Last week I spent a lot of time going over case stories around application platform, trying to crystallize drivers and benefits. Yesterday came up a very related question at the ebizQ Web 2.0 Forum (www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2009/05), in which I am a regular commentator: In What Area of an Enterprise is Web 2.0 Most Underutilized?. Here’s my comment on that.
While collaboration at large (including wikis, blogs and networking) is probably the most widespread Web 2.0 practice to penetrate the enterprise, I find that Enterprise 2.0 applications and UI’s are the most underutilized. That is understandable, since it is in that area that enterprises have extensive investments and legacies, and changing and evolving applications is complex and expensive. Yet, that is probably the area that will have a very significant business impact. We start to see the first implementations, which are indeed delivering the expected benefits. Here’s a recent example I came across – a project which I think is pretty representative of Enterprise 2.0 applications – in the general context of Web 2.0 and “millennial” lifestyle.
The enterprise at the heart of this story produces an innovative “millennial” outdoors consumer product, which is taking its time penetrating the market. In order to accelerate the penetration, they decided to accompany the web and viral marketing campaigns with group events, in which they let groups experience the product. That required their channel partners to organize such events, publish details, register participants, and handle the logistics. The solution had to deal with a combination of requirements that are usually handled by distinct software product – Content Management, Process Management, Procurement, Accounting, Resource Allocation and more. The business case did not justify a long and expensive project and the acquisition and integration of several systems, and this was well beyond the scope of Situational Applications. so the CIO saw here an opportunity to use one of the new platforms that claim agile development and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. The objective was to provide the various functions in a “cloud” manner, from a single location and a single application to partners and visitors wherever they are. The specification described a Rich Internet Application for the use of the channel partners and implementers, and a dynamic web portal to promote the events and handle registration. Using one of the new RIA platforms (Magic Software’s uniPaaS in this case), they were able to address in one project the varied user personas and use cases, with the appropriate mix of Browser based interaction for visitors and rich interactive clients for power users – all part of a single application. Moreover, given the pure Web Architecture, the entire deployment is in a single data center and no local installation is required. It enables to on-board new partners and scale up the channel with practically no IT hassle – a truly agile operation.
I think that one of the reasons for the slow adoption is also the scarcity of appropriate application infrastructure. But it is probably only a matter of time before this would change.
Dark Clouds, SOA Obituaries, and how many angels can dance on the tip of a pin
McKinzey published a few days ago a report on Cloud Computing, trying to pin down the definition of Cloud Computing and highlight its economics, in particular when comparing holistic approaches – the cost of an on-premise data center (hardware and infrastructure, if I understood correctly) compared to the cost of the same facility in the Cloud (Amazon in this case). One of their conclusion is that above a certain size, Cloud is more expensive than On-premise.
Last January, Anne Thomas Manes published her famous blog post titled “SOA Is Dead”, claiming that most SOA projects failed to deliver the promised benefits or worse. Unlike McKinzey, she did not go into a lengthy discussion of defining SOA, but the title was enough to unleash a storm in our industry.
The question I ask myself and others is how much of the commotion is for internal consumption of the experts, and how much of it really matters to those who consume the stuff and end up footing the bill.
I do not know personally IT professionals who conducted a SOA project in order to implement a SOA. I do know people who chose to use SOA principles and applied them going forward, sometimes having to retrofit and sometimes transforming, taking advantage of the service orientation and cleaner design. So what’s in the statement “SOA Is Dead” beyond provocative semantics and a great opportunity for industry experts to express themselves?
Now comes the “dark cloud” commotion, with a very similar effect. I would be very surprised if a large company would simply go along with the generic McKinsey report and use it for decision making without a serious subjective evaluation.
My point? Let’s not waste energy on debating theology, and use that to make concepts more understandable and share experience and best practices.
→ 1 Comment
Posted in Opinions & Comments
Tagged Cloud, Cloud Computing, SOA