Category: Mashups
October 25th, 2009
Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
Many as-yet-unforeseen new developments will create enormous societal, cultural, and business opportunities over the next decade, just as long as we don’t make irreversible decisions down the wrong path. There’s been an important and relatively sudden change taking place over the last couple of years in the way that we interact with the Web. While direct access or search activity has been (and still is) the most common way that we access the content and applications of the Web, new ways have been rapidly growing and competing with how we work online, both at home and at work.
Thus these new models, exemplified by social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise.
The once relatively unified world of the Internet, with a few major top-level types of access directly connected to it (browser, e-mail, IRC client, newsreader, etc.) and a few key sub-apps such as search that virtually everyone online used have been extended — as well as fragmented — into popular new channels into which users are now rapidly moving en masse.
That’s not to say that direct usage of the Internet (loading up and using sites and apps via the traditional Web browser) is going away. It’s still far and away the most common way to interact with the Web today and will likely be that way for quite some time, if not forever.
But real shifts in both online platform alternatives and in the mobile market are beginning to usher in foundational new usage patterns by users. These new channels — of which the latest generation of mobile apps and social networking platforms, which are often tightly integrated with the Web but are not truly one with it, are just the two biggest examples — demonstrate what is probably a generational transformation of the vital border between us and the Internet.
And this is the crux of the point: Where the point of user attention and interaction resides and who controls it is one of the most important conversations between us and our “preferred intermediaries”, a fancy term for who we like to work with to interact with the Web. This in turn has significant implications for enterprise intranets, our often clunky yet essential local “Web” in our organizations.
Why are these changes happening? There are at least two major reasons:
The first is that user attention on the Web has been moving to social networks, best exhibited by Facebook, which has been the single largest gainer of online usage in the last 3 years, over all other applications. Even e-mail has been eclipsed in many markets and only search remains more dominant. Social networks, which are platforms in their own right — just like the Web, but also have touchpoints well outside of it — have come into their own as competing yet codependent platforms that sprawl across the Internet, telecommunications infrastructure, mobile devices, and desktop computers.
The second reason is
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
August 11th, 2009
Pragmatic new models for enterprise architecture take shape
The best outcomes result naturally from self-organizing thought leaders in an organization that seek each other out and collaborate on shared solutions to their problems.Hear the words “enterprise architecture” and many people will turn away automatically. It’s not that they aren’t aware that technology drives so much of the modern world, they just think it doesn’t apply to what they do. The famous IT/business divide is too often kept this way because of mutual incomprehension, not-invented-here thinking, and apparently incompatible mindsets. However, this is beginning to change.
High technology continues to relentlessly pervade practically every aspect of today’s business world, prescribing what is potentially possible and often conferring enormous leverage when harnessed fully. But it has been the advent of the Web 2.0 era and its inexorable movement (some might even say infiltration) into the workplace that is making traditional IT — and the master planning version of it, enterprise architecture — an entirely new beast by popularizing simple, egalitarian tools and approaches that can be understood and applied more easily and quickly by a broad audience across most organizations.
Increasingly, in some IT departments and business units around the world, a closer new relationship is forming in which technology is deeply interwoven into continuous joint business processes of creation, change, and adaptation. Like so many grassroots tech culture movements, this one doesn’t yet have a formal name, but increasingly some are calling it emergent architecture.
The first seeds of this change began to be felt with advent of agile development processes a few years ago along with the subsequent rise of software mashups, and the popularity of user-distributable widgets, badges, and gadgets. These technology approaches combined with emerging business trends such as tacit interactions and pull-based systems driven from with bottom-up within organizations, particularly when co-existing with social computing and Enterprise 2.0.
The result: A new environment for creating technology-driven business solutions using different, more open communication channels with richer information and ground truth as well as significantly more adaptive technology elements often strongly influenced by the Web 2.0 world.
Meeting in the middle: Emergent Architecture
In recent years enterprise architecture has been moving from a discipline that provides top-down, a priori technology blueprints to the business side to one that articulates key, strategic possibilities and only the most critical high-level constraints (such as security standards) and then operates as a conductor, promoter, problem solver, and evangelist across the organization through the vehicle of a cohesive community to co-develop needed solutions.
When I wrote that most organizations were badly in need of a technology and software process “angioplasty” a few years ago, I highlighted the trends that will increasingly drive the agenda for new initiatives and projects when it comes to the strategic application of technology to business:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration (internal or external) over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
This is more true than it’s ever been and has been contributing to a growing discontinuity in the way that enterprise architecture will be conducted in the future. Going away are overly formal procedures, detailed technology prescriptions, complex software frameworks, and dreaded compliance checks. Replacing them are highly collaborative, adaptive processes, technology opportunism, simple (frequently Web-oriented) technologies, and dynamic — even spontaneous responses — to organizational and marketplace needs.
Enterprise architects of the near future will still dispense clear guidance that carries the requirements of the entire organization with it, but it will be appropriately broad and EAs will actively help tailor it to local needs across the organization. Self-service IT will become much more common as workers are comfortable using today’s extremely easy-to-use, adaptive, and flexible tools, many of them using Web 2.0 ideas such as simple, open architectures and malleable pieces and parts, especially open APIs, and even new, open business models such as crowdsourcing and community-based involvement.
While organizations such as Gartner are just beginning to map this trend, there’s increasingly little doubt that the infamous chasm that often disconnects IT and business is being crossed in many quarters by business users unafraid of today’s populist technologies combined with IT practitioners that strongly desire to solve immediate and important business problems. That today’s collaborative and communication technologies in the workplace are much more open, social and collaborative than they were even a couple of years ago are likely to be
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
July 24th, 2009
First impressions of Google Wave
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
- 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 - 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
June 13th, 2009
Running your SOA like a Web startup
One of the more striking differences between IT and the online world these days is the contrast between traditional enterprise service-oriented architecture and its equivalent on the Web, open APIs. More and more lessons are coming from the online space, providing key insights into how we might invigorate the way we open up our IT systems for maximum value.
SOA does not have the same business urgency and lacks critical focus in this regard in most organizations. So while some new data shows that 75% of all large enterprises will be using SOA by the end of this year (and 60% will even be expanding it), the most obvious successes with service-oriented approaches aren’t classical organizations at all. They are Web companies that offer APIs out of a basic need: To build a network of partnerships quickly and cheaply as well as tap into external innovation and inexpensive 3rd party investment.
A quick examination of Google News shows several useful new public-facing Web services (aka open APIs) that were announced this week, including one for Microsoft’s Bing as well as from smaller companies like School Loop, which just launched an API that “lets gradebook and assessment systems pull data–such as rosters and assignments–from School Loop and write scores into the School Loop gradebook for display to parents, teachers, students, and other stakeholders.” Both of these APIs let anyone, anywhere build applications that interact with and incorporate their respective capabilities.
These are just two typical examples of more than 40 new APIs that were released to the world over the last 30 days alone, according to Programmable Web’s API dashboard, currently the most reliable source for such information. This pace of release is fairly steady: A “global SOA” is growing up around us on the Web.
Joe McKendrick recently asked here on ZDNet if we needed an iTunes model for Web services. The reality is, it already exists — albeit in Web-friendly, simple form — and not in the failed visions of UDDI directories of yore, but in the pragmatic release of hundreds and hundreds of new APIs every year.
SOA and Open APIs: Close Cousins
Now, it’s also true that SOA initiatives in large companies generally don’t publicly announce their internal developments, so it’s much harder to get a sense of what is being created and used in most organizations. However it’s fairly clear that there are some significant differences and outcomes between these two approaches for open services, even as they ostensibly have the same goals on the face of it: To encourage interoperability between different business systems and enable opportunities that would otherwise be too difficult, expensive, or time-consuming to capture.
What’s especially intriguing about these two sides of the same coin are the innate assumptions that they make: SOA is usually an overhead effort (thought it can also be done on the ground) between IT and the business which ultimately allows businesses to achieve improved results and even serendipitous outcomes when it comes to the integration and leverage of existing investments in systems and data. The ROI is very often hard to measure and rapid improvements to the business are usually not the norm. SOAs also tend to be more inward facing and designed for internal consumption.
Contrast this with open APIs, in which the API is considered of primary strategic advantage to the business. The view is the investment in the development of an API is warranted because of immediate benefits that can be gained: increased reach to new customers on the network, tapping into external innovation, increased 3rd party investment, and a scalable model for 3rd party relationships. Interestingly, the bigger the organization, the more value an API has to offers to existing and potential partners, primarily because of the data tends to be richer and more valuable and/or the functionality it exposes is world-class through the success of the enclosing business. This is a vision where a service-oriented business channel (open APIs, not Web pages) often becomes the dominant channel for interaction with their customers as it arguably has for market leaders such as Amazon, Twitter, and others. Unlike most SOA efforts, APIs also tend to be designed for consumption by the broader world, though they are certainly used internally as well.
In would be a gross oversimplification to say that SOA is a technical approach to solving a outstanding set of business problems and open APIs are a business solution that uses a technical approach, but increasingly that seems to be the case. A couple of years ago I asked if it was the timing was right for businesses to open up to the cloud particularly since a near majority of CIOs were clamoring for it. For more enterprises, that just hasn’t happened, leaving strategic gaps in execution that has helped lead to the recent discussions about the possibility of the quiet death of SOA.
These points highlight a key difference between
May 30th, 2009
The enterprise implications of Google Wave
Google has launched many communication services since its inception yet none of these have had such obvious business utility or attempted to reinvent the collaborative process from the ground-up.Google announced their forthcoming service known as Wave this week to widespread coverage in both the press and blogosphere.
Created by many of the same team members that developed the highly successful Google Maps, the preview of the service itself on Thursday was quite compelling, resulting in a rare standing ovation at a tech conference according to ZDNet’s own Sam Diaz. Its egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009.
This is clearly a tall order, but the Internet leader provides plenty of substance to back up this vision despite growing evidence that individual companies may be losing the capacity to drive the agenda for the world when it comes to establishing successful new Internet standards and technologies. While the ultimate destiny of Wave itself is far from clear, it’s both intriguing and open enough that it will likely emerge on the radar of businesses large and small when it becomes widely available later in the year.
Wave’s relevance to the enterprise might seem premature with so many of the early and current Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter-style social messaging, mashups, etc.) still — often arduously — making their way into the workplace years after their inception. Though we seem to finally be hitting a tipping point with 2.0 tools at work, Wave itself seems credible enough to get on our watchlists, at least to understand the implications.
The real question is whether there are really such significant gaps in the current state of Web-based communication that we need something new like Wave. With Google’s tendency to emphasize the consumer world first and the enterprise later, it’s also valid to ask if Wave will really have much impact on businesses. Interestingly, you might be surprised at some of the answers, so let’s take a look.
Wave: A communication and collaboration mashup
Google Wave itself consists of a dynamic mix of conversation models and highly interactive document creation via the browser. Using simple, open Web technologies (Google makes much of the fact that most of Google Wave is a open set of formats and architectures that is jointly developed with the Web community) Wave combines many of the key features of e-mail, instant messaging, media sharing, and social networking into a seamless experience and data set that are eponymously known as waves. All of this is opened up to developers via the Google Wave API.
The demonstration at the introduction of Google Wave (link below) showed how users can interact in real-time, collaboratively creating structured conversations that contain rich media, instant notifications, simultaneous user editing of the conversation, and live integration with server-side resources such as spell-checking and language translation. Most interestingly, while waves are relatively self-contained and use their own types of servers and data formats, they are easy to embed elsewhere or to build extensions for, enabling virtually infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. In fact, a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about. And as we’ll see, this has implications for the enterprise world, not only with SOA but also with social communication in general as well as Enterprise 2.0 specifically.
See Waves in action: Watch the introduction keynote at Google I/O on Thursday.
What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven’t changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user’s contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more.
The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that’s a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we’ve come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology.
As the original announcement post explained, to fully understand Google Wave, one should appreciate the separation of concerns between the product Google is offering and the protocols and technologies behind it, which are open to the Web community:
Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:
- The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
- Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
- The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.
The key here is that Google is expecting many more front-ends for creating and editing waves, depending on the individual requirements of various entities. Google Wave is their own front-end application for doing so and using HTML 5 in their wave client shows they are planning more for
January 29th, 2009
Using Web 2.0 to reinvent your business for the economic downturn
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.
- 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
January 13th, 2009
8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009
We are starting 2009 off in a particularly inauspicious economic climate, though as we’ll see, important opportunities also exist. 2008 was a very tough year for many businesses and industries and it’s almost as hard to see how things could get worse as it is to understand how things can get better. To survive and thrive, organizations will be looking to make the most of what they already have while gearing up to weather an unknown landscape of challenges this year. These concerns frame up the majority of my Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions for this year, though not all.
I predict a rebuilding year for most organizations, with a few that will use innovative new ideas to break out with major successes.Before we review what’s likely to happen this year, let’s take a quick look at 2008’s predictions:
I led off my list last year with the pronouncement that SOA was becoming lighter weight and more Web-oriented, which was largely borne out. Last summer’s numerous online debates about things like Web-Oriented Architecture and the future of SOA eventually culminated in some bold conclusions by industry leaders such as Anne Thomas Manes who went as far as to declare SOA dead as of a few days ago, being eclipsed by “mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on ’services’“. It’s clear that SOA isn’t really dead however, but evolving markedly in response to years of experience as well major business and technological changes in the industry.
My predictions for little progress on enterprise search and for growing security concerns around Enterprise Web 2.0 also seemed to do well with many IT leaders expressing frustration in both fronts in my discussions with them throughout the year. The rise of social networking in the enterprise, the adoption of Enterprise 2.0, and the use of mobile applications in business also scored well with numerous surveys and research showing impressive uptake.
Other predictions didn’t fare as well or their outcome is unclear or hard to determine. These include significant early adoption of tools to take the unstructured information in blogs and wikis and mine them, the rise of Microsoft Silverlight in the enterprise (though Adobe AIR seemed to do fairly well), significant early adoption of collective intelligence applications/decision support, and a push by IT for governance budget for Enterprise Web 2.0 systems and applications. I also missed out on predicting the advent of cloud computing, one of the year’s biggest news stories.
Finally, two of last year’s predictions in particular are going to be much bigger in 2009 than in 2008. These are the shake out of Enterprise Web 2.0 vendors and the uptake of enterprise mashups, more on those below.
As for 2009, I predict a rebuilding year for most organizations, with a few that will use innovative new ideas to break out with major successes. With the large network effects that have been built online over the last few years by the major internet players, we will have fewer fast growth businesses in the major categories, but there is still plenty of room for major new products in industry sectors and classes of data that haven’t seen wide penetration online yet. This will also include, as we’ll see, areas that have only partially thrived online traditionally, like real estate and investment banking, that now must be completely transformed and remade, as the downfall of these industries leaves a large vacuum that must be filled by something.
8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009
1. Tight budgets will drive the adoption of low-cost Web 2.0 and cloud/SaaS solutions. This seems like an obvious prediction but how it plays out will be very interesting. This could end up actually helping the smaller Enterprise Web 2.0 players as companies look to get away from the big-ticket, enterprise-class offerings from major vendors like IBM, Oracle, and others. But in reality, once enterprises make the decision to move to platforms for wikis, enterprise mashups, cloud services, SaaS enterprise apps, and so on, they may find the one-stop shop of pre-integrated solutions from entrenched software providers more than they can resist. Make no mistake, however, IT shops and businesses alike will be looking to cut costs and I expect a lot of IT and business downsizing to happen in a surge of “Economics 2.0″.
2. Online community and 2.0 technologies become a priority for most organizations. The early data from our IT and Business Outlook Survey for 2009 shows these two areas as
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.
Subscribe to Enterprise Web 2.0 via Email alerts or RSS.
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
- Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now
- Unrivaled support from Novell, now available for Red Hat Novell If Linux is going to power your mission-critical applications, you'd ... Download Now
Recent Entries
- Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage
- Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?
- Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
- Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy
- Community management: The ‘essential’ capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts
Blogs From Our Sponsors
Most Popular Posts
- Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?
- Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
- Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage
Top Rated
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- The best support in the Linux business
-
If Linux is going to power your mission-critical applications, you'd better have the best support known to business. Novell was rated the top provider of Linux technical support.
- Learn more >>
- Save time with automated shipping solutions
-
The Business Essentials Guide provides you useful tools and templates to help grow your business and save you time with automated shipping solutions.
- Visit the UPS Business Essentials Guide
- Keep Up With The Latest In Document Management with The DocuMentor.
-
Doc delivers the scoop on today's enterprise content management, printer maintenance, and all other issues related to document management. It's the DocuMentor Blog.
- Learn more >>
- Reduce risk. Reduce complexity. Increase reliability.
-
A simplified IT environment isn't just less complex. It's also more reliable. Standardize on a single Linux platform with SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, and get the world's most interoperable Linux
- Learn more >>
Archives
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras & Camcorders
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Forrester Research
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Home Theater
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Project Failures
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- Smartphones and Cell Phones
- Social Business
- Social CRM: The Conversation
- Software & Services Safari
- Software as Services
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tech Broiler
- Technology and the Global Supply Chain
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- Virtually Speaking
- The Web Life
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now
- The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
- Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
Popular Sanity Saver Videos
