Category: SOAP
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
November 4th, 2008
Open APIs reach new high water mark as the Web evolves
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
September 6th, 2008
The WOA story emerges as better outcomes sought for SOA
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
April 17th, 2008
Web 2.0 success stories driving WOA and informing SOA
The striking contrast between the stories that we’ve been hearing lately about the slow going of SOA initiatives in the enterprise and the vibrant and rapidly growing ecosystems similar to them on the consumer Web has been generating a lot of debate and discussion in the enterprise IT community recently. This discussion was brought into sharp relief when ZDNet colleague Joe McKendrick recently reported on Burton Group’s Anne Manes stating that it “has become clear to me that SOA is not working in most organizations“, based on a wide ranging study they performed.
It’s become clear that the SOA world will have to change some basic assumptions.This is just one data point of many recently showing the continued shortfalls we’ve experienced in trying to get our enterprise systems to work together in the ways that we would like. Organizations clearly want to leverage high levels of interoperability to seize new business opportunities, innovate on top of existing assets, and properly leverage the extensive landscape of software, data, and infrastructure that most organizations have accumulated in large quantities over the years. But we are still having a great deal of difficulty doing so and SOA investments are just not reaping the types of return on investments that most businesses would like to have.
Looking for answers on how to improve SOA
This has driven a search for new models since there’s little question that the core ideas behind SOA seem to be the right ones. Rather, it’s been how we’ve gone about designing and implementing SOAs that appears to be at the crux of the issue. As we look at the most successful examples of SOA actually working, we keep being drawn back to the Web itself, with companies such as Amazon and their highly successful Web Services Division (with hundreds of thousands of business consumers of their global SOA), Google and its numerous and varied open Web APIs from Google Maps to Google Data, eBay and billions of dollars in listings it generates through its public SOA, or the rise of applications like Twitter (which gets 10 times the use through its APIs than from its user inteface) and applications that are primarily used via their SOA presence. Then there is the increasingly widespread adoption by millions of users of a sort of “visual SOA” with Web widgets and gadgets as well the rapidly growing story of software mashups, aka composite applications in the SOA world. There are many more SOA-ish success stories like this on the Web, but few in the enterprise.
John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb remains the best directory for finding all the APIs that Web companies have contributed to the Global SOA. Over 700 APIs are listed currently.
So if so-called Web 2.0 companies — which value participation almost above all else, both from consumers and organizations that want to integrate them into their offerings — are seeing highly desirable levels of adoption and significant ROI, how can this help understand how to improve our efforts in the enterprise? Most new Web 2.0 applications start out life with an API since getting connected to partners that will help you grow and innovate is a well-known essential for success online today. Despite years of SOA, we still don’t focus on consumption and openness as fundamentally essential characteristics to building an internal partner ecosystem that have beat a path to your door to use the services you are offering to them to build upon.
One big issue, as I’ve written about in the past, is
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 »
February 25th, 2007
Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 2: Mass customization, mashups, and recombinant Web apps
In my last post, I took a look at the recent proliferation of Web widgets, which are modular content and services that are making it easier for anyone to help themselves to the vast pool of high value functionality and information that resides on the Web today. Companies are actively "widgetizing" their online offerings so that it can actively be repurposed into other sites and online products. And as we discussed in the last post, it's believed that letting users innovate with your online offerings by letting embedding them in their own Web sites, blogs, and applications can greatly broaden distribution and reach, leverage rapid viral propagation over the Internet, and fully exploit the raw creativity that theoretically lies in great quantities on the edge of our networks.
DIY on the Web is looking to be a major trend; Newsweek recently speculated that 2007 will be the Year of the Widget.
Looked at this way, letting thousands and even millions of users build Web sites and apps out of your Web parts and then monetizing it with advertising, usage fees, or subscriptions sounds great in the abstract. But one of the big outstanding questions is if widgitizing is mostly useful for gaining fast user adoption and market share, and not for building the fundamentals of a viable, long-term business online. While this last question is still very much an open one, part of the answer will come from the way that the consumption side of DIY develops. The question is this: Are environments emerging that will enable rich and sophisticated DIY scenarios that are usable by most people?
So while my last post looked at the recent growth of available Web parts, now we'll look at the consumption side of the DIY phenomenon. Specifically, beyond the simple copy-and-paste of snippets of HTML, what is the current state of capable tools that will let all of us assemble useful apps beyond the widget encrusted dashboards that are most likely outcome possible today? Because without tools that enable real integration between all these portable Web parts, services, and feeds, we don't have useful new software, we just have fancy information displays.
Like the emergent, DIY usage currently being explored and increasingly embraced with Enterprise 2.0, the idea of DIY is to get developers and IT departments out of the demand loop and letting users self-service themselves. Like spreadsheets and desktop databases have been used for years by end users to build simple apps, with the rise of reusable, portable Web parts and feeds allows the assembly of an entire spectrum of Web apps that don't require true software development skills. Given the right tools that guide users down the right paths (palettes of pre-tested, approved parts, built-in security, versioning and configuration management), DIY might become a major force for leveraging the largely untapped The Long Tail of software demand, instead of becoming a giant support headache for public Web companies and internal IT departments.
Of course, what I'm referring to here is
January 5th, 2007
2007: The year enterprises open their SOAs to the Internet?
Those that follow the trends on the Internet and the trends within the enterprise have long noticed a very similar direction in both spaces for a while now; a push to move their software to a real services model. The reasons for this push seem straightforward: easier integration between systems, a better foundation for building new applications, dynamic business process automation that crosses organizational boundaries, and better management and monitoring of IT systems.
By having a fully-functioning services infrastructure there's even the potential of such esoteric sounding things as BAM, or business activity monitoring, which reasons that if you expose most of your software as services in a standard way, you can finally see what your business is actually doing, while it's doing it. Thus, services are currently the hot topic as new IT systems come out-of-the-box with open services and older ones are retrofitted with them. Consequently, as we shall see shortly, 2007 will likely be the tipping point for most organizations to make service-oriented architectures one of their top priorities.
But when it comes to Internet services and enterprise services, the big difference has always been the disparate drivers in these two very different environments:
1) Control - Individual parts of enterprises typically feel unrewarded for opening up and sharing their services and data. Contrast this with the Web, where opening up and sharing with others is usually rewarded by new customers in terms of users, increased business, advertisers, etc. Simply put: The culture of most enterprises, with their hierarchical reporting structures, often just does not encourage the freewheeling distribution of information and access to functionality the way that the Web does.
2) Cost structure - In the enterprise, IT systems are typically an overhead cost, or worse, belong to a particular business unit, with either owner driving up overhead costs or unfairly taxing a business unit when a system opens up within the enterprise. On the Internet however, services via open APIs already have a natural built-in cost recovery mechanism; nominally a fee for usage or other positive motivation such as industry adoption or ecosystem establishment.
3) Mandate vs. necessity - Many enterprises have been trying to make the move to SOAs for several years now, often with SOA projects that attempt to bring consistent standards, technologies, products, and schemas across the organization. These are typically top-down initiatives (and indeed, almost need to be) that because of their necessary infrastructure focus then all too often fail to connect directly with the operational reality of running a business. This results in the typical query from the CEO: "How is my SOA specifically helping me run my business better?". On the Web however, having an open API has nearly become a matter of survival. If a SaaS product or Web 2.0 site fails to offer an API, it's practically a deal killer since data can't easily be migrated in and out of the service, integration with other existing systems isn't an option, and 3rd party add-ons will not be available.
These drivers give us the state of affairs we seem to be witnessing on the Internet and in the enterprise currently; longer than expected ramp-up and adoption for
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…
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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