Welcome to the Party IBM!

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...

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Mashup Milestones

One of the ‘special pleasures’ of CEOs everywhere is money. How to make sure your company makes enough of it, how to make sure you company doesn't spend too much of it, and so on. So it is with a very deep personal satisfaction that I can report that JackBe has received $9.5 million in funding for sales, marketing and, most important for all of you, continued development of our enterprise mashup software platform, Presto. It is this kind of milestone event that can make even the most grizzled software veteran reflect on the changes that a rapidly-growing industry like ours has already undergone and where it is heading.

It’s easy to forget that less than 2 years ago you couldn’t find a reference to ‘mashups’ unless you listened to late night radio. But enterprise mashups today get coverage in the general business press, make the to-do list of CIOs and enterprise architects, and even rank high on analysts lists of technologies to watch and embrace. Notable mashup software/service providers include a literal Who’s Who of heavy-weight companies like IBM, Yahoo, and Microsoft. And we’ve already seen some frighteningly-quick exits from the mashup space, a few notable sudden entries, and the obligatory wannabes who want to ride the mashup coattails while hoping you can’t tell the difference. All this in 2 short years.

Most importantly, the vernacular and the technology of mashups has grown by leaps and bounds. For example, here at JackBe we’ve introduced the first Mashup Markup Language, an XML/XQuery/XPath answer to creating complex mashups, and Mashlets, a mashup visualization that can be published and consumed in a variety of platforms including portals, RIAs, Wikis, blogs and just any old web site. We also introduced the first set of guidelines for mashup buyers and implementors in our 5 Cs of Enterprise Mashups. And like JackBe, we’re seeing other mashup vendors relating their products to broader enterprise IT efforts like ERP/SFA, portals, RIAs, and perhaps most notably, SOAs.

So, here we are. Smarter than we were 2 years ago. More relevant. More motivated. And I genuinely believe that the opportunity ahead of us is huge. We have a great chance of being a technology that forever leaves an enduring mark in the enterprise software ecosystem. But it’s not a done deal. The experts tell us we still face some hurdles. If the last 2 years are any indication of our future trajectory, you’ll need to hold on tight. It should be one heck of a ride.

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Faster, Better, Stronger

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

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

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

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

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

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JackBe and the IBM Mashup Ecosystem Summit

[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:

1. 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.)
2. Mashup of Data vs. Processes. It is easy to confuse the two and it's important to remember they are not the same.
   
3. 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.

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Ajax is for real in 'Real-World Ajax'

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.)

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Business Value Continued….Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership Part 2

Well I’m back with some more ideas and thoughts about Web 2.0, the enabling technologies driving it, and the potential benefits for enterprises. I tend to focus on the technologies and the enterprise aspect of Web 2.0 simply because I get tired (am tired) of people defining it as simply a “social collaborative” movement. Although this is true, and great for my girlfriend who can blog and share her photos, this says little to the strategic impact that the underlying technologies, that make capable the social aspects, can have on the enterprise. Here are a few real universal business situations or rather timeless barriers to a better bottom line that technologies such as Ajax, Mashups, and a SOA can positively affect.

Quickly adapt to Changing Business Needs.

When organizations mandate a business process rule, such as a limit on the size of a particular type of business transaction, it is typically embedded deep within the application code. Finding, adjusting, and maintaining consistency with other systems can be error-prone and extremely time consuming and error-prone processes. By deploying such rules in a separate but integrated environment, organizations can empower business executives via a user interface to achieve extreme agility and oversight.

Effectively Monitor and Continuously Improve the Business

Systems information and transactional flows capture critical interactions that may be required for financial, contractual, regulatory, and business governance. Tracing and reporting audit data are tedious tasks and tenuously contingent on predefined conditions, including monitoring servers and client devices, coding predetermined subroutines to capture processing metrics, running batch routines for replication and reporting, and so forth. Due to the complexity of pulling this information together across a whole business process, the effort is often only made when critical issues arise. To avoid business risk, ongoing monitoring can be automatically captured by the abstracted process layer, which can trigger alerts, alternate process flows, provide automated reporting, and expose many other intelligence metrics. By reacting to early warnings a business can preempt situations that may cause undue and costly mistakes. Organizations may also seek to implement Six Sigma or regulatory initiatives via this type on mechanism.

Simplify Business Integration Efforts

Integration points that are incorporated and managed in close context to specific business processes will provide significantly more value. In the example, enterprise procurement activities are often scattered across multiple systems, where the collating, parsing, and regrouping of items to be sourced are typically very manual and labor-intensive processes. However, these processes can be centralized and automated into a composite application or mashup that avoids these inefficiencies.

Reduce Costs and Risks of Manual Processing

Many organizations still struggle trying to automate manual or paper-based transactions. Highly document-intensive composite application processes are very common targets for Web services. In the procurement example, a user may intervene in multiple places, introducing the potential to corrupt the process flow. With an orchestrated composite application, automated triggers engage users where and when necessary, removing the need for each individual to know every activity in the process required to continue the flow of a specific transaction.

Leverage Existing Systems and Resources

Reusability of code not only saver resource efforts in development and maintenance, it also impacts application quality and security. By utilizing a standardized framework, companies can focus skills development across a variety of systems and solutions to prevent these effects.

Again, these are just a few examples but I and JackBe believe it is these types of scenarios that are not as highly publicized at the moment (overshadowed by the Youttube/myspace buzz) but will at the end of the day drive real business value to the mass.

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Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership

What is all the Web 2.0, Ajax, Enterprise 2.0, SOA buzz in the driving towards? What does it mean for the line-of-business manager or the enterprise itself? I thought I’d take a moment at breaking down how the approaches/ideas and supporting technologies could positively impact the underlying business books. As to not make this to vague, I’ll take the latest hallmark of Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, and a classic financial benchmark Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and we’ll deconstruct how this latest set of technologies and techniques stands up against an old benchmark.

The TCO of a solution must take into account the initial and ongoing costs of the solution, relative to the solution it replaces. Enterprise Mashups (which are closely related to composite applications if not the same depending on one’s definition) are based upon a SOA and have the potential to lower TCO in several ways, including:

• Managing the Services in an SOA is less expensive and complex than managing the interfaces in a traditional integration solution.

• By leveraging the Web Services standards, mashups can lower the cost of proprietary technologies. Standards level the competitive playing field for vendors by lowering prices generally, and also simplify the task of integration, lowering costs directly.

• Business analysts and technical business users are able to compose applications without the involvement of more expensive IT personnel.

• The more complex a business change is, the more effective SOA-based mashups can be at reducing the TCO of the solution because of their inherently flexible nature.

Fundamentally, a SOA provides business an “agility quotient” – the more complex the underlying infrastructure and the more dynamic the business environment, the greater the benefit of an agile architecture to the business. SOAs provide the ability for business users to create enterprise mashups, thus creating and managing business processes.

Where am I going with all of this and how does it fit into the world of Ajax, RIA, or JackBe for that matter? There is one important piece yet missing – the user interface itself. If the tools that users interact with aren’t agile themselves, the benefits of these enterprise mashups to the organization risk being lost. The services that contribute to a mashup can now be consumed by light-weight client models thanks to Ajax. This is why the integration layer will be driven by those who are experienced with client side models. The back-end can do their part, expose the services, which they have or are doing so, but they aren’t going to be able to create what is truly needed for the consumption because this is not there expertise. The services are moving out farther-the power of the apps as well-to the client so it only makes sense that the driver of this integration will be through the client tier experts and more specifically, those skilled in Ajax.

Later, I’ll attempt to address the benefits of incorporating SOA, Ajax, and Mashups into the enterprise to more strategic business benefits. Please feel free to leave your comments and opinions.

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Web 2.0 in the Top Secret world

One of JackBe's customers, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is spotlighted in Computerworld. It's a nice, concise summary of Web 2.0 technologies and their use within the highly-secure, high-demand world of intelligence gathering and analysis.

Sure, it's a bit self-serving to blog about one of our own customers in the news. But it's not every day that the generally-secretive folks in the intelligence community talk about the tools they use in their world. We're very proud of our work with them! And there might even be a few lessons you could learn from their work.

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Time or Vogue?

If you got to choose which magazine cover you were featured on, what would it be? Time? Vogue? Fortune?

What got me started on this line of thinking? Well, JackBe made the cover of Infoworld last month in their article, 'Top Ajax tools deliver rich GUI goodness'. It's a recap of 4 Ajax vendors: Tibco, Backbase, Bindows and JackBe, of course. I think it makes a good beginner's primer on some of the issues you need to consider when selecting an enterprise ajax toolset.

The screenshot in the upper-right-hand corner of the cover is an Ajax-based dashboard JackBe built for a customer. You can get the entire article in PDF format here (it includes the magazine cover).

OK, so it's not Time or Vogue. But 'any press is good press'. (Any know who said that line? I can't seem to find the source.) And certainly the folks at Infoworld did a nice job of highlighting our 'good side'.

What magazine cover would I choose? Probably Rolling Stone. But only if Annie Leibovitz took the photo.

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