September 24th, 2009

Creating a unified model for enterprise mashups

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 2:43 pm

Categories: Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Open APIs, REST, Right To Remix, SOA, SOAP, SaaS, Situational Software, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, WS-*, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services

Tags: Enterprise Mashup, Runtime, Mashup, JackBe, EMML, Collaboration, Dion Hinchcliffe

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

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August 5th, 2009

The future of enterprise data in a radically open and Web-based world

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:16 pm

Categories: Business Models, Cost-effective scalability, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Governance, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Open APIs, REST, Radical Decentralization, Right To Remix, SOA, SOAP, SaaS, Two-Way Web, WS-*, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA)

Tags: Web, API, Business, Information Discovery, WOA, Channel Management, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Marketing, Web Services, Enterprise Software

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

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July 24th, 2009

First impressions of Google Wave

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 10:04 am

Categories: ATOM, Active Directory, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Google Accounts, Identity, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Products, RSS, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Software, Social media, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Wikis

Tags: Google Inc., Collaboration, Groupware, Recruitment & Selection, Enterprise Software, Software, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Dion Hinchcliffe

After spending a few hours using an early version of Google Wave today, it’s clear that in its initial incarnation it won’t be ejecting existing enterprise collaboration tools from the workplace any time soon. It’s not that it isn’t impressive, far from it, however Wave’s complex interface and open-ended feature set provides an unexpectedly steep learning curve, particularly from a company that is famous for simple, powerful user experiences.

That said, Google Wave holds considerable potential for bringing next-generation Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to organizations looking for best-of-breed solutions.

For those that didn’t see the unveiling two months ago, the vision of Google Wave is one of online communication completely reinvented for the possibilities — as well as the expectations — of the Facebook/Twitter era.

After all, e-mail itself is decades old and even highly successful Web 2.0 communication tools like blogs and wikis have gotten somewhat long in the tooth, at least in their most common forms. With browsers capable of doing more than ever and tight integration with existing information assets becoming more and more critical to users, Google Wave attempts to up the ante by combining many of the features and capabilities we come to expect in modern Web applications.

These advancements include truly social conversation, simultaneous multi-user editing, connection to external Web/intranet apps through extensions and embedding, and much more. In fact, as we’ll see, Google Wave has virtually all of the key ingredients to comply with my FLATNESSES mnemonic for identifying effective, Enterprise 2.0-capable applications.

The end result is something that comes across as a distinctly sophisticated Web application clearly made up of many elements that sometimes behave somewhat unpredictably precisely because it’s designed to be highly extensible and freeform. Admittedly, my experience was with the developer sandbox for extensions, but this is exactly the intent of Google Wave: to be the center of integrated communication and collaboration in a dynamic and immersive yet safe experience.

Here are some of the observations I made during my use of Google Wave. Note that this is an early version of the software that will undoubtedly be richer and more complete upon release, though experience shows that Google rarely makes major changes to products once they are shown to early audiences.

Observations on Google Wave

1. The basic interface looks a lot like Gmail. This is generally good since Gmail is widely used and understood by millions of people. The biggest obvious difference is that the inbox/content area that takes up most of the page in Gmail is now split in half, with a list of waves on the left and an active wave on the right. The rest of the page is taken up with a Contacts pane, just like in Gmail, and some standard boilerplate links on the upper right. In fact, it’s so consistent with the Google experience (including Google Accounts) that it seems quite likely — to this author anyway — that Google Wave capabilities will be added to Gmail at some point. Upshot: Other companies can and will make their own front end editors/viewers for waves and this user experience has few surprises. It is very much what you’d expect from Google with a user interface/navigation consistent with their other applications.

   
   Screenshot of Google Wave: Strong similarity to Gmail

2. Google Wave works better with groups of contacts.While this seems obvious, the issue is that online conversations tend to work better when they can involve a wider range of people than just those that you think of immediately. The tedium of starting a wave is that you have to add all the participants than you’d like to have in it. Auto-joining groups are supported at this time in a fairly interesting fashion (if slightly unexpected, see below in robot participants), but will be critical to create easily and quickly en masse in order to make Google Wave useful and time efficient. One potential issue: Supporting cross boundary waves and simultaneously supporting Google Accounts, Active Directory, and other user account databases. This will be a complex issue for enterprises that want to

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June 13th, 2009

Running your SOA like a Web startup

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 1:50 pm

Categories: Business Models, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Governance, Identity, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, Open APIs, Products, Right To Remix, SOA, WS-*, Web 2.0, Web as Platform, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA)

Tags: Web, API, SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Channel Management, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Marketing

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

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April 18th, 2009

Google's cloud gets ready for the enterprise

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:03 pm

Categories: Cloud computing, Cost-effective scalability, Design Patterns, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Open APIs, Products, Radical Decentralization, SOA, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services

Tags: Google Inc., Java, Enterprise, Secure Data Connector, Cloud Computing, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Dion Hinchcliffe

Last week’s announcement of Java support for Google App Engine (GAE), along with a host of new features aim specifically at businesses, served to reconfirm the Internet giant’s interest in providing enterprises with its evolving cloud computing capabilities. So what’s new and what’s missing in GAE for enterprises that are looking to try out the cloud?

These additions move Google much closer to the enterprise space than it was previously, though there is still work to do.For its part, the enterprise software market has so far remained fairly resistant to Google’s offerings, which range from search to SaaS products, at least compared to the uptake in software from established enterprise leaders such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP.

But today’s increasingly broad interest in cloud computing may provide Google with an ideal opening. That is, if they can successfully deliver their unique strengths in the technical and economic underpinnings of networked computing in a form businesses find compelling for cutting costs, becoming more agile, and transitioning successfully to the next generation of computing.

The good news for Google: Of the big four enterprise firms mentioned above, only Microsoft currently has a credible cloud computing offering heading to the market with Azure, though IBM and Oracle are certain to follow shortly. Thus there is a clear opening for Google if it can offer businesses what they really need in the cloud before the leading enterprise software firms manage to arrive. It won’t be easy; the network is Google’s turf and it is clear that the platform wars have indeed returned, as I discussed a few weeks ago.

The original GAE was primarily a consumer Web application-focused cloud computing offering at the outset and was concerned about performance and high scalability much more than it cared about a robust feature set. It took cloud computing minimalism to a new level, though again, that was also about making it run quickly. GAE also required that you adopt its choices in programming language (Python), database (proprietary datastore), and request/response application model. And while it’s not giving these up, the latest additions promise to bring many of the capabilities and technologies that enterprises will require and open up Google’s nascent cloud computing platform for a much broader range of uses. As we’ll see, these additions move Google much closer to the enterprise space than it was previously, though there is still clearly work to do.

Let’s take a look at exactly what the new GAE offers from an enterprise perspective and then look at what

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March 3rd, 2009

Cloud computing: A new era of IT opportunity and challenges

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 10:30 am

Categories: Business Models, Business Process Management, Cloud computing, Cost-effective scalability, Design Patterns, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Governance, Lightweight Service Models, Orchestration, Products, Radical Decentralization, SOA, SaaS, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services

Tags: Information Technology, Cloud Computing, Dion Hinchcliffe

It doesn’t take long to get a good feel for the potential of cloud computing and how it can offer ready access to entirely new business capabilities, less expensive IT resources, and unrivaled flexibility for businesses of every size. Since becoming a hot topic early last year as major vendors, including top firms such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, jumped on the bandwagon with a wide-range of offerings, cloud computing has consistently stayed on the industry’s radar. One of the bigger challenges IT departments will face this year is whether they can take the plunge with cloud computing quickly enough to benefit their organizations as a whole.

With leading companies still joining the movement — including IBM, HP, and Salesforce — cloud computing has moved from a cottage industry to one of the bigger growth areas in the computing business, just as the industry as a whole begins to take serious lumps from the recession.

The onus is now on businesses to take advantage of cloud computing to cut costs and become more agile. In the process, they will have some hard choices to make — and some intriguing ones as well — if they want to access the many advantages that cloud computing platforms can provide.

There are also some non-trivial challenges involved in adopting cloud computing that must be watched closely as well. These includes a long list of issues such as the security and privacy of business data in remote 3rd party data centers, the dreaded concerns about platform lock-in, worries about reliability/performance, and even fears about making the wrong decision before the industry begins to mature.

However, in a business environment where change is almost mandatory in order to survive, cloud computing appears to offer significant economic benefits if the risks can be offset. Hence, one of the bigger challenges IT departments will face this year is whether they can take the plunge with cloud computing quickly enough to benefit their organizations as a whole.

ZDNet’s own Phil Wainewright has covered some of the more interesting issues swirling around cloud computing of late including the default lock-out that occurs in the event of the demise of a cloud computing provider as well as the brewing SLA battles between the major providers. This underscores how the cloud computing space is where the new platform wars are forming and it’s sizing up to be as big or bigger than earlier ones. The good news for now: In a wide-open new industry, there is no clear leader today and choice prevails.

This brings up the side discussion of what actually constitutes cloud computing, since everyone seems to be applying the label to anything that runs on the network. Is it Web hosting of your application code? Is it a software platform as an on-demand service? Do SaaS applications count as cloud computing? The answers to all these questions are a qualified yes; the answer hovers roughly around the outsourcing of computing of any kind (CPU, storage, apps, etc.) using a shared cost, commodity utility model. In general, you know if you’re involved with cloud computing of some kind if you’re receiving a bill for computing services being done for you somewhere else but which you can access directly.

I used the term commodity utility model since cloud computing providers aren’t monopolies today (unlike a lot of the other utility services we use in business) and currently compete actively with each other on features and pricing. This means that CPU cycles, bandwidth, and application logins in the cloud will be extremely cheap and extensively commoditized for the foreseeable future. This constant competition creates continuous pressure to drive down the costs and increase the capabilities of cloud computing platforms in a way that just doesn’t happen naturally within IT organizations today. In other words, just like most businesses don’t generate their own power or create their own financial institutions to keep their money in, increasingly they won’t keep their computing in largely parochial, private capabilities that can’t leverage the economies of scale, innovation, and efficiencies of dedicated providers.

Enterprise cloud computing: Some assembly required

As a new industry, there is a lot of choice in cloud computing today and will continue to be more until the inevitable shake-out occurs and the winners begin to emerge. That also means there is no dominant model for how cloud computing should be delivered and this is resulting in some interesting fragmentation in the market already. Some cloud computing offerings are so generic (Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, aka EC2) that they are nothing more than sophisticated on-demand hosting services while others offer nearly everything you need to create software, as long as you use their programming model, frameworks, tools, and management systems (Google App Engine). Which model a business chooses will have deep ramifications for how they can take advantage of cloud computing and because of this, most organizations will likely have multiple providers.

Is it time to declare the death of the enterprise data center? No, not quite yet, but it’s coming.

Let’s also make no mistake, most IT executives currently think very few cloud computing solutions are properly enterprise ready today. Though a number of them have come a good bit of the way towards

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January 29th, 2009

Using Web 2.0 to reinvent your business for the economic downturn

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 5:27 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Blogs, Business Models, Business Process Management, Cloud computing, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Governance, Hype, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Wikis

Tags: Web, Software-as-a-service, Network, Crowdsourcing, Business, Enterprise 2.0, Organization, Chances, Refactoring, Web 2.0

We are very fortunate that, given the generational challenges we face today, we have tools that those that came before us could not possibly imagine.At this point it’s more than clear that 2009 will be a challenging year for a great many businesses. Most organizations these days are now actively engaged in activities that are taking a look at what they can do to make the best of the current economic situation.

Some business leaders will be looking at paring things back to the basics while a different sort will be looking at entirely new avenues to survive and thrive. The decisions we make now can greatly affect what happens to our organizations going forward.

The good news is that most enterprises actually have a fair number of compelling options right now if they are willing to think outside the box. While some might look at the social aspects of things like Web 2.0 as marginal subjects when things get tough, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the deeper implications of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Many of the more transformational aspects of the 2.0 era now have extensive groundwork laid for them, are available in genuinely enterprise-ready solutions/pilots, and many have just been waiting for the right situation; the driving need for businesses to change and transform in the face of radically different business conditions.

Why is Web 2.0 particularly interesting right now for the enterprise? Web 2.0 has always been about making the most of the intrinsic power of the network and whatever is attached to it. This can be people (social computing and Enterprise 2.0), low-cost dynamic Web partners (open APIs and cloud computing), the world’s largest database of information, lightweight integration (mashups and Web-style SOA), or maximizing the value of the network itself (the network effects that everyone talks about), and much more. These collectively represent better, more efficient, and less expensive ways to accomplish things that we previously used to do without the network’s help or with methods that didn’t take advantages of how the network works.

Read this year’s Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions for 2009 for more perspective on this topic.

Fortunately, our businesses have become so thoroughly network connected that the inherent efficiency of most 2.0 approaches will now work just as well inside the firewall as outside, though there still remain a few differences.

So what does this mean to the harried businesses looking for new approaches to creating value in a chaotic and unpredictable time? How can this help in cutting costs or driving growth? Here are some practical ways that 2.0 approaches can help organizations grapple with the challenges of 2009. Though some of these have an IT slant, many of them are strategic approaches to Web 2.0 that most organizations can embrace across their lines of business to capture substantially better outcomes.

Note that the struggle with many of these, as with so much of Web 2.0, is that there is a major shift in control, a much higher level of transparency, and an openness that many businesses can be uncomfortable with. However, to organizations that are willing to overcome these largely political, cultural, and mindset challenges, significant opportunities are available for the taking, often for relatively modest investment.

Strategic use of Web 2.0 for growth and resilience

As always, this is not an exhaustive list, though it’s a good start, and only gives a sense of the possibilities. I pointedly left out important areas like mobile, despite prognostications like mine or others lately that it’s a hot subject; it is, it’s just not fundamentally transformative enough at this point. I am sure readers will contribute more below in TalkBack.

1. Move to lower-cost online/SaaS versions of enterprise applications. - Face it, paying for yearly upgrades and new license fees is a major, recurring budget line item most organizations would like to eliminate now that most companies have a computer in front of every worker. Open source software is an option and is certainly cheaper up front, until the support costs and other factors come in. There are, in fact, numerous lower-cost options today for virtually any type of business software but unless it’s browser-delivered, or even better, externally hosted as SaaS, you can’t use the provider’s economies of scale to drive down the full range of costs from deployment of upgrades and technical support to hosting, backups, and management. In general, moving to SaaS for anything that isn’t strategic to the business is the best place to start if you’re trying out externally hosted apps for the first time.

   Strategic applications might be more difficult to migrate to a SaaS model both from a customization and change management standpoint as well as from concerns about governance, reliability, compliance, and regulation. Retraining and data migration are a cost component in SaaS scenarios but are manageable in today’s increasingly online and data standardized world. How much will you actually save? The numbers vary, but recent reports say that moving to a SaaS version of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system will save the average firm

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November 4th, 2008

Open APIs reach new high water mark as the Web evolves

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:27 pm

Categories: Badges, Business Models, Cloud computing, Cost-effective scalability, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Gadgets, Global SOA, JSON, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, REST, Radical Decentralization, Right To Remix, SOA, SOAP, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Widgets

Tags: Web, API, Channel Management, Internet, Marketing, Dion Hinchcliffe, Business Leader

Late last week an important milestone for the Internet was quietly reached as the number of available open Web APIs crossed the 1,000 mark, according to the popular API tracking service, Programmable Web.

We are nearing the time when opening our supply chains across the Web isn’t just a good idea, it will be essential for competitive survival. While still seemingly small in number compared to the number of traditional Web sites that exist, open APIs have become an increasingly vital story for Web startups and traditional firms alike to cost effectively partnership, expand the reach of their products (and especially their data), and drive their network effect deeply across the Web.

It’s now almost uncommon to see a new Web product that doesn’t sport a shiny new API so that other online products can integrate the pieces they like into new experiences and offerings. In short, APIs allow a Web application or online business to have thousands of points of presence in other products, instead of just one.

Though APIs were pioneered by many of the original, successful firms on the Web including eBay and Amazon, which can both cite considerable returns for their efforts, it’s only been in the last couple of years that APIs have been taken seriously in a widespread way by the Web community and have become a new competency area.

In my discussions with many companies, one of the biggest obstacles to adopting APIs is a lack of understanding of what a non-visual Web presence looks like and how to build a business model around it. Business leaders are much more likely to understand investment in a traditional Web site, which they are familiar with and understand somewhat, than in an online software development kit, which is more developer-centric and which they are much less likely to fully appreciate, even though APIs can often have more strategic value than a Web site.

The good news is that emerging case studies and the impressive numbers from Amazon earlier this year are showing the the way and there has been a noticeable change in attitude and uptick in interest since cloud computing became such a big topic over the summer.

Yesterday, Programmable Web’s John Musser summarized some of the more interesting findings

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September 6th, 2008

The WOA story emerges as better outcomes sought for SOA

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 2:04 pm

Categories: ATOM, Ajax, Business Models, Customer Self-Service, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Governance, JSON, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, REST, Radical Decentralization, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SOA, SOAP, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Tolerance Continuum, Web 2.0, Web as Platform, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Widgets

Tags: Web, Business, SOA, Organization, WOA, WOA Story, REST, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware

Over the summer the enterprise IT blogosphere was swept up in a conversation around the concepts that many are calling Web-Oriented Architecture, or WOA. A different way to think about service-oriented architecture, WOA extolls a different but related set of technologies, in particular how to apply them in specific ways to connect our systems together into the solutions we need to take on our daily business challenges. WOA offers the exciting and fast-growth promise of the Web 2.0 world, while SOA has been seen as struggling and encountering low engagement in most organizations.

For those just joining the conversation, SOA is the most common set of top-level organizing principles and technologies that enterprises use to organize and connect their IT systems. However, SOA is increasingly in the firing line for less-than-stellar results and lack of business alignment. Few promising solutions for this have emerged lately, with the increasingly notable exception of WOA. WOA describes a compelling new focus that can address many existing SOA issues, but is sometimes at odds with traditional IT and business thinking.

Along with different technology emphasis, WOA offers a compelling new perspective on service uptake and consumption and offers potent ways of thinking about business models that can directly drive innovation and growth. Even better, we can now point to existing WOA success stories, albeit most of them in the online world. In short, SOA (of which WOA is a part) hasn’t looked this interesting in years. But like most new ideas, it inevitably faces challenges from the old guard.

For its own part, far from being a boring, back-office story about plumbing and infrastructure, SOA has actually seen better results than most of the enterprise architecture models that came before it. However, these returns have been fairly lackluster compared to what most business were actually looking for and what SOA practitioners wanted and were actively trying to achieve, certainly when any measurements of the ROI were taken. My detailed WOA overview last April tells the story: The Burton Group ultimately concluded earlier this year that “that SOA is not working in most organizations” based on extensive conversations with clients.

I’ve covered this territory a number of times in the past, most notably with an in-depth exploration of What is WOA?, but the story remains the same: WOA is being driven by the widespread success that lightweight Web services — and particularly their use in open APIs — are having on the open Web. The broad lesson that has been dawning on the enterprise architecture world this year is that this is what’s actually working in terms of what SOA has been trying to accomplish, but with a uniquely different approach.

Explore several WOA success stories and how they are driving SOA.

The tide seems to be turning in terms of the industry’s perspective of WOA as well. Respected SOA expert David Linthicum recently asked “SOA out, WOA in?” and seemed to think it was, noting it will take a long time, like SOA did, to make inroads in the enterprise despite its widespread adoption on the Internet. ZDNet’s own Joe McKendrick recently noted that “WOA wins hands-down over SOA in popularity contest” and Dave Rosenberg recently discussed WOA on CNET and took it as a forgone conclusion. And this is a key point: Many organizations I talk to are already using some WOA to some degree on the ground today, it’s just not being promoted like traditional SOA is, thereby missing the benefit of the support, documentation, guidance, management, and infrastructure/tools support needed to fully flourish.

We have started to see traditional organizations begin to offer WOA-friendly services to the world at large. For example, the World Bank recently opened its Web API to developers using the increasingly popular Mashery service, which allows an organization to outsource their WOA. Of course, WOA can be used solely inside the firewall but some of the most interesting scenarios involve integration with business partners, on demand in a very agile, lightweight fashion.

And in the end, this is the challenge. The use of WOA on the technology side is only interesting if there is support for the business for the scenarios it encourages. You could convert all your Web services from SOAP or REST and be fully ready for the resulting stream of consumer and enterprise mashups, API customers, and hundreds of new business partners, but not if you’ve not redesigned your business a bit. This is also one key reason WOA isn’t synonymous with REST. WOA is architecture, both technical and business, while REST is a style building WOA services. The implications of WOA also go beyond REST to include other Web-oriented scenarios such as widgets, browser-based interfaces, and so on.

WOA entails both technology and business change

Unfortunately, many businesses have not yet absorbed the lessons of the Web 2.0 era and still look at the Web simply as a way to deliver Web pages. This limited view and understanding of the Web’s potential means that most organizations do not have it on the radar to link themselves together in the enterprise-wide and Web-wide ecosystems of creation and integration that WOA can enable. SOA has always been about connecting systems and people together and — at long last — we have a clear path to potentially wonderful outcomes in terms of unintended uses. This includes the ability to access business opportunities inside of time windows which would previously have been unattainable with our traditional, heavyweight SOA models. But only if we truly change the way we think about how to leverage the network.

One last thing, it’s important to remember that no small system can sustain contact with a large system for very long without being fundamentally changed by it. This is what is happening with businesses (the small system, no matter how large) and the Web today (the big system.) The intrinsic nature of the Web is driving major changes in how we create network-based products and services and is inexorably turning us into Web-oriented businesses. Businesses that want to be successful on this network without understanding its fundamental nature and capabilities are only delaying the time it takes to reach the full potential the Web offers.

In this way, WOA often describes network business models (such as open Web APIs) that often seem very foreign to non-Internet businesses but are powerfully aligned with the way that the Web works. These models are almost certainly essential to be successful and flourish in the modern competitive landscape on our networks today. In this way, too many organizations will ignore adding a WOA aspect to their SOA work until it’s too late and the ability to generate strong network effects in their industry is greatly reduced.

WOA is just one of a set of transformative new distribution models for network-based systems.

So how do organizations start down this route to investigate the WOA way of doing SOA and seeing if it works for them?

Like many aspects of Web 2.0, WOA is not complex or overly expensive, it’s a way of thinking about interacting over the network and all the classic SOA principles still apply, which just create and expose them differently.

1. Learn about WOA. Study the technology (HTTP, REST, syndication, open Web APIs, widgets, metadata documentation, Ajax, mashups, JSON, etc.), as well as the business and implementation side, including partner ecosystems, developer support sites, monetization, and chargebacks.
2. Adapt WOA to your organization. Every organization will have a landscape of existing SOA approaches and technologies that WOA approaches will need to be added to. Furthermore, WOA does little good unless you’re willing to use it for what it does well: Provide the fuel for RIA-powered portal applications, enterprise mashups, your public APIs, and so on. Begun working through how WOA security will work in your organization (inline or through HTTPS, for example) and other key starter issues that are (hopefully) already described in your SOA governance documents.
3. Conduct a pilot. Validate the items in #2 with a small pilot. Select a mashup platform that works well for your organization and try it out. WOA enables SOA to be used in a much more agile, open, and effective manner, with the right tools involved but only in an environment that supports it all the way through the “stack” from browser, server, database, development tools, and management infrastructure.

What are your thoughts on WOA? Will this finally be where the rubber meets the road for many SOAs?

August 1st, 2008

Enterprise cloud computing gathers steam

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 1:45 pm

Categories: Business Models, Cloud computing, Convergence, Cost-effective scalability, Crowdsourcing, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Governance, Identity, Lightweight Service Models, Open APIs, Products, Radical Decentralization, SOA, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Web 2.0, Web as Platform, Web services, openid

Tags: Service, Enterprise Cloud Computing, Multitenancy, OpenID, Paas, Cloud Computing, Dion Hinchcliffe

The days when organizations carefully cultivated vast data centers consisting of an endless sea of hardware and software are not over, at least not yet. However, the groundwork for their eventual transformation and downsizing is rapidly being laid in the form of something increasingly known as “cloud computing.” This network-based model for computing promises to move many traditional IT capability out to 3rd party services on the network.

The promise of cloud computing has captured the industry’s imagination this year for two big reasons. The first is the growing realization that cloud computing can successfully be used to strategically cut costs and drive innovation. And the second is that current offerings are getting very close to being ready for prime-time use in enterprise environments.

When Web behemoth Google officially entered the cloud computing arena back in April of this year, the space became a hot topic in IT circles almost overnight, despite the long history of availability from major vendors such as Amazon and Sun as well as a number of pioneering smaller vendors such as 3Tera and Egenera.

Other major IT players include IBM, Dell, HP, Intel, and Yahoo are all making serious investments in cloud computing research or major infrastructure Om Malik reported this week. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley is also tracking Microsoft’s movement in this space with project ‘Midori’.

Why was Google’s entry a signature moment in cloud computing? Most likely because it brought the necessary critical mass to an industry which was growing steadily but had yet to break out into the mainstream. Google has a well-known reputation for globally scalable applications that can reliably service millions of concurrent users while successfully controlling costs and efficiency in everything from power and bandwidth to storage and processing power. So when they claimed that anyone can now “build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure” it received considerable attention.

Cloudy IT: Increase efficiency while innovating

The twin challenges of driving the high costs of information technology down while providing innovative new solutions to improve the business are two forces that often come into direct opposition in the modern IT shop. Businesses must keep costs down to stay competitive while at the same time investing in new ideas that will offer compelling new products and services to those same customers.

These two objectives come into opposition since new spending (on things like R&D) is usually required to successfully innovate while at the same time the pressure is on to provide the same services for less than it cost last year. Companies have come to expect to reap the cost dividend from trends such as Moore’s Law, outsourcing, and year-over-year productivity improvements.

Interestingly, it’s at this very intersection of issues that cloud computing appears

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