Category: WS-*
September 24th, 2009
Creating a unified model for enterprise mashups
A unified mashup model can increase software quality, lower IT costs, and directly drive choice and innovation. I’ve written here over the years about software mashups; simple combinations of pieces of the Web that are rearranged into new useful forms. I’ve even called the approach a key to the future of software development. While mashups in the enterprise have been reasonably successful up until now — about a third of enterprises have them today — there have been challenges in enabling the same level of wide use and benefits that are currently evident on the open Web.
Fortunately, this may be about to change. Today marks the introduction of an effort by the new Open Mashup Alliance (OMA), a federation of interested parties in the mashup space that want to bring the benefits of standardization, consistency, interoperability, and a real marketplace to the world of enterprise mashups. The initial participants include a wide range of firms such as Adobe, CapGemini, HP, Intel, JackBe, Kapow, Programmable Web, Synteractive, and Xignite. Disclaimer: My company is also a founding member organization of the OMA. Note that anyone can become an OMA member, either as a company or a user and the principles of the organization are open and egalitarian.
Related: Joe McKendrick’s Enterprise mashup proponents start organizing.
What makes OMA especially interesting from my perspective is that it’s much more than a “high concept” strategic effort that will one day put forth specifications or technology that may or may not be useful to enterprises for creating mashups. Instead OMA sponsor JackBe, one of the world’s top enterprise mashups vendors, has generously contributed their existing and proven enterprise mashups model — known as the Enterprise Mashup Markup Language — along with a fully working reference implementation of an EMML runtime, as well as 50 working mashups.
Thus EMML exists fully today as one of the more mature enterprise mashup specifications available. It is robust, mature (it has been supporting production applications for several years), and now it is open for anyone to use via a Creative Commons license. And given JackBe’s technology roots in the Java community — their CTO is the respected John Crupi of Core J2EE patterns and Sun fame — it is free of proprietary technologies and formats. EMML also brings the leverage, speed, and power of domain-specific languages to the table as well.
The result is an open enterprise mashup specification and runtime model using familiar standards and/or community technologies such as XML, XPath, XQuery, SQL, JavaScript, and JRuby. Using the EMML reference guide, anyone can now create an EMML-compliant mashup runtime. This also means any EMML-based mashup is able to run inside any EMML-compliant runtime. The resulting mashups — because they are built with an open, interoperable specification — can now be published, shared, reused, and if applicable sold in a larger, standardized market. This creates the possibilities of a real enterprise mashup ecosystem and marketplace that wouldn’t happen of its own accord. The potential is not inconsiderable given that so far the enterprise mashups industry, lacking a consistent model (outside the browser itself, see below for further details) has been fragmented into a story of multiple competing vendors and technologies. This included IBM (Mashup Center), Serena (Mashup Composer), JackBe (Presto), and many others.
I’ve personally examined EMML and can attest that it’s a clean powerful design that includes potent capabilities such as declarative data transformation, advanced procedural logic, parallelism, meta-data and much more. That’s not to say more can’t or won’t be done to extend and evolve EMML but it’s a credible start to create a consistent model and runtime artifacts for the design and operation of enterprise mashups across all the vendors that support it. At its core, however, EMML and its runtime is essentially an enterprise-class version of Yahoo Pipes.
While it’s also true that today’s announcement will certainly not hurt JackBe as the top provider of EMML tools today, I also know — based on my conversations with them lately and over the years — that 1) they are a startup company that is volunteering the output of their hard work and is unlikely to vault to market domination on this basis alone and 2) that they believe this effort is one of the best practical ways to help enterprise mashups gain critical mass and that 3) the benefit to them is by improving the conditions of the enterprise mashups industry as a whole. At least that’s my perspective.
Ultimately, the OMA creates a standardized approach to enterprise mashups that creates an open and vibrant market for competing runtimes, mashups, and an array of important aftermarket services such as development/testing tools, management and administration appliances, governance frameworks, education, professional services, and so on. Creating an ecosystem like this is only possible when the mashup industry is focused on heading in the same general direction instead of competing over individual technologies (notably, this is one of the reasons the Web works so well).
Enough of the mashup development and runtime process is left open with EMML that there is also plenty of room for differentiation. While EMML will indeed level the playing field, vendors also have plenty of room around the edges to offer additional capabilities for EMML-based environments including visual designer tools/IDEs, modeling systems, administration consoles, portfolio management systems, and so on.
In the larger view, there has always been the tantalizing possibility for
August 5th, 2009
The future of enterprise data in a radically open and Web-based world
Like many aspects of applying Web 2.0 to the enterprise, the challenge is both in adapting the business and its thinking while successfully leveraging the latest delivery methods.In recent months, another significant front in the growing trend of open data has emerged, and with it a growing focus on what businesses can do with that most precious asset they’ve developed at enormous expense over the years: their data.
The advent of a new administration in the United States, which has been pushing to open U.S. government databases en masse, and a proliferation of open data initiatives in other countries — perhaps most notably in the U.K. — has put the often behind-the-times government world into the forefront of open data with such sites as data.gov, which the nation’s CIO Vivek Kundra has promised will have tens of thousands of feeds this year alone.
Open data holds up the promise of instant connectivity between arbitrary numbers of ad hoc partners while at the same time reducing integration costs, improving transparency, harnessing external innovation, and even (perhaps especially) creating entirely new and significant business models. I sometimes refer to these as “open supply chains“, and the term is highly descriptive when it comes to the potential for open data models to make cloud computing safe and interoperable, help journalists to do their jobs better, or create multi-million dollar new lines of business, such as Amazon’s well-known Web Services division.
All of this activity underscores the relatively lackluster track record of traditional businesses in understanding and managing the opportunities, risks, and rewards of open data. Despite some significant success stories there is an apparent — and perhaps widening — digital divide between the classical world of business and the online world.
Even the considerable investments that most large organizations have made in IT system interoperability and integration, particularly with such popular approaches such as service-oriented architecture, have produced famously lackluster results. My good friend David Linthicum, a leading SOA expert, has gone as far as saying that the lack of focus on data is a major part of the problem.
Taking a product focus instead of a project focus
For those that have embarked down the open data road to see where it leads, one thing seems to be clear: Exposing data — whether it is internally within an organization or outside to partners, or even the whole world — is a way of thinking about the very nature of the business, more than it is about achieving a one-off end goal. This is because open data seems to create immediate, close, and powerful relationships between the publisher and the consumer of the data, and leads to a series of unexpected outcomes. These relationships can be created with extreme ease with today’s methods over networks like the Web and though often speculative, a good subset of them form rapidly into important ones that can draw in new customers, identify new innovations, head off competitors, or just generate revenue. Witness Twitter and its hundreds of partners accessing the platform (and its enormous audience) through its API or Netflix and its impressively successful prize contest that opened up data selectively to dozens of high-value self-selected contributors as a leading example.
Read about emerging open business methods for more open data success stories.
In other words, in order to be competitive with the next generation of businesses, most organizations are going to have to look at open data for reasons involving efficiency, competitiveness, and long term health, particularly as open data enters their particular industry.
Enterprise open data options: Leveraging today’s Web best practices
But it’s still not clear to businesses the options they have and how they need to think about opening up strategic sets of data for reuse internally, with their partners, and indeed, with the rest of the world. Far from being a story about IT plumbing, open data is a way of doing business, forging strong relationships over the network with other organizations, customers, and potential customers. However, the success of the Web itself as a dominant global platform has made it the de facto channel for providing open data, even the networks internally to most businesses heavily use Web technology for their applications, intranet, and interaction with the rest of the world. This means opening data generally means opening it up over the Internet using Web technology and approaches.
So critically, being successful with enterprise open data requires
June 13th, 2009
Running your SOA like a Web startup
One of the more striking differences between IT and the online world these days is the contrast between traditional enterprise service-oriented architecture and its equivalent on the Web, open APIs. More and more lessons are coming from the online space, providing key insights into how we might invigorate the way we open up our IT systems for maximum value.
SOA does not have the same business urgency and lacks critical focus in this regard in most organizations. So while some new data shows that 75% of all large enterprises will be using SOA by the end of this year (and 60% will even be expanding it), the most obvious successes with service-oriented approaches aren’t classical organizations at all. They are Web companies that offer APIs out of a basic need: To build a network of partnerships quickly and cheaply as well as tap into external innovation and inexpensive 3rd party investment.
A quick examination of Google News shows several useful new public-facing Web services (aka open APIs) that were announced this week, including one for Microsoft’s Bing as well as from smaller companies like School Loop, which just launched an API that “lets gradebook and assessment systems pull data–such as rosters and assignments–from School Loop and write scores into the School Loop gradebook for display to parents, teachers, students, and other stakeholders.” Both of these APIs let anyone, anywhere build applications that interact with and incorporate their respective capabilities.
These are just two typical examples of more than 40 new APIs that were released to the world over the last 30 days alone, according to Programmable Web’s API dashboard, currently the most reliable source for such information. This pace of release is fairly steady: A “global SOA” is growing up around us on the Web.
Joe McKendrick recently asked here on ZDNet if we needed an iTunes model for Web services. The reality is, it already exists — albeit in Web-friendly, simple form — and not in the failed visions of UDDI directories of yore, but in the pragmatic release of hundreds and hundreds of new APIs every year.
SOA and Open APIs: Close Cousins
Now, it’s also true that SOA initiatives in large companies generally don’t publicly announce their internal developments, so it’s much harder to get a sense of what is being created and used in most organizations. However it’s fairly clear that there are some significant differences and outcomes between these two approaches for open services, even as they ostensibly have the same goals on the face of it: To encourage interoperability between different business systems and enable opportunities that would otherwise be too difficult, expensive, or time-consuming to capture.
What’s especially intriguing about these two sides of the same coin are the innate assumptions that they make: SOA is usually an overhead effort (thought it can also be done on the ground) between IT and the business which ultimately allows businesses to achieve improved results and even serendipitous outcomes when it comes to the integration and leverage of existing investments in systems and data. The ROI is very often hard to measure and rapid improvements to the business are usually not the norm. SOAs also tend to be more inward facing and designed for internal consumption.
Contrast this with open APIs, in which the API is considered of primary strategic advantage to the business. The view is the investment in the development of an API is warranted because of immediate benefits that can be gained: increased reach to new customers on the network, tapping into external innovation, increased 3rd party investment, and a scalable model for 3rd party relationships. Interestingly, the bigger the organization, the more value an API has to offers to existing and potential partners, primarily because of the data tends to be richer and more valuable and/or the functionality it exposes is world-class through the success of the enclosing business. This is a vision where a service-oriented business channel (open APIs, not Web pages) often becomes the dominant channel for interaction with their customers as it arguably has for market leaders such as Amazon, Twitter, and others. Unlike most SOA efforts, APIs also tend to be designed for consumption by the broader world, though they are certainly used internally as well.
In would be a gross oversimplification to say that SOA is a technical approach to solving a outstanding set of business problems and open APIs are a business solution that uses a technical approach, but increasingly that seems to be the case. A couple of years ago I asked if it was the timing was right for businesses to open up to the cloud particularly since a near majority of CIOs were clamoring for it. For more enterprises, that just hasn’t happened, leaving strategic gaps in execution that has helped lead to the recent discussions about the possibility of the quiet death of SOA.
These points highlight a key difference between
May 17th, 2007
The story of Web 2.0 and SOA continues - Part 1
It’s nearly the middle of 2007 already and I’ve had occasion to sit down and look at where Web 2.0 and SOA software models have evolved lately. Partly it’s because we’re now seeing some of the bigger software companies seriously embrace lightweight SOA recently, and it’s also because we’re continuing to see more clearly that Web 2.0 and SOA really are largely (but not 100%) the same concepts that merely lay on different — if fairly different — parts of the software continuum. Here’s the latest on this story.
For those not up-to-date on this trend, the fact that these two big conceptual foundations in the software business overlap extensively — and somewhat unexpectedly — appears to be a pretty important subject for a number of reasons. One is that SOA is the dominant design paradigm in business software today, with most software development projects using some subset of it as their primary organizing principle. The core principle of SOA is the decomposition of software into sets of services which can be used and composed into new applications that have a very high level of integration and reuse.
The second reason this convergence is important is that potent ideas in Web 2.0 have been mapped back from what seems to be working best on the often unruly, much less-organized, but considerably larger Web. Web 2.0 is more of a pragmatic extraction of what actually works best in online product design than a rigorous a priori engineering exercise. That both have arrived at largely the same endpoints on their own, but with very different priorities and focus in some areas, should not be understated.
SOA and Web 2.0 have also crossed over considerably around Rich Internet Applications and Ajax. Read ZDNet’s Joe McKendrick recent post for the latest on this story.
I’ve written in the past about the considerable overlap and convergence of these two popular software models. From my contrived or converging article exploring the early possibilities to my first Venn diagram showing the similarities and differences, it’s been clear that Web 2.0 and SOA are closely related. Understanding the exact demarcations and differences between the two, however, is driven by a couple of realizations. One is that from a product design perspective, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each method prescribed for creating your software can dramatically effect what an online product can do in the market or for your business internally. Go with traditional SOA and you’ll be able to leverage the advantages that its design center confers. Go with Web 2.0 ideas, and you’ll be able to take on a different set of challenges and be successful in a very different environment and for different reasons. But make no mistake, it’s fairly clear that choosing one of the other can really matter to a project’s or product’s ultimate success.
Both conceptions do make one very important assumption, that all software is part of a larger ecosystem bigger than itself. This idea has been with us for a while, ever since distributed computing. But the focus of software ecosystems has continued to move around over the years, from computing, to services, to data itself. What’s the real core? What’s the most important aspect of our applications? The O’Reilly concept of Web 2.0 tells us that data is one of the most important parts of our software applications these days, and this is backed up by citing one world leading product after another that took this idea seriously. SOA tells us that services are the center of composition. That services in a SOA also transport data is also important, but the focus in traditional SOA tends to be much more on the seams of our IT systems than what makes them the most valuable overall. These may be seemingly academic distinctions but the ongoing struggle of SOA implementation in many organizations and the runaway success of many a Web 2.0 application hints that this may indeed be some very important hair splitting.
To show how SOA and Web 2.0 line up when compared to each other, I’ve included in the diagram above my most recent update depicting the overlap and convergence of the ideas in Web 2.0 and SOA. It paints a clear picture of what the two have in common and how they are different as well. Note: No depiction like this could be complete and this is very much a work in progress. For this version, I’ve recently added security and monetization as two core aspects that SOA and Web 2.0 share, but with varying degrees of importance (SOA cares more about security, Web 2.0 cares more about monetization of products and services.)
Another important item: The bottom of the overlapping circle contains a cryptic Read the rest of this entry »
April 27th, 2007
A tale of two Web 2.0 conferences and mashups
I've just come off a whirlwind conference tour that started in San Francisco last week with Web 2.0 Expo and ended with the Web 2.0 Kongress yesterday in Frankfurt. I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at both conferences and it was fascinating to see the differences in focus between the two events, as well as some of the apparent trends they had in common.
Given the estimates of the size of the crowd at Web 2.0 Expo, anywhere from 10,000 to 16,000 people depending on who you talk to, there's little doubt it was one of the leading events this year around the next generation of the Web. In contrast, the Web 2.0 Kongress was a smaller and much more business focused affair with a lot of focus on integration and SOA. Yet it was abundantly clear at both, based on my conversations with numerous attendees, that we're now well clear of the early hype of Web 2.0 and much more on how to exploit the opportunities that it maps out for us.
Another key trend I saw was the attendance of mainstream business people who were very much in evidence at both events, something that I've noticed has been increasing at Web 2.0 events lately in general. I met attendees from major corporations, federal and state government, and many others from medium to small size businesses. And a good percentage of them were business people and not from the technical side of things. This doesn't come so much as a surprise if we take into account indicators such as the McKinsey global survey on Web 2.0 which I covered in my last post.
The boundaries of the Web are blurring
The other hot trend, besides of course of just about anything social to do with the Web, that was explored at both events was
November 7th, 2006
Web 2.0 Summit: IBM evolves vision of SOA and Web 2.0
One of the most consistent trends on the Internet is the rise of open APIs and the applications built on top of them, known as mashups. Programmable Web currently lists over 300 APIs that can be used for everything from building Web sites on top of Google Maps to using Amazon's powerful infrastructure APIs for storage and cluster computing. The underlying trend: The desire to easily remix the vast pool of high value data and services on the Web today into useful new solutions, at home and perhaps even in the enterprise.
In a late morning session today at the Web 2.0 Summit, IBM's Rod Smith painted a compelling picture of this mashup trend combined with the emerging edge of enterprise IT. The result? A surprisingly close relationship between the somewhat stodgy world of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the bustling world of consumer Web 2.0.
The convergence of SOA and Web 2.0, two highly interrelated trends that are very focused on 1) connecting people and systems together easily, 2) making software and data available for reuse via services, and 3) building new value upon the foundation of existing information resources and IT assets. This convergence is something I've been following quite closely for a while, particularly in some key exploratory blogs and articles late last year.
SOA/Web 2.0 convergence is important topic since many of the biggest challenges in enterprise IT are actually being solved today out on the Web, particular around the best way to engage users, deliver highly usable software, integrate systems, and achieve high levels of reuse and adoption. So it was fascinating to hear the experiences of Rod and his team over the last year, where they've visited over a 100 customers sites and taken the temperature of CIOs in terms of how Web 2.0 can help them with their business problems.
The story is a fascinating one and in this first part of two, we'll take a look at what Rod and his team at IBM is uncovering in the business trenches in terms of
October 16th, 2006
Situational Software Platforms Begin to Emerge
Over the lifetime of this blog I've often written about using the latest Web-based software and tools to accomplish things on a completely different timescale than has been possible previously. Things like Ruby on Rails, mashups, syndication, and other lightweight software and service models seem to be changing the rules of the game out on the Web. What used to cost thousands to develop, now only costs hundreds, what took 5-10 people now only takes one or two. Many of these trends appear to be successfully optmizing for one all important variable in an increasingly time-challenged world; ease of development and consumption.
Unfortunately, most of these trends have been happening out on the Web and not in our enterprises. Until just recently that is. More and more, we are beginning to see tools that directly support these same dramatic improvements in productivity and convenience and which are aimed directly at the enterprise.
As part of an increasing product focus of this blog, something made possible by the actual emergence of capable Web 2.0 products for the enterprise, we'll be taking take a look as often as possible at the latest crop of innovative — or just plain interesting — new Web 2.0 tools for the enterprise. The common theme: Applying what seems to be most successful on the Web today inside the enterprise, a transplantation that is only possible by carefully and judiciously adding a critical element: enterprise context in the form of security, governance, standards-compliance, etc.
Our latest in-depth look will be Enterprise Web 2.0 up-and-comer, JackBe. At last week's AjaxWorld Conference and Expo, I had a chance to listen to JackBe's Dan Malks and Deepak Alur, two renowned ex-Sun engineers, announce one of the more intriguing new products in this space, JackBe's Presto. Presto is an ambitous and capable foray into the world of Ajax-powered enterprise mashups and lightweight, pragmatic SOA, with a nice user-powered Web 2.0 focus. The goal: To provide an enterprise environment so easy, that it can allow just about anyone — specifically including end-users — to create software they need for a given situation, which has given rise to the term situational software.
In enterprise software world envisioned by JackBe, end-users and developers alike can have equal access to the vast landscape of powerful services that are increasingly springing up behind the firewall in most organizations in the form of service-oriented architecture. The aim is to provide powerful, very easy-to-use tools that allow new applications to be assembled from the rich inventory of functionality and data that previously required dedicated software projects, along with the obligatory project managers, developers, and testers, and end-user representatives in order to access and reuse.
JackBe calls Presto a REA platform, which standards for Rich Enterprise Applications, a nod to the fact that Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) by themselves work terrifically on the Web, but are missing key elements needed to work well in the enterprise. This includes the ability to access enterprise-class services in the form of SOAP, WS-*, legacy systems, back-end databases, or provide a consist set of policies, management, and administration.
How Presto Adds Enterprise Context to Mashups
Presto provides a trio of key components that neatly separates the problem of how to build compelling Ajax applications that automatically have the expected enterprise capabilities, all without developers — many of which will be end-users — having to know how to "color inside the lines."
Given that most Ajax applications inside the enterprise will be de facto "mashups" because of their use of more than one Web services, Presto provides a clean, consistent way for browser-based Ajax applications to use a variety of enterprise services, many of which may or may not have varying levels of compliance with local SOA standards. Called the Ajax Service Bus, this component provides a simple layer that provides service "dial-tone" for Presto-based applications that is compliant with enterprise governance policies.
The actual mechanism that provides governance is the the 2nd key piece of the Presto framework, the Enterprise Service Director which "mediates and governs all communication between application and SOA services. Enforces strict authentication and authorization SOA consumption policies." Governance is one of the top issues in SOA these days and Presto provides advanced, and more important, largely automatic governance of services provided to developers and end-users.
The last critical element of Presto's enterprise context is its Enterprise Mashup Server, a component that reveals a key reality of mashups; that many mashups are better of performing much of the actual data and service 'swizzling' behind the scenes, outside the browser and on the server. Providing a consistent way of building recombinant new enterprise services out of pre-existing services is another way that JackBe appears to have pushed the state-of-the-art further, primarily by moving the key ease-of-use factor into the realm of service composition as well. Offering mashup creators leverage the full mashup typology and decide for themselves where to put mashup functionality — either in the browser or on the server — provides essential flexibility and increases the potential for service reuse.
Software Development by Developers or End-Users
The browser is the place that users are increasingly becoming comfortable composing their own Web pages made of badges, widgets, feeds, and so on and Presto provides an entirely browser-based end-user IDE as well as professional Eclipse-based IDE for traditional devlopers to use for projects that warrant a more disciplined approach. Both products allow SOA administrators to use the Enterprise Service Director to make sure developers, end-user or professional, comply with policies and governance guidelines.
While it's hard to be critical of service I haven't used extensively yet, JackBe is one of the best examples today of providing rich, Web 2.0-era platform for the enterprise. We'll continue taking some examinations of the product as more of it becomes available to use so stay tuned for more soon.
For more enterprise mashup tools, read my recent round-up of eight great mashup tools
Note: I made sure my diagram of Presto above included the fact that leveraging Web services out on the Web's service ecosystem will become increasingly important in the enterprise. This fact will only make governance absolutely critical as data flows in and out of the enterprise to remote suppliers. Being able to incorporate external services like this securely in a highly agile fashion will increasingly become a competitive advantage. And like many software advances, not having to build all the plumbing and infrastructure by hand before solving the business problem will increase your project's success, reduce risk, and cut costs.
Next up for tomorrow: A major new release of one of the best entirely Web-based mashup tools currently available…
May 23rd, 2006
Does Java EE 5 getting REST mean WOA will break out?
The REST vs. SOAP debate can seem like an esoteric discussion about Web services, but it’s not. REST puts the Web back into Web services by taking what’s been so successful with the fundamental protocol of the Web, namely HTTP, and making it into a seemingly ideal Web services architecture. This model has been called Web-Oriented Architecture in certain quarters, and the label does seem to fit. REST, and its little brother, XML over HTTP, have increasingly gathered mindshare lately by sheer Darwinian competition.
SOAP is an a priori concoction created early in the life of the Web, while REST is a natural extension of that most successful Web services protocol of all time, HTTP. And now, like so many things lately, best practices from the Web, such as REST, are flowing back into our enterprise architectures and related products. And for good reason.
For example, the new Java EE 5 (good coverage of this release by ZDNet’s Joe McKendrick here) now significantly includes built-in support for REST. Unfortunately, J2EE expert Richard Monson-Haefel has a raft of concerns about JAX-WS 2.0 (the actual name of the new Web services support in Java EE 5), specifically about the dizzying complexity required to implement it. This is genuinely unfortunate because REST has some extremely powerful capabilities to bring to the table and Java is one of the most heavily used enterprise platforms in history. REST’s ease-of-consumption, interoperability, and performance – all due to its simplicity and true harmony with HTTP – are its most important attributes, but this can potentially be undone by excessive cruft.
Read this distilled overview by Doug Kohlert to see what it looks like to develop a simple number adding REST service with JAX-WS 2.0 in Java EE 5.
We get into Web 2.0 territory with the REST/WOA discussion when we talk about turning applications into platforms. Specifically, this means
May 13th, 2006
Using SaaS and Web 2.0 for business automation
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking at solutions for automated business processes that are based on the online, low-barrier, and highly collaborative worlds of SaaS and Web 2.0. Primarily, this is part of my exploration of using Web 2.0 in the enterprise, sometimes called Enterprise 2.0, but which we call Enterprise Web 2.0 here.
Read the overview of our exploration of Web 2.0 strategies in the Enterprise, or read the strategies explored so far, which have covered enterprise approaches for blogs and wikis.
This area is of importance because good, effective Business Process Management has been one of the holy grails of enterprise software for years now. Traditional software development has repeatedly yielded BPM results that are too heavyweight, brittle, hard-to-change, and not responsive to the business. And like with so many aspects of Web 2.0, looking at the successful models in the highly Darwinian Petri dish of the Web gives us many suggestions on how to do it better: Dynamic languages that make mashing together functionality both inexpensive and easy, low-impedence and highly scalable integration models such as JSON and REST instead of SOAP or WS-*, peer production techniques that harness the users as the users operate the system, self-service IT and the list goes on.
Harnessing Web 2.0 techniques for business process integration, automation, and management, particularly around highly-repetitive, transactionalprocesses will allow more time for tacit interactions, the high value knowledge work that many workers can’t spend time doing because of the overhead of tedious, low-value transactional work. Tacit interactions are perceived as one of the biggest remaining avenuesfor achieving higher worker productivity.
And if any of this is true, we should be seeing
April 26th, 2006
When the worlds of SOA and Web 2.0 collide
Noted business and IT forward-thinker John Hagel wrote a detailed piece yesterday about what he calls the "highly dysfunctional gap" between SOA and Web 2.0. And it’s true, there are few worlds in the IT industry that seem more opposite from each other, yet are more strangely intertwined, than SOA and Web 2.0.
Yet these two cultures are generally failing to cross-pollinate like they should, despite potentially extraordinary opportunities.As most of you know, SOA or Service-Oriented Architecture, is a corporate means of normalizing the aspects of IT systems to make them more shareable, rewirable, dynamic, and integrated. Web 2.0 is a similar, but more populist and social concept, that also involves in its own way the turning of applications into platforms that can be reused, shared, and aggregated. For its own part, SOA has stodgy-sounding composite applications, while Web 2.0 has a virtually identical concept with the much hipper moniker: mashups, a reference to the musical phenomenon it so much resembles.
Hagel notes that these two worlds seem quite far apart, despite being practically related in their technology genes, though certainly far from being identical twins. For one, SOA is technically more complex and has higher-order concepts, like orchestration, while Web 2.0 has social, presentation, ad hoc organization,and participatory aspects that SOA generally doesn’t address at all. As a result, as Hagel kindly observes, I’ve noted in the past that SOA and Web 2.0 practically complete each other. Yet these two cultures are generally failing to cross-pollinate like they should, despite potentially "extraordinary opportunities." Why and how to fix it? Hagel has some thoughts about this:
What is required to break this SOA logjam? Two things. 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. Second, they should avoid the temptation to present grand visions of new architectures and concentrate instead on starting points where these technologies can deliver near-term business impact. (This should not be too hard since by nature Web 2.0 technologists are bootstrappers and hackers.)
Of course, the invariably insightful opinion-maven Nicholas Carr noted Hagel’s post too, and had a thing or two to say as well, taking a position that I’m increasingly coming around to as well, namely that SaaS might be the way this all happens in the enterprise, more than through the social tools. Though that’s not entirely clear yet either. Anyway, Carr says in response to Hagel:
That makes sense - but only if you assume that Web 2.0 collaboration tools, like wikis and tagging, will actually pay off within businesses in a broad and substantial way. There are, as I wrote previously, reasons for caution here. If Web 2.0 technologies fail to fulfill the promises being made for them, they could end up slowing rather than accelerating the transition to the next generation of business software. My own sense is that it may be software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, more than the Web 2.0 crowd, that will end up breaking the logjam, not only through their discrete application services but through integration platforms like Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.
ZDNet’s very own Joe McKendrick was recently spotted wondering if SOA has jumped the proverbial shark. And I just read about venture investor Peter Rip wondering something very similar about Web 2.0. The reality is that both notions represent singular and hugely valuable concepts that have a large significance to those that build and use them. While the terms might be tired, evolving, being reinvented or whatever, the fact is that the innovation on the Web is pouring over the firewall of the enterprise and remaking it. Slowly in some cases, but much faster in others. Web 2.0 seems to be overtaking SOA in subtle, yet telling ways.
The funny thing is, it’s the intangibles like trust and not technology that matter the most in both worlds, and that often is the biggest holdup for moving things forward. And I’m talking lack of trust as barrier. As in not trusting the data in a socially constructed database, not trusting that your Web service supplier will be there when you need them and will stay in business, or even not trusting SaaS given that it’s no more reliable than the network cable snaking into your office. These are some of the bigger issues that Web 2.0 software could actually exacerbate before it helps, and likely converges with, the world of SOA.
But if the intangible concerns with highly federated data and software get surmounted, expect to see the proliferation of just-in-time enterprise mashups, and the tools to create them, for solving situational business problems and supporting dynamic business processes. This is one of the biggest potential benefits of the merging of Web 2.0 and SOA. But only if software architects and designers find the right ways of adding critical enterprise context and social utility to the resulting mix. As he notes, this will unleash the enormous opportunity that Hagel observes.
Is quickly delivering incremental near-term solutions from the bottom up the answer? Yes, I think Hagel probably has it right there. What do you think?
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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