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.

Rich Internet Applications and the software as a service model by ZDNet's Ryan Stewart -- Software as a service is going to become a more viable business model in the years to come. Rich Internet Applications are going to play a very large part in that revolution by focusing on offline/online content as well as more customizable applications.

composite application frameworks come of age

Gosh is that the time!

It has taken me a while to get back to blogging. Some really good reasons for by blogging holiday. I finally finished the book AGILIZATION which managed to get listed in Amazon and WHSmiths websites even before the ink had dried. At NDMC we've had a really busy time launching our new website at www.ndmc.uk.com that we're really happy with - and we've launched IT Directions too, which is a breakfast club for IT leaders across Europe that helps IT manufacturers and suppliers to get a better understanding of the European IT market - particularly at SME level.

And with all of this going on we've been putting the finishing touches to the 2007 edition of encanvas. And we are SO excited about the new multi-sourcing capabilities and the new-look interface.

When we first trialled encanvas in 2005, few IT people had heard the term composite application framework. Even fewer had come across mash-ups! But suddenly, with media interested fanned by the huge investments of IT industry titans, encanvas and products like it are rapidly becoming the new black dress of IT.

A Composite Application Framework (CAF) is a computing platform used to design and operate applications composed of information gathered from different sources that form a new process or information flow. They vary in size, completeness and scope of use. Most of the major software titans - SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft - are committed to the development of their own enterprise integration toolkits that now closely resemble Composite Application Frameworks. In addition to this traditional set of enterprise computing software players, there are a number of software heavy-weights such as Cordys, Fujitsu, Sun Microsystems and Ingres that also provide enterprise scale platforms.

What makes encanvas particularly different is that it has been designed for repeatable authoring of platform agnostic information flows by non technical users and does not require coding skills. Business analysts are able to author prototype systems that can eventually be deployed as live systems without the need of a coding phase. achieving remarkable results is made simpler by the baked in applications that encanvas provides out-of-the-box such as multiple data-sourcing, filtered context search, reports, business intelligence, GIS, web content management and shortly document management. But for all of its simplicity and ease of use, encanvas delivers corporate ready solutions that have the security, scalability, resilience and administrative controls for enterprise-scale applications.

The market for SOA integration tools is hotting up and is expected to touch over 95% of large organizations by 2011. Analysts anticipate more than $17.1 billion will be invested in the technology over this period. That means most organizations will be selecting a composite application framework of one form or another to fit their needs. Naturally, we expect a high proportion of these will be adopting encanvas!

Well that's me done for now. Time for a holiday. Back in two weeks.

Does enterprise 2.0 mean that time is up for Microsoft Vista?

BI 2.0, CRM 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 - read most IT journals and you would be left thinking that every area of IT is trying desperately to re-invent itself. If you were a cynic, you would probably put this down to software companies seeking to re-launch acronyms that never really lived up to expectations first time round. But the 2.0 'thing' goes deeper than that.

Hype-curves might be the bread and butter of IT marketers, but there is something genuinely different and somewhat more transparent about what's happening to corporate IT at the moment. It's nothing less than a user-driven revolution. You see, in most medium-to-large organizations, there is an enormous gap between IT departments and the business. This is not a new problem either - it goes right back to the dawn of business computing.

On one side of the page, development managers feel like they're constantly chasing moving targets set by line managers that don't understand what they're asking for. At the same time, the IT department is trying to keep up with 'what's new in IT' and prevent users from trashing the network. They know that keeping up with the ever growing in-box of development requests is not an option. So, as often as they can, they turn to shrink-wrapped, plug-in-able software applications that are fashioned around good practice processes. (This all sounds like good common sense until you realise that less than 40% of any software application is normally ever used and that the integration of these components across departmental silos can take as much time and money as it would to have developed the application in the first place).

On the other page is the business user community that is unsatisfied by the applications they received. The applications they receive do not reflect what they asked for. The resulting applications, formed around specific processes, create fragmented systems that don't talk to one another. More often than not, this leaves high performing people with underperforming information. Out of necessity, business people fill these holes in performance and usefulness by using spreadsheets, PowerPoints and word processor documents.

Enter '2.0'

The 2.0 era is about the liberalization of IT development. Its emergence is a clear indication that business users are no longer prepared to accept the stock answers from IT of 'It can't be done' or 'It can't be done that way' or 'Maybe in 6 months'.

2.0 is a handy tag that technologists are now consistently adopting to describe a wave of new approaches to solving old and familiar business challenges with ‘consumerized IT’ that non technical people can get their hands on to start shaping information systems to fit their specific needs.

New software tools are removing the need for applications to be authored by programmers. Line managers are able to take much greater ownership and control over the formalization of humanized information flows - to fit technology around the needs of the organization.

There are a number if building blocks that support ‘Enterprise 2.0’ - the aggregation of 2.0 technologies:

• Rich internet applications - At one time, web browsers were only able to support very basic presentation. Development in the methods used to feed more powerful presentation components to Web browsers (the most influencing of which is called Asynchronous Java And XML – ‘AJAX’) mean that highly intuitive applications - that you would previously only have imagined on your desktop - can now be deployed as services over the web.
• Mash-ups and composites application development tools - Software like Encanvas enables non technical people to design lean processes supported by 'best fit' information flows that embrace pre-built building blocks of functionality (like forms design, reporting, relational database authoring, GIS and business intelligence tools) that can bring data, user interfaces, application components and output formation together within a single desktop authoring environment to build new information management systems. Products like Encanvas bring together (1) Business Intelligence, (2) Data Management and Architecture and (3) Portal and Content Management in a single environment; all created without demanding any programming skills.
• Agile project model - Instead of old fashioned 'waterfall' project techniques (where development tasks - that at one time demanded a cacophony of different software development tools - are conducted in parallel) new software makes possible virtually real-time applications development 'across-the-desk).
• Control over information - Whereas information used to be the domain of computer people, the workplace today supports a much richer information environment with individuals demanding much more control over the way that they access, manage and share information. The challenge for business managers and IT is to find the balance between control and usability that creates the magical outcome of optimised workforce productivity.
• The ‘widgetization’ of the software industry – Instead of being about companies that build software applications shaped to support specific business processes, a globalized software industry is becoming more about the creation of ‘widgets’ – light-weight pluggable applications that slot into an open desktop environment powered by web 2.0.
  

What does ‘2.0’ mean to the software industry?

It’s easy to imagine that there will many more ‘widget-factories’, that exploit the skills of many thousands of independent developers working for many different companies in loosely coupled markets. The traditional application software vendor will all but disappear, as corporations move away from shrink-wrapped software, whilst at the top-end of the market, the big software players will continue to dominate and grow.

What does ‘2.0’ mean to Microsoft?

The dominant player of the software industry is facing its biggest threat yet. Unlike the bigger enterprise database vendors - Oracle, IBM and SAP – Microsoft has enjoyed its greatest success in supporting a user behaviour that favours desktop software and shrink-wrapped packages. The sudden move of an industry to consumerize IT means that Microsoft’s latest flavor of desktop software – ‘VISTA’ suddenly looks a high-risk and expensive purchase. Are corporations going to jump to VISTA when their people already get the majority of its value? Microsoft’s market position is suddenly looking outdated, and its approach outmoded. All that said, a corporation of Microsoft’s size and wealth always has the ability to react to market changes if aspires to do so.

What does ‘2.0’ mean to IT?

The ‘2.0’ experience does not threaten IT. After all, the standards that ‘2.0’ embraces are already known and trusted. What ‘2.0’ does is change the role of IT from its ‘defensive’ role as the protector of business continuity, into the attack role of providing competitive advantage by releasing the innovation and creativity of high performers in the enterprise.


What does ‘2.0’ mean to business users?

The greatest beneficiaries of ‘2.0’ are the business users themselves and line managers that are now in a position to translate their information needs into systems that really fit.

What happens next?

Expect to see the following ‘power trends’ occurring over the next 18-months:

1. The rapid development and expansion of the widget industry with major software companies starting to take widgets more seriously.
2. Slower than expected take-up Microsoft Vista.
3. Frantic pace of adoption for corporate-ready mash-up and composite applications.
   Re-definition of the role of IT.
4. Early-signs of a software industry going through globalization and a move away from shrink-wrapped applications.
   
   

Hats off to Nicholas Negroponte and his $100 laptop

Nicholas Negroponte is the founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) http://www.laptop.org established to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves. OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte with a core of Media Lab veterans, but quickly expanded to include a wide range of exceptionally talented and dedicated people from academia as well as industry, the arts, business, and the open-source community.

The scheme is hoping to put low-cost computers into the hands of people in developing countries. Ultimately the project's backers hope the machines could sell for as little as $100 (£55). Test machines are expected to reach children in February as the project builds towards a more formal launch.

Ask any primary school head in any corner of the world and they will probably tell you that’s a good idea. Like Nicholas, I think the idea that school children are still being encouraged to learn through Microsoft products is ridiculous. Instead of finding new ways to share, communicate and express themselves, children are being spoon-fed their applications. And let’s be honest, these kids are not going to be using spreadsheets and word processors by the time they hit work. It’s only out of touch politicians that could possibly still think that they will.

Perhaps the $100 laptop and Encanvas will herald in a new way of educating children, where IT is absolutely embedded into the coursework of children. Encanvas provides a much better way of librating children from the straight-jacket of corporate business applications – because, using Encanvas, children can fashion their own applications in a way that embraces their personal creativity. Blending Encanvas with the $100 dollar laptop could be the next big step in embedding IT into the class-room across the world.

Good job Nicholas!