efficiently, collaboratively (so they can share their analysis/knowledge), and to do all this with the least amount of programming skills required (leaning towards no programming required). We are aiming for this at JackBe, as I am sure other vendors in the mashup space are.
Other notable topics of discussion at the Mashup Summit were:
- Microformats. My favorite topic. I think Microformats (www.microformats.org) are currently under rated/under used in an enterprise. Expect to see a lot of interesting things in this space in the coming months. We have a thing or two in the works about this as well at JackBe. (Also see Jeff Nolan's comments on this topic.)
- Mashup of Data vs. Processes. It is easy to confuse the two and it's important to remember they are not the same.
- Offline & Synchronization: Ross Mayfield of SocialText asked how important this feature is and whether there really are good use cases that demand this feature. He blogs on this (and related) topics quite a bit and has a interesting perspective.
Bottomline, we at JackBe believe that a mashup has to be user-focused and user driven (not IT driven). Let's stop searching for the killer app. The killer app is here and it is the User. Let's enable and empower them to do what they really can do with mashups.
Read More...
Summary only...
There are a couple of new books on Enterprise 2.0 you may want to check out. First, from Sandy Carter at IBM, is ‘The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0’. It's a good look at what makes SOA projects work. But more important, as Joe McKendrick at ZD Net points out, the book elevates Web 2.0 to true enterprise-grade status. I couldn't agree more.
But we'd would be remiss if I didn’t give equal time to ‘Real-World Ajax’, a substantial effort from our friends Dion Hinchcliffe and Kate Allen. This type of work just proves that Ajax is ready for prime in the enterprise. Once you read it, we expect you'll agree. (In the interest of full disclosure: Yes, we are a bit biased, as there’s a nice section in there on JackBe’s Ajax Bank demo.)
Read More...
Summary only...
