Category: Situational Software
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
September 2nd, 2009
Enterprise 2.0: Finding success on the frontiers of social business
It’s entirely possible something may cause social tools to abruptly stop their broad movement into the workplace, but history tells us that it’s just not likely. Success is in the eye of the beholder and with it often spawns a growing body of followers, adherents, acolytes, as well as nay-sayers that won’t be convinced until it’s an inescapable conclusion. In this very manner, at least so far, seems to go Enterprise 2.0, a moniker for corporate social software that has been inspired by widely popular online Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, and other social software.
As we’ll see, this is an intriguing case of a nascent business, social, and technology movement that seems to — despite some claims to the contrary — actually have had a rather humble and unheralded ascent while making surprisingly deep inroads in business including some higher profile successes. Make no mistake however, despite the apparent numbers, this is a movement that’s in its early days yet and which has years — if not a decade or more — before it has its largest impact.
What exactly the impact of Enterprise 2.0 will be however, has been the subject of an active and lively debate online over the last couple of weeks.
Uptake moving faster than absorption
My recent exploration of the potential causes of Enterprise 2.0 failures here on ZDNet managed to spark quite a discussion in the blogosphere about enterprise social computing and its overall appropriateness, motivations, and benefits to business. In particular, well-known contrarian Dennis Howlett weighed in last week with fairly severe criticism of Enterprise 2.0 which ultimately resulted in a direct response from Andrew McAfee today (who described it originally). For those wanting to follow the rest of the conversation, Paula Thornton probably did the best round-up of the discussion. The range of responses shows a wide variety of opinion reflecting both the scope and timeliness of this subject.
For my part, I would observe that the points that Dennis makes, while resounding with business importance (and being a bit disingenuous since I believe Dennis knows better given the information available), almost completely ignores the discussion and experiences with Enterprise 2.0 up to this point. This includes both the extensive efforts taking place in companies around the world right now as well as the already widespread nature of these tools. Far from being a solution waiting for some kind of business problem, at present Enterprise 2.0 describes a new way of working together that is already being used by millions of workers every day.
Figure 1: Stats, Adopters, and Motivation
That not every Enterprise 2.0 effort will benefit the business is also certainly true, as it’s occasionally misapplied and overused, like any new business or technology idea. However, the many people finding value in these tools today or who are working hard to make them successful are poorly served by broad generalizations, that for some reason, Enterprise 2.0 “is a crock.” That it’s not a well-known term is certainly true; most people using social tools at work are just doing it and not giving it a name. This does not distract from the numerous stories of success that have emerged over the last few years.
As JP Rangaswami pointed out recently, social computing is increasingly moving beyond the perception of being “interesting, but of no commercial value” and into a place where it’s thought to provide a range of bottom-line business results for most that apply it.
In working with and examining the results of many early Enterprise 2.0 efforts, I’ve been forced to come to the conclusion through repeated example that there is something fundamentally unique and powerful about social computing. Though not all uses of social tools result in rapid adoption or instant results, those that establish an early network effect can and do push existing IT systems (often ECM, knowledge management, and communication tools) into rapid irrelevance or completely upend and replace older, less dynamic databases or information repositories in surprisingly short amounts of time. That this almost always happens with just minor disruption is fascinating to me. And as we’ll see below, despite Dennis’ skepticism, these emergent tools have a rich and wide set of use cases. In the end, senior managers that may not “give a damn” about the emergent nature of the enterprise do in fact care about better ways of running their businesses.
That there is such a wide range of positions about Enterprise 2.0 from highly experienced people inside the worlds of technology and business is intriguing but probably inevitable due to the early stages of these changes and their rapid onset. In large part, I believe this is because of the distributed and muted nature of the information about what’s happening with social computing inside the workplace (this is in contrast with B2C-style corporate social media, which is still getting the lion’s share of buzz and attention right now.) Many projects are also adopting early advice and aren’t heralding the massive change that these tools may bring, are flying under the radar, and setting expectations low in a business world that is fatigued with the failures of big-bang IT. That adoption is happening as fast as is apparent today is intriguing given the warning that McAfee himself makes about expecting too much change from all of this:
[C]ertain E2.0 enthusiasts adopt the language of revolutionaries. They rail against the old corporate order and proclaim that they’re working for its downfall. They portray hierarchy, standardization, and management as enemies of innovation, creativity, and value creation. And they maintain that E2.0 is an unstoppable force that will only gain power as Millennials enter the workforce and that resistance to it is, ultimately, futile.
McAfee does point out that he indeed believes that those organizations without these tools will eventually fall behind, but he notes it generally won’t happen that quickly.
So while revolution is almost invariably not taking place in organizations adopting social computing tools, the pace of uptake has actually been quite impressive given the rate at which enterprises typically adopt new technologies (translation: usually with glacial pace compared to the consumer world). The numbers and profiles tell the story as you can see in the State of Enterprise 2.0 visual above. While a “disruptive revolution” is not what’s happening, and Enterprise 2.0 is certainly not inevitable for most organizations (yet), the adoption of the tools has in fact been taking place at what some would call near-revolutionary velocity, including the number of companies reporting they are consciously engaging in it as some level.
Although I’ve been following Enterprise 2.0 closely since 2006 and I’m generally known as an advocate, I should be clear that I’ve also tried very hard to be impartial and balanced (hence, for example, my Enterprise 2.0 failures post). No one is served by unrestrained hype. As much as possible, I have gathered data and examined the trends to see if indeed 1) the tools of Web 2.0 have begun to move into the enterprise and 2) improve business results. The first is now virtually a foregone conclusion; we are clearly beyond the
May 15th, 2008
Mashups turn into an industry as offerings mature
There were a great many product announcements at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month, but it was the number of announcements around Web-based mashups in particular that received a large share of attendee and media attention. By my count there were at least nine significant announcements in this space, many around the business flavor of this emerging new type of ad hoc Web applications. These are often referred to as enterprise mashups and the growing number of offerings in this space run the gamut from Web widget assembly platforms for end-users to data-only swizzlers and remixing applications created specifically for IT professionals.
Penetration of mashups in the enterprise is just beginning as their benefits begin to be understood.One thing is now clear in this burgeoning new industry; that there is genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting serious about applying them to make the development of Web-based business solutions faster, more commonplace, and less costly. One significant open question continues to be how long it will take for rapidly evolving mashup techniques to move into enterprises, which have been falling behind developments on the fast-pace of the consumer Web for a number of years now and are just now beginning to make inroads into some businesses.
And its a space that is expected to grow into a serious one in the next five years. A widely covered new report from Forrester estimates, however, that this space is expected to grow into a $700 million a year industry sector by 2013, or about 1% of the entire software industry, depending on how you define mashups and which types of tools are included.
For awareness and understanding of the fast-growing world of mashups are significant challenges as IT practitioners, business strategists, and software vendors attempt to grapple with what’s facing up to be the biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don’t yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace. Generational changes can be difficult for businesses to embrace successfully, and while evidence that mashups are remaking the business world are still very much emerging, they certainly hold the promise.
Figure 1: Mashup Tools and Platforms Circa 2008
However, the continued proliferation of high quality Web parts and open APIs, especially in the last couple of years, has offered compelling sourcing options for enterprise mashups is the making the expanding Global SOA compelling as local IT resources for building and improving business solutions. Combined with the consumer Web’s intensive focus on ease-of-use to gain adoption, and this has paved the road for low barrier, low cost effective assembly of software mashups instead of the time consuming and expensive design and coding of largely new applications. In this sense, mashups are probably the next major new application development model as well an increasingly popular approach for achieving better ROI with service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Mashup Standards Emerge: Read how a number of new mashup standards have appeared recently.
But while the life of the average Web developer has been greatly improved by the
April 22nd, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 industry matures as businesses grapple with its potential
Some of the big IT news over the weekend was the announcement that Forrester predicts that the Enterprise 2.0 space will be a $4.6 billion industry within 5 years. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan had the full breakdown yesterday on Forresters bullish outlook while Dennis Howlett immediately took umbrage with Forrester’s conception of the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace using a “loose definition and one that could be applied to any number of technology components from CRM through to supply chain management and pretty much anything between.”
Certainly that’s the challenge of pinning down something with a term that still doesn’t have industry consensus after two years, yet seems destined to be a vitally important space that our businesses are going to be moving to over the next few years. Enterprise 2.0 itself was originally defined by Harvard’s Andrew McAfee a couple of years ago in careful detail (early timeline) about something he called freeform, social, emergent software applications (such as blogs, wikis, but many others as well.) The enterprise software industry began carrying the banner ever since, applying Enterprise 2.0 to the next generation of countless marketplace offerings, often whether or not they were any of the things that seemed to make this new type of application unique and special.
Read The State of Enterprise 2.0, a thorough summary of this new software space.
The intent of creating this new term, however, was to capture a very significant change in the way that people use networked software, regardless of it was the genuine retooling of “big box” traditional IT software suites or the infiltration of subversive Web 2.0-style consumer applications across the firewall. Careful market segmentation for research tracking purposes and the debate over the inclusion of traditional, top-down IT systems into the definition of Enterprise 2.0 can be interesting exercises. But such efforts also miss the big picture and the long-term potential of this potentially potent new generation of enterprise software applications.
In my studies of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, there are two major methods by which these new applications take hold. The first is the traditional model where the IT department or some part of the business decides at a high level to adopt these new tools and begins the process of evaluation, acquisition, deployment, training and adoption. This is the traditional model that most IT large-scale software acquisitions still use today.
The other model is where individuals take it upon themselves to find the best solutions to a given problem at hand and solve them creatively and collaboratively at a grassroots level. This is becoming increasingly more common, particularly in organizations that are less strongly hierarchical and I’ve identified this story in many large organizations, from AOL’s stunningly rapid viral adoption of MediaWiki (the open source platform that runs Wikipedia) to the story of a large utility company getting ready to roll out Enterprise 2.0 only to find that the majority of departments had already adopted a solution on their own.
This second form of adoption is one of the hallmarks of this new model for using software to solve business problems and it speaks volumes to how different they are from the previous generation of applications. So it’s worth spending a little time understanding exactly why and how they are so different. To explain this, I often refer to Read the rest of this entry »
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
March 20th, 2008
Standards support for mashups emerge
The announcement earlier this week that IBM has put together an open approach for making user data secure inside of Web mashups, known as SMash, was the most recent step in an unfolding story about the way the industry is trying to bring structure and order to the rapidly growing and frequently unruly world of Web mashups.
As I’ve covered here in the past, mashups have enormous potential to allow more rapid and much less expensive development of online applications by emphasizing assembly over development, economies of scale by enabling high levels of reuse, and the consequent ability to rapidly get software solutions with the right data in the right place at the right time.
However, all is not rosy in the mashup space as I wrote last fall; there are significant challenges remaining before end-user or enterprise mashups can become a widespread reality despite the numerous offerings that exist today. Since then, I’ve only have one major new item to add to the list of adoption issues, namely that fact that most leading mashup solutions don’t provide a good enough SaaS delivery model. Consequently Yahoo! Pipes remains the best example of a mashup tool that has the requisite low barrier for use for widespread adoption, despite far more sophisticated and capable brethren from the likes of JackBe, Serena, and soon, Lotus, the latter which appears to be repackaging everything it learned with the impressive QEDWiki into an enterprise-class product.
Fortunately, good news is on the horizon for many of the issues I raised last year. It now appears that the mashup industry is heading in a direction which may make the space much more viable indeed over the next year. For example, two my biggest concerns, both non-starters for organizations that want to adopt a mashup model (21% of all organizations reported that they were interested last year), was 1) the lack of serious security and identity support and 2) not having a common standards for the assembly of Web parts such as widgets, gadgets, and other Web applications. Without knowing how to secure mashups, safely handle sensitive user and business data, or know where to make infrastructure and tooling bets, most organizations were likely to sit on the fence and wait until these risks were addressed.
IBM’s announcement this week about SMash was just one of many solutions now being offered resolve these two issues not only in the mashup space, but across the Web industry, as our personal and professional data gets more and more federated across the Internet and within our organizations. Efforts in this area include range from Google’s OpenSocial initiative to the push for adoption of DataPortability.org’s and OpenFriendFormat’s support which are all improving the world of data safety, security, and mobility in the mashup world as well.
But the most comprehensive and detailed plan for bringing standard approaches and techniques to mashups has to be OpenSAM, which leverages many existing standards such as WebDAV, openid, LDAP, and also subscribes to DataPortability.org’s standards to create a consistent and well-organized design and interaction model for offering complex, heterogeneous mashups to both the consumer and business community. Even more importantly, they cite a good number of companies already offering Web applications that support OpenSAM. The OpenSAM vision is broad and focused across the usage spectrum and the OpenSAM folks say that “once OpenSAM is added to an application, it can immediately join mashups with all other OpenSAM applications.”
While there is still a lot to sort out and the mishmash of standards can seem Read the rest of this entry »
October 16th, 2007
The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups
The promise of remixing existing online services and data into entirely new online applications in a rapid, inexpensive manner, often referred to as mashups, has captured the software industry’s imagination since the release of first major example, HousingMaps.com, in early 2005. Since then, mashups have offered the potential to finally make widespread software reuse a reality, enable SOA initiatives to achieve positive ROI, and radically drive down the cost of application development while satisfying large applications backlogs that plague organizations almost everywhere.
Applying mashups in a business settings is often referred to as “enterprise mashups” and recently we’ve finally begun to see the tools emerging to bring real mashup capabilities to consumers, business users, and IT professionals.
However, though anecdotal evidence seem to abound — there are a good number of stories about businesses creating isolated mashups here and there — and mashups are again getting placed on hot tech trends lists for 2008, we’re clearly still not yet seeing the flood of mashup-based apps inside of organizations despite their consistent and steadfast growth on the consumer Web.
ProgrammableWeb’s mashup graphs (left of page) currently reports that over 2,400 mashup-based apps currently exist.
The public Web of course has been a global laboratory for innovation for 15 years and it’s not surprising that experimentation and creativity in such a large pool of resources of people and services would generate some interesting outcomes like the several thousand mashup applications currently available. But the question has been: Where is the same result inside our organizations? Those same organizations that often desperately need software to solve a business problem for which software simply isn’t available — at least without extensive customization — because the typical business problem’s unique, situational nature. In previous posts I’ve discussed how spreadsheets are often the only end-user development tool available to the average person to meet this need today.
So what exactly is holding back enterprise mashups from becoming a more popular phenomena inside our organizations? This has been in contrast to many other aspects of Web 2.0 inside the enterprise, where openness, network effects, and radical power and simply are often driving extremely fast uptake and adoption of new apps and technologies. By many indications, mashups — particularly in the enterprise — have so far fallen short of their potential and the question is why?
I’ve discussed this with a various people in the mashup community and analyzed a number of the leading mashup platforms and have boiled the outstanding challenges down to Read the rest of this entry »
July 26th, 2007
A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise
For well over a year now we’ve seen reports and announcements from a major industry analyst firms and others tracking the movement of Web 2.0 ideas into the enterprise. Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, and many others have all weighed in on the trends or made recommendations, sometimes cautious and sometimes optimistic, that organizations should start heading down the Web 2.0 path. And public interest in Web 2.0 in the enterprise is widespread too, not in the least exemplified by the fact that Web 2.0 trends of all kinds — business and consumer both — are tracked closely here in many blogs on ZDNet.
This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been.We’ve also seen that the term itself has moved from passing familiarity in the leading edge of the technical community to nearly universal recognition in both IT and mainstream business circles. That Web 2.0 is a complex topic there is little doubt since it’s often described as a grab bag category of the latest ideas and movements that include — but are by no means limited to– wikis, blogs, RSS, podcasting, content tagging, mashups, and social networking.
The big question? What do you really need to know today about Web 2.0 in the enterprise?
Reducing all of these ideas into an underlying set of principles is what people like Tim O’Reilly have been doing for several years now. It’s generally understood by most people that the Internet has changed considerably in the last half-decade and that those changes have reached a tipping point that’s enabling brand new business models, unleashing a wave of innovative products, influencing public behavior on a large scale, and in particular, resulting in entirely new types of online businesses. But as I discussed in last year’s discussion on Web 2.0 reductionism, trying to get at the core motive force behind things as disparate as rich user experiences and collective intelligence is no small task.
Fortunately, we are indeed as an industry starting to get a handle on how all the pieces of Web 2.0 fit together. For instance, it’s now clear that having hundreds of millions of people globally connected together pervasively via one single high speed two-way network (aka the Internet) will result in many of the things we’re now seeing in the marketplace. It seems a fundamental new widespread focus on leveraging that two-way aspect of the network deeply in our online products, as well as increasingly playing to the fundamental strengths of the network that is the Web, is teaching us invaluable lesson after invaluable new lesson for our businesses. The result is that the living laboratory of the Web is now the source of the greater part of our innovation in business these days. Today’s World Wide Web is a larger ecosystem and with far more brainpower and activity that any single organization could ever hope to match.
Web 2.0 Transforms The Business Landscape
The story of Web 2.0 began with things like open source software, which is nothing more than entire products created ad hoc by volunteer armies of contributors that now outnumber — by virtue of the sheer capacity the network — the world of commercial software efforts. It’s not lost on careful watchers that open source software tends to be more feature rich, secure, and bug free that commercial software, despite being created by thousands of loosely coupled, self-selected contributors. Since then, this idea of commons-based peer production of products on the global Internet has spread through just about every other type of product that can be delivered over the Web from marketing, advertising, collaboration, news, customer service to banking, investment, fund raising, disaster management, and dozens of other types of business and civic activities. This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been. We’ve tinkered for a couple of decades to build good networked software that took advantage of this fact but we didn’t yet have enough knowledge of the best techniques for creating them. That things like peer production are now moving to the center of the design of online products finally shows a maturing realization that our older, more traditional views of networked applications were just not effective as they could be.
Combine the rise of peer production with the Web growing up into a true software platform as part of the rise of rich user experiences and SaaS. Then witness the movement of the Web out into the world in the last few years and exploding into thousands of types of new Internet devices, mobile and otherwise, that deliver — and just as importantly if not more — capture value in every corner of the globe and in every conceivable setting.
An overarching and compelling new business vision
And while there more trends beyond these that are driving Web 2.0, the upshot is that the productive capacity of the world is increasingly wired into the Web and can be leveraged by building online products that encourage the close cooperation and involvement of those at the edge of the network. You can get now people on the Web en masse to build innovative software applications or help you accumulate vast and almost infinitely rich databases of information and even foster enormous online populations for which you are the preferred intermediary and of which you can tap the combined intelligence.
It’s this more comprehensive and integrated vision of Web 2.0 and its ingredients consisting of Read the rest of this entry »
July 23rd, 2007
A bumper crop of new mashup platforms
While application developers tend to roll their eyes at the concept of end-user mashups, they remain one of the more promising new trends in software development this year. And while it’s certainly true it’s early days yet for mashups, the tools that enable them remaining rather limited, seems to be changing as I regularly come across compelling new mashup platforms as well as upgrades to existing ones that show what will be possible soon. And for now, as evidenced recently in the McKinsey Web 2.0 in business survey where 21% of organizations globally said they are using or planning to use mashups, there appears to be considerable demand for mashups at the enterprise level even though the majority of existing offerings are primarily aimed at the consumer space. Is this disconnect resolving with the current crop of offerings? Let’s take a look.
In today’s mashup world, the apparent business potential of highly accessible and easy-to-use mashup creation tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft’s PopFly is still undermined by their apparent lack of readiness for the enterprise. Mashups could theoretically allow business users to move — when appropriate — from their current so-called “end-user development tools” such as Microsoft Excel that are highly isolated and poorly integrated to much more deeply integrated models that are more Web-based and hence more open, collaborative, reusable, shareable, and in general make better use of existing sources of content and functionality. Remember, business workers still spend a significant amount of time manually integrating together the data in their ever increasing number of business applications. Tools that could let thousands of workers solve their situational software integration problems on the spot themselves, instead of waiting (sometimes forever) for IT to provide a solution, is indeed a potent vision.
So what’s typically missing from today’s mashup platforms to make them both useful and desirable in the enterprise? While no one knows for sure, since mashups are just starting to be considered seriously in many organizations, it generally boils down to 1) deep access to existing enterprise services and data/content repositories, 2) SaaS-style Web-based mashup assembly and use, 3) assembly models that are truly end-user friendly with very little training required, 4) a credible management and maintenance story for IT departments that must support a flood of public end-user built and integrated apps, and last but certainly not least, 5) mashup products that address important questions about mashups and enterprise security. None of these are particularly easy to solve, which is most likely why mashups haven’t been more prevalent before now.
This latter issue of security — in terms of reliably securing applications that are created largely out of other services and applications — can’t be understated and will likely determine whether an mashup platform can even be considered for adoption in a given organization. This is particularly crucial since the Global SOA, the vast landscape of open functionality and content on the Web, now provides a truly massive yet rather security-challenged set of source of material for enterprise mashups. The question here is whether Web apps that are assembled by users — and not developers or security experts — and that combine capabilities from a wide variety of sources including the open Web can ever be made safe enough for most businesses? That’s an important open question and one that few of the mashup platforms listed below spend much time addressing.
Are mashups really a major new development model? Read a detailed discussion.
The answers to these questions will inevitably shake out as the existing mashups products get applied to real business problems and the industry collectively learns what capabilities and approaches are needed for them to be successful. And I don’t expect it will be a one size-fits-all either; mashups can be approached many different ways, from the pure service mashup models of RSSBus and Kapow’s RoboMaker to the innovative yet very end-user friendly wiki model that IBM’s QEDWiki takes.
I’ve been been tracking many of these new or evolving mashup platforms and thought I’d compile my take of the leading players in the mashup space today, particularly given the number of new or significantly upgraded products in the last few months. To make the cut, all the products listed below had to allow live integration of functionality or content (data) over a network, provide an easy-to-use development model that is theoretically accessible by end-users, be available in at least beta form, and either consume and/or produce Web-based applications and services. Using this refined selection model, you’ll see this list looks a bit different from last year’s round-up of mashup platforms. Yet despite the removal of a few products, the list is bigger than Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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