I'd just like to pay a small tribute to the guys and girls at McKinsey that contribute to McKinsey Quarterly. I have been surprised how frequently the insights that NDMC has captured in Europe - and our interpretations of those insights towards market change and enterprise behaviors - so frequently get represented (and are often better described) in the content of the McKinsey Quarterly. I'd specifically like to draw your attention to Lowell L. Bryan who has been doing some great work in exposing the topic of organizational design and helping business leaders to come to terms with new market behaviors. Lowell has authored an excellent book on the topic and his endeavors encouraged me to finally get on and complete Agilization.
Yet again this month, Nick Lawrie and I were delighted to read that McKinsey has been researching peer-to-peer collaboration and collective intelligence. Their Quarterly Report titled How Businesses Are Using Web 2.0 describes the findings of a global survey they have conducted of C-level executives.
According to their findings three quarters of executives interviewed plan to maintain or increase their investments in technology trends that encourage user collaboration. That's excellent news for encanvas and the development of business thinking around the topic of situational networks. The innovation of enterprise mashups is unlikely to change workforce behaviors until business leaders start coming around to the idea that the new economy of the 21st century is about 'fit and creativity' more than it is about 'process excellence'.
If you have the opportunity, take 10 minutes out of your day and read what they say.
Friday, 1 February 2008
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
AJAXWorld Event
I'm delighted to be attending the AJAXWorld event in New York and to meet some of the other thought leaders in the area of RIAs and Enterprise Mashups. It looks like situtational applications are finally getting some attention. My speech will focus on the work Encanvas has done in Europe to deliver enterprise applications without coding and I' m really looking forward to comparing notes with some of the other software companies that are driving change in USA.
Sunday, 20 January 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
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.
Wednesday, 15 August 2007
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.
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.
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