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Archive for November, 2006

Spurred by Steve’s remark dismissing Web2.0 technologies as flaky,

I thought a few words in defence of Web2.0 would be worthwhile (a subject I have written about over the last year in my ebizq blog ). I should however state that I have no sympathy with the hyperbole and bizarrely anti-enterprise IT attitudes of some Web2.0 evangelists such as David Girourard of Google who says:

“Enterprise software is entirely bereft of soul. It is designed for business not for humans.”

Or the respected Enterprise Web2.0 visionary, John Hagel, who back in April stated that SOA had failed because

“SOAs were hijacked by an alliance of CIOs and IT consulting firms, each with their own reason for extending the effort required to deploy SOAs.”

And then went on to propose the way to getting over this problem for Web2.0 is:

“First, Web 2.0 technologists need to work on connecting directly with line executives of large enterprises without trying to go through the IT departments.”

Man the barricades, business line executives all you have to lose is your IT chains!

However, Steve’s skepticism is valid: Much Web2.0 technology is immature and hard to use. As he mentions, anybody who has set up a blog with RSS feeds (both of which are well established Web2.0 technologies) will know that it can be surprisingly tricky and unpredictable: Not the usual characteristics of a technology that one would consider unleashing on those disinterested in technology – the type of people that some claim Web2.0 technologies should appeal to!

However, as with any new wave, some of the Web2.0 technologies will mature and gain ground in the enterprise while others wither. One of the ground-gainers is enterprise wikis because they provide real value. Now, I am not saying the wiki tools are perfect but they are good enough and good enough is a key metric: So long as they are good enough to use, for most people that is sufficient if they can see the value. Using enterprise wikis to reduce the mountain of email with yet another version of a project plan or discussion document attached is clearly a good thing. When you can do it with little cost and little need for IT department to handhold, better still!

A web2.0 guide is next on my task list – so expect more this subject soon!

Ronan

According to…

…a sneak preview of CIO magazine’s annual state of “State of the CIO” survey the challenge is

“Innovate and grow [the business], but be very buttoned down when it comes to costs, risks, security and regulatory compliance.”

Also quoted in the article is Gartner CEO Gene Hall who says:

“many CEOs believe that their CIO is [too] cost-focused and not capable of contributing to growth—and they need IT to contribute to growth”

It sounds a little like the old “work smarter, not harder” approach is the only way out of the double squeeze to deliver more with less. So how can CIOs regain the innovation habit that might have been stamped out while cost cutting was the only virtue. Well here are three quick ideas on how to simultaneously innovate and spend less money:

Obviously, SOA is a key candidate as Steve points out: SOA is an architecture which supports software as a service/service outsourcing (i.e. reduces costs) and also increases internal agility (i.e. increases agility and hence supports growth).

Something that may sound a little surprising when first raised is investing in hardware upgrades . Not only will this increase the processing power available, more importantly it will reduce the power bill by phasing out old power hungry machines.

I would also look at some of the Web2.0 technologies and in particular wikis. While they may be less sexy than the horribly named “enterprise mash-ups”, the technology is more mature and provides an excellent way of simultaneously reducing the volume of email flowing around with yet another updated project plan attached and increasing collaboration within the organisation and where there is collaboration, there is innovation.

Any other suggestions?  Comments welcome – as always.

Ronan

I always find…

…Joe McKendrick’s posts worth reading, and his post on ‘Less coding, Less outsourcing’ is no exception. Basically the points being made are that reducing coding will reduce the most commonly outsourced piece of the puzzle, and that better alignment of technologists with business-oriented end users will increase the likelihood of development being kept in-house.

I would like to add one further perspective to this discussion, however. A counter-balance to these two points may be that once a company has implemented SOA, it becomes much easier to look at a model based around Software as a Service (SaaS). There are already examples of SaaS success, such as salesforce.com, but one of the problems in this way of outsourcing a segment of business operations support is the difficulty of ‘carving it out’ from existing implementations. In order for SaaS to work, there need to be clear boundaries between the outsourced service and the rest.

Implementing an SOA provides this clean separation of discrete business services, linked together with standard interfaces. This immediately makes it easier to go down a SaaS road – the task is certainly not trivial, even in an SOA environment, but it is certainly a lot less effort and introduces considerably less business risk.

This may seem an odd position for me to take after suggesting recently that SaaS is not likely to be a killer app for SOA. However, I am not trying to say that SaaS alone will drive SOA adoption, but rather that once SOA has been adopted, SaaS becomes a more practical option.

Steve

I noticed recently that Attunity has just…

…announced Change Data Capture (CDC) for Microsoft SQL Server. CDC is an important mechanism for making file transfer or Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) far more efficient, something that is highly desirable in a world of shrinking batch windows and demand for real-time or near real-term accuracy. When using CDC, only the changes to a file are captured for transmission. For example, a price list might be transferred to every location of a retail chain once a week, and then any changes during the week will automatically be passed on to these sites without having to incur the overhead of a complete new file transfer.

Attunity is reputedly the first vendor to deliver CDC for Microsoft SQL Server, and I think it is great news. Many companies have invested heavily in SQL Server, and yet the IT industry seems to concentrate on getting the most out of legacy databases rather than SQL Server. This functionality offers an important means to leverage SQL Server investment – after all, for many companies SQL Server should be considered as a legacy database in its own right.

Steve

IT.Director.com has an…

…interesting article discussing the IT industry’s attempts to speed up SOA adoption by identifying the killer apps that will drive business execs to make the required investments.

Taking the liberty of paraphrasing, the two killer apps candidates discussed are Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Now, I absolutely agree that BAM can be a significant business driver, presenting as it does a greatly increased visibility into business operations, often available real-time. The combination of this visibility with management tools to set and monitor exceptions and key performance indicators can be very appealing to business execs. However, I must point out that BAM isn’t actually anything to do with SOA. Sure, an SOA architecture provides an ideal basis for BAM, exposing IT activities in business services terms, but BAM can also be achieved a number of other ways, such as through Business Intelligence (BI) based solutions like those from Information Builders and Business Objects.

On the SaaS front, the key point is that operational processes must be of a level of granularity and ease of access that it is easy to take a particular process or set of processes and effectively outsource them by using a hosted service. In this case, the suitability of SOA is even stronger, largely because not only does it present clean interfaces but also they are standards-based.

However, It is unclear to me that these two angles will drive enterprise-wide take-up of SOA. They might be a way to get a foot in the door, but in the end I believe that the investment needed to drive widespread use of SOA will need to have a mixture of drivers. Reuse may be boring, but within the IT budget it matters, and the resulting faster time to market and associated agility is also important. The visibility point is strong, but since there are other ways to achieve it I think the key will be to focus on the fact that SOA enables MANY killer app opportunities by making IT investments more flexible, responsive, productive and better aligned with business needs, and that it does so in a much easier, faster and less risky way.

The summary in my mind is that although excitement will continue to grow around SOA, all-consuming, enterprise-wide deployments through 2007 will still be rare. A lot of toes will be dipped in the water, pilots will be carried out, individual projects will be implemented – but we are still some way off mass adoption.

Steve

BEA announced 19% year-on-year growth in revenues for 3Q06 – very nice!

Apparently SOA is a big driver of this growth, with AquaLogic contributing more than 20% of license revenues. I also noticed that license revenue grew 12%, while services grew 24%.

Now, I know that BEA will probably argue that SOA initiatives go deeper in project terms than some of its other product areas, and therefore there is more scope for services. But I can’t help a nagging feeling that if a software company renowned for its standards-based products is growing its services revenues twice as fast as its license fees, this reflects somehow on product complexity, ease of use and intuitiveness. Maybe I am just too suspicious.

Steve

Steve’s spotted the announcement of Interop Vendor Alliance…

…(also covered here)– which appears to be about interoperability the Microsoft way: how to get your software to work better with Microsoft’s. And to be fair most large vendors think like this anyway – just most wouldn’t have the nerve to say it so publically.

So what is this really about? If you look at the web-site right now, you will see a lot of case studies and solution descriptions about using Active Directory to manage non-Windows assets from Linux to Mac to Oracle to DB2. All of which sounds rather like a variation on the familiar Microsoft embrace, extend and extinguish strategy (as outlined in the US Department of Justice report on the browser wars). So, is the strategy to embrace interoperability in order to extend Microsoft’s dominant position on their own platform into providing higher level services that span both Microsoft and other platforms? Dominance in a higher level service then enhances the value of using the complete stack as the service will no doubt work best on the Microsoft platform.

Of course given the vaguest of mission statements and the newness of the alliance, it really is too early to make a judgement. What would I like to see? To be honest, I am not sure I see any need for this alliance – except as a website which focuses on all the various standards related activities Microsoft is already engaged in to improve interoperability.

Furthermore, its very existence reinforces the perception that Microsoft stills sees the world as binary: Microsoft and not-Microsoft. This is, of course, an attitude which fundamentally works against smooth interoperability. It is only when Microsoft accepts the reality that it is only a major player in a heterogeneous world will that attitude disappear and interoperability issues hopefully dissipate at the same time.

Ronan

A recent announcement from BEA caught my eye.

BEA has announced it has joined the Interop Vendor Alliance, as a founder member (actually, can you become a founder member of something that has already been founded?). OK – so I admit it – I don’t know what the Interop Vendor Alliance is, so I had to go and look. Oh wow! Apparently,

The Interop Vendor Alliance is a community of software and hardware vendors working together to enhance interoperability with Microsoft systems.

I am so excited. Finally, all those annoying issues of Microsoft interoperability will be fixed! I’m not exactly sure how, but I trust these industry alliances of caring vendors. So what will this alliance do? Well, according to the site, vendors will

…socialize customer feedback with an eye toward increasing technical collaboration that targets common interoperability challenges

…work with customers to identify their top interoperability challenges

…post best-practice guides created as a result of scenario-based testing” and “descriptions, white papers and case studies about their solutions…on the Alliance web site

I am sure that given the importance of this issue, the Alliance vendors will be happy to exchange customer information with each other, and I am quite certain that any naughty vendor simply using this as a marketing ploy will be summarily drummed out of the club. We can all relax – Microsoft interoperability issues are about to become a thing of the past – the Interop Vendor Alliance will save us all.

Yay.

Steve

One oft-debated SOA topic is how to show that it can deliver real business value.

Claims abound of intangible business benefits such as ‘business agility’, but it can be hard to find real examples where SOA delivers clear business value.

So I was pleased to see the recent BusinessWeek article on ‘mashups’. The idea of mashups came from a desire to have a customized web experience, where different sources of internet pages are blended or ‘mashed’ together, such as combining Google Maps and real-estate listings. However, companies are realizing that mashups can offer real business benefits too. BusinessWeek writes

Now, some leading-edge companies such as E*Trade and Siemens are experimenting with the technology to more easily customize their corporate applications and help boost employee productivity. Enterprise mashups … typically integrate internal company data and software with external services. For instance, E*Trade combined its internally developed customer relationship management system with Salesforce.com to give the sales team access to some new features.

This technique for delivering higher value services and solutions by mashing up existing ones seems to fall smack bang in the area of SOA. By using an SOA approach, business services are created that can now be mashed up pretty easily, since SOA makes them easy to invoke through a standard interface. Enterprise mashups may be one of the much sought-after ‘killer apps’ for SOA, although this may be rather overstating its appeal. However, there is no doubt that mashups offer innovative businesses a new avenue to create value – the key is that SOA makes it possible for these initiatives to be put in place quickly, easily and with little technical effort required (hopefully!).

Steve

I have just read…

…a rather startling claim ( from Simon Phipps of Sun that they have ‘shipped’ 70 million copies of OpenOffice.org with another 30 million copies coming from other sources – with the clear implication that 100m copies is in some way equivalent to a number of users approaching 100m. Taken at its simplest level, 100m users puts them at 20% of the office productivity suite business (as Microsoft claims 400 million users). Given that Microsoft got $11b in revenue from Office in 2005, does this mean that OpenOffice.org is taking away a whopping $1b+ of revenue from Microsoft- assuming that 50% of the OpenOffice users would have bought Microsoft Office otherwise.

Should Microsoft be quaking in its boots? While I have certainly heard good reports from some about Open Office, this seems to be a great example of how Open Source marketing can bend the normal rules of the software industry to the point where it is hard to figure out what the real story is. When Mr Phipps says that there are 100,000,000 copies of Open Office “out there”, he almost certainly means that 100,000,000 copies were downloaded or shipped on CDs. This is like a software company sticking an evaluation copy on the front of Dr Dobbs or BYTE and then claiming every reader as a customer. What matters of course is the number of actual sites using the product (and hence actually “investing” in it).   It would therefore be reasonable to suggest that the actual market is a very small fraction of this and I would suspect that Sun has its own estimate of the actual market which it is choosing not to disclose for its own commercial reasons.

While it may be an easy shot to take at Sun and OpenOffice, the same problem pervades so much of the Open Source landscape. 10,000 downloads doesn’t mean anything if 9,990 were by students! To be serious for a moment, when evaluating Open Source for enterprise use you need to be very aware that the same rules do not apply as apply for vendor controlled software: For instance, reference sites may not carry the same weight as they are sometimes too close to the project and hence have their own intellectual pride and even careers are closely tied up in its success. In the worst case, what you thought was a reference site is closer to a sales pitch as the independent customer is in fact the primary author and sponsor of the project!

Before anybody takes from this that I am in any way anti-Open Source, I am not.  However, any Open Source project from Open Office down does need to be evaluated using a different set of rules from traditional pay-for software.

Ronan