Business Making Progress

Economic Analysis of the Cloud: Check the Fine Print – Your Results May Vary

I recently came across an interesting post on GigaOM: Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted? by Charlie Oppenheimer. The point of the article is to walk through an example that supports his claim that “if you have a significant amount of load that is well known and predictable then you may be able to save some money by bringing a portion or all of that inside,” or in other words, self-host. Amazon is MORE expensive. While the majority of his analysis was pretty good, there were a few gaps that - in my opinion - need to be addressed.

1. How often is this type of decision ever ONLY about cost? Rarely. There is a lot of strategy work and planning that should go into the Cloud vs. self-host decision. If you were an ISV start-up seeking funding, how many VCs would fund your business plan if it contained a large budget for buying hosting infrastructure hardware? My guess is zero. Deployment strategies can and should vary. Fortunately, there are ways to manage your deployment within a Cloud environment that can give you more flexibility. Leveraging reserve instances instead of running entirely on-demand could dramatically reduce your run-time capacity requirements without sacrificing the ability to keep up with fluctuating demand. Plus, it will ultimately lower the overall cost of deployment, too. A true win-win.


2. If you ARE focusing on cost, then you need to consider whether or not it is more effective for your business to work with Capital Expense (CAPEX) or Operating Expense (OPEX). More often, I hear from our partners and customers that OPEX is the way to go because it is much more predictable and stable from a budgeting and forecasting perspective. The finance department will thank you for it.


3. Labor costs CANNOT be excluded from the analysis or the conversation. There is just too much variation between the resource demands of a self-hosted environment vs. a Cloud-based environment in terms of time, money, and personnel needed to scope, implement, manage, and maintain the system. A big part of why we built Progress Arcade was to address the need to simplify application deployment in the Cloud for our partners and customers. Excluding labor costs from your analysis is like refusing to set aside money to pay your taxes each year. In either case, your revenue model will be distorted and incomplete. You can’t see the complete picture.

Bottom line: do your homework and make an informed decision based upon YOUR unique set of requirements. Don’t let someone else “calculate” your success.

Thanks and, as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Straight From the Source: How One of Our ISV Partners Uses SaaS to Improve Business

Almost all businesses—large or small—have a need for a comprehensive human resources (HR) program to serve their most valued resources, employees. Leading integrated benefits, payroll and human resources solutions provider Unicorn HRO provides solutions to manage HR processes with greater speed, scope and depth.

In the ’80s, Unicorn’s on-premise solution addressed approximately half the target market needs, and they knew they wanted to offer more.  Today, Unicorn leverages the Progress OpenEdge SaaS application development platform to help their customers, from mega-corporations like McDonalds to lesser-known SMBs (small-medium businesses), do business with greater efficiency.

I asked Tim Diassi, EVP and GM for Unicorn HRO to share the top reasons they use SaaS and this is what he told me:

• Ability to deliver services via the Web -- Unicorn releases new software upgrades twice a year with updated federal, state and local tax rates. SaaS helps Unicorn keep everything up-to-date so that customers can quickly and easily take advantage of the newest software version to stay compliant.
• Reduced time-to-market – The scalability and flexibility of a SaaS application development platform accelerates the speed with which Unicorn distributes software upgrades. In fact, Unicorn migrated 50 clients over a single weekend, without a hitch.
• Business continuity and disaster processing – Just because your network goes down, doesn’t mean your business can stop running. Unicorn’s service teams have kept customers’ applications up and running during all kinds of crises, including Hurricane Katrina.
• Increased ROI – Thanks to the cloud, Unicorn has experienced double-digit growth for the past 5 years without adding any significant cost of capital investment for the development of new services.

The Progress–Unicorn partnership shows the true power of SaaS. We’re excited to continue to work with such an innovative company as they plan further leverage SaaS for increased efficiency and business process integration.

Thanks and as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Greetings 2012 – Say Hello to OpenEdge 11

As was mentioned in mid-December, the latest update to our OpenEdge platform is now shipping, and I am pleased to say that it is enabling hundreds of our customers and ISV partners to securely develop and deploy applications across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud.

One of the highlights of OpenEdge 11.0 is our patent-pending Multi-tenant Tables, in which data is physically (not virtually) separated in the database - providing greater security and control for Cloud deployments. Multi-tenancy is a critical component and key differentiator for our customers and partners, along with our multi-Cloud deployment options, business process-enabled development, and support for mobile devices.

Feedback has been very positive and many customers are migrating to OpenEdge 11.0 sooner than expected to take advantage of the increased security in the Cloud, greater deployment flexibility, reduced costs, and faster time to market. Let me share some of that feedback with you now.

Security and Flexibility through Multi-Tenancy

Jeffrey Brown, Senior Development Project Manager at Infor notes, “Progress provides us with the technology to power our Infor10 Distribution Business, a distribution application specifically designed to help distributors with complex business models run an efficient, end-to-end operation. We are interested in the new multi-tenancy capabilities in the OpenEdge platform that could provide us with the flexibility to add an additional level of security and separation of data at the database level that is unique in the industry.”

Reducing Cost While Speeding Time to Deployment

Another Progress partner, a global medical software and services provider, used OpenEdge to develop an order management system for internal call centers. Multi-tenant Tables in OpenEdge 11 provide a viable solution for compliance with data security regulations customary to the healthcare industry. Moreover, it facilitates the roll-out of their order management system to all companies they acquire moving forward, which will be deployed in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, and with better security measures.

Efficiency and Moving Down Market with SaaS

Over in Germany, EDV-Software-Service AG (ESS), a provider of ERP software and services for the mid-size housing and real estate market, is leveraging OpenEdge 11 Multi-tenant tables to move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to gain efficiency and expand into new markets. Their CIO Michael Förster explained, “Progress Software understands the needs of medium-sized businesses and helps us provide value to our customers and accelerate our time-time-market with new solutions. We took part in the OpenEdge Early Adopter Program and Multi-tenancy Workshop, and in only five days were given the tools and expertise needed to get our new release ready for launch in early 2012.”

I look forward to hearing more about how our customers and partners are taking advantage of OpenEdge 11.0. For more information on OpenEdge 11.0, please review the “What’s New in OpenEdge 11.0” feature highlight.

Here’s to a great start to 2012!

Thanks and as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Consulting our crystal ball: IT Predictions for 2012

With the New Year just around the corner, many are busy thinking up unattainable diet and fitness resolutions, but we here at Progress have instead spent our time collaborating on more realistic forecasts for the coming year.

The team here at Progress put our heads together to produce our top predictions on how the role of IT within the business will change in 2012. An increased emphasis on cloud development, data security and social integration are all issues we expect organizations to prioritize over the next twelve months, but the list doesn’t stop there. Here’s a quick look at where we see business IT going in the coming year:

1. Cloud on the move. Organizations will increase deployment of the public cloud, escalating demand for cloud-enabled systems and applications.
2. Cost control evolves to efficiency. While cost was the main driver of cloud adoption in the past, the focus will now expand to include system efficiencies and time to market.
3. Data security starts with secure access. Who will have access to the data? How will it be encrypted? Who is the core owner? A strong driver that runs on a stable and tested data interface like ODBC is the best line of defense as application stacks continue to grow.
4. RIP: Non web-based applications. Approximately 80% of business apps will be web-based, and they need to be business process enabled, web-based and cloud-deployed.
5. IT border control. More than half of all content and functionality will be out of your organization’s control … in the hands of outsourcers, supply chain partners and external community databases. How will it be protected is the question du jour.
6. What’s in the fire hose? While we may see companies promoting fancy strategies for managing “fire hose data,” only those focused on responsive analytics will make meaning from the massive deluge.  
7. Limitations of freeware. This year, we will see greater support for ODBC and investment in data connectivity as companies look for dependable, robust ODBC drivers to handle financial transactions securely and quickly.
8. All hail the social enterprise. Social collaboration apps will dominate as employees look for ways to more effectively share and innovate across regions and lines of business; in fact, users will begin to expect these capabilities to be offered as standard, embedded features in business applications. 

And there they are: Progress’ IT predictions for 2012… how do they stack up to what you have in mind? We welcome comments below or on Twitter at @DrJohnBates or @ProgressSW

Imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery

It’s nice to be first…

First makes you a thought leader. First means you are ahead of the curve. First tells everyone else “follow me…”

On September 20, 2011, Progress announced the general availability of Progress® Arcade™ - a portal environment for simplifying the deployment of SaaS applications in the Cloud. The Arcade platform is Cloud agnostic to prevent vendor lock-in, thanks to a partnership with RightScale. It’s so simple to use, it only takes a handful of mouse clicks to go from zero to the Cloud. You can move your application and data back and forth from the Cloud if you require without restriction. Initially, Amazon is the Cloud vendor for Arcade, with others following soon.

Now, read this:

On October 6, 2011 at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference, CEO Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Public Cloud, which I happened to learn about from a blog post on TechCrunch. According to Ellison, the Oracle Public Cloud is a platform for the deployment of Oracle applications in the Cloud. It avoids vendor lock-in through Cloud interoperability. It allows the application and data to move back and forth from the Cloud if needed. And, it can “play nice” with Amazon.

Sound familiar? It sure does.

Progress Software was first to market with Arcade. Oracle was first as well – first to follow!

Again, it’s nice to be first…

Thanks and, as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

SMB Business Outlook: “Cloudy”

Welcome back! Now that summer is over (sigh), it’s time to once again focus on work. I am sure you are busy reviewing your end-of-year strategies and tactics. Some of you might even be peering into 2012 and wondering what you can do to make an impact—maybe grow revenue through new customer acquisitions, make your business more efficient, improve customer relationships, etc. Hopefully, the Cloud is on your short list – and if it’s not, it SHOULD be. And here’s why…

We recently surveyed our Application Partners and ISVs and discovered the following:

• 90% are investigating Cloud computing
• 88% have given “a lot” or “some” thought on hosting in the Cloud
• 60% will begin work on testing the Cloud
• 50% will make some form of Cloud purchase in 2011

If you aren’t among this group, then you are at risk of falling behind and losing business to the competition. The Cloud is everywhere – even non-technical folks will be using the Cloud in some way, shape, or form in the very near future. Not sure about that prediction? Have you seen the recent commercials and ads from Microsoft® and Apple®? They make “going to the Cloud” seem easy and, dare I say, fun? I can imagine you yelling at the screen now, “Sure, storage in the Cloud is easy, but configuring and deploying business applications in the Cloud is HARD!” This is where Progress® Arcade™ comes into play, and you can reference my Welcome to the Cloud blog post for more information on this topic.

For those of you that are still hesitant about the Cloud, let me give you some additional food for thought. I was recently interviewed by InformationWeek for the article, Cloud Contracts: 5 Questions SMBs Should Ask. The article talks about five key topics you should discuss with your potential Cloud vendor(s). While there are obviously more things to consider, this article should help you address many of your greatest concerns prior to “signing on the dotted line.”

Thanks and, as always, please let me know what you think.

PS: I hope to see you at Progress Revolution, September 19-22, 2011 in Boston.

Welcome To The Cloud

Greetings! I decided to kick-off my inaugural blog post talking about a hot topic these days - the Cloud. It seems like everywhere you turn, someone or some company is promoting the “whys” of going to the Cloud. But I noticed there are very few actually focused on the “hows”of getting into the Cloud. As far as I am concerned, if you can’t get there efficiently and effectively, you will never experience those advantages in the first place!

Recently, CRN interviewed my colleague Mike Ormerod and me for an article, Marrying the Cloud? 7 Items to Include in a 'Cloud Prenup'. The article talks about the critical things to think about when developing your Cloud strategy. I realize that not everyone has the ability to invest extensive amounts of time researching the Cloud. Therefore, an underlying point that I tried to make was this: if I can help you become better informed, moving to the Cloud can be simple, straight-forward, and easy.

Beyond just information, another way that I can help make moving to the Cloud simple, straight-forward, and easy is with a new solution called Progress Arcade™. Arcade is a portal environment designed to facilitate moving OpenEdge applications to the Cloud.

Arcade provides free community resources to help you:

• Share – network and discuss all things SaaS and Cloud with others just like you
• Try - take a test-drive of other Progress applications and solutions with just a few clicks
• Browse - visit our virtual marketplace of complementary products & services

Then, when you are ready you can take advantage of premium resources to help you:

• Stage - configure and prepare your application for the Cloud quickly and easily
• Demo - offer prospects the ability to demonstrate your products in the Cloud
• Deploy - deploy your production application in the Cloud with just a few simple clicks

If you would like to learn more, I suggest you check out the Progress Arcade website for more information, visit Progress Arcade to have a look at the community and premium resources, or drop me a line and let me know what you think: mcicciari@progress.com.

Multi-tenant Distributed Process Environment (Part 2 of 2)

Last week at Chennai, Nasscom EmergeOut conclave recognized the prominence SaaS & Cloud hold in IT psyche today, and they had Innovation in the SaaS/Cloud space as its primary theme. I chaired a session called 'Software Procurement Model Trends'. It was interesting to note the amount of serious adoption in the whole gamut of companies from very small startups thru SMEs to large corporations like Diamler. And while today it is more about Software as a Service (SaaS), companies are now beginning to seriously look at Platform as as Service (PaaS) as well.

I also shared views on  SOA & BPM in the Cloud at the Great Indian Developer Summit in Bangalore last month and geared my thoughts on multi-tenant business processes. Like I had noted in my earlier post, as business processes get more integrated into the enterprise IT infrastructure landscape, new solution architectures are possible. We’ll begin to see whole cloud and distributed application models being encapsulated into single-solutions with embedded business processes. We’ll see these same solutions being deployed on the cloud, and even further being deployed in a dynamically scalable multi-tenant model.

This is, in my view, the more advanced of the three possible models for SOA/BPM in the cloud:

• Using Business Process Management (BPM) for integrating applications in the cloud
• Above BPM itself running in the cloud
• BPM embedded inside solutions running in the cloud (single-solution view)

BPM in a SaaS model, wherein one can model and execute their business processes over the web, is not exactly new. Gartner reviewed the web based BPM modeling and deployment possibilities in 2008, and cited the three possible deployment models:  For each application instance it may have its own BPMS and repository on a shared server, or a shared  repository, or the extreme form of shared BPMS+repository an a shared server. The whole web based BPM modeling and deployment fad has come and gone. This is partly due to limitations on the kind of use cases that fit in into BPM on the web, with solutions and services they access possibly being within the enterprise. And accessing services inside the enterprise firewall from outside is not the easiest of configurations to open up for secure access. So, model and execute on the web in a SaaS model is probably still time away from mainstream adoption. Until enterprise IT landscapes mature some more; with more widely distributed solutions over the web- possibly accelerated by rapid acceleration of SaaS model business solutions and also the accelerated adoption of public clouds within enterprises.

Now, one possibility not explored much is BPM and SOA becoming an integral part of a single solution. Though SOA is an integration paradigm and BPM is a model-driven business process layer targeting integration solutions & human workflow processes, both do offer a very elegant model for today’s modern applications. The granular coarse-grained services professed by SOA is a very good way of partitioning and abstracting sub-systems in any application. What’s more, BPM is a good mechanism to model all first level business processes and flows in any application. This is the single solution view of SOA/BPM.

However, once we switch to a single-solution view, with SOA/BPM being used in the solution as a first order design paradigm (and not just to integrate external applications or services), SOA/BPM can exist in two forms. 1) A simple solution model with an embedded BPM layer that helps organize the solutions functional sub-components better thru coarse-grained services, and all first level of solution capabilities modeled and realized as BPM processes. 2) A solution model that is actually distributed, but still in a single-solution context enabling and providing functionality for a single business solution. Extending this further, you could look at this single-solution environment as one that actually has distributed functionality (a la normal SOA - even as all the web services are essentially modular functionality that aggregate to form the whole application). These applications will use distributed sub-components in a SOA services abstraction and have business processes that provide a higher level of functionality in the application that access these components. Similar to the single solution view described above, but now these sub-components and business processes also are distributed across servers.

It is in this single-solution SOA context that SaaS and multi-tenancy become relevant. Using this model, an ISV could build an application on a platform that leverages the modularity offered by SOA abstractions and the easily customizable first level business process flows enabled by BPM. And, they can make this application available in a SaaS model. If there were to be a BPM+SOA based application platform made available by any of the BPM/middleware vendors, then it is only natural to expect this to also support declarative multi-tenancy.

Multi-tenancy enabled BPM/SOA-platform? Does it sound far-fetched? Not really… Last my month my class (Internals of Middleware Systems course at IIIT-H) built a multi-tenant SOA platform as the course project. They demo’d the solution at the end of the course. It had full working declarative multi-tenancy built into the SOA platform they built, and it included a business process (orchestration) engine based on Camel and a web services platform, registry and repository, and declarative multi-tenancy. (Phew! J ). I was pleasantly surprised. They actually got the whole solution working (albeit in a basic POC mode). So technically, a PaaS for Multi-tenant BPM/SOA based applications is definitely feasible. Sometime, hopefully soon, there could be commercial offerings in the market.  

Are you a sitting duck or one that will respond immediately to threats?

While many organisations are being ‘cautiously optimistic’ about what the future holds, the realities of today’s tough business environment could leave them as sitting ducks, according to Rick Reidy, CEO at Progress Software. They might take consolation that they’re in the same pond, but when interest rates in Japan hit near-zero, banks continue to fail and mistakes can lead to a ‘flash crash’, the pond is not a safe place to be. Businesses may have money, but fear and uncertainty is holding back decision-making – we await further regulation and want to know the consequences of recent government changes.

 
Listening to Rick’s keynote at our UK business summit (#progresswsummit, if you want to follow on twitter), in the impressive surrounding of Chelsea Football Club’s ground, London, it seems most of the audience agrees – it’s not good enough to sit around and wait to see if growth returns, and you cannot grow simply by cutting costs. You have to take control of your own ‘growth agenda’, as Rick put it. Businesses that want to survive the next five years need better visibility, through putting processes in place that enable them to react quickly to meet customer demands, adapt to market changes and take advantage of new opportunities. As Rick has advised, businesses need to act on up to the minute information so that leaders can make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight.
 
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll already know that we call this ‘operational responsiveness’: the ability to sense and respond to customer and market changes so that organisations can move quickly to meet challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. 
 
Rick has talked about what this means in the airline industry: the notion of irregular operations has become a weekly reality as companies face intense market pressure, striking staff and disruption from natural phenomenon. ‘Swivel chair’ communication between operational areas is no longer good enough. To react quickly enough, they need responsive processes in place that can help them maintain services and inform customers, almost as-it-happens. If they don’t, they will face massive fines, lost custom and damaged reputation – risks no company can afford at present.
 
We’ll be hearing more from Gordon Penfold, CTO at British Airways, about their approach to becoming operationally responsive to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Watch this space for my take on his talk…

 

Stamford Bridge, here we come

Tomorrow sees Progress Software taking over Stamford Bridge, home ground to the world-famous Chelsea Football Club. We’re not just there to check out the players’ dressing rooms – we are being joined by James Caan, of Dragons' Den fame, as well as the great and the good of the UK business community, to discuss how businesses can start to make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight, in their operations.

Gordon Penfold, Chief Technology Officer at British Airways, will be sharing his insight on ‘operational foresight’, revealing how the organization has set itself up to better deal with the irregular operations that have become a fact of life in the last year. And Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, will be sharing his views on where the next wave of truly responsive business management is coming from, and which trends to watch for. And Progress' own Chief Executive Officer, Rick Reidy, will be giving a keynote too.

I'll be there, speaking in one session but also blogging and tweeting from the event. So watch this space for the latest updates.

For those of you attending, I look forward to seeing you there.

www.progresssoftwaresummit.com

 

Is Performance Part of SaaS SLA Negotiations? And IF NOT – should it be?

Application performance, that is. Over a year ago we brought in a new Content Management System (CMS). And even though we looked at more than six vendors, the decision was made to go with a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. I’m just a user of the application so I have no idea how they negotiated the contract but I assume that the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) took into account performance, customer service, AND application performance. I’m happy to let IT deal with customer service issues because being told that I might have to wait a month for a new feature is completely acceptable. I understand and accept that we probably have a set number of hours a month for support services. But what about the actual performance/response time of the application? Shouldn’t that be something that a SaaS provider cares about and monitors?

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t part of our negotiations because after 2pm EST, our CMS reminds me of those three-toed sloths I love watching on the animal planet. We’ve been complaining about it since we launched, but our SaaS provider has never come up with a solution. It was initially blamed on our network - IT made some tweaks, but that didn’t help. At one point our SaaS provider gave us a little test to run when we were experiencing slowness, which we did, but the problem was that we’d then be asked to do something else… To be honest, we (the users) aren’t jumping at the chance to break away from our work to help our vendor with application/network performance tests. Just fix it and make our lives better. Isn’t that what the promise of SaaS is all about?

Well our constant complaining finally paid off. A meeting was scheduled to talk ONLY about system performance issues. We were asked to provide a list of all the things that we did in the CMS that were “time” intensive, i.e. waiting for screens to pop. One of my team members put together a very comprehensive list—it was great because it said everything I would have wanted to say. I (nicknamed “Pamela Pill” as a child) decided to record my desktop as I worked in the CMS for 18 minutes. I actually didn’t think anyone would watch it, but they did. And what’s more, they loved it! Even the vendor thought it was great. Just by watching this video, they could clearly see two actions that we were performing that were processing very slowly. This is what we call BUSINESS INSIGHT here at Progress.

I think it’s great that our vendor may be able to troubleshoot and fix our problems but it took over a year of complaining and a video for them to believe that we were really suffering. My point isn’t to bash our SaaS provider or SaaS solutions in general, my point is to remind service providers to talk about application performance during the contract negotiations, and for the buyers of the service to ASK about it. With SaaS you may lose much of your reliance on your internal IT department, but they probably still should be held accountable for pipe and power. If the pipe is open and the power is on (which we determined it was), the problem lies someplace else. I think all SLAs should cover those problems, especially if they affect the service being delivered.

Did you notice my use of “I think”? For those familiar with SLAs, am I asking too much? Do you have any best-practices for people negotiating SaaS contracts or specifically the SLAs associated with a SaaS contract? Am I expecting too much?

Progress can’t help you negotiate your SLAs but we do enable SaaS providers to build, deploy, and manage SaaS offerings and we have the leading enterprise service bus (ESB) in the marketplace (Sonic ESB), that is exploited as part of the OpenEdge SaaS platform to address the process integration issues surrounding SaaS deployments. However, the one area that I think our CMS vendor missed out on is what we provide to our Progress-based SaaS providers to better monitor and manage SLA’s – that is Actional. Progress Actional provides the business visibility needed for SaaS and business service providers to guarantee service level management. Having that visibility into the business transactions and ensuring that application performance is meeting the needs of the USER… that is what we call Business Assurance – and what I think was missing in our SaaS providers offering. Hopefully it's not missing in yours… Learn more about SaaS Enablement and Business Transaction Assurance.

Provisioning Dimensions for the Cloud

At last Saturday's class for my Middleware Internals at IIIT-Hyderabad, I was introducing cloud computing and provisioning. Some basic questions came up - even computer science students from a Top-10 institution in the country have questions like "Isn't SaaS Cloud". What many miss is that Cloud Computing is more about virtualization-over-the-web and the enabling of mechanics such as integration and provisioning.

To this end (virtualization-over-the-web), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides the end users [i.e. the enterprise] value based views of a 'virtualized' application wherein all the operational and infrastructural aspects are managed by the service provider. Likewise PaaS provides the virtualized view of an application platform on which the end user can build a solution. Or with IaaS, where just the infrastructure/OS is virtualized over the web on which any solution can be installed and configured. The definition of cloud also varies based who you ask. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers will tell you that cloud is when you build applications on their platform. IaaS providers will tell you that if you use their infrastructure, then that is cloud. But I feel the real cloud is what the end enterprises see--a virtualized over-the-web application landscape in a combination of IaaS, PaaS & SaaS. It's a very heterogeneous environment that enables the IT solutions for the various business needs that the enterprise may have. This integrated infrastructure gets the best of breed with no constraints on technologies, platforms, payment models, and even physical location, while still enabling some common binding elements such as Web 2.0 enabled user interface, common administration approach, common integration approach and even provisioning capabilities across the various platforms in the cloud. 

Provisioning is also emerging as an important common aspect of cloud computing. It has emerged from something intrinsic to specific platforms such as Amazon EC2, and now to a more generic expectation across all cloud services.Though the dimensions and approaches to its realization may be different in different providers, a few key dimensions are hardware resources, application platforms or cross cutting dimensions like user provisioning or business service provisioning. Examples include specific resources like hardware (say 2 CPUs), OS (linux ver x.y), app platform (tomcat servlet engine), or an instance of a specific application. And more importantly non physical resources like provisioning a user (for example: enabling access to multiple systems/apps for a new employee).

Through 2010 I think we should be seeing more enabling abstractions, models and utilities for provisioning in the heterogeneous cloud computing environments.

Now That's a Real Forklift Upgrade

I have to admit... I don’t really know how our customers use OpenEdge. I do know there are a ton of customers - over 65,000. And, if that weren’t enough, there are over 1,500 partners too. What's more, many of them are in-production with SaaS offerings.

Damn, that’s a lot.

(If any analysts are reading... just think about the opportunity of selling Actional into that installed base even if we never got another “new logo” sale.)

This week’s press release follows on from several months of a beta period where about 20 or 30 OpenEdge customers tested the newly released Actional integration.

As TVH Forklift Parts realized, knowing what’s happening in their integrated infrastructure, and being able to assure a consistent level of service has tremendous value to a distributed and shared infrastructure.

Why is this important?

It’s about the business context. Without that context, solutions are just technology (we have good technology too… but that’s not enough).

That’s the difference between assurance and management. Assurance implies business-technology coordination to achieve a business result. Management implies your technical components are up and running. Big whoop. Just today I spent 2 hours on the phone with T-Mobile. All the technical components were up, but it still wasn’t working. I know you can relate.

Colleen points out that our partners are being viewed more and more as business partners, not just technology providers. Simply put, our partners need technology to understand the business impact of “events” within their infrastructure.

Understanding the business impact means that we (technology infrastructure providers) need to provide an awareness of the business context when problems occur. The only way to do that is to track business context all the time.

I’ve heard a few times recently of prospects who have a “competitive” solution in place to track business assurance… but when I probe, it seems they don’t run it all the time because (pick one):

1. It impacts performance of my applications. (it doesn’t scale)
2. It collects too much information. (it doesn’t scale)
3. It requires too much CPU on my app servers. (it doesn’t scale)

I don’t understand how people think a solution that doesn’t run all the time can do the job.

Let me rephrase.

If it’s not running all the time and collecting context of your business, how are you using the context of the business to make better run-time decisions?

Simply put, you’re not.

I’m glad to welcome TVH Forklift Parts to the Actional family. And, if you’re reading, thanks for sharing your story.

Holy Cloud! Thousands of Customers & Hundreds of Partners

At parties, I do everything I can to avoid talking about work. But, when forced, people eventually ask where I work. When I tell them Progress Software, it's usually followed by "No, we're actually a big public company that does more than databases."

I bet you didn't know we had thousands of SaaS customers in production using our products... Well we do!

And, by the way, it makes a great opportunity for each of those to use Actional for both cloud governance and inter-mediation for customer-specific policy and really flexible standards-based application layer security. If we never sold a new logo, we could still grow like weeds. Our tiny competitors are struggling to survive the recession after raising tons of money their investors will never see again, and we're in a position to thrive by delighting our existing customer base. Awesome.

And not only do we have thousands of customers, we have hundreds of partners adding vertical value to our software solutions.

That partner thing. It's big here.

Why does it work so well for us? Well, that's a huge thanks to the culture of collaboration here at Progress. Actually, it's more than that. It's like an open source attitude towards collaboration (even when we're creating commercial products). We listen, we adapt, and we learn.

We're a day away from the end of our fiscal year, and things are really crazy as you'd expect as we close our year end business. This has been a real transitional year for Progress and another successful year for Actional:

1. We've absorbed IONA and Mindreef, and rolled out new products around integrating those technologies with Actional.
2. We've received top recognition from Gartner and Forrester analysts, and Forrester even delivered a few use cases demonstrating hard ROI numbers around Actional deployments at our production customers in finance and telco.
3. We've delivered another major release update, demonstrating Actional's capabilities well beyond traditional web-services based SOA by integrating Progress OpenEdge, SAP ABAP, IONA Orbix IIOP, Spring, and Microsoft BizTalk orchestration support.
4. We've weathered a very bad economy, and we're quite well positioned for a very strong 2010 with our top-selling Business Transaction Assurance offering.

Why on-premise SOA cannot offer cloud pricing

David Linthicum suggests that SOA infrastructure vendors must switch to a cloud pricing model and get paid only on delivering value, further taunting the vendors to put their money behind their products. Interesting proposition... But I don't believe it will work. And the comparison to cloud or SaaS may not even be valid. For SaaS, its easy to identify the value delivered - as that of a business solution being made available as a service. For cloud, the SLAs are at the platform level and can only ensure availability - they cannot ensure business value. On-premise SOA is even worse because the operating platform is not even in the SOA vendors control, so guaranteeing even the availability at the same level as cloud is not even possible. At best the vendor can assure that the SOA platform will not fail, but they definitely cannot guarantee against failure from the hardware, OS or other layers in the solution stack that reside with or on the on-premise SOA.

The business value that David refers to is way beyond just platform availability, and that surely cannot be assured by any single component in the overall solution stack - unlike in the SaaS model where the SaaS provider controls the complete solution stack and can provide the guarantees.

NYC Cloud Computing Expo Preparation Almost Done

Well, we're just a few days away and preparation is winding down. We've got an article written and ready to go, and I've got my presentation mostly complete and just need to work on layout, notes and review. Sounds like I'm almost done... just hope I don't get sidetracked by some fire drill.

The media alert went out today and it got me thinking that it might be interesting to share the creative process.

Personally, I don't get nervous with public speaking. It doesn't mean I always do well, its just that I quite enjoy the opportunity to get in front of a crowd of strangers full of adoration for the gems spewing from my mouth. In fact, I tend to not "rehearse" for presentations as much as "immerse" myself in the content and visualize how it will go, the thoughts I'd have, the questions that might come up, and feed that back into the presentation in a way that makes it more robust.

This presentation started with work on a white paper I began working on about two months ago. It was a bit of a free form set of ideas I have about cloud computing. I had only the guideline of my submission - The Impact of Cloud Computing on Enterprise Architecture - and I ended up with content in four areas:

1. The difficulties of enterprise integration
2. The corporate challenges of enterprise software
3. A definition of cloud computing
4. Some best practices

The level that I speak at is relatively high, and I worry that it's not enough detail for people. I guess we'll see on Monday.

It took me a week of writing, with some interruptions I'm sure, to get down about 3,000 words on paper. That's about 3 1/12 pages of writing, and it was handed over the PR team for editing.

It may be totally behind the scenes but the people that have edited my stuff in the past, this time included, do wonderful work. It's always important to double check the content and the meaning, and to make sure that the important points stayed, but they really tighten it up and focus it down.

They turned my 3,000 words into 1,120. The final piece has just 20 additional words, though I had to do about a day of editing to bring some of the meaning back, and highlight some points that were lost originally. It'll be posted on Monday so keep an eye out for it. As always, let me know what you think.

I had been thinking about this cloud stuff for some time, and tweeting ideas to see how people would respond. I've also been vigorously reading the tweets and blogs of others to get a sense for where the conversation is. Hopefully, my presentation on Monday adds something to the conversation, in a way that constructively builds on what others are saying.

The difficulty with creating the presentation, of course, is that I didn't just want to put the paper in presentation form.

That would be boring. (Boring is bad.)

I came across a presentation titled "Charts are Cheap" by Major Dan Ward (who unfortunately, didn't include a link to his blog in his presentation, so I can't link you to him!). The idea was 1/2 - 1 idea per slide/chart. Simplify and people will understand more.

So, I'm trying something new with my presentation. It's really lightweight and a lot of what I'll say is not written on the slides. It is, mostly, written in the paper. And, what's not, would be great to discuss online after the event.

Part of the reason to do something different is my "middle of the night" speaking slot. And, I believe I'm also last for the day, so anyone that does come, and stays awake, has me between them and the bar. Not an enviable position.

Though, if they need a drink after my presentation, I believe Mike is organizing a Tweetup at ESPN Zone in Times Square after. Hope to see you there.

This Should Make It Obvious to Anyone

Looking at things from the perspective of how software is evaluated and brought into the enterprise, it's no wonder cloud computing is dramatically changing the landscape. Combine that with the trend of software vendors looking to compliance to shore up revenues, and customers pushing back to reduce their software maintenance costs, and I think we're in for some interesting changes in selling software over the next couple of years*.

In any case, I thought it would be interesting to put together a quick list of how software is piloted in a "traditional" purchase cycle, and how it might be piloted if "purchased" from a cloud.

So, assume a thorough selection process has been completed on a product and its alternatives (I don't think we do that well today either... I think it's too feature-focused and we're not nearly evaluating the "right" things), and we're talking about getting the first small set of people up and running on the selected solution.

Traditional Software Purchase

1. Software is purchased.
2. Hardware is purchased.
3. Space is found in data centers for the production kit.
4. A plan is created for moving into production, often a lengthy process inserted around specific rules/restrictions for changing production systems.
5. Development and test environments are setup.
6. Computer room space is found for the permanent location of the development and test kit.
7. Any databases required to support the application are purchased and configured, including hardware if necessary.
8. Administrative and security staff support is required to configure all this new equipment to company standards, backup procedures, and security policies.

Cloudly Purchased Software

1. Get a login.

Even people who don't know anything about software should be able to figure out which is easier. And, while I shouldn't need to ask, but, how much longer do you think the first process takes than the second from the time a decision is made?

If you want to follow the doings of a new startup taking advantage of just this difference, follow Mike on Twitter. He's starting a new company and taking full advantage of open source and clouds to have some incredible infrastructure and development cost metrics - actually showing through his own experience what can be achieved.

Want to hear more? Remember, I'm speaking at the NY Cloud Computing Expo later this month.

* "Ray" Wang has been tweeting and blogging about this topic quite a bit. I find it very interesting to follow.

Cloud Computing... It Depends on Who You Ask

What exactly is cloud computing? Lately, this is one of the most often repeated question in any discussion about the Cloud. And the answer depends on who you ask! (Personally, I think that if there are not at least three different popular definitions of a new technology, then the technology is not in its "hype" phase of the hype cycle :-) ).

Cloud is often confused to be just one of:

• Utility Computing - The on-demand resources with dynamic provision offered by virtualization platforms such as VMware, EC2 etc.
• Grid computing - Loosely coupled discreet computing nodes, that come together to form a larger computing-grid.
• SaaS - Just the notion of a software abstracted on the web is cloud to some.
• PaaS - To some, cloud is if one were to "build" the solution and then deploy it on a virtualized platform on the web.
• User centric cloud - RIA desktops that provide seamless and integrated access to information and services on the web, while still retaining a "sane" visual front to the user.
• Even Wikipedia defines it as: The majority of cloud computing infrastructure as of 2009 consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built on servers with different levels of virtualizationtechnologies. The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers.
• And, I am sure there are more!

Syscon attempted to reconcile the definitions by getting no less than twenty one (!!) industry experts to define cloud. Their definitions had wide ranging defining attributes: elastic, virtualized, services over the web, multi-tenanted, pay-as-you-use, massively scalable technology enabled services, SaaS is the consumer-face of cloud computing, distributed utility grid (wow!), on-demand resources with APIs, and more!

What I see missing though is the end enterprise view. It is this view that brings all of the above (and more) together. As I see it, this is "cloud computing". A fairly abstract IT enterprise landscape. Where the biz requirement is real—with its solution made available over the web, with simple web based user access, with guaranteed SLAs on service availability and performance, with seamless integration to other information sources/services over the landscape. The exact location, platform, configuration, size and such are all abstracted from the enterprise by the solution provider. Further, the solution provider also takes care of maintaining the application (enhancements/bug fixes), managing the production environment, and managing any backend integration requirements that the client-enterprise may have - offering a complete "managed service". The enterprise needs to focus just on the biz at hand, and in defining the IT solution that is needed. The solution-service providers takes care of the rest. All of them coming together to form the enterprise "cloud" - accessed over the web, managed over the web and probably even orchestrated over the web.

The enterprise Cloud will also evolve over time. When there is just one ISV making a solution available in the above managed model, that is SaaS. If the same ISV also "builds" it on the web before making it available on the web, then that is PaaS. If the ISV just uses storage on the web, then that is cloud storage. If the same solution is deployed within the enterprise network on a virtualized platform such as VMware, then that is virtualization. If the solution is distributed across discreet computing "nodes" on the web, then that will be the computing grids. Now fast-forward a few years... If the IT landscape in an enterprise architecture is a combination of all of the above types of solution environments, then there is an opportunity for a loose "biz grid" that can bring all of these together, which in many ways is already prevalent today - the SOA infrastructure! SOA is all about discreet services that are location agnostic, with standards based description and easy access. Today's SOA environments are very very vendor dependent (that is assuming the emphasis is on the reliability and performance). Soon we may see this a reality. A vendor neutral SOA environment that will bring together all the disparate IT solutions in the enterprise, both within and on the cloud. Likewise, Web 2.0 will define the user experience that brings all of the same solutions in a seamless integrated and very-functional UI.

Below is a visual of what I'm thinking... use Comments to let me know what you think.

Convergence of SaaS, Cloud and SOA - Use Case

Was at the HeadStart (innovation showcase) and Compute (ACM Bangalore chapter) co-event this weekend at Bangalore. Was chairing the panel discussion on "Delivering SaaS from the Clouds". The panel included the Founder/CEO of Computational research Labs (part of TATA goup), Head of Cisco/Webex in India (they have a large dev center and equally large India sales ops), Lead Architect at Honeywell, and the Head of the RIA tools development at Adobe. There were an interesting mix of perspectives ranging from the glue and access paradigms from the fringes of the cloud (as in the RIA & webex rich desktops), to hard core grid paradigms and application/service abstractions on the cloud (bright by CRL), to cloud backends (CRL and Webex) and the usage perspective brought on by Honeywell exploring cloud for many of its field initiatives. We also had great discussions ranging from the market opportunities that each one sees to their take on the solution architectures and to the cloud trends that we can expect in 2009.

In particular, I found two aspects very interesting:

1. Build-on-desktop or Build-on-cloud? Unlike the more popular expectations of using the cloud to "host" applications that are built on desktops and 'uploaded' to the clouds to be accessed from browsers, there are also models (in industrial automation) where the application is built on the cloud and 'downloaded' to the devices. Essentially, they are engineered on cloud and downloaded to the devices in the enterprise - examples include energy audits and automation optimizations.
2. The serious production use cases are still elusive. Most people dabbling in cloud are still experimenting and playing around with it. Serious use models are yet to evolve. I believe that this is probably a manifestation of the hype curve. Hopefully the dust will settle down and serious usage emerges in 2009.

Talking about use cases, I came across another interesting use case in the same week. This is in the Governance risk and Compliance (GRC) space. Here the value proposition seen from the cloud is unique—beyond just SaaS. In terms of the agility and the arms-length distance:

The GRC space is extremely regulation driven. And is bound to change often. Today the model for implementing GRC is to "build it in" the existing operational solutions, which we all know is cumbersome and extremely difficult to manage changes. Given this, the proposition from this  company was unique. This company that specializes in governance and consults in best practices, has evolved a "canned" GRC model, and is offering the same as SaaS on the cloud. The compelling case to the clients is that this implicitly allows an arms-length distance between operational systems, easy verifiability of the GRC rules in effect, and is also able to easily modify the GRC rules as they evolve and change. The nature of this scenario is implicitly that of convergence. The value prop is SaaS - the runtime is the cloud and the solution involves extensive access to data and services in the enterprise which is best done using an SOA infrastructure.

Come to think of it, cloud in the enterprise will be deeply entwined with SOA. We are not talking about simple utilities like rate calculators or converters. If serious enterprise solutions are made available on the cloud by 3rd parties, these will always involve access to other enterprise information and services running either in the Intranet or possibly elsewhere in the web-cloud as well. So far, any SaaS solution provides for custom APIs to enable this integration. As the more generic cloud platform evolves, it becomes a question of time and the standards and generic approaches to integrate the enterprise into the cloud will emerge.

This will be yet another space to watch in 2009, even as we already are tracking aspects such as cloud performance, and the cloud monitoring and management (an extension of the SOA Management problem that Progress Software already solves very well with Actional).

Do we really need this complexity?

My first post on the Progress SOA Blog! This gives me jitters... All the writing till now was somehow different. There was a carefree attitude to that writing. When I wrote my book (nearly 40% of the book on SOA approach to Integration), or when I write my personal blog posts, I never had to worry about the impact. Now as informal as this may be, at the end of the day it does have a non-personal tone. Even so, I am excited about this. :-)

My views essentially are reflections on the software services and SI ecosystem and what/how they use technologies in the integration solutions space. Lately, I have been also quite caught by the SaaS/PaaS promise in the SOA context - even if I am quite skeptical about the hyped up value.

Recently, I was speaking on this topic at the IndicThreads conference on Java at Pune. I included a slide on the complexity of SOA. While in my flow I was using it to talk about some of the SOA enablers in our SOA portfolio in simplifying this complexity, the presentation and some following questions triggered a thought... How much of this does the industry actually need? Aren’t these more of a fringe scenario that needs all of this? Isn’t the REST vs. SOAP argument a good case in point? 80+% of the world needs only basic remote service mechanism. While REST more than suffices here, this basic need from the world is but just a small part of SOAP! So, who needs the rest?

The simplicity of REST is stark - at least when compared to the extremely unwieldy SOAP and its numerous accompanying specifications. And it is further compounded by all the WS* standards. Making things worse are frameworks for frameworks such as WS-Policy. WS-policy is a framework that layers on SOAP. And there are other standards that use WS-Policy as the basis for definition. In effect, we have XML over HTTP, on which is defined the SOAP standard, on SOA is the WS-Policy. And on WS-Policy are standards such as WS-S & WS-T. Phew!

Now compare this with REST - that actually has no other specification other than HTTP itself! Granted, this seriously limits what we can do with REST. But lets accept it - the world needs mostly ONLY the likes of just REST and only a very small fraction needs the multiple layers of specifications such as SOAP! Even in the SOAP land this is very well captured in how AXIS evolved - trying to keep pace with the rather haphazard offshoots of SOAP. And now there is CXF whose basic premise is to simplify SOAP and Web Services. From the word go, it has embraced the simplicity and is also trying to be more about services and less about SOAP. In the spirit of the latter, CXF also supports REST right off the bat.

I see 2009 as year where this simplicity is bound to get consolidated. The more simpler and easier the SOA framework becomes, the more it will get accepted. FUSE open sources SOA framework will be one very serious contender in this space. Functionally as complete as any other SOA solution, yet lean and mean with a good set of tools. Watch out for more in the months to come.

All Hail the SaaS Revolution!

Been thinking a lot about Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS) this week, and as it turns out, so have a few others!

Dave Linthicum posted recently that for the "last year we've been in a silent revolution around the use of APIs/services," while Mel Greer (Lockheed Martin's Chief SOA Architect) says the SaaS model is still an "impending challenge." Past or present aside...

Mel outlines the challenges companies will face by "as a service models" and includes:

• the need for SLA's,
• real time monitoring,
• end-to-end testing,
• new pricing models, and
• a rethink on "service usability."

Mel, if you're reading, when do we not have these problems?!

Though the word is way overused, Mel is really suggesting that we'll need a way to govern the "as-a-service" business model. In fact, it's a popular topic this week. A blogger over at Patni had a long post with a gem in the middle... a governance outline (that I don't fully agree with) for SaaS. I presume this governance model would need a way to measure and police the following five elements of the SaaS scenario:

1. Strategic Alignment
2. Risk Management
3. Performance Management
4. Resource Management
5. Value Delivery

SOA What? Let's think together for a second. Dave's right. There're are a ton of services out there. The Amazon web services are really cool, and people are being really creative with solutions being brought to market around them. Mel's right too. SaaS models are in their infancy, and if they're to really grow and achieve their potential, there are a lot of challenges ahead of us. Why not think about a SaaS governance model that could be used to make SaaS deployment more successful?

Does SaaS impart any requirements that differ from other "services" models? How would you approach figuring out your requirements and evaluating solutions that depend upon SaaS offerings? Do you think that SaaS adds a separate flavor to governance, or is it just same-old with how you operate your services and work with your providers today?

I believe SaaS does add separate requirements. Though, I'd look at the SaaS space from two different perspectives; that of the SaaS provider, and that of the SaaS consumer.

Providers have the following concerns:

• Security: Consumers will have security requirements, but providers will have the more complicated requirement of meeting the security demands particular to each customer, without code changes each time.
• Knowledge: Providers need to know what's happening when a customer calls with a problem so that they can be specific and inspire confidence. Without specifics, vendors are just perceived as finger-pointing even when they're right! (This is one of my favorite customers stories to talk about.)
• Use the SLA as a competitive differentiator: If providers can accommodate their customers' business model better than a competitor, and can accommodate change/expanding models, they'll be a step ahead of the game.

Consumers have similar, but different requirements beyond the obvious:

• SLA's that matter; Availability, for example, is important. Uptime, not really. SLA's should be based upon metrics that matter (and are measurable!).
• Agility, (it's why they're using SaaS); As new features are deployed, it's important for SaaS consumers to be able to on-ramp their applications easily/quickly to take advantage of new features. Conversely, consumers need to be protected from change forced upon them by their service providers.
• Low switching costs; Should a consumer need to change vendors it shouldn't break everything. At the same time, this feature can actually be extended to transparently combining SaaS vendors in the infrastructure so that applications don't know/care which provider is used, and decisions can be made that best serve the business, not the developer.

I'm curious to know what you all think about these requirements, and if these are among the things that are top of mind. I'm curious to know what real-world experiences people have with SaaS from a corporate perspective. I'll tell you, mine are limited to salesforce.com, and they're not very good. Rephrase - they're not what I would want were I a CIO delivering solutions to my users.

Here's a quick SaaS factoid: Did you know that Progress Software has 150 SaaS application providers delivering over 500 SaaS based products to the market today?

A Problem Common to SaaS and SOA

I read a blog posting from the other day by a frustrated software as a service (SaaS) vendor venting that:

• They need rapid release cycles... but,
• They can't find all issues in their pre-production environments

For example, the author said "There are multiple points of failure and I can’t seem to think of how we could avoid these types of issues going forward."

Welcome to the world of running a service.  Whether the service is SaaS, a service you provide inside your organization (e.g. a SOA service), or a traditional business service (e.g. like those provided by Reuters, Bloomberg, and Thomson), the issues are the same: You can never anticipate all the ways your consumers will use the services in advance.  This means the risk of consumers experiencing problems is much higher than in other situations.

It also means you can't operate in a "let's get it right, ship it, and go on to the next project" traditional development-shop mentality.  You need to think about solving the problem in a fundamentally different way.

The first step to addressing this problem is being able to insulate consumers from one another (even when they use the same instances of your service).  The most important thing is to ensure that the actions of one consumer can't cause problems for another consumer.  For example, if a consumer goes into an endless loop making requests of your service, you need to ensure this doesn't impact your other consumers (for example, using infrastructure to implement request throttling controls).  Basically you're controlling the ripple effect.

Once you've figured out how to insulate consumers from each other, you can now think about "onboarding" each consumer as a separate project (even though you are in production your consumers aren't).  What assistance do you need to provide to them so they can successfully complete the project of going live with your infrastructure?  If, for example, they use REST or SOAP services you provide, how do you help them to ensure that they are using them correctly and appropriately?

Thirdly (and really this is just an optimization of the past point): How do you empower your consumers to do this for you (so you don't have to do all the work of making them successful).  You'll never be able to fully avoid the responsibility of "owning" consumer satisfaction (and fixing it if it's bad) - but you can put measures in-place so that your consumers can be more successful with less effort.  This can be as simple as providing much better documentation, samples, and tutorials - all the way to providing an interactive environment for the consumer to explore how to best use your service.

Polymorphic SOA

There's lots of industry noise about Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the expected benefits, but in many cases SOA is an implementation of procedural programming that may be implemented in Object Oriented (OO) technologies such as Java or .NET. That said, I cannot really see anything OO in a basic BPEL or Web Service implementation; have we all forgotten that OO was promising the benefits of reuse, etc., as well? What if we could improve our SOAs by implementing the OO paradigm in them and using techniques such as polymorphism?

What would a polymorphic service be in SOA? And more importantly, what would be the advantages? One of the most common tasks that occurs in any SOA project is the ability to transform data, e.g. convert a document from one format to another, for which many technologies are currently used, such as XSLT and java binding technologies like Castor and XML Beans (to name a few). While each of these technologies provide the ability to transform one document to another, they do not provide the ability to dynamically implement transforms without further hand coding.

Now what is a polymorphic transformation going to actually implement? Well, unlike an object model, I have no base implementation that I can derive from and no guarantee that my transforms are going to execute in a single environment. And what I don't want to do is deploy a specific XSLT wherever a transformation is required because if the format or the data in the input document changes for some unforeseen reason, then the XSLT is essentially invalid. Therefore, the service that I want to deploy will take in any document and transform it into the target type without having to understand how it is implemented, and if for some reason the transformation service cannot convert the inbound target, then an exception is thrown.

Now I am sure that some of you may see this as being a good idea, but what are the benefits of this? If one of the significant costs of a SOA is the time and money of transformation, being able to insert a single polymorphic transformation service in multiple places could severely reduce TCO of any implementation and reduce the number of errors; how many developers do you have working on essentially the same transformation? For a more tangible example, in the world of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), what if adding a new partner was no harder than ensuring the partner’s request document can be managed by the OO transformation service. Suddenly the ability to get a return on investment on smaller traffic customers who are making money on fractions of a penny per transaction allows a new market to be tapped.

Is this possible today? Absolutely. Products such as DataXtend SI provide this polymorphic transform services, especially when coupled with ESBs that do not have to be strongly typed.

SOA What? Developers can spend more time developing business logic and less time writing complex transformations, which I am sure they like. But also your SOA infrastructure becomes more agile, allowing you to react to customer and market demands. And if your looking into SaaS to provide the ability to make money on smaller customers, imagine the benefits if all the points of mediation were polymorphic?

The Future of Customer Service: "Our systems have failed, how does that make you feel?"

Breaking a bit of tradition… there is a funny story in here but not until after I let you into my head for a second. Now, don’t be scared.

I've recently been doing some research on social computing. I'm not even close to being a "visionary" - that's Dan and Hub's job - so maybe I'm stuck in the myopic world of SOA. But when I hear web services, I think integration/SOA, but as I read more and more, it seems I'm in the minority. Most people hear web services and think Facebook, Twitter and a host of other things that are seemingly more about social computing than web services. Perhaps they are converging? I think I like that idea…

I [personally] care about businesses using technology in a way that takes the 'technology factor' out of it. It enrages me when I ask a question and the answer is phrased in terms of the technology used to solve the problem.

I recently had a rather humorous conversation with Continental -- I encountered a problem related to manipulating a reservation on their website. It was a (polite) 20 minute conversation where I insisted it was a reservation problem while she insisted it was a website problem. Why did it matter? Because she could help me with a reservation problem but not a web problem - even if the reservation was made via the web. I enjoyed the semantic disagreement because I knew that under the covers somewhere there was an IT vocabulary driving the interaction. (Totally aside, in the end, it turned out she could help me... she put me on hold, called the online department, and then came back online and said, "they are aware of the issue, try again in three weeks." Yes, I wish I was kidding.)