What's in store for Enterprise Mashups in 2010?

Enterprise Mashups are the big topic for 2010 as organizations seek to harness their SOA investments and get their apps on the cloud. A report by Business Insights suggests the Enterprise Mashups software market was worth around $161m in 2008, and is forecast to grow to $1.74bn by 2013. So what can we expect from Enterprise Mashup platforms in 2010?

In 2009, Enterprise Mashup platforms designed for business started to make inroads into corporate IT thinking by providing a coherent way of bringing together web services, RSS, twitters, maps and other sources of data together in secure enterprise portals. they're quickly becoming the preferred consumption layer of information served from business applications in the form of web services and now there are more than enough case stories to show how scalable and robust the technology is. 'Enterprise mashups = software that's ideal for consuming web services. Great. So what's next?' you ask.

Here I've summarized my top 6 list of the key innovations in Enterprise Mashup platforms you can expect to hit the market in 2010. These are the capabilities that are likely to separate the 'men from the boys' in this fast maturing enterprise software market.

1. Advanced Security Architectures (Inclusive + User Activity Monitoring)
2010 is the year of inclusive security as firms move away from protecting data silos to protecting data itself. It's no longer possible for organizations to protect their operations by hiding behind a firewall. In an era of business social networking, mobility and collaboration, security has become a more sophisticated challenge and governing data has to become the responsibility of the line of business managers. Enterprise Mashup Platforms are now being equipped with capabilities to track user behaviors to ensure that the usage of every data item can be traced from its source via the consumption portal to each individual user (See 'Encanvas Ring-of-Steel' for an example).

2. Cloud Deployment
The migration from running in-house servers to operating IT systems on a cloud computing platform is now well underway in most industry sectors. IT analysts IDC suggest that up to 1/3 of new IT spend will be on cloud computing technologies by 2013. Whilst we haven't seen large ERP migrations (yet) the future of computing will be in the cloud before we know it.

3. Advanced Analytics
A year ago when you said the words 'Business Intelligence' people thought about dashboards. Of course, dashboards are a great way to expose a single page view of what;s going on in a business or process to expose insights that would otherwise remain hidden in spreadsheets and databases. A decade before, business intelligence meant you were talking about 'OLAP cubes' and the ability to create views of enterprise data that was held in disparate systems, decision makers needed to frequently refer to. But the advent of Enterprise Mashup Portals means that today it's not difficult to harvest data from disparate systems from across the enterprise and create custom dashboards and reports (although many vendors do continue to ignore the important role that printed output has to play in disseminating information!). As we've been heading towards 2010 I've seen a transition in buyer expectations away from 'static business intelligence' that offers up preset views of data, towards a more fluid and proactive form of business intelligence. This new generation of business intelligence platform is about moving away from spreadsheet systems towards portal deployed applications that give users the ability to serve themselves with the insights they need. That means features that provide users with the tools to create 'what if?' scenarios have to be available and easy to configure, and data visualization tools need to exist that enable users to define their own maps, visualization structures and data plotting grids without needing to be mathematicians, programmers or scripters. MiddleApps like Encanvas VisualPlot due for release in 2010 provide this level of functionality out of the box and I'm sure that we've only just started on a long journey of user empowerment for business intelligence mashups.

4. Collaborative Social Networking
Business social working is becoming better understood but we have yet to see a clear market leader in this space. I expect this is because the mix of features required for business have yet to materialize in the same product or platform. It's going to be interesting in 2010 to see how businesses react to Encanvas Secure&Live's social office technology that provides a white label environment for creating secure live collaborative environments. I expect that most Enterprise mashup platforms will have integrated with (or will have built their own) business social networking tools by the end of 2010.

5. Applications Stores (AppStores)
The reuse of mashup applications has always been a contentious issue but platforms like Google and Apple's iPhone are showing how effective AppStores are to access and reuse applications. In 2010 we're going to see many organizations looking to build their own AppStores powered by Enterprise Mashup applications.

6. Collective Intelligence
The blend of collaborative social networking and Enterprise Mashup technologies starts to build a coherent information management architecture for the enterprise that is by its very make-up agile, scalable, secure and extensible. It means that 'the system' will be able to interpret who speaks to who, what content they share, the groups individuals belong to, the problems they encounter, the opinions they express, the projects they contribute to, what their colleagues think of them, and all of this information will help systems to filter out for individuals the subject matter information and relationships that matter most. I expect we won't see collective intelligence solutions emerge until late in 2010 but the first few early seeds of examples will no doubt be in place by the end of the year.

So there we have it. The list of new capabilities you can expect from Enterprise Mashup platforms in 2010. If the product you're considering doesn't meet these capabilities then it makes sense to examine some more options.

Gartner top 10 predictions for 2010

So Gartner's top 10 predictions are out for 2010 and it's a very different picture to last year. Nevertheless, it's always interesting to see what the world's leading IT analysts think is going to happen next in the year to come.

In this article I've plucked out the bits that have most to do with Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Mashups, Business Social Networking and other such technologies that are making businesses more agile.

No surprise that Cloud Computing is number 1. The feeding frenzy around cloud computing has been growing for some time and now it's almost impossible for IT leaders not to consider cloud computing as a way forward for their future IT infrastructure. For many organizations however, cloud computing is just another form of commercial model for virtualization of servers; the result of a transformation is a gated environment for enterprise applications on a hosted web server instead of using in-house servers. This myopic view of cloud computing is a big undersell on the possibilities that the cloudspace offers to create extensible community-based portals and possibilities of knowledge markets, federated applications and the like that reach beyond the firewall of the enterprise to harness talent and resources from knowledge markets - but it's a start. I expect that the majority of organizations will want to 'practise' deploying non-core applications to the cloud first and then see how well the experiment works before they consider porting their discrete applications and ERP systems to this new platform. We could be talking a lag of 3 to 5 years before larger corporations make this sort of 'can't turn back the clock' step.

Number 2 on Gartner's list is Advanced Analytics. It's interesting that Gartner worked hard not to say Business Intelligence and came up with a new term. But BI is changing. At one time it was about massing data into huge OLAP cubes to impart knowledge organizations already owned but couldn't see. Today though, business intelligence has gone online and forms part of the Enterprise Mashup Portal platform business people use to consume information services. These applications are no longer passive, but provide tools for users to serve themselves with new views of information, let's them paint 'what if?' scenarios and share their content within their secure social networks. The need for agile Business Intelligence tools has been answered by mashups that form part of the social operating systems organizations are in the process of developing. Advanced Analytics is no longer about OLAP cubes that serve only 15% of the user population; it's about letting decision makers at all levels of the enterprise consume information in new ways to find answers to new questions they've only just begun to think about.

Social Computing comes in at number 6 on the list. Trying to make sense of social networking in a business context has been a tough challenge in 2009. In truth, there are so many different technologies and approaches that the subject has proved too overwhelming for IT leaders to make any sense of. I expect that the take-off in business social networking will only happen when 4 things happen (at the same time and probably in the same software service that business people can try before they buy):
1. A security architecture emerges that business people can trust - Business social networking has to sit within a security blanket that corporate buyers can trust. The software applications and services found in consumer land don't come close to managing content and intellectual property the way that businesses need to.
2. Data can be owner-managed - Organizations want to harness their corporate information capital, while individuals want a record of their social relationship activities. Having knowledge of conversations, talent and skills on Facebook or Twitter doesn't give business people the security or control over information assets that they require.
3. A realistic alternative to email emerges - Email today is the peer-to-peer communications vehicle of choice that benefits from the ability to work even when the sender and receiver are not both online. Without a genuine alternative to email, the home page of most business people will still be Outlook.
4. Supporting social behaviors - In the real world business people chat, have more formal conversations and even more formal scheduled meetings. It's not realistic to believe that, in a virtual world, business people will suddenly be satisfied with informal communications for every situation. Business social networking tools will have to mature to support social behaviors that people are accustomed to.

The fact that Security - and specifically activity monitoring - has only reached number 7 on the list is surprising to me. With all of the concerns raised around data security in 2009 I would have singled out Security as being a top 3 issue. The issue of enterprise security has matured over 2009 away from the idea of protecting the silos of data to protecting the data itself. This has fostered more mature discussions around inclusive security models that see users as individuals rather than good guys and bad guys (where anyone who doesn't work for the enterprise is assumed to be bad). In 2010, Encanvas is releasing its RING OF STEEL inclusive security architecture that enables CIOs to push back data governance to line of business managers so that appropriate governance regimes can be implemented at departmental level. This means that the people responsible for data are also made responsible for its security. For IT leaders this has to be good news. Whoever said that IT leaders must be the security watchdogs of the enterprise anyway?

The last notable entry holds up the list at number 10. Mobile applications are still topical it seems but the idea that mobile applications need to be treated as somehow 'special' is slowly ebbing away. Convergence of web and mobile platforms mean that Enterprise mashup platforms like Encanvas can produce applications for mobility as easily as they do for desktop and web. The mobile device has become 'just another portal consumer' in an always connected world. I expect we won't see mobile applications appearing on the next Gartner list for 2011!

All of the above is good news for Integrated Software Platforms like Encanvas that provide 2-step publishing to the cloud with the assurety of a robust inclusive security model. No surprise that the global market for Enterprise Mashups Software is expected to grow ten-fold in 2010.

Looks like it's going to be a busy year!

ERP in a Services Oriented World

I've just completed this White Paper in support of work that I'm currently doing in the Insurance sector to migrate organizations from traditional ERP systems to more agile platforms based on a blend of Master Data Management, SOA and Enterprise Mashup Portals. It's hard for CIOs to come to terms with the fact that business social networking and collaboration means that it's no longer possible to protect the enterprise by selectively cutting it off from the rest of the world behind Firewalls. This White Paper I've written for Encanvas describes how a blended strategy of ERP+MDM is a smarter move and encourages investments in 'IT growth innovation'.

Hope you like it. Ian.

Wake up JackBe, Encanvas v2 has arrived

It's been a frustrating year watching JackBe and Corizon running around the market while we sit on our hands and code ferociously to get Encanvas secure&live ready for market before Google Wave. I think of it as our 'wilderness year'!

Thankfully it's now coming to an end and in 2010 we have the launch of Encanvas v2 and Squork to look forward to. Unfortunately, we're still busy patenting the unique technologies that have been added to the platform so you'll have to bear with us on going public until the end of January. At least there will be a sneaky peak next week!

I'm delighted that we've been able to beat Google to the punch with what I believe is a more appropriate communications platform for web collaboration than Google Wave - which has had its doubters of late - but I'm sure, when the guys at Google overcome the short-comings of the beta,Google Wave will be a world class product.

At the TECHNOLOGY WORLD event in Coventry next week we'll be meeting with the major electronics companies of the world to introduce a truely world class enterprise mashups platform. Can't wait.

Thanks to everyone involved in Encanvas since the early days of 2002 for staying with the product. If you'd like to see a Webshow of the new technologies just let me know.

Idiots Guide to Enterprise Mashups

I keep getting asked for a simple overview on Enterprise Mashups. After looking around slideshare for a while it became apparent that descriptions of what Enterprise Mashups are about and what they're for tend to be really over complicated so I've penned a simple 10 slide overview.

Cloud Coffee House

Sorry I've not been online much this year - I've been busy writing my new book Cloud Coffee House that describes how the two worlds of cloud computing and social networking are likely to collide and create a cloudspace where people will in future enjoy both work and play. If you get the opportunity to read it I hope you'll tell me what you think!

Top 10 Enterprise Mashup Software Products and Why

The growth in information working and the knowledge economy is placing new demands on information technology. Knowledge workers today expect the same level of access and ease of use from their business systems that they enjoy with their iPOD or favourite websites (such as Google). A challenge facing IT departments is how to keep up with the volume of requests from information workers to develop new applications in response to their rapidly changing information needs. In a 2008 survey conducted by IBM, a majority of CEOs rated their organisation's ability to manage change 22% lower than their expected need for change. Business mashups give people the tools needed to adapt to change, develop new insights, and act on new business opportunities.

Enterprise mashups are an important new development in IT as they provide a new and accessible means of creating large numbers of business applications without requiring complex IT projects or large numbers of IT people with deep technical skills. They offer organizations a way to rapidly adapt to changing business needs.

Unlike traditional IT development tools that focus on the small number of heavy-weight business applications that serve the majority of users, enterprise mashups are specifically designed to support the 'long-tail' of demand from small numbers of users, sometimes individuals, for a proportionately large number of relatively light-weight (and sometimes short-terms) business applications that information workers as individuals, or working in teams, need in order to respond to new business situations. Without enterprise mashup technologies these information applications would otherwise go unserved by IT. The usual consequence of this is IT heads finding information workers serving themselves with self-made applications built using desktop tools such as MS Excel or MS Word (and the security risks and version control dangers this represents).

It was Luba Cherbakov of IBM, who is attributed with putting the term situational application (or SN) on the IT technologies ever growing list of acronyms. Cherbakov describes a Situational Application as - “…an application built to address a particular situation, problem, or challenge. The development life cycle of these types of applications is quite different from the traditional IT-developed, SOA-based solution. Situational applications are usually built by knowledge workers who adopt iterative development often measured in days or weeks, not months or years. As the requirements of a small team using the application change, the Situational Application often continues to evolve to accommodate these changes. Significant changes in requirements may lead to an abandonment of the used application altogether; in some cases it's just easier to develop a new one than to update the one in use.”

Enterprise mashup software applications (that produce situational applications) mean that the majority of information worker needs can be self-served by appropriately robust and scalable enterprise IT solutions. Applications are normally authored and deployed using Web based technologies (so called Web 2.0) that can harvest information from disparate sources to create composite applications - built using ready-made building blocks of applications components that are assembled using integrated point-and-click development environments designed specifically with non-IT people in mind.

According to a report published in 2008 by IT industry analysts Forrester Research, mashup usage is growing rapidly. According to their research the enterprise mashups software market is expected to generate global revenues of $700 Million by 2013 (Forrester defines mashups as "custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique").

In January 2007, an Economist Intelligence Unit survey revealed that mashups were the most popular traditional web 2.0 technology in the enterprise, with 64% of companies saying they already use or planned to use mashups within the next 2 years.

Situational applications are growing in popularity because business organizations seek to:

•Unlock innovation and the creativity in their business
•Need to increasingly work in consort with industry partners to achieve shared business outcomes
•Demand information agility to respond to rapidly changing market situations and therefore need to uncover business insights more speedily; often relying on a blend of information that exists within and beyond the enterprise fire-wall
•Reduce application backlog without losing control and governance - Speed development of applications and reduce the cost and risk of applications development for the majority of knowledge worker applications that serve small groups of workers (and sometimes an individuals’ specific information needs)

Performance Metrics for Assessing the Top 10

I’ve based my assessment on the terms of reference established by Microsoft in their excellent white paper on enterprise mashups (J.R. Arredondo, May 2008)that comes in two parts:

1.Capabilities that an enterprise mashup platform must display in order to ensure broad enterprise adoption across business users and also acceptance within the IT organization such as:
-Business user requirements.
-Easy to use for business users.
-Integrated with business users’ daily work life.
-Powerful for power users to “finish the whole job.
-Social and viral.

2.The existence of key technical elements of a mashup platform:
-Access to a repository of web services that users and IT managers can employ to publish and manage corporate and public information that information workers can leverage in Enterprise Mashups.
-A gallery of visualization components that users can use to make sense of newly aggregated sources of insights.
-Mashup creation capabilities are easy to use by non technical users.
-Authored mashups create THE PORTAL ARCHITECTURE (ie. User permissions, site layout, page layout, hierarchies and taxonomies etc.), not just component pages.
-A place where users can share the mashups they create and a social and collaborate workspace that supports the deployment and manageability of mashups for internal and external users - as well as the social networking capabilities that help people to connect with one another, create workspaces and data mashups within them.

The Top 10
So who are the key players in the Enterprise Mashups space? Here’s my Top 10 of what I believe are the most influencing products in the market today (presented in reverse order):

10. Corizon – A UK software business that originated from call centre and CRM integrations projects sponsored by British Telecom and has continued to develop its platform to serve the needs of call centre integrations market. This early verticalization of its proposition has enabled Corizon to rapidly develop a sound raison-d’être for its technology and through successive deployments the company has fashioned a robust enterprise mashup platform. However, the solution offered – whilst incorporating many of the attributes of enterprise mashups technology does not target or meet the needs of the long-tail of business applications (or Microsoft’s key functional determinants) and therefore sits at number 10 in my list.

9. Just Systems – Headquartered in Tokyo, Just Systems is a global software provider with three decades of successful innovation in office productivity, information management, and consumer and enterprise software with over 2,500 customers worldwide and annual revenues over $110M. Whilst not strictly speaking an Enterprise Mashups player, JustSystems – with its XFY technology - has developed an XML architecture for dynamic composite documents similar to Encanvas that makes it well positioned to become a leading player in the market over the next few years.

8. Twinsoft - A French company, Twinsoft sees itself as a market leader in Enterprise Mashups. According to its website, its flagship product, Convertigo Enterprise Mashup Server helps companies reuse their existing assets to build new and exciting WEB 2.0 composite applications for a fraction of the cost and time needed to complete software rewrites or traditional development. It’s a good story and the company has some very interesting case stories but its software platform relies heavily on Twinsoft’s OEM relationship with DreamFace and to me looks very much like a consultancy-led offering rather than a coherent software application.

7. Nexaweb – This Burlington (Massachusetts, USA) based company specializes in modernization technology that ‘enhances, extends and transforms legacy applications through an open web development platform and reference architecture’ but to anyone in the enterprise mashups space, the parallels between the technology platforms are obvious. Nexaweb has found a convincing story to sell its Web 2.0 architecture to IT departments in a way that IT people understand its purpose. Not a platform for situational applications yet but no doubt it’s on Nexaweb’s roadmap.

6. Serena – Serena is the first major player to create a marketplace for mashups and their software applications dovetail nicely into the Microsoft desktop world so users find their UI familiar. Serena has profited from its experience in Applications Life-Cycle Management and has the most advanced version control and mashup management features in its class. Another strength of Serena’s platform is its orchestration module for integration with legacy systems (similar to Encanvas’s Information Flow Designer). However. Serena has yet to provide a full platform to include social networking and collaborative features so in my view they’ve still got some way to go. The absence of an On Premises offering is also a major weakness for large corporations.

5. JackBe – The Enterprise Mashup platform making the most noise, JackBe has recently received even more coffers for its developments through another round of funding. Jackbe sees portals and mashups becoming the 'ecosystem' for business users - and the browser as the business container of choice (I agree). Similar to Encanvas, JackBe’s mashup platform, Presto, can leverage internal and external data while meeting tough enterprise security and governance requirements. The vision of the management team seems to be sound but the company has got some way to go to prove its marketing messages with real-world case examples and the software platform currently appears to lack depth in areas of legacy integration tools, life-cycle management and orchestration.

4. Microsoft SharePoint – Other than its light-weight consumer mashup product Popfly, Microsoft doesn’t really have an enterprise mashup ‘product’ as such but it does a pretty good job of gluing its enterprise computing platform tools together to create an enterprise mashup environment. SharePoint Designer 2007 is intended to be more of an end user tool but not for any users that I know without a computing degree!

3. Interneer – Interneer (CA, USA) would not describe themselves as an enterprise mashups player at all but their technology is relevant and well designed. Inteneer’s Intellect platform is positioned as a human-centric workflow platform that (according to their website) “allows average business people to configure web-based applications with integrated workflow at the speed of business, without programming.” Interneer has developed an extremely intuitive and easy to use point and click design environment for non-IT people and has managed to combine this UI with an equally impressive applications integration and orchestration module. What Interneer lacks at the moment is the collaborative workspace and automated portal deployment architecture. It also remains to be seen whether Interneer has the vision and marketing muscle to remain at number 2 in my ‘best of the best’ chart.

2. Encanvas - Encanvas version 1.7 didn’t make the number 1 spot – but that’s okay considering the amount of investment that has gone into its GIS and print technologies of late (and with the 1.8 release just around the corner). Encanvas continues to be the easiest to use code-free situational applications publishing platform, the most secure and most dexterous. Its ability to create databases, virtual marts and harvest legacy sources through multi-linking between fields of data from disparate web services, legacy and desktop data sources makes its data mashup possibilities more versatile in my view than any of the other products in this category (although OpenSpan’s desktop integration technologies gives Encanvas a run for its money). Encanvas also has built in collaborative tools like WebShow for turning enterprise mashup applications into virtual collaborative workspaces. Encanvas’s use of its own embedded applications components (including GIS and visualization, dashboard meters, charts, reports and now printing) together with its ability to deliver the deployment portal architecture and security without requiring IT skills, makes Encanvas a strong runner up.

1. IBM Mashup Center – IBM has taken the whole subject of enterprise mashups much more seriously than Microsoft and has recently invested over $100 million in mashup, collaboration and social computing technologies. This investment is now beginning to show through the new line-up of technologies coming out of the IBM stable. IBM Mashup Center is in my opinion the first meaningful platform that unites a user interface that non-IT people can understand with data mashup technologies and web harvesting and discovery. The portal based solution also integrates with Avaya’s Application Enablement (AE) Services API which is probably the first mashup cross-over into the unified communications space. IBM appears to understand collaboration better than Microsoft, yet its strategy is enterprise platform based and so it may suffer as the industry moves towards self-forming situational people networks who will want the ability to pay for their IT platforms on a utility basis. A challenge for the IBM team is how to counter the factor of 100 price difference to Encanvas when the functionality is getting so similar.

Other key players that are likely to influence the Enterprise Mashups space are Coghead and Dreamface who have excellent design interfaces but have yet to deliver the full gamut of enterprise mashup platform capabilities, Endeca, StrikeIron and OpenSpan who play in the Information Access Platform space and have particularly powerful enterprise legacy systems connectors with scope to develop enterprise mashup capabilities in the future, Kapow technologies who currently lead the way in mashup harvesting tools, composite applications vendors like Cordys that focus more on enterprise business process management but whose technology implementation is similar in terms of usability and dexterity to enterprise mashup platforms, and finally rapid applications authoring providers like LiquidApps from Harmonia Inc and IronSpeed who are introducing development environments that have the potential to respond to a number of the use cases that enterprise mashups address.

It will be interesting to see who the winners and losers will be in 2009 which promises to be a year of step change innovations in all areas of technology – cloud computing, unified communications, virtualization, mashups, location-awareness… time for a coffee ;-)

The importance of lists

Happy New Year? Not on Friday

So there I was driving back up the M1 motorway following a meeting in East London. I was so absorbed in my thinking that I completely missed two junctions and found myself at Junction 18 adding another half an hour to my journey. Poo.

Anyway, what I was so self-abosrbed in was the subject of LISTS. What got me thinking about lists was the conversation I had just had with the sales director of an office equipment company. It reminded me of a problem that just keeps surfacing. When sales people use CRM systems they quite rightly complain about the time it takes to fill in all of the record data. Why? becuase the user doesn't always want to add (or see) all of the data that managers do. They just want to order their thinking and make sure they spend their time on the most important things rather than the 'can do' subjects that are sometimes easier to do but are less beneficial in achieving outcomes.

The technology problem with this is that databases - particularly relational databases - demand that users fill out a certain level of fields of data in order to maintain the linkages between tables and provide coherency in the quality of data. But this results in users being presented with too many fields of data to fill in at times when they just want to create a list.

You see the reason why products like Google search don't work in business is CONTEXT. All information in business has to be associated with its purpose, the topics it relates to, the people who need it, the processes it serves. So business is about LISTS and DATA the relationships between them. But we've not got that balance right yet - which is why information workers still feel poorly served by IT (me too).....and so I missed my junction, two infact and ended up north of Coventry on a miserable day with sub zero temperatures and a dirty windscreen that my frozen screenwash couldn't clear feeling marginally sorry for myself.

So here's the challenge - how to create a simpler way for information workers to create, access, order, edit and prioritise lists on different subjects where items can be converted into records and those record can be developed into relational database tables. Ironically, we (I should say Andy) solved this problem at NDMC in 2003 but I'd forgotten that we had - so my New Year Resolution is to fix this problem once and for all and incorprate the new usability features into Encanvas 2.0 when it gets released (which if we're lucky will be before 2010!)