Situational Applications and Agilization

I was delighted to have the opportunity to interview Nick and Andrew Lawrie of Encanvas. Here's the interview.

The new 2.0 release of encanvas 07 ships in February and includes a host of new features. Ian Tomlin investigates how encanvas is stepping up its technology lead in enterprise situational applications software in the face of a growing pack of enterprise mashup and situational application software vendors.

Long before people were talking about enterprise 2.0 and mashups the problem of enabling information workers to access and use information in ways that made sense to them existed. And before the hype-cycle of mashups started to rear its head in the United States, people around the world were working on practical solutions that would help to break down operating silos within corporations, make them more agile and finally give information workers the tools to serve themselves and become more productive. What has happened over the past 18 months is that the IT sector has begun to wake up to the idea that there are better ways of working, and that those methods, in the not too distant future, will forever change the operating environment of the office worker. This awakening has placed a convex lens over the technology market which to some extent brings a greater focus on the subject but in other ways creates distortions on the real world picture. And within this mix of hype, blogs filled with a heady mix of impressive marketing slogans and a wheel barrow of new technology acronyms that we all now have to get used to, there is encanvas, one of the first technology answers to appear on the market and still one of the very few with proven corporate success stories evidencing a compelling ROI.

The new release of Encanvas (07.2) to be released in February 08 builds on the corporate robustness that has led to major corporations adopting the technology as a method of solving their strategic priorities – achieving compliance, finding cashable efficiency savings, sharing information with stakeholders, identifying weak signals of market change, leveraging emerging value networks, exploiting their global talent pools and monitoring their competitive threats.

The ethos of Encanvas has always been to simplify the creation of situational applications - applications for small groups of users with specific needs that will typically have a short life span, and are often created within the group where they are used, sometimes by the users themselves, This is achieved by removing ‘coding’ from the process of formalizing information flows that bind peer-to-peer communities with their value networks, and information workers to their objectives and sources of information. Providing a single code-free integrated development environment means that both project sponsor and analyst can work across the desk and fundamentally understand every aspect of the application being created. The result? A workspace that brings people together to work in a way that is better controlled, more efficient and benefits each of the stakeholders without compromising on corporate robustness, scalability, security and performance.

What has made this simplicity of use possible has been the development of a strong library of pre-built building blocks (that Encanvas call ‘design objects’) so that users can point-and-click to create new situational applications combining user interface and portal design, business logic, data management and output. In the latest release, most of the core design objects including those used for e-forms, enterprise search, business intelligence, reporting, charting, geospatial capture, analysis and visualization have been upgraded or enriched to improve usability and dexterity.

The new version of Encanvas provides a richer set of tools for enterprise integration with drag-and-drop formation of data feeds from all sources; providing most of the capabilities you would expect from a heavyweight Enterprise Integration Application (EAI) environment. Andrew Lawrie, Encanvas’s CTO says, “We’re not trying to push the product into the SOA market but our clients have made it clear that they want more integration options. Whether it’s linking to legacy systems or bridging across RSS feeds, document repositories and intranets, they want to be able to painlessly gather data from anywhere and, within the applications, they build they might want to create new databases, temporary data marts or simply use web services to put an agile layer over their existing databases. The new release of Encanvas gives our clients this. It also enables developers to add more sophisticated Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tools than we offer as standard out-of-the-box.”

Another key feature of the new release is the introduction of asynchronous communications and the possibility of showing third parties presentations and applications over the internet via a standard web browser without needing downloads or plug-ins. COO Nick Lawrie says, “It’s been on our agenda for some time to move the core platform of encanvas into the realm of a collaborative workspace environment to facilitate remote working. There are many situations that demand collaboration and the shared use of information today that are poorly served by desktop sharing tools that are demanding on platform resources. Encanvas has always been about ZERO download, INSTANT on and with our asynchronous capabilities we’re still honoring that. We’re expecting our partners in 2008 to exploit these new features to support situational applications for remote project meetings, remote software development, remote training and remote applications support.”

But with recent announcements by IBM, Cordys, JackBe, Composite Software and Serena, how can Encanvas hope to maintain its leadership in the Situational Applications arena. Nick Lawrie is confident that his team has the answer, “We created Encanvas from the ground up with a specific vision of how situational applications would bring a compelling competitive advantage to corporations in the next decade. We’re still only part of the way down that journey and our time has been spent making sure the technology is corporate ready. That’s what our case studies show – our ability to compete on level terms with best of breed players in areas like geo-spatial information management, knowledge management and enterprise integration. Whilst we’re beginning to see early seeds of some useful tools, we’re a long way off from the BIG corporate solution. We believe that the core technology architecture of encanvas is fundamentally different to our competitive peers, and fundamentally correct. It would be too difficult for software houses that have invested millions of dollars on mashup enabling technologies to turn their ship around and rebuild their core engines to deliver the seamlessly integrated platform that we expect to have completed by Fall 2009.”

Ian Tomlin is a director of NDMC Consulting and author of the book 'Agilization - The Regeneration of Competitiveness'. A regular speaker and presenter on technology matters, he advises major corporations in Europe on new technology trends and market behaviors.