DLS Thoughts

Search: A Key Building Block for Business Applications

2011-07-10T18:21:00.002-04:00

As I wrote previously, the ECM market is going through significant transformation and continued consolidation. The convergence of 4 different markets are contributing to this evolution. One of the interesting aspects of this transformation is the emergence of search as a key enabler for business applications.

Basic Premise

Future winners in the evolving ECM market will need to embrace new composition frameworks that can rapidly deliver solutions at the intersection of content, social, search and analytics, and business process management. Those composition platforms will also need to support hybrid cloud delivery models to deliver optimal business values based on the customer needs.

Search and the Composite Application Platform

Search based applications combine a broad range of capabilities: I find this aspect of the definition particularly interesting. From my perspective, this makes search technology one of the building blocks of an application composition platform. It offers both information management capabilities such as information categorization, text mining, indexing, fuzzy matching and information navigation capabilities such as faceted / relational navigation and data visualization in the context of business applications.
Information is integrated with business processes: this is a critical aspect of search based applications and this is where I believe there is strong overlap with decision management or case management. In a business context, search supports a decision process. Those decisions might be more project centric which will require more collaboration and ad-hoc discovery. They might also be more process or case centric in which a network of processes will manage the orchestration of the decision process.

This requires that search capabilities be weaved into the fabric of business applications.

What about some examples?

First let's look at some examples for best of breed search vendors and how they leverage the concept of search based applications to address their customer problems.

New account opening and single view of the customer

Attivio provides the case study of a large global bank challenged to enhance customer service across 40 countries, 50,000 employees and 100 separate sources of information. The bank decided to leverage a search based application to provide a unified view of customers resulting in the enhanced productivity of the customer facing agent, improved customer experience, and a higher percentage of first call resolution rates, while decreasing overall support and maintenance cost.

Warranty and quality monitoring

High warranty costs have received significant exposure lately. Think about Johnson and Johnson having to recall 22 products in 19 months adding up to over $900M in revenue loss. Those are nightmares manufacturing executives cannot ignore. Getting the information to identify warranty issues before those organizations are at risk requires visibility throughout the entire supply chain. By integrating data from multiple sources, search based applications provide the right tools to support the discovery and early identification of product quality issues. Endeca offers Endeca Latitude for Warranty to address this problem.

A New Kind of Business Application Composition Platform

The examples above illustrate the power of search based application. Those applications become even more powerful when they are combined with an action engine that enables the tracking and processing of warranty issues, the collaboration on criminal investigations or complex financial products. With xCP, our view is that great search and data visualization capabilities need to be combined with the orchestration of content and information that will drive optimal business decisions: for instance a product recall based on the early identification of warranty issues.

Samir Batla, product manager for search and analytics at EMC IIG has posted a series of blogs posts on how xCP exposes a wide variety of technologies that enables optimal business decisions and how from early warnings, customers can take action to make pro-active decision for their businesses. As shown below, the anatomy of an optimal business decision requires much more than search. The combination of the broad set of capabilities of xCP is what enables these optimal business decisions.

The Need for Cloud Integration

2011-06-13T22:48:00.001-04:00

The cloud is everywhere those days and the software industry is going through some drastic transformations. According to IDC, “Software as a Service 2010-2014” report, software will never be the same. The on-premise software market will go down 19% during this period from a market share of 66%. In the same period, shares of the public cloud are expected to go up 12% to 22% of the software market revenue. The Platform as a Service market is expected to grow between 39% and 55% a year for the next 5 years (IDC forecast vs. Forrester forecast). This is quite some shift...

Forrester Research defines Platform as a Service (PaaS) as:

A complete application platform for multitenant cloud environments that includes development tools, runtime, and administration and management tools and services. PaaS combines an application platform with managed cloud infrastructure services.

A key value of PaaS is the ability to focus on the business application and not on platform technologies. As PaaS becomes more widely adopted and business applications increasingly built on top of such platforms, the need for cloud integration will become pervasive.

Modern applications require the ability to expose enterprise information in the context of the task at hand. Adaptive contextual user experiences will become increasingly critical for business users to rapidly make optimal business decisions. In a PaaS or SaaS world, this will require robust integration with the needed information sources such as:

Cloud based applications: CRM systems like Salesforce.com, HR systems like Success Factor or Workday, public cloud email systems and productivity applications
Enterprise applications: ERP systems like SAP or Oracle Business Applications
Content management systems internally hosted or in the public cloud
Legacy systems and applications

However, cloud integration as some serious challenges it needs to overcome. A July 2010 survey by Saugatuck Technology confirms that data security and privacy as well as data integration concerns are top concerns in deploying cloud based business solutions.

Let’s have a look at some of those challenges:

Data integrity and information security. Art Coviello from RSA articulates the problem nicely: "While cloud computing offers tremendous benefits in cost and agility, it breaks down some of the traditional means of ensuring visibility and control of infrastructure and information. Forcing enterprises to develop trusted relationships individually with each cloud service provider they wish to use is cumbersome and will not scale. New thinking in security and compliance is required to provide a future in which organizations can consume services from a wide variety of cloud service providers on-demand and for all their application needs."
Application security integration. Anyone who has tried to integrate applications together knows that one major integration issue is around access control and particularly role based security. Protocols like OAuth have emerged to provide a simple way to publish and interact with protected data. Other standards like XACML provide flexible solutions for enforcing granular authorization. Unfortunately, those technologies are not broadly adopted by enterprise application making authorization integration a challenge.
Data integration. Many enterprise systems still require proprietary integration mechanisms. But even cloud based applications require integration with their proprietary APIs. Cloud based integration should provide a flexible mechanism for data mapping and integration. As Mark Brennan, Director of Business Applications at Pandora puts it: "traditional approaches to integration are no longer adequate when you have literally dozens of SaaS applications, all needing to talk to each other. If every change, customization or refinement becomes a project, we can’t keep up. To changes all that, we need a solution that elevates us out of code level and putting the power directly into our hands". Some of those data integration challenges may involve:

Bi-directional data synchronization
Transactional integrity and service orchestration
Solutions to deal with information caching and system latency

Clearly, addressing those challenges will be key to enterprises moving and trusting their enterprise systems to the public cloud.

A New Platform to Deliver Superior Customer Experiences

2011-06-04T23:30:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, I talked about the new platform and the new technology era of business applications. The new platform must enable business applications to drive optimal business decisions and improve customer experiences. It must provide a breadth of application services that enable businesses to rapidly build intelligent business applications that can adjust rapidly to changes in their business environment.

Several weeks ago, at EMC World 2011, I gave a presentation on How to leverage Documentum xCP and the 5 Cs (correspondences, capture, case, content and compliance) to deliver superior customer experiences while improving business efficiencies.

In my presentation I started with a personal experience. A few months ago, I got an automated phone call from my bank telling me that my debit card had been deactivated and to press 1 if I wanted to reactivate it. Puzzled, I decided to call my bank instead. First, regular customer services was closed; so I decided to get routed to the service where you report card losses. After a 15 minute process, I finally got in touch with a customer representative who told me that this was a scam they were aware of and that they had issued a press release to warn their customers about the scam. Yes, you read right: a press release... As educated and responsible consumers and customers, we are expected to monitor the press releases of the companies we do business with, no less.

Well, in the day and age of personalized services and hyper social interactions, needless to say we expect more. This is where the new platform comes into play. Imagine what my bank could have done had they been using that new platform:

They could have been monitoring social channels and their own customer data to look for patterns that their brand was being used for mischievous purposes. That's where Big Data comes in. Leveraging data computing appliances and predictive models, corporations can be on the look for significant patterns or events that are likely to impact their businesses.
Once, my bank has found evidence that a scam is underway, they could have leveraged the intelligent correspondence management and process capabilities of xCP to send me multi-channel personalized communications and to make sure that I was aware of the scam. In those communications, they would have provided me with instructions on how to deal with the situation.
They could have been proactive in identifying customers that were victims of the scam and opened cases to help those customers deal with the situation, cancel their debit cards and issue new ones
They would be delivering better customer experiences, ensuring the loyalty of their customers while protected their business against potential charges of negligent behavior.

This is the power of the new platform. Gain insight from social and business data, and take actions on that insight to deliver superior customer experiences. As the success of companies like Zappos shows, companies that can successfully deliver those superior experiences create long term sustainable competitive advantage.

The Evolution of the ECM Market

2011-05-28T01:47:00.001-04:00

When Documentum was founded, the founders' vision was to manage the world's information to enable innovation and scientific breakthrough (like finding a cure for cancer). Since then, what started as a Document Management opportunity has gone a long way. Today, Enterprise Content Management is a mature market providing breadth of technologies that enable organizations to reshape the way project or transactional decisions are made. The ECM market is also a market that has gone through significant transformation lately and continued consolidation.

I see the convergence of 4 markets contributing to the evolution of ECM targeting different interaction types (from adhoc to structured) and application types (from horizontal to vertical).

The Commoditization of Content Services

The unprecedented success of Microsoft SharePoint has commoditized content services and significantly changed the content management market. SharePoint is now a force to be reckoned with. The sprawl of SharePoint sites has also created tremendous opportunities for information governance and given rise to a new generation of anti-SharePoint offerings such as Box.net leveraging the cloud to simplify information sharing.

The Emergence of Social Business Platforms

With the launch of their new Alfresco Enterprise release, Alfresco embraced the concept of Social Content Management. Jive and IBM refer to the same opportunity as Social Business. Whatever the term, in its latest magic quadrant, Gartner recognizes the impact of social interactions as social media create masses of unmanaged content.

Jive and IBM are the clear leaders in Social Business Platforms and the recent partnership between Jive and Alfresco recognizes the need for Social Business Platforms to provide robust content management capabilities. Social Business Platform vendors like Jive have been successful against Microsoft by focusing exclusively on social features and how they can help certain types of employees (salespeople, developers, etc.). Microsoft has also recognized the impact of social on content management and collaboration with SharePoint 2010.

Vendors for Social Business Platforms include: Jive, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco Quad, Acquia / Drupal

When ECM Meets Search Based Applications

The concept of search based applications is defined by Sue Feldman and her team at IDC as "applications that combine search and or text analytics with collaborative technologies, workflow, domain knowledge, business intelligence or relevant web services". This definition is being embraced by search vendors such as Endeca, Sinequa and Exalead (now part of Dassault Systemes). Gregory Greffenstette, Exalead chief science officer, offers a glance into concrete examples of search based applications from logistic track and trace type applications, to CRM, 360 view of the customer and decision intelligence.

At EMC, we have recognized the importance of search based applications and are incorporating search and text mining functionality into our products from CenterStage to Documentum xCP leveraging our Documentum xPlore, Content Intelligence Services and Federated Search Services, now core features of the EMC Documentum Platform.

Other ECM vendors from OpenText to IBM have recognized this trend as well with significant investments and acquisitions in this area. Key to delivering the promises of search based applications will be tight integration with composition tools for a new breed of business savvy developers that will enable the rapid creation of search enabled applications.

The following search vendors have embraced this trend: Autonomy, Microsoft / Fast, Attivio, Endeca, Sinequa, Exalead (Dassault Systemes)

Towards Composite Content Application Frameworks and Dynamic Case Management

As Gartner points out in its latest magic quadrant, there is increasingly more pressure on ECM vendors for ready to use solutions which solve real business problems rather than generic content platforms composed of dozens of loosely coupled modules. The need for more business solutions coupled with the convergence of the ECM and BPM markets has seen the rise of new opportunities for what Gartner calls Composite Content Application frameworks and Forrester calls Dynamic Case Management. While composite content application frameworks address the needs of content solutions, dynamic case management focuses on the convergence of ECM, BPM, business analytics and event processing. The reality is that there is a spectrum of solutions from content to case that require a new generation of composition tools to rapidly deliver business value with the agility to evolve quickly as business needs change. Organizations need more than a repository, they need an application platform and the solutions that come with it.

The following vendors provide composite content application platforms: EMC Documentum xCP, IBM, OpenText, Adobe, SpringCM, Hyland, Nuxeo

Towards the New Information Fabric

As the delivery of composite content application platforms transition to the cloud, this creates an opportunity for a new information fabric that will deliver tremendous business value and flexibility while reducing barriers to adoption. The industry is clearly at an inflection points in the adoption of cloud services. While Public cloud services offer tremendous promises, hybrid cloud deployments are most likely to provide the right balance between information control and flexibility.

Future winners in the evolving ECM market will need to embrace new composition frameworks that can rapidly deliver solutions at the intersection of content, social, search and analytics, and BPM (from content to case). Those composition platforms will also need to support hybrid cloud delivery models to deliver optimal business values based on the customer needs.

Do you share this perspective on the evolution of ECM market? Share your thoughts on this blog or on twitter.

The New Technology Era of Business Applications

2011-05-21T17:02:00.002-04:00

After a long hiatus, I have decided that it was time to start blogging again. Last time I posted a blog post was more than 2 years ago. Time flies...

We live in an exciting technology era. Technology transformation is accelerating and what is unique about this transformation is that all layers of the technology stack are experiencing significant changes at the same time. Jeetu Patel wrote a good blog post introducing the Post PC-era. For business applications this has significant implications.

The new platform: Business applications require a new platform. That new platform must be scalable, elastic, and rapidly respond to the needs of the business. It also needs a rich set of services to enable businesses to rapidly deliver applications that meet their most critical needs. At EMC Information Intelligence Group, we are investing on both those fronts:
1. At EMC World, we announced EMC OnDemand to take EMC Documentum into the New Platform era.
2. Documentum xCP was mentioned in every one of our executives keynotes (by Joe Tucci, Pat Gelsinger, Paul Maritz). xCP provides the breadth of services that enables to rapidly deliver business applications that meet the critical needs of the business. At EMC World, I had a presentation on leveraging the 5Cs (correspondence, capture, case, content and compliance). Those are cornerstone services for the new platform.
The new developer: The new developer needs new tools to create applications at a new level of abstraction and to enable her to focus on solving business problems rapidly and not as much on coding or the technology. The new developer needs powerful composition tools. Check out how xCP can empower the new developer to rapidly create sophisticated business applications.
The new user: Choice computing is critical to the new user. Check out Jeetu Patel's Blog post on the new user. The new user wants pervasive access to information, user interfaces that are catered to her needs. She needs to make decisions rapidly and needs the right insight to make the right decision with confidence. To that effect, EMC IIG had some significant partnership announcements at EMC World. But beyond the right user interface, the new user needs instant access to the right data, with the insight that enables her to take the right action. She needs to be able to turn information into business advantage. I presented at EMC World on how xCP can enable the new user to do just that

Those are exciting times at EMC IIG, the innovation machines is humming and we are taking part of the transformation of the business application platform on those 3 fronts. This represents an incredible opportunity for the future. I am exciting to be part of this transformation and to lead the development of next generation technology that will enable it.

Business and Cultural Challenges of a Next Generation Collaborative Solution

2008-11-15T11:21:00.005-05:00

Cross posting from my blog post on the EMC Knowledge Worker blog.

Last Monday, at Momentum Prague 2008, I held a Product Advisory Forum (PAF) with 27 EMC customers. The overall objective of the Knowledge Worker PAF was to assess the characteristics of a next generation collaborative solution. As an introduction, we reviewed a set of disruptive trends around:

The changing nature of the Enterprise
New work habits, social and cultural changes
Disruptive technologies that support new patterns of collaboration
The impact of the changing economic climate

See the presentation for more details on each trends.

3 teams of participants were then asked to assess business, cultural challenges and solutions that would help their organizations adapt to such trends.

Overall Needs and Business Challenges
The following needs and business challenges were identified:

Organizations need to improve collaboration within their organizations and with external parties. This raises issues around the proper level of openness and how to balance such a need against the needs for better security.
- Open systems are necessary to enable expertise location and finding information
- Integration between enterprise services is required to break information silos and encourage collaboration across various types of content in the enterprise
- Improving connections between people and content provides additional context to the information and fosters better interaction between knowledge workers
Organizations need to improve the use of information structures and reuse of already existing information
- Formalizing knowledge within organizations can improve its reuse. In order to do so, organizations needs better mechanisms for classifying and organizing information. Both taxonomies and folksonomies have a role to play.
- Reusing content in new ways can open new business opportunities and improve the speed of delivery of new projects.
- Organizationally, there is no substitute for producing lessons learned and synthesizing information. Organizations need to adopt models that encourage information reuse and developed template based information models.
  - This provides a framework for producing new quality information more quickly and on-ramping on new subjects and projects more quickly.
How do organizations make sure that the information they manage is valid and of quality and how do they effectively manage their information lifecycle?
- Organizations can rely on informal validation where the collective intelligence of the community can be leveraged to produce and elevate the most valuable information
- In parallel, some categories of content will never be properly assessed by the community. Formal processes are required for such content (e.g. Standard Operating Procedures)
- In addition, organizations need to put systems and policies in place that preserve information readability over the years and retain only content that is relevant to the organization. How does an organization properly identify the content that needs to be retained, in particular when it pertains to the organization knowledge?
- Organizations should look at technology that helps with concepts extraction and leverages such capabilities for improved information classification
Organizations must deploy technologies and solutions that empower their business users:
- Business users should be able to configure applications in a way that meets their needs
- Access to information should be ubiquitous

Cultural and Organization Challenges
Software does not drive organizational changes, people do. Too often, budgets get sucked into technical implementations to the detriment of investments in driving adoption and culture changes. Investments in driving adoption are critical and software vendors can help by delivering better out of the box solutions that allow organizations to focus on adoption and less on implementation. Some of the cultural challenges organizations have to confront include:

Fear. Fear of consequences and fear of rejection. Organizations need to assess how they value knowledge. Often, people are reluctant to contribute for fear that it will undermine their own value. Organizations needs to adopt processes that better value and reward sharing information.
Privacy. People are also concerned that we will share information and loose control of how the information will be used. Vendors need to provide features that help end users better understand how the information they contribute is being reused.

Organizations need to leverage the viral aspect of Web 2.0 technologies and move towards a Discover / Adopt / Adapt model. Only when the information is adopted and adapted does it start to deliver significant value to the enterprise.

Being able to justify the ROI of Web 2.0 and social networking technology is a challenge. Organizations must be able to measure the adoption of the content being shared. Measuring direct benefits should focus on productivity benchmarks with or without such technologies.

EMC Knowledge Worker Strategy Fit
Overall, EMC Knowledge Worker strategy is a great fit for many of the business challenges identified during the workshop. EMC's investments in CenterStage will provide improved patterns of collaboration that empower their business users and extend the reach of their virtual organization.

In addition, EMC Documentum provides a robust framework for managing the information lifecycle and the reuse of information. At the core of EMC strategy is a strong emphasis on information intelligence to permeate all of its collaborative capabilities. Based on advanced concept extraction and combined with an understanding of people social networks and interaction with content, such information intelligence will foster information reuse and provide better models for information classification and retention.

In order to help customers with the adoption of such technologies, EMC will work with its partners and its own consulting organization to provide best practices on how to most rapidly deliver business value.

CenterStage: A Technical Overview

2008-10-01T12:29:00.002-04:00

Cross posting from my blog post on the EMC Knowledge Worker blog.

With CenterStage, EMC delivers an interactive web experience, together with the associated computational resources and web services, for accessing and managing communities and team workspaces within the framework of an enterprise information infrastructure. Designed as a rich internet application, CenterStage leverages AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and web services to provide a dynamic user experience. Let's take a look at CenterStage high level architecture:

For version 1.0 release of CenterStage, two CenterStage clients will be made available in Q1 2009: CenterStage Essentials and CenterStage Pro. CenterStage Essentials provides basic content services; CenterStage Pro builds upon CenterStage Essentials to provide rich Web 2.0 and Social Networking capabilities. CenterStage Pro leverages CenterStage Essentials sub-systems and builds upon them.

Server Infrastructure
CenterStage leverages the robust customization infrastructure of the EMC Documentum Platform components as well as core services to provide both data model and services.
The following server components are provided with CenterStage:

Content server - This core server component provides data model management, security services and content management services
Full text index - Provides CenterStage with full-text search functionality
Thumbnail generator - This component generates thumbnails for common file formats. More advanced rendition capabilities (advanced formats, multi-paging) require customers to upgrade to the CTS framework and its Media Transformation Services (MTS) or Advanced Documents Transformation Services (ADTS)
Federated search - Allows users to aggregate searches across multiple sources. CenterStage Pro will provide search adapters for Google, ODBC/JDBC, Open Directory, and Open Search to name a few
Classification and Entity Extraction - The classification and entity extraction server components extract metadata from the content being uploaded in CenterStage based on semantic analysis of the content itself. The extracted metadata provides additional dimensions used by users to filter content

In addition to the above server components, the following modules need to be deployed to support CenterStage functionality:

Collaboration services: Provide the core collaboration infrastructure and is also used as the underpinning for the collaboration functionality available in Webtop
Rich media and transformation services: Support the ability to preview content in context within CenterStage
Extended search services: Provide the core set of services for search and clustering capabilities
CenterStage Essentials and Pro services: Provide the additional core services and data model for both CenterStage Essentials and Pro

Services Infrastructure
CenterStage application services are built on top of Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) providing CenterStage with a strong service orientation . CenterStage application services provide coarse-grained APIs built to address the needs of the user interface. Elements of the services infrastructure include:

The Rich Content Management Platform (RCMP) services, which handles the presentation layer requirement for:
- Component delivery - the component registry and configuration management for the various UI components (or Widgets) exposed in the CenterStage UI
- Container manager: the infrastructure for managing the user interface layouts
- Bundle support: the packaging and deployment model leveraging OSGi at its core
The CenterStage Essentials and Pro application services which provide a broad set of APIs to address the needs of the user interface and support its team productivity, information discovery, business process and web 2.0 functionality

User Interface Infrastructure
Built as a true rich internet application, CenterStage leverages browser - based technology to bind to the proper services and render the user interface:

A thin UI infrastructure allows CenterStage to render the layout definition provided by the services. Service binding is achieved via either DWR (Direct Web Remoting), REST or SOAP depending on the UI technology leveraged in a particular UI widget. CenterStage leverages the ExtJS toolkit for most its user interface, but widgets can be built using a different UI technology such as Flex.
A plugin infrastructure is also provided to enable seamless integration with the desktop when working with files.

Many of the architectural subsystems described above are in place in CenterStage Essentials Beta. Other sub-systems will be introduced with the formal release of CenterStage. Building upon the strength of the EMC Documentum Platform and standard rich internet technologies, CenterStage will provide a strong foundation for social, intelligent content enabled applications.

What's wrong with today's Enteprise 2.0 offerings

2008-08-18T14:36:00.001-04:00

Cross posting from my blog post on the EMC Knowledge Worker blog.

In the report, "Enterprise Content Management's Next Step Forward", Forrester makes the point that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) does not work for most enterprises. Current ECM implementations provide poor support for how most business people, especially information workers, work; and IT organizations are in perpetual catch-up to the ever changing behaviors of their knowledge worker. Forrester argues that ECM must adapt to move to more organic content management approaches that help abstract ECM’s complexities from end users, adapt to the way people work, and provide contextual views of, and access to content.

Andrew McAffee coined coined the acronym "SLATES" (as in Blank SLATES) to described such organic content management approach in his article, "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration", which appeared in the Spring 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review. SLATES stands for:

Search: for any information platform to be valuable, its users must be able to find what they are looking for. Improved information discovery drives reuse and better productivity
Links: understanding how content is interconnected is an excellent guide for what's important. The "best" pages are the ones that are most frequently linked to
Authoring: when authoring tools are deployed and used within a company, the intranet platform shifts from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work of many
Tags: tags reflect the information structures and relationships that people actually use, instead of the ones planned for them in advance and make patterns and processes in knowledge work more visible
Extensions: automate work through the use of categorization and pattern matching
Signals: technology must be able to signal users when new content of interest appears

Since then, authors such as Dion Hinchcliffe have built upon the SLATES framework to add characteristics such as:

Social, emergent and freedom
Network-oriented to describe that the content of Enterprise 2.0 applications must be fully Web-oriented, addressable and reusable

While SLATES is a useful acronym to describe important concepts, it falls short - even with the additions provided by Hinchcliffe - of addressing the true need of the enterprise:

Since December 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which set litigation guidelines in the US, now require electronically stored information be included in discovery requests. This means that organizations have a legal obligation to produce all electronic documents that pertain to a given lawsuit. As a result, organizations must have in place a robust information management strategy that decreases the cost of information discovery.
Information in highly collaborative gets stale quickly, particularly in project-driven environments. This is a typical knowledge management problem. Without processes in place to synthesize best practices and lessons learned, the trail of information is marginally useful. Information lifecycle management becomes critical to managing the growth of digital information and improve the quality of the information available for reuse. To meet the needs of the enterprise, enterprise 2.0 solutions must blend delegated administrative controls (such as provisioning, de-provisioning, retention policies, etc) with features that empower end-users
Sensitive information must remain protected no matter how it is accessed or exchanged. For instance, in highly sensitive systems, users may not be able to print or export content.

ECM can fill such gaps. ECM is entering a new and exciting phase where a compliant information infrastructure supporting new and innovative social networking and content creation paradigm will put ECM in business context and drive the adoption of such infrastructure. This is the vision for CenterStage.

Software Plus Services - An Interesting Development

2008-07-19T11:16:00.006-04:00

Last month, I blogged about next generation internet application and how companies like Amazon are innovating on the business model side and scaling their infrastructure out to provide rock bottom prices. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Rishi Chandra from Google touched on a similar topic. Early July, Microsoft announced it Microsoft Online Services that can:

Help relieve the burden of managing and maintaining business systems, freeing IT departments to focus on initiatives that can help deliver true competitive advantage.

Microsoft Online Services include:

Office Live Meeting
Exchange Hosted Services
Dynamics CRM Online
SharePoint Online

The most interesting part of the announcement is the pricing. Microsoft introduces a new licensing model call a User Subscription License (USL). USLs are interesting because they blend online access and on-premise access. So if a company has bought a USL of Office Live Meeting, their users are licensed to use either Microsoft Online or an on-premise deployment of Live Meeting. This provides an interesting twist to the Software Plus Services that Microsoft has been touting for a little while now.

Licensing is very competitive as well. A USL for the Business Productivity Online Suite is $15 per month. That means, for $15 per month, a user can have access to Exchange, SharePoint server, Live Meeting and, when released, Office Communications Online. See the Office SharePoint write up for a good explanation of the licensing model. Customers can also license Microsoft Online piece meal:

$10/month for an Exchange USL,
$7.25/month for SharePoint,
$2.50/month for Office Communications
$4.50/month for Live Meeting

Each USL includes a storage allocation: 1GB per USL for Exchange storage and 250MB per USL for SharePoint, and additional storage can be purchased for $2.50 per GB per month.

Looking back at how Cloud Computing is shaping to be a disruptive trend, this announcement is particularly interesting. The business model part makes it particularly attractive to IT organizations as they can start testing out mixed deployment of hosted and on-premise while protecting their investment. It will be interesting to follow how this gets adopted, but in my opinion, this is indicative of a paradigm shift in our industry.

On a closing note, an interesting description of the infrastructure required to support this offering and telling on the level of investment:

13 global datacenters (growing to 20 next year)
Replicated to two distinct datacenters to provide redundancy
Service guarantees a 99.9 percent SLA

Have you heard of CenterStage?

2008-07-19T10:38:00.002-04:00

CenterStage is EMC Documentum next generation information workplace that will provide an integrated end user experience that's contextual, visual, multi-modal and personal. CenterStage will include two offerings:

CenterStage Essentials: a free client that requires the Documentum Content Server and provides basic content services functionality
CenterStage Pro: the full Web 2.0 client built upon CenterStage Essentials and the Documentum ECM platform.

CenterStage Essentials Beta will be announced with EMC Documentum 6.5 launch. We have also created a community on labs.emc.com to manage the beta program. Join us there.

Enterprise 2.0: A State of the Industry Address

2008-06-11T19:16:00.001-04:00

Dan Keldsen, director of market intelligence at AIIM and Carl Frappaolo, book author and vice president, market of market intelligence at AIIM are presenting the result of an extensive study they just completed on what's going on with Enterprise 2.0. The survey had 441 respondents and was recently released as a 90 pages report available at www.aiim.org/enterprise20

AIIM also assembled a panel to assess the findings of the survey. The panel included Patti Anklam, Stowe Boyd, Andrew McAffee, Eric Tsui and David Weinberger

Among the top findings from the survey:

Age does not matter (as much as you think)
Culture matters (more than you think). This is the single most important thing to embrace Enterprise 2.0
- KM inclined organizations are 2X as likely to significantly increase rate of networking and increase formation of communities
- KM inclined organizations are 31% as likely to pursue Enterprise 2.0 strategically
- The key drivers for adoption are: Increase collaboration (69%), Awareness of what we know (56%), Increase agility and responsiveness (56%), Faster communication (55%)
- The biggest obstacles are: Lack of understanding, Lack of best practice
It is a slow market which frustrates early adopters - market is not moving as fast as led to believe
Strategy (is hard to find) and Enterprise 2.0 is often undertaken in a non-strategic way

Working in the Cloud: How Cloud Computing is Reshaping Enterprise Technology

2008-06-10T20:28:00.000-04:00

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise delivered a thoughtful and interesting talk on how cloud computing is reshaping enterprise technology. Rishi makes the point that the next 10 years of innovation will be in the cloud.

From Rishi's presentation, I took the following takeaways:

The cloud will drive towards unmatched scalability which in return will marginalize the cost per unit of the infrastructure whether it be storage or processing power
The uptime requirements of the cloud will provide unmatched reliability
Cloud computing providers need to build trust in their infrastructure. Security being often the primary concern.
This is a highly disruptive trend which could transform the economic dynamics of the software industry for on-premise software

During his presentation, Rishi outlined 4 areas of innovation that will further increase the appeal of cloud based solutions:

Consumer driven innovation will set the pace. Why? Because the consumer world is Darwinian in nature. Within the Enterprise, there is a lack of direct connection to the end user as purchase decision connect vendors with IT or purchasing departments. In the consumer space, consumers have direct choice and access to the technology.
One key lesson learned at Google is that simplicity wins. Google has been able to accomplish this by having an explicit focus on end user. This results in better solutions for the end user and drives towards increased innovation.
The rise of the power collaborator. The world is about team and group productivity where individuals needs to become increasingly connected to be more productive. Rishi makes the point that tools in the enterprise are still built for power users. The cloud is focused on collaboration and allows users to contribute information anywhere, all the time. Rishi envisions users being able to collaboration on content online and leverage "cloud services" such as automated translation to break communication barriers between contributors, or publishing services to publish information. The cloud is the right platform to provide those services and will offer one repository of information with open APIs.
The economics of IT are changing. The larger question for the enterprise is: how does the enterprise deal with scalability? Google as tremendous scalability challenges it needs to deal with. For instance, on the Google Picassa web service, 7 million new photos are uploaded a day. As Google scales its infrastructure, Google predicts that scale will drive unit costs towards zero. This is an interesting trend and aligned with what Amazon S3 services illustrate with storage at $0.15/GB. This provides some clear challenges for more traditional storage companies. Google positions its App Engine as a scalable hosting platform. This trend towards unlimited scalability provides huge opportunities and have great implications for the enterprise.
Barriers to adoption are falling away. Connectivity is becoming less of an issue. In addition, the user experience of web applications is getting richer all the time. Also, reliability expectations have changed. For instance, Gmail is multi homed, providing unmatched reliability. Rishi predicts that this will provide a level of reliability that on-premise deployment will be challenged to meet. One key barrier to adoption is security. But how secure is your organization today? 1 in 10 laptops are stolen within 12 months after purchase. Rishi makes the argument that data in the clould is more secure. However Google recognizes that in order to address the security issue, it will need to build trust with its customer. Google already does this, Postini is leveraging its cloud infrastructure for security and compliance solutions.

As closing remarks, Google does not believe that on-premise software is going away but predicts that innovation will happen in the cloud and open APIs will foster competition. Rishi predicts that all Google applications will become more social and leverage a common platform.

From the Bottom-Up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community

2008-06-10T20:19:00.001-04:00

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, both Intellipedia evangelists at the CIA covered some interesting aspects of Intellipedia. Intellipedia encompasses:

Wiki, the core of Intellipedia
Blog
Tagging and social bookmarking (ala del.icio.us) branded as Intelink
Document management branded as Inteldoc
A gallery of images similar to flickr
Video services

Intellipedia differs in many ways from Wikipedia. With Intellipedia, all edits are attributable to the author as users are required to login. It is not limited to an encyclopedia use case. Intellipedia also introduces a team dimension as well where many contributors from different agencies are contributing attributable point of views. Adoption is still ramping up and Intellipedia is not at a point where everyone is contributing knowledge. One of the challenge for adoption has been cultural. Sean and Don created a framework with 3 core principles to deal with distribution of knowledge issue:

Work at broadest audience possible
Think topically not organizationally
Replace existing business processes and move processes out of channel but into a platform. For instance, if a user is about to send an email sent to 50 people, it would be more effective as a blog post.

At Intellipedia, the #1 contributor is 69 years old with 40 years of experience. Adoption is not an age issue, organizations need to address the cultural challenges, and start small.

Visual Search: A Better Way to Find Information?

2008-06-09T13:33:00.008-04:00

Visual search is an area that's definitely gaining traction. A couple interesting startups have emerged that put a new twist on searching for information:

SearchMe, located in Mountain View, CA, a well founded startup, launched its private beta in March 2008
Viewzi, based in Dallas, TX, is offering early access to its visual views

SearchMe takes the Cover Flow approach to visually represent search results. Their model is very similar to Finder in Apple's Mac OS X.

Though very attractive, the SearchMe model is limited when searching for songs, videos, or shopping items. SearchMe always return a web page which may not always be the most appropriate context.

Here comes Viewzi, which created a platform with an API to allow domain experts to build specialized views. As it matures Viewzi is planning to open up its platform to allow the community to contribute views and expertise. Viewzi already provides multiple ways for users to search for information and users can switch between different views based on the type of search that they perform. Some interesting samples from the various view Viewzi provides:

Video x3 View
4 Sources View
Web Screenshot View
Gadget View
Everyday Shopping View
MP3 Search View
Album View

Viewzi also does a pretty good job at associating the relevant views to the search term.
Such focused visual searches are very effective to help locate information more quickly as they clearly set the context for the user. The application of such technologies within the enterprise would be tremendous. It will be interesting to follow Viewzi's evolution as they open up their platform to a broader community and how many business related views emerge.

Next Generation Internet Applications

2008-05-31T16:42:00.001-04:00

A colleague of mine, Michael Hackney, pointed me to an interesting company, DreamFactory and their Cloudware offering. DreamFactory leverages the Amazon infrastructure for their storage and billing infrastructure and Webex for their realtime. This allows them to focus exclusively on the application side and they leverage SalesForce AppExchange as an alternative delivery mechanism. I have to say, this is quite an innovative approach and a disruptive business model. Basically, they hardly own any infrastructure and focus exclusively on value-add. This allows them to be dirt cheap for their entry offering - @12.95 for a starting point + usage fees:

For their professional offering:
- Storage: $1.50 per GB/month
- Data Transfer In: $1.00 per GB/month
- Data Transfer Out: $1.70 per GB/month

which is basically what Amazon charges for their infrastructure plus a small markup.

Their business model is set up to be low cost and profitable from day one and cover cost as usage increases. For the Amazon of the world, it solidifies their position as the infrastructure that runs the web.

Back from EMC World

2008-05-24T11:05:00.003-04:00

Back from EMC World in Las Vegas. Overall this was a very positive show. The numbers are impressive:

The Content Management and Archiving community represented 23% of the EMC World Audience
There were more that 200 tracks, sessions and demos showcasing our products for our CMA four solutions platforms

On the Knowledge worker side, this was a very positive event. We publicly announced "Project Magellan" and got some exciting response. Here are some extracts of the positive feedback we received:

First at Mark Lewis keynote which can be found on YouTube, Mark Lewis introduce our new generation of client as follow: "You will be amazed by the new levels of usability in the content management products we’re introducing, and also the use of Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures to connect our products together" from Byte and Switch
We also got some very positive blog coverage. Marko Sillanpaa wrote a nice piece on Project Magellan, a few extracts from his post:
Better still the UI is not only clean but sexy. Learning from the best in UI, Magellan adds interfaces introduced by Apple for iTunes and iPod. In addition to standard thumbnail directory views, Magellan offers a browse option similar to Cover Flow. While search adds a filtering option similar to that in iTunes for finding a song based on a genre and artist.
But what it does show is that EMC is listening. Finally a UI that is as clean and simple as Alfresco and SharePoint and a bonus that it’s as sexy as an iPhone. And I for one want to say, thank you for listening.

You bet Marko and thank you for the positive write up!

A case study in Wikis, Facets and KM

2007-11-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since I posted on my blog. I have decided to write again to share some of the interesting topics I have come across. I recently read a very interesting write up from Pete Bell from Endeca published on KM World: Acmepedia: a case study in Wikis, Facets and KM. Pete makes some very interesting observations.

Regarding the key differences between Wikis and traditional KM:

• Wikis are an addition to KM, not a rip-and-replace. They will become yet another silo if they’re not designed to complement your existing enterprise packaged applications.
• Faceted navigation and information access can be the key to crossing different content silos.
• Although facets are part of the solution, they also introduce new requirements: how do you categorize everything so it can be found again through faceted navigation? With enhancements, tagging and folksonomy provide an answer.
• Authority and trust impose different constraints in the enterprise than in the public Wikipedia. Facets offer dramatic changes here too.

Best practices for Wikis:

• “Curated” content: Only a utopian would expect white papers, legal documents and HR forms to be produced by the proverbial million monkeys banging on a wiki. These would continue to live in a CMS, complete with version control, workflows and the like.
• Packaged applications: Data and notes from CRM, HRM and ERP packaged applications were some of our most valuable content. We would sensibly leave it where it was, but use information access to integrate it.
• Wikis and blogs: These group collaborations proved best at capturing the conversational nature of emerging topics, discussions, threads, opinions, ephemera and niches. And they required some business
process changes to align them with communities of practice.

Folksonomy and Taxonomy:

In our own experimentation, we found that the purists’ folksonomy can be amended very successfully with a pragmatic approach. It can succeed by blending elements of tops-down and bottoms-up organization. Key techniques:
• Controlled vocabulary: instead of free-form document tagging, first prompt users to select common terms from a controlled vocabulary, like names of industries, products, customers and geographies.
• Enter tags in facets: Instead of prompting for tags in a single field, offer faceted fields—again, like industries, products, etc. The name of the facet itself adds valuable structure.
• Auto-complete terms: Prevent vocabulary drift by using a type-ahead search to suggest known terms as the user types.
• Put an editor in the workflow queue: Actively prevent vocabulary drift with an expert. It takes less effort than you’d expect. You won’t catch everything, but you can add common synonyms and hesaurus
terms, and promote frequently used terms to the controlled vocabulary.
• Auto-tag: Supplement user tagging with some based on rules, like tags derived from an author’s department or LDAP profile.

Finally! My Yahoo is Getting an Upgrade

2007-03-18T12:11:00.000-04:00

I have been a long time My Yahoo! user and over time have accumulated quite a collection of personalized content. But lately, with new and innovative services like Netvibes and PageFlakes, I had grown overly frustrated with the lack of investment in My Yahoo! and had been considering migrating away from using it. Finally, it looks like Yahoo! has decided to change course and some exciting new features are coming our way. The new My Yahoo! is currently offered in Beta to a limited number of users. For a preview of what's coming, check out this screencast. Also, Yahoo! is starting a new My Yahoo! blog that will hopefully give users a good sense of where things are going.

So, I guess I will wait a little longer and see if the new My Yahoo! finally gets to par with its competition.

Build Your Own Application With Coghead

2007-03-10T18:46:00.000-05:00

I have been invited to participate in Coghead beta program. Coghead's catch line is a:

Simple, powerful new way to create web-based business applications that can be used by anyone, anytime, anywhere!

Their application is built using OpenLaszlo and provides a very responsive user experience. I have been evaluating their application and they definitely get the idea right. End users have a multitude of needs for business application. We could refer to this as the long tail of business applications. And IT cannot respond to everyone of those needs in a scalable manner. Therefore it makes sense to create an application that empowers business users to quickly create applications as their needs occur. Coghead Gallery provides a number of application templates to quickly get started.

Where I personally find that Coghead falls short is with its concept of collection Coghead allows users to build applications made collections, forms, views, and actions. Collections are objects used by the application. They contain records. A collection describes a data structure, and provides tools for viewing and modifying data of that type. Records are the actual data that is stored; each record is an instance of the data defined by the Collection. For example, if you have a collection “Purchase Orders” then a record would be the data that makes up one purchase order.

Though a powerful concept, it does not go far enough in my opinion. Business application needs go beyond the need to assemble collections. Nevertheless, this is a good start and a nice application.

Jetspeed 2.1 Released!

2007-03-03T11:38:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to the Jetspeed team who released Jetspeed 2.1 this week-end. Included in this release are a large number of bug fixes and some significant new features including:

Jetspeed Desktop: a web 2.0 client-side JSR-168 portlet aggregation
Parallel Rendering: multithreaded portlet aggregator with portlet timeout tracking and removal of slow rendering portlets
Jetspeed Distributed Cluster: support for distributed deployments of the portal on multiple application server platforms
JSR 168 Caching: full caching support of the JSR-168 portlet specification and distributed cache invalidation
Improved LDAP support: full security maintenance using LDAP is now supported for many LDAP providers
Full fledge AJAX API

All great features that will go a long way to make Jetspeed 2.1 an option for enterprise portal deployments.

The Jetspeed 2.1 release comes with a nice installer and you can try it for yourself in about 5-10 minutes.

The detailed releases notes are available on Jetspeed-2 web site.

Below is a screenshot of the new Jetspeed-2 desktop client side aggregation.

Data Sharing and Vizualization: Next Generation

2007-03-01T17:58:00.000-05:00

The International Weekly Journal of Science has published an interesting article illustrating how social software us creating a new paradigm for sharing data. Proof in point is IBM's new Many Eyes service launched on January 23rd. The site provides an infrastructure for uploading data sets and creating visualization for the data through various visualization types available.
By making the data publicly available and providing an infrastructure to analyze it, it empowers individuals and creates a very powerful model for developing collective intelligence quickly. Fernanda Viégas of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts points out that governments, international agencies and research organizations generate huge silos of publicly available data on almost every aspect of society, but the public has never been able to explore, share and discuss these data sets easily. That is interesting, but more interestingly, I could see huge applications of this type of technology to the enterprise with potential dynamic enterprise datasets. In the enterprise context, this type of application of social software could drastically impact organizations' ability to be more data driven and to leverage data to collaborate on business decisions.

Below, some more screenshots from Many Eyes.

Posted visualizations:

Posted comments:

Posted data sets:

Online Office Suite - It's Heating Up...

2007-02-25T10:17:00.000-05:00

My blog post a couple weeks ago on online office suites was quite timely. Last week, Google announced the re-branding and extended reach of its Google Apps for your Domain. As I pointed out in my previous post, Google's announcement validate in many way the disruptive nature of such offerings. Google's improved offering includes:

Google Apps Standard Edition: a free service that includes Gmail accounts (since enhanced for mobile access on BlackBerrys), a shared calendar, Google Talk instant messaging, access to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and a Web page creator.
Google Apps Premier Edition: a service designed for businesses of all sizes (read: targeted at the enterprise) which costs $50 a year per user and includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee for e-mail, additional e-mail storage (10GB per account instead of the 2GB limit of the Standard Edition), and new administration and business integration features.

In the enterprise edition, a control panel allows domain administrators to control which features they want to activate and to customize those services for their organization.

Administrators can:

Add, change, or remove user accounts
Create the Start page layout for their user base where users can quickly preview their inbox, calendar, document list and other essential information related to their organization.
Run a chat session
Design a Web site
Set up e-mail accounts
Define mailing lists (you can include recipients outside your domain)
Configure calendars

Not surprisingly, Google Apps also comes with a broad set of APIs that use HTTP requests for a publishing and editing protocol in the spirit of the REST approach to web service interfaces. Most of these APIs allows client applications to view and update Google Apps constructs (e.g. spreadsheets) in the form of Google data API ("GData") feeds. GData leverages either of two standard XML-based syndication formats: Atom or RSS. Such APIs will strongly empower Google's partners and could overtime provide Google with strong competitive differentiation.

From the end user standpoint, Google Apps Premier Edition is all about collaboration, with 2 main positioning statements:

Communicate and connect: This includes GMail, Google Talk and Google Calendar
Collaborate and Publish: This includes Google Docs and Spreadsheet, the Start Page and Google Page Creator

Evaluating Google Docs and Spreadsheet is beyond the scope of this post, but in many ways compares to the Microsoft Office Suite, it falls in the category of the good enough.

This may explain some of the early broad adoption Google is claiming. Kevin Gough, product manager for Google Enterprise observes that:

CIOs are increasingly looking at what can they safely outsource to a trusted partner and what is a core function that is going to give them a competitive differentiator. They’re realizing that email and productivity tools and the staff that have to maintain that is not a competitive differentiator for them and they can redeploy that staff on things that are more core to their business.

Early in its release of Google Apps Premier Edition, Google claims that a number of large enterprises have commenced deployment and pilots of the online system that is looming as a threat to Microsoft's desktop-based office productivity dominance.

We have hundreds of thousands of small to medium businesses that have already done that," said Gough. "They’ve already switched their entire infrastructure over to Google Apps. We have just released the Premier Edition of Google Apps today and today we already have GE, Procter & Gamble, Prudential and Loreal. If on the first day of the launch we have two of the top 25 companies in the world. Imagine what’s going to happen in a month or a year from now.

The coming year will be interesting to watch and should create plenty of opportunities for those who can seize them.

Digg Like User Interface as a Product Management Tool

2007-02-17T10:34:00.000-05:00

Yahoo!'s Yodel Anecdotal blog provides an interesting take on gathering user's feedback. Yahoo! has built a brand new Yahoo! Suggestion Board to collect users' feedback for its various web properties.

From a product management stand point, this is a great use of the Digg concept. Instead of providing the traditional disconnected feedback form where users provide feedbacks one at a time without any understanding or context of previously submitted feedback, the Yahoo! Suggestion Board concept provides an avenue to directly involve users in the prioritization of features/enhancements by letting them vote, comment, and make suggestions on what really matters to them. This is a great use of community building and the architecture of participation to better listen to the voice of your customers and make your users the drivers for how a company's products should evolve.

Yahoo! is getting quite an earful for reaping off the Digg user interface, but this is a creative a powerful use of such concept to put users' at the center of future products enhancements.

Online Office Suites - Part 1

2007-02-11T11:35:00.000-05:00

There has been a lot of talk lately about online office suites, or Office 2.0, with the mandatory 2.0 moniker. The acquisition of Writely by Google in early March 2006 rekindled speculations that online office suites where back for good and provided a real threat to the dominant Microsoft Office position.

I believe there are some strong arguments for this, this time. If we take the new entrants in that space through a classic Clayton Christensen analysis, new online office suites clearly have new market disruptions characteristics. Compared to Microsoft Office, they provide:

Lower performance in "traditional attributes" but improved performance in new attributes, simplicity and convenience
Target non-consumption: customers who historically lacked the money or skill to buy or use the product. The standard version of Office costs about $400 where most online office suites are typically free.
The business model of these new entrants make money at a much lower price per unit sold.

In addition, Microsoft's monopoly on the Office suite market has created strong regulatory pressures on the company and has forced it to transform its integrated, differentiated, proprietary file format into a more modularized and standardized file format (see OpenXML), that will drive towards the commoditization of the Office suite. If a user can produce and open any Office documents with about any Office suite application, including a free one, why would someone spend $400 for MS Office 2007? These technology factors combined with the "good enough" user experience factor will create significant competitive pressure over the coming year and Google has definitely recognized the opportunity as it gears up with its Docs and Spreadsheets applications from the Writely acquisition and soon to come, a Presently offering for presentations that will presumably support the OpenXML PresentationML format.

Over the next few weeks, I will take a look at a few of those online Office suites.

Mashup for the Enterprise? A look at QEDWiki

2007-02-10T21:09:00.000-05:00

IBM announced early February the release of QEDWiki for the Enterprise. QED stands for "Quickly and Easily Done" and is intended to be a tool for mashups in the enterprise. As IBM puts it:

QEDWiki is a browser-based assembly canvas used to create simple mash-ups. A mash-up maker is an assembly environment in which the creator of a mash-up uses software components (or services) made available by content providers. QEDWiki is a unique Wiki framework in that it provides both Web users and developers with a single Web application framework for hosting and developing a broad range of Web 2.0 applications.

QEDWiki also provides Web application developers with a flexible and extensible framework to enable do-it-yourself (DIY) rapid prototyping. Business users can quickly prototype and build ad hoc applications without depending on software engineers. QEDWiki provides mash-up enablers (programmers) with a framework for building reusable, tag-based commands. These commands (or widgets) can then be used by business users who wish to create their own Web applications.

To see QEDWiki in action, check out an introduction and an insurance claims use case videos on YouTube.

With QEDWiki, Lotus Connection and Lotus Quickr, IBM has been riding the Enterprise 2.0 wave at full speed. Those products are definitely innovative and very interesting. It just bodes the question on how do you position one versus the other versus Websphere Portal, Quickplace and Workplace if you are an IBM sales rep...

Web 2.0... The Machine is Us/ing Us

2007-02-08T12:08:00.000-05:00

I came across a video produced by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University that I found to be very well done. Instead of looking at Web 2.0 through the usual lenses of collaboration, social networking, wikis and folksonomies, it takes a fresh time machine approach to describing how end users became the engine of the Internet and some of the societal questions that result from this transformation. This is very refreshing.

A transcript is available on Digital Ethnography's blog.

Internet Users and Tagging

2007-02-02T08:37:00.000-05:00

The Pew Internet & American Life Project just published a report on tagging. Some very interesting findings from the report:

A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.
Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.
Taggers are considerably more likely to have broadband connections at home, rather than dial-up connections. Men and women are equally likely to be taggers, while online minorities are a bit more likely than whites to be taggers.
The act of tagging is likely to be embraced by a more mainstream population in the future because many organizations are making it easier and easier to tag internet content.

More details on the demographics of taggers are provided below:

In his upcoming book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder,
Weinberger describes how radical it is for people to move away from hierarchical classifications. His prediction:

We'll also undoubtedly figure out how to intersect tags with social networks, so that the tags created by people we know and respect have more “weight” when we search for tagged items. In fact, by analyzing how various social groups use tags, we can do better at understanding how seemingly different worldviews map to one another.

The New Era of The Long Tail of the Pharmaceutical Industry?

2007-01-27T15:41:00.000-05:00

I came across a good article on the New York Times this morning, The Dangers of Swinging for the Fences by Joe Nocera. Reading this article, I could not help but think whether the pharmaceutical industry had entered a new era where addressing the long tail of drugs production would be the next evolution for that industry.

Joe Nocera makes the point in his article that the pharmaceutical business is changing. This is particularly well illustrated by the tough times at Pfizer. The modern Pfizer was built on Blockbusters, which is what the industry calls medicines that generate $1 billion or more in annual revenue.

At Pfizer for instance, the top 4 drugs account for 35% of revenue. Lipitor alone with $12.9 billion in annual revenue accounts for 27% of Pfizer's revenue. And with Lipitor coming off patent in 2010, Pfizer needs to worry on how to make up for that blockbuster's revenue.

The blockbuster business model is falling apart - and not only in the pharmaceutical industry by the way. First, big bets like the Lipitor one, require a significant time period to recover the investments to produce such blockbuster and drug patents expire after 17 years. Second, expensive go to market strategies with direct advertising to consumer and doctors are experiencing a backlash.

New business models in the pharmaceutical industry are starting to favor the long tail of drugs where new discoveries tend to be very much targeted and according to Harvard economist David Cutler:

Drugs are eventually going to be customized for individuals.

Jeffrey Kindler, CEO of Pfizer is betting on it and wants Pfizer to become as good at developing $500 million drugs as in coming up with new blockbusters. Well, that's a big bet for Pfizer and let's hope with Pfizer can pull it off.

It will make for a much healthier industry and could be the start of a new area of the long tail of the pharmaceutical industry. It will be interesting to watch closely how successful Pfizer is at revolutionizing its industry.

The Cost of Ineffective Search

2007-01-26T18:22:00.000-05:00

Great article in Network World on the Cost of Ineffective Search. The author starts with a strong punch line:

A company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it, IDC research found last year.

You think that's bad. think again:

A survey conducted by Accenture this month of 1,000 middle managers found that more than half of the information they find during searches is useless.

The Butler Group estimates that 10% of a company's salary are wasted on ineffective searches.* Susan Feldman at IDC found that 3.5 hours each week are wasted on search that don't turn up the right information.
People spend about 9-10 hours a week on average looking for information and don't find the information they are looking for 1/3 to 1/2 of the time.

So why is search so ineffective?

1. Enterprises are not investing much in search
Most companies are under-investing in search compared to other systems such as portals, dashboards, databases and other enterprise systems and are not using the latest search technology. The best search applications use concept searches and very few companies have adopted such technology.

2. 90% of the documents that are created have no useful metadata
Companies for the past 10 years have found it extremely difficult to get employees to add metadata to content.

3. The right data sources are not getting indexed
Companies need to figure out what search is used for (customer service, eDiscovery, etc.) and adapt their search strategy.

The Answer?
The semantic web is viewed as an answer to ineffective search. Recent research from MIT Sloan shows that using semantic search technology will turn up most desired results about 80% of the time compared to 50% of the time with search technology used by most companies today.

Improved metadata through a non-intrusive tagging process will definitely contribute to improved search as well, further indicating the value of social tagging.

Service-Oriented Information Infrastructure

2007-01-23T18:34:00.000-05:00

Mark Lewis had an interesting write up a few days ago on Service Oriented Information Infrastructure (SOII) and I could not agree more with him. Actually, I believe that in many ways this trend has already started. Look at Amazon Simple Storage Services and how sites like SmugMug and YouOs use this infrastructure to essentially run their web sites. You are talking 60,000 customers utilizing 12 GB of storage and 80 GB of bandwidth per month for YouOS and 10 terabytes of new images each month for SmugMug. That's serious infrastructure there. In the case of SmugMug, the company estimates saving $1/2 million a month in storage expenditure!

So, I definitely agree, SOII is the way of the future for the storage industry, looking at Amazon S3 strategy is actually enlightening.

This actually strongly highlights the need for standards in that space. But, then imagine the possibilities: based on the value of their information, customers could either leverage an Amazon S3 services or internal storage for key business records. This also means that application providers need to anticipate such need and layer their product architecture accordingly.

This is starting to happen, Koral, a startup in the content management space is built from the ground up to support storage as a web service and has done a reference implementation using Amazon S3. It will take a while for this type of technology to be adopted in the enterprise, but given the profound impact it will have on established players' product architecture, this clearly has the potential to be a disruptive innovation.

The Value of Co-Creation

2007-01-20T18:21:00.000-05:00

I have been reading Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. Overall, it is a good book. One of the arguments the authors make is that corporations need highly permeable boundaries to foster innovation in their organizations and be successful. In the software industry, we have seen how IBM and others have leveraged the open source movement to co-create and drive innovation in the industry. IBM for instance estimates that it saves in R&D around $1 billion a year by investing in the Linux community. And in its hardware business alone, IBM sold $2 billion worth of Linux based hardware in 2006. Those make strong arguments for the value of co-creation, right? Well, wait to hear how P&G leverages co-creation. In the late 1990's, P&G realized that out of a $1.5 billion R&D budget, generating a lot of patents, less than 10% of the produced patents resulted in products. So P&G's CEO, A. G. Lafley, set out a pretty aggressive goal: that 50% of P&G new products and service ideas come from outside the company by 2010. We aren't talking about outsourcing here, but true co-creation. Identify most promising ideas out there that help P&G innovate and incorporate them into P&G R&D.

The result is big time dividend as mentioned in P&G's New Innovation Model in March 2006, by Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab on HBS Working Knowledge.

More than 35 percent of our new products in market have elements that originated from outside P&G, up from about 15 percent in 2000. And 45 percent of the initiatives in our product development portfolio have key elements that were discovered externally. Through connect and develop—along with improvements in other aspects of innovation related to product cost, design, and marketing—our R&D productivity has increased by nearly 60 percent. Our innovation success rate has more than doubled, while the cost of innovation has fallen. R&D investment as a percentage of sales is down from 4.8 percent in 2000 to 3.4 percent today. And, in the last two years, we've launched more than 100 new products for which some aspect of execution came from outside the company. Five years after the company's stock collapse in 2000, we have doubled our share price and have a portfolio of twenty-two billion-dollar brands.

That's pretty amazing and should be a call for action for any executive out there. Co-creation works in a big way!

What do the "Out There" People in Your Organization Think?

2007-01-13T12:00:00.000-05:00

The Attention Company posted an interesting survey on what it calls the "Out There" people. See the "Out There" survey and the "Out There" reactions.

In a nutshell, the survey makes the following points as described below:

The "Out There" people are the ones "participating in online communities"
- 20% of your organization population very active
- 32% are somehow active
They are the winners in your organization
Information is everything:
- Employees at the bottom levels of an organization have most of the knowledge
- Transparency in decision making increases the likelihood of success

These points are particularly interesting when put in context with organizations and how better information sharing techniques can help organization perform better. This shows the benefits of having a strategy to best disseminate information and knowledge within a company.

Confluence: A Nice Product Evolution

2007-01-08T11:08:00.000-05:00

I have been tracking Confluence for a little while now, I have to give credit to their team for a nice product evolution.
In 2.0 in November 2005, they added label or tagging support with cloud display and improved their dashboard display. See their 2.0 release notes.

More screenshots are available in this slide show.

In April 2006, in their 2.2 version, they added support for personal spaces. See the 2.2 release notes.

And, this January, they are adding people directories in 2.3. See their 2.3 release notes.

For those interested in getting in touch with their developers, some of their personal spaces are available online.

Who Likes Peanut Butter Anyway?

2006-12-07T17:38:00.000-05:00

I never liked peanut butter, so that may be the reason why Brad Garlinghouse's memo resonnated with me. His Peanut Butter Manifesto gives us a lesson in leadership. It is the responsibility of senior management to lead the march for change and to clearly articulate why it is happening. I found Brad's manifesto effective at doing so. Ironically enough, it would probably resonnate true with quite a few organizations were you to replace the product names. Organizations often tend to spread peanut butter when they are reluctant to refocus their business and align it with clearly articulated strategic direction. To be successuful, every organization should have:

A focused, cohesive vision
Clarity of ownership and accountability
Decisiveness

The drama of working out internal company issues in public is unusual but quite entertaining. I am not sure what are the benefits for a Yahoo! executive to do so. But, his call for change should be applauded. Too many executives often do so too late. Knowing when is the right time to call for change is hard, looks like that time has come at Yahoo!. Now, let's see how successfully, Yahoo! can refocus its business. Will Brad lead the charge?

Why Kodak’s Strategy Will Work…

2006-12-06T21:54:00.000-05:00

The November 27th issue of Business week had a very interesting article about Kodak and some of the tough choices and strategy shifts it had to undertake over the past 10 years. Over the past ten years, Kodak had to re-invent itself from a film company to a print company to a digital technology provider illustrated by its recent deal with Motorola. So what's behind Kodak's transformation? First, despite the resistance to change that any strategy shift entails, is the recognition of a true identity and business purpose. Kodak is an image company and as such, it is able to adjust, though painfully, through the value chain of the image business.

In a sense, this is a classical illustration of Clayton Christensen's "Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits". The law of conservation of attractive profits states that in the value chain there is a requisite juxtaposition of modular and interdependent commoditization, that exists in order to optimize the performance of what is not good enough. When modularity and commoditization cause attractive profits to disappear at one stage in the value chain, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage (quote from The Innovator's Solution). This happened to the computer industry (see Intel) and is happening to the image industry. Kodak's bet that the growth of digital photography will happen in mobile phone and that profits margins for sensor chips will be twice those of the digital camera business aligns with the above law. Kodak is identifying new revenue opportunity in the image value chain and aggressively pursuing the shift in the value chain. That's true leadership and it will pay off. Good luck Mr Perez.

Meridio Records Management with SharePoint

2006-12-02T14:53:00.000-05:00

I came across this interesting presentation from Meridio a couple days ago. Meridio positions itself as the leading worldwide provider of enterprise Document and Records Management (eDRM) software, engineered for Microsoft .NET platforms.

As a result, Meridio is naturally embracing SharePoint and identifying both how to position itself and provide value-added to SharePoint 2007. Meridio recognizes one of the weaknesses of the SharePoint architecture with the risk of proliferation of a large number of sites which in return makes the SharePoint infrastructure difficult to manage (if not unmanageable) for large organizations. SharePoint's approach to Records Management relies heavily on the site archictecture as well. See the Web Seminar with AIIM and Microsoft: Records Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for a good overview.

Meridio is positioning itself as an enterprise policy management solution for SharePoint 2007 which can act as an enterprise records management repository for SharePoint and legacy systems as well.

Here is a screenshot of Meridio’s policy management user interface in a SharePoint environment.

Meridio's architecture seems to start positioning Meridio as a potential virtual records management repository for the enterprise which is undoubtedly the right direction for them to remain relevant.

It is an interesting and promising extension to SharePoint. Remains to be seen how successful they will be now that SharePoint is positioning itself as a platform that can provide basic Records Management capabilities.

Interesting Open Source WSRP Consumers/Producers Compatibility Analysis

2006-06-25T12:19:00.000-04:00

A colleague of mine recently pointed out an interesting presentation from CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory (University of Portsmouth) comparing experiences with open source portals WSRP development and testing.

By standardizing presentation-oriented web services, WSRP makes it possible to construct web portals in "plug-and-play" mode. This presentation compares WSRP support for the eXo Platform, Liferay, StringBeans and uPortal. WSRP4J, which is not a portal framework but a reference implementation of the WSRP 1.0 specification and the basis of WSRP support in many portal frameworks, is also discussed. In summary, WSRP Open Source implementations are still in early stages. From a producer standpoint, WSRP4J is clearly the most compatible of all and can be accessed by all the reviewed WSRP consumers. From a consumer standpoint, none of the consumers are fully functional. From Xiaobo Yang, Xiao Dong Wang and Rob Allan presentation, the test summary is shown below.

Jetspeed-2 Desktop: Client Side Portlet Aggregation

2006-05-13T13:46:00.000-04:00

I have not had much time to get involved with Jetspeed lately, but when I read Steve Milek post on the development list last Monday, I figured I had to check out the new Jetspeed-2 desktop mode. And I have to say, this is shaping out quite nicely.

Essentially, the Jetspeed j2o Desktop mode combines Jetspeed server-side portal services with client side ajax services. Traditionally, Jetspeed has been a server centric application where every request is processed by the server request pipeline. In Jetspeed j2o desktop the page aggregation is controlled by the client services. This makes for a pretty sleek client experience. The Jetspeed j2o implementation significantly leverages the DOJO library and essentially implements a client side JSR 168 compliant portlet rendering engine. Some screenshots are enclosed below.

Jetspeed-2 Desktop View

Jetspeed-2 Desktop Portlet Drag and Drop

Jetspeed-2 Back in Normal Portal View

Users can switch back to the traditional Jetspeed view:

For more details, read Steve's post on the Jetspeed-2 dev list. Great job from the jetspeed team!

Wikis: New Trend For Consumer Oriented Web Sites?

2006-04-22T14:34:00.000-04:00

Wikis have been around for a while. The open source community has long been using them as a means of communicating project updates and documentation. The Wikipedia phenomenon has played a significant role in increasing awareness and demonstrating the power of Wikis. Now it is time for consumer oriented web sites to jump on the band wagon and leverage Wikis as a means to provide better alignment and customer focus for their web sites. How much customer focused can you be? There seems to be a trend for a new generation of consumer web sites to leverage Wikis as a way to foster their community involvement and provide better customer focus. Granted customer reviews have been around for a while; just select one product on Amazon and consumer reviews usually abound. The paradigm shift here? The entire site content is driven by the community. This has the potential for early adopters to disrupt their industry business models. Some examples:

Trip Advisor: This is probably the best example. Trip Advisor is opening its travel guides content to the community at large. If this takes off, this could be quite disruptive to the travel guide industry. No more outdated content; get to read about the not so-well known places to visit. Leverage millions of tourists and local inhabitants to participate in writing Trip Advisor travel guides content. Look at what Wikipedia did to the Encyclopedia industry...
Product Wiki: Another good example of what consumer shopping web sites could become. Let your community decide what you should sell and talk about. This could be fairly disruptive as well. Sell what your customers are looking for and develop micro communities of shopping web sites where customers drive what should be on the product catalog. The risk here is that, third party resellers figure out the trick to push and promote their own products. But with the proper controls in place, this concept has some potential.
Wet Paint: Provide a framework to create Wikis focused on specific consumer areas. Check out Wiki XBox 360 for the XBox fans.

This is just a small subset of the next generation of consumer web sites and still very much a work in progress. But well worth a few minutes of blogging...

Market Dynamics For Idea Validation

2006-03-26T19:59:00.000-05:00

Here is an interesting idea. Use market dynamics to weed the good ideas from the bad ones. I just happened to read an interesting article from today's New York Times ("Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas" by William C. Taylor) that outlines just that. I personally find the idea quite appealing. The premises go as follows:

Allow anyone in your company to have Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) for their ideas.
Have every employee allowed to trade $10,000 of those idea stocks.
Let the market dynamics decide.

This is not a completely novel idea but Rite-Solutions has a product (The Innovation Engine) that does just that. A modern take on the suggestion box...

Yahoo! Mail Beta - I am loving it...

2006-03-04T17:03:00.000-05:00

I finally got access to the new Yahoo! Mail Beta and I am loving it. My favorite feature? The RSS reader. My Yahoo! already offered the ability to add RSS feed to your personal pages; well now even better, you can read your RSS feeds in your mail client with indicators of whether or not new items are available. I look forward to Yahoo! integrating RSS with Messenger next...

An Interesting SOA Platfom Reference Model

2006-02-05T14:45:00.000-05:00

I came accross a white paper from IDC that presented an interesting SOA platform reference model. According to IDC, any SOA platform should be made of:
Core Services

Deployment services. To host and manage the operational, runtime functions
Integration services. Data and process-style integration across operating environments and platforms with support for demand-driven (request/reply) or event-driven interoperation
Process orchestration. Organizes and aggregates services into flows to automate system and business processes
Policy. A business policy or systems rule or condition that governs an action (Business rules are the foundation of business processes.)
State management. The ability to recognize, support, and manage entity state, thereby providing support for processing governed by state transitions

Supporting Services

Access services. Reliable and secure system and people-based access to services and necessary system artifacts within the SOA
Development facilities. Full life-cycle support and versioning of services and messages, including modeling, coding, debugging, testing, deployment, and change control
Security and management services. Service and process monitoring, management, security, and ID management
Application and data services. Services built around the supporting data persistence and data semantics

It shows the level of completness that application frameworks must provide in order to address the various requirements of SOA.

Jetspeed-2.0 has been released!

2005-12-10T12:58:00.000-05:00

Two years in the making and a busy couple last months and there it is. Jetspeed 2.0 final release is out! From the release announcement:

The Apache Portals Jetspeed Team is pleased to announce the final release of the Jetspeed 2.0 Open Source Enterprise Portal. This final release is fully-compliant with the Portlet Specification 1.0 (JSR-168). Jetspeed-2 has passed the TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) suite and is fully CERTIFIED to the Java Portlet Standard.
The Jetspeed team will be presenting the new 2.0 release at ApacheCon US 2005 on December 10th in San Diego.
Jetspeed is a full implementation of the Java Portlet API. Notable features include security components backed by LDAP and database implementations and some robust administration interfaces. Custom portals can be built and deployed using the Jetspeed plugin for Maven. Developers can use the Jetspeed PSML language to assemble portlets and the Apache Portals Bridges project to 'bridge' portals with existing technologies including Struts, JSF, PHP, Perl. For GUI designers, Jetspeed comes with several built-in templates used to decorate portals and portlets. Join the growing community of Jetspeed users and developers at ApacheCon. David Sean Taylor will be presenting a Jetspeed tutorial that shouldn't be missed by anyone interested in the technology.

Features of the Final Release Include:

Standardized:

Fully compliant with Java Portlet API Standard 1.0 (JSR 168)
Passed JSR-168 TCK Compatibility Test Suite
J2EE Security based on JAAS Standard, JAAS DB Portal Security Policy
LDAP Support for User Authentication

Foundation Component Architecture:

Spring-based Components and Scalable Architecture
Configurable Pipeline Request Processor
Auto Deployment of Portlet Applications
Jetspeed Component Java API
Jetspeed AJAX XML API
PSML: Extended Portlet Site Markup Language
- Database Persistent
- Content Management Facilities
- Security Constraints

Portal Core Features:

Declarative Security Constraints and JAAS Database Security Policy
Runtime Portlet API Standard Role-based Security
Portal Content Management and Navigations: Pages, Menus, Folders, Links
Multithreaded Aggregation Engine
PSML Folder CMS Navigations, Menus, Links
Jetspeed SSO (Single Sign-on)
Rules-based Profiler for page and resource location
Integrates with most popular databases including: Derby, MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Postgres, DB2
Client independent capability engine (HTML, XHTML, WML, VML)
Internationalization: Localized Portal Resources in 12 Languages
Statistics Logging Engine
Portlet Registry
Full Text Search of Portlet Resources with Lucene
User Registration
Forgotten Password
Rich Login and Password Configuration Management

Administrative Portlets:

User, Role, Group, Password, and Profile Management
JSR 168 Generic User Attributes Editor:
- JSR 168 Preferences Editor
- Site Manager
- SSO Manager
- Portlet Application and Lifecycle Management
- Profiler Administration
- Statistics Reports

Web Framework Support and Sample Portlets:

Bridges to other Web Frameworks: JSF, Struts, PHP, Perl, Velocity
Sample Portlets:
- RSS, IFrame, Calendar XSLT, Bookmark, Database Browser
- Integration with Display Tags, Spring MVC

Customization Features:

Administrative Site Manager
Page Customizer

Portal Design Features:

Deployment Jetspeed Portlet and Page Skins (Decorators) CSS Components
Configurable CSS Page Layouts
Easy to Use Velocity Macro Language for Skin and Layout Components

Development Tools

Automated Maven Build
Jetspeed-2 Maven Plugin for Custom Portal Development
AutoDeployment of Portlet Applications, Portal Resources
Deployment Tools
Plugin Goals integrated with Auto Deployment Feature

Application Servers Supported:

Tomcat 5.0.x
Tomcat 5.5.x
Websphere 5.1, 6.0
JBoss

The release is available for download from the Apache Download Mirrors:
http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/download.html
We hope you enjoy using Jetspeed! Documentation is available at: http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/.

Embedding Apache Directory Server

2005-11-09T21:30:00.000-05:00

Apache directory server is an embeddable LDAP server written in Java. It is now embedded in Jetspeed-2 which fully supports LDAP for authentication and partially for authorization. The Jetspeed-2 security SPI has been implemented to support LDAP. Embedding Apache directory server has been overall quite a pleasant experience.
The first step consisted in integrating Apache DS with Jetspeed-2 Maven Plugin:

<goal name="j2:_start.ldap">
  ...
  <java classname="org.apache.ldap.server.ServerMain" fork="yes">
    <classpath>
    <pathelement
      path="${maven.repo.local}/${plugin.groupId}/
            jars/jetspeed-security-schema-${jetspeed.version}.jar"/>
    <pathelement
      path="${plugin.getDependencyPath('directory:apacheds-main')}"/>
    </classpath>
    <arg value="${org.apache.jetspeed.plugin.ldap.conf}"/>
  </java>
</goal>

The above code invokes Apache DS ServerMain startup class with the server.xml configuration file parametrized through ${org.apache.jetspeed.plugin.ldap.conf}. As illustrated above, Apache DS is also started with the Jetspeed schema extensions. The pathelement element references jetspeed-security-schema which holds the Jetspeed specific schema extensions. The schema extensions java code is generated using the Apache DS Maven Plugin directory:schema goal. The classes are then compiled and archived as a referencable artifact for the LDAP server. Once the server is started, it is now time to bind to the LDAP server. Jetspeed-2 uses the Sun JDK LdapCtxFactory for its default binding configuration.

Fostering Tools Communication: Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework

2005-10-29T16:01:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post comparing both Microsoft Visual Studio Team Server and Eclipse development environments. Since then, I found out about a new Eclipse project that seems quite promising. Eclipse is hosting a new project to develop an Application Lifecycle Framework. A good overview was given by Ali Kheirolomoom at Eclipse World this August. The eclipse ALF purpose is too:

Create a technology framework that will enable a diverse set of vendor tools, irrespective of architecture or platform, to exchange user data, manage business processes and collaborate in support the chosen ALM infrastructure technologies in use by development communities.

The ALF project plans to create a common and extensible domain specific vocabulary to facilitate domain modeling and provide an events and service flows model to enable loosely coupled tools integration. The technology will create a SOA leveraging web
services and web services orchestration to integrate disparate tools sets.

ALF is designed to build upon the other eclipse tools and to provide additional support for security, web service orchestration, service flow and meta models as illustrated below:

One example of how ALF could be used is illustrated below:

A user adds an issue to an issue tracking system which triggers an event that launches a service flow and determines whether the issue should be added to the Requirement Management System and Project Management System.

ALF plans to develop a meta model vocabulary based on the Zachman framework. The initial focus of the ALF will be on subject areas that cover:

Requirements management,
Request and issue management,
Configuration management and versioning,
Business process models

The ALF appears to me as a key Eclipse initiative which will provide better integrations between disparate tools. It will also go a long way in offering better visibility and metrics at various levels of the application lifecycle.

Integrating BIRT with Your Application

2005-10-15T17:54:00.000-04:00

I recently started to explore BIRT - Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool. As illustrated in the following examples available on BIRT's web site, it provides a wide range of reporting and charting capabilities.

One of the features, that I find quite promising is the ability to easily embed the BIRT engine in custom applications. This can easily be illustrated through a basic unit test. The code below illustrates the key elements required to get started:

    /**
     * @see junit.framework.TestCase#setUp()
     */
    protected void setUp() throws Exception
    {
        super.setUp();
        // The directory where the key plugins are located.
        System.setProperty("BIRT_HOME", "C:/.../src/main/resources");
    }

    ...

    /**
     * @throws Exception Throws exception.
     */
    public void testRunReport() throws Exception
    {
        String[] args = {
            // The format
            "-f",
            "html",
            // The output directory
            "-o",
            "C:/.../target",
            // The locale
            "-l",
            "en_US",
            // The encoding
            "-e",
            "UTF-8",
            // The file to generate the report from.
            "C:/.../src/test/resources/helloworld.rptdesign"    
            };
        ReportRunner.main(args);
    }

The BIRT_HOME directory should contains the following runtime plugins required for the embedded engine:

Managing the Software Development Process: Microsoft is Getting it Right.

2005-10-05T22:58:00.000-04:00

I recently attended a presentation on the upcoming Microsoft Visual Studio Team Suite (MVSTS) and I must say: what Microsoft is coming up with looks very much like an aggregation of the best practices that everyone preaches, all bundled into one very cohesive package. I decided to run a comparison between the tools available as Open Source and how an Open Source stack would compare to MVSTS.

First the Microsoft stack: I found two good resources for describing MVSTS roadmap and getting an overview of MVSTS.

Second the Open Source stack: I decided to focus on the Eclipse set of tools (see references below) and Apache Maven for software project management.

After integrating all the tools out there, the Open Source stack comes fairly close functionally to the MVSTS stack. Unfortunately, integrating all those technologies into one cohesive package requires a good amount of work. I personally feel that this is unfortunate. In my mind it raises some fundamental questions:

What purpose are open source foundations fulfilling when developing their product offerings? Is it technology adoption, industry cooperation, technology innovation? Providing a cohesive offering requires making some choices that are difficult in foundations with members with sometimes competing interests. Here Microsoft has a clear advantage. So how can the open source community provide a cohesive tool kit for managing the software development process? Is it a desirable outcome?
Can commercial entities leverage a common offering and maintain a coherent strategy and competitive advantage? A lot of the value in commercial offerings comes from the integration of diverse technologies into a cohesive offer. If open source foundations fulfill this role, can commercial entities' offerings still remain attractive? Does this cannibalize product offerings in favor of services?

The answer to most of those questions depends on the type of technology. With regards to tools supporting the software development process; I feel it makes sense to foster collaboration. Providing a more integrated open source offering would serve as a foundation to the open source development ecosystem. The Eclipse foundation has done a wonderful job at doing so, but in a fragmented fashion. This is what Microsoft achieves by investing in its development tool suite. It fosters the adoption of its technology and platform and nurtures its technological ecosystem. I feel that all commercial vendors could benefit with what amounts to a fairly minimal investment. Most of the technology building blocks are already available.

Eclipse References:
- Eclipse UML2 tools
- Test and performance tools
- Testing tools
- Monitoring tools
- Web tools
- SDO tools.

Idiosyncrasies of java.security.AccessController

2005-09-24T07:28:00.000-04:00

As part of cleaning up Jetspeed 2 JAAS RdbmsPolicy, i ran into some not so obvious idiosyncrasies of java.security.AccessController and the differences between doAs(), doAsPrivileged() and whether to pass the AccessControlContext or not.
On the differences between doAs() and doAsPrivileged(), I found a good post of Sun Java Forums:

doAsPrivileged effectively means you are granting
the calling stack your [code's] privileges when executing the code in question. Whereas doAs only associates the subject with the current access control context, all the calling code still requires the permission to be assigned to it (under the subject in question).

Where it gets interesting, is that when implementing a custom policy, and assessing whether the caller is authorized to access the callee, in implies(ProtectionDomain protectionDomain, Permission permission) the protectionDomain does not contain the principals when performing a doAs check. As mentioned in this post on the Java Forum, when the permission check is concerned about the principals in the subject (call to protectionDomain.getPrincipals()) for the security check, the security check should be performed as:

doAsPrivileged(theSubject, anAction, null)

By passing in a null access control context, the caller is essentially saying: "I don't care who called me, the only important thing is whether I have permission when associated with the given subject".

Subtle differences...

Making Sense of Identity Management

2005-09-14T20:38:00.000-04:00

With the rise of service oriented architecture, maintaining a consistent user identity across multiple enterprise systems is becoming increasingly difficult. In an attempt to address the pain that many large IT organizations go through, the software industry has given birth to an onslaught of standards with the purpose of maintaining a common identity across the enterprise. Jason Rouault from HP has written a great paper that sheds some light on that space: Making sense of the federation protocol landscape. As an introductory reading, I strongly recommend An introduction to identity management as well. I like the following definition for identity management:

The set of processes, tools and social contracts surrounding the creation, maintenance, utilization and termination of a digital identity for people or, more generally, for systems and services to enable secure access to an expanding set of systems and applications.

The following pictures sums it up well from a conceptual standpoint:

In my views, a right identity management strategy can provide a strong competitive advantage to an organization as distributed application or services can leverage a much better known user and therefore increasingly build value added to address their employees, customers, partners, and suppliers needs. As organizations consider service oriented architectures, it is critical to craft an identity management strategy in line with such distributed services.

Key Reports for Monitoring Application Development - Need for Historical Data

2005-09-05T17:15:00.000-04:00

When managing distributed software development teams with wide ranging skills sets, code base intelligence becomes critical to ensure the quality of the ongoing development effort. Here are some lessons learned worthwhile sharing:

Unit test code coverage should be put in historical context: Tools like Cobertura and Clover provide great unit test coverage reports; however, most default reports provide point in time coverage and as a result become difficult to use as a metrics for the development effort. To create a successful developer testing practice, developers activities should be measured against specific targets. Setting developers unit testing targets is a great practice to foster the creation and development of unit tests as an implicit and routine part of their activity. Historical measurement is critical to be able to manage such activity efficiently. Clover provides such historical coverage report.
Unit tests are necessary but beware of bad tests: Enforcing unit test coverage is important to facilitate future development work and improve code quality (see previous post), however poorly written unit tests can provide a fall sense of confidence that proper checks are in place. Unit tests that provide poor assertions checks will result in reasonable code coverage but will not provide the proper checks for guaranteeing the code base quality. In addition to unit test reports, and code coverage reports, unit test code should comply to a specific set of rules as illustrated by the PMD Junit rules.
Measure your developers activities: Activity reports measuring development activity can provide great insight on the evolution of a code base and the activity level of various contributors. StatCVS provides a very detailed set of statistic that can be useful to understand and monitor the activities of a large and distributed team.
Dashboard and code quality indexes: Dashboard are critical for management to be able to measure and assess the evolution of various components of a large project. Maven provides a flexible plugin for a point in time dashboard. However, in order to properly follow the evolution of a large development project, historical data is important as it provides the ability to identify key areas of improvement as well as measurable targets. Continuous improvement and continuous refactoring often advocated by agile development methodology advocates requires good metrics to measure improvement and justify the benefits.

Those reports provide a sample set of tools that can be useful when managing development teams. However, one key issue for management is to be able to correlate metrics improvement with critical business metrics such as development effort cost savings (shortened features development time lines, decrease bug level, shortened quality control, etc). More thoughts to come on that subject...

XML and XSL Reuse: Leveraging XML XInclude with Xerces and Xalan

2005-08-17T13:36:00.000-04:00

XInclude is a recommended XML specification from the W3C. It essentially provides an alternative to DTDs external entity references. A good overview of the differences is provided on Elliote Harold's blog. The most appealing reason for using XInclude is that XML includes are fully well-formed documents that can be processed individually.

Let's take a simple example. Let's assume that we have a ContactInfo.xml document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<hrxml:ContactInfo xml:lang="EN" 
    xmlns:hrxml="http://ns.hr-xml.org/2004-08-02"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="../schemas/hrxmlResume-2.3.xsd"
    xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">

    <xi:include href="contactinfo/PersonName.xml"/>
</hrxml:ContactInfo>

which includes a PersonName.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<hrxml:PersonName xml:lang="EN" 
    xmlns:hrxml="http://ns.hr-xml.org/2004-08-02"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="../../schemas/hrxmlResume-2.3.xsd"
    xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">

    <hrxml:GivenName>David</hrxml:GivenName>
    <hrxml:FamilyName>Le Strat</hrxml:FamilyName>
</hrxml:PersonName>

Each document is fully well-formed and can be transformed individually. In this example, we can create a htmlPersonName.xslt stylesheet to format a person name:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:hrxml="http://ns.hr-xml.org/2004-08-02"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

    <xsl:template match="hrxml:PersonName">
        <xsl:value-of select="hrxml:GivenName" />
        <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="hrxml:FamilyName" />
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Leveraging Xalan (2.7.0), we can apply the stylesheet to the well-formed PersonName.xml document.

To do so, we can leverage the Xalan command line utility. In this particular example, we invoke the utility through an ant script as described below:

<java classname="org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process" fork="true" dir="." >
    <jvmarg value="-Djavax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory=
               org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl"/>
    <jvmarg value="-Djavax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=
               org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl"/>
    <jvmarg value="-Dorg.apache.xerces.xni.parser.XMLParserConfiguration=
               org.apache.xerces.parsers.XIncludeParserConfiguration"/>
    <arg value="-IN"/>
    <arg value="${home.dir}/components/contactinfo/${xml.name}.xml"/>
    <arg value="-XSL"/>
    <arg value="${home.dir}/styles/html${xml.name}.xslt"/>
    <arg value="-OUT"/>
    <arg value="${home.dir}/output/${xml.name}.html"/>
    <arg value="-HTML"/>
    <classpath>
        ...Your classpath...
    </classpath>
</java>

The jvmarg are of particular interest as they enable the processing of XML XInclude with the Xerces parser.

In addition, for rendering the ContactInfo.xml, we can leverage XSL include as follow:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?<
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:hrxml="http://ns.hr-xml.org/2004-08-02"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

    <xsl:include href="htmlPersonName.xslt" />

    <xsl:template match="hrxml:ContactInfo">  
        <xsl:apply-templates select="hrxml:PersonName" />
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

And voila, we have achieved a high level of reusability of both presentation and data components!

Cost benefits of Unit Testing

2005-08-04T17:55:00.000-04:00

Many definitions are available for unit testing but, in simple terms, a unit test is a method for testing the correctness of a particular module of source code. Sounds like something most software development organizations would want to do... In the real world, however, the issue of cost benefits often comes up. It is indeed very hard to talk about the benefits of unit testing without knowing the answer to the following question [1], [2]: How many defects did unit tests avoid, how much time was saved and, how much time and defects will be saved in the future?
Over the next few weeks, I will blog on the cost benefits of unit testing and how to quantify such benefits. Commonly quoted benefits of unit testing are [3], [4], [5], [6]:

Problems are found early in the development cycle.
Code that works now, will work in the future.
New features will not break existing functionality.
Making change becomes easier, as controls are in place.
The development process becomes more flexible.
Implementation design is improved as APIs are forced to be more flexible and unit-testable.
Bringing new developers on board becomes easier and improve teamwork. Unit tests document the code.
The need for manual testing is reduced.
The development process becomes more predictable and repeatable

However, quantifying such benefits is often challenging for organizations. Still, everyone agrees that the cost of fixing bugs or changing software increases exponentially the later issues are uncovered in the software life cycle. In a development process where identifying bugs is the responsibility of the quality assurance (QA) group, the QA group risks to run into
bug indigestion. Unit testing is critical to prevent unit-level issues to be uncovered later in the software development life cycle. Software methodologies that rely heavily on developer unit-level testing can therefore achieve a much lower cost of ownership throughout the software development life cycle.

Enforcing unit-level testing throughout the development process should be a major focus of any management team involved in managing the delivery of a software product or solution. Identifying the optimal amount of unit-level testing to maximize the benefits of writing unit tests is hard to measure. Best practices suggest that the ratio of test code to code under test required to achieve at least 90% code coverage is between 2/1 and 4/1. This means that to thoroughly test a 100-line Java class requires 200 to 400 lines of test code. The higher the unit-level test coverage, the better the quality. This suggests a best case scenario and does not necessarily maximizes the return on writing unit tests. My experience suggests that the benefits of unit testing can be achieved much sooner but also suggests that there seems to be a threshold above which the benefits of unit testing can be most felt. Let's take, as an example one of the projects I recently completed. As illustrated below, the initial phases of QA resulted in a flood of bugs. At the same time, levels of unit tests were insufficient. I would draw a first lesson from this observation:

To maximize, the cost benefits of unit testing; start writing tests early. Focus on "quality" assertions where assertions are performed against relevant data.

As testing went on, I believe that we can clearly identify the point of inflexion where the value of unit tests really shows. As illustrated below, as our unit tests level improved, our development team was able to significantly improve our bugs closing rate without introducing new issues and therefore avoid a bugterial infection. Therefore, the second key lessons:

Good unit-level test coverage allows projects to significantly shorten their bug-fixing cycle. Therefore, resulting in direct cost benefits.

Quantifying cost benefits depends on the type of project under scrutiny, however simple empirical data clearly demonstrates such benefits. As a result if you are a developer, you should be writing unit tests today; if you are a manager, you should be driving adoption of unit-level testing practices. The quality of your software and your ability to respond to your customers demand will significantly improve. Be agile, today!

Some thoughts on JSR 196

2005-07-29T13:07:00.000-04:00

There are a few open source security framework out there that follow an SPI model for their security implementation. Acegi is one, Jetspeed security is another one. Both spring based frameworks follow an SPI concept, but the specifics are quite different from JSR 196. In the JSR 196 world, the javax.security.auth.container.AuthContextFactory is used to obtain context objects that encapsulate authentication modules and delegate to the ClientAuthModule or ServerAuthModule given the authentication context (ClientAuthContext or ServerAuthContext). Each authentication context is initialized according to a MessagePolicy that specifies what authentication guarantees the module is to enforce when securing or validating request and response messages within that context. A ServerAuthModule may delegate some of its security processing responsibilities to a LoginModule for JAAS authentication.

Regarding, the management of the authentication modules interaction, I found that comment in ServerAuthContext interesting:

Implementations also have custom logic to determine what modules to invoke, and in what order.

I could be nice to have policies or rules to manage that interaction...

Jetspeed Security - JAAS all the way...

2005-07-29T11:58:00.000-04:00

I finally got some time to update Jetspeed security documentation. I still have a little bit of work to do, but I think this is a good beginning and it was badly lacking. Jetspeed 2 fully leverages JAAS for authentication (through the implementation of javax.security.auth.spi.LoginModule) and authorization (through the implementation of a custom java.security.Policy) and provides a flexible security framework with a set of coarse grained services for user management, role management, group management and permission management.

Jetspeed security SPI provides a pluggable authentication and authorization architecture. I found interesting some of the similarities with Acegi as pointed out by Keith Gary Boyce on Jetspeed user list.
For future releases, I am planning to investigate integration with JACC and with JSR 196. Additionally, Jetspeed provides some nice portlets that provide management features for the security framework.

It isn't about Free Software

2005-07-21T18:26:00.000-04:00

I have been involved in the open source community for a little while as a volunteer contributor and can relate to some of the dynamics that Marc Fleury describes in his post... However, as I develop a better understanding of the OS community dynamics and of how the community operates I can't help but think, why isn't everyone jumping on the bandwagon?

Have you ever worked with a closed product that needed to be extended to address your business needs? Let's put it this way, I have never worked with one that did not need to... but very often given the closed nature of most software products, extending a product behavior results in numerous headaches for development groups. Most people tend to think about open source as Free Software. What a terrible misunderstanding of the promises of the OS movement! I have become convinced that the strength of open source isn't the source (code), it is the community. I hope that's what Johnathan Schwartz meant in his post on Free Software Has No Pirates. Opening a product source code provides many advantages and extends the boundaries of the virtual organization:

- It encourages the development of a strong community.
- It makes products more easily extensible for customers.
- It fosters innovation on top of companies' product offering.
- It provides a virtual engineering team much larger than any organization may ever dream of.
- It is closely aligned with the market, its trends and evolution.

So why are companies so reluctant to open their code up? I strongly feel that the value of most products is not in the hidden "secrets" kept behind their closed source. It is in the integration with other enterprise solutions, in the flexibility that it provides to their customers to address their business needs today and not in the next release... It is in engaging, trusting and leveraging the community to provide users with solutions that meet their needs.

Marc is right Open Source != Free Software, open source = community; its true value is in the community that it nurtures and empowering its user base...

Agora: A Community Network Visualizer

2005-07-16T11:49:00.000-04:00

Wish you could get a better understanding of the dynamics of virtual communities? Who are the key members of the community, how do community members interact with each other? Well, here comes Agora... Stefano Mazzocchi sent an email to the Apache community demonstrating Agora and its usefulness in analyzing online communities. I must say, it is very nice. 3 years of data collected to give you an in-depth view of various communities' interaction. Here is an example of the Jetspeed development community from January 2003 to July 2005. I was curious to see how much I had contributed to the community so I decided to highlight my own name...

if you want to try the tools for yourself, go to the demo posted by Stephano. Or check the latest version of the application from MIT on their Welkin project home page.

Jetspeed 2 Build Process Clean Up - Step 2

2005-07-12T22:28:00.000-04:00

Warning: Instructions on this post may become outdated, please be sure to visit Jetspeed 2's getting started for the latest documentation.

Step 2 of Jetspeed's build process clean up has been committed. As a result, a few things have changed when build the latest Jetspeed (2.0-M4-SNAPSHOT and above). A summary of the changes made can be found in Apache Jetspeed Jira.

Then new steps to get started are changed as follow:

If you are build off of Jetspeed 2 source code for the first time:


cd ${jetspeed-2-home} 
maven initMavenPlugin allClean allBuild

If the Jetspeed 2 maven plugin is installed, then to build the portal and all its components run:

 
cd ${jetspeed-2-home} 
maven allClean allBuild

If you are using the Hypersonic SQL database, start the production Hypersonic database by typing


maven j2:start.production.server

Then run quickStart (in seperate window/terminal session):


cd ${jetspeed-2-home} 
maven j2:quickStart

This will recreate the DB to deploy into. WARNING This will drop all the tables and data in the production database.

3. Start up Tomcat. With a browser, go to: http://localhost:8080/jetspeed

If you are creating a new Portal Application without the Jetspeed source:

In order to get started with a new portal application that will include a developer's specific portal customization, Jetspeed 2 provides as part of its Maven Plugin a goal that can get you started with your project. To do so:

1. Make sure that the following properties are set in your your ${USER_HOME}/build.properties file:

- org.apache.jetspeed.portal.name: e.g. testportal. The name of your new portal application. This will also be used as the artifactId for your project in the maven repository.
- org.apache.jetspeed.genapp.home: e.g. C:/tools/workspace/testportal. The location where your new portal application should be created.
- org.apache.jetspeed.genapp.groupId: e.g. testportal. The maven pom group id indicates the group location for your project in the maven repository.
- org.apache.jetspeed.genapp.name: e.g. My Test Portal. A friendly name for your new portal.
- org.apache.jetspeed.genapp.currentVersion: e.g. 1.0. The current version for your new portal application.

2. Once the above properties are set, make sure that the Jetspeed 2 Maven Plugin is installed on your local machine. You can install the Jetspeed 2 Maven Plugin as follow:


maven -DartifactId=maven-jetspeed2-plugin -DgroupId=jetspeed2
      -Dversion=2.0-M4-SNAPSHOT plugin:download

where

- artifactId: The name of the Jetspeed2 plugin artifact deployed to the maven repository.
- groupId: The name of the group where the Jetspeed2 plugin is deployed in the maven repository.
- version: The version that you want to use. For this functionality, the version should be 2.0-M4-SNAPSHOT or above.

3. Run the Jetspeed2 plugin target for generating a new portal application:


maven j2:genapp.portal

4. Go to the directory where you just created your new portal application and execute:


maven j2:portal.install 
maven j2:quickStart

That's it, you are ready to get started with your new portal application.

Google Search on Your Cell Phone!

2005-07-12T20:08:00.000-04:00

Maurice Sidi posted a blog on Google SMS. What a great idea! This is a very smart move and it sheds some more light on where the company is going. If this takes off, it could be huge! Think Google gets a lot of traffic today?

How does it work? Basically, you type a basic SMS message that you send to Google and get search results back. Remember those days where you would call 411 and forget to write down the number after being connected. Those days are over. Instead you get an SMS message and keep it for as long as you need it. Try it out for yourself.

1. Start a new text message and type in your search query

2. Send the message to the number "46645" (GOOGL)

3. You'll receive text message(s) with results

Want to learn more about it, check out Google SMS demo.

Jetspeed2 Build Process Clean Up

2005-07-06T09:59:00.000-04:00

Using J2 in its current form requires an in-depth understanding of how J2 build internals operate.

As an example, an integrator wanting to get starting with J2 will want to start with the portal web application and customize it from there. It should be made easy for integrators to get started with the web application without requiring an in-depth understanding of the various sequences in the build process.

A typical implementation will want to create a project as described below:

\sample-portal
+---\etc             Contains the build dependencies
                     definition.
+---\portal-webapp   Contains the portal web application 
                     being built.
+---\src             Contains the portal initialization
                     source (db scripts, etc).

Building the portal in this structure should be possible by leveraging the deployed Jetspeed dependencies:

Components: All libraries (jars) required for the runtime operation of the portal engine.
Portlets: All web libraries (wars) required for the runtime operation of the portal engine.

Integrator using Jetspeed2 should be able to do so easily and to easily get (through dependencies) the latest versions of the release Jetspeed components (libraries as well as portlets).

The current maven-plugin and portal build implementation rely on the source build (target directories) rather than the dependencies for the assembly of the portal engine, making it more difficult to get quickly started and to keep up with enhanced components.

I started to work on cleaning up the build process with the objective on centralizing all deploy and install activities to the Jetspeed2 maven plugin. This should greatly simplify getting started with Jetspeed2. Work on this issue is being tracked on Apache Jetspeed 2 Jira.

The Business of Software

2005-07-01T14:52:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading "The Business of Software" from Michael Cusumano. Overall a well written book on the fundamentals of the software industry. The book focuses essentially on the analysis of the business model for a software company. There isn't really anything striking new in Cusumano's analysis of software companies' business model, but the author does a good job in outlining the choices offered to software companies and how their business model will have to mature as companies and technologies mature.

Essentially, there are 3 choices for a software company:

A pure product play (Some would argue that with the advance of open source and the broad adoption that it has been getting lately, that pure plays are getting much more difficult).
A mix of products and services.
A pure service play.

I found very interesting Cusumano's analysis of a typical enterprise software company revenue over the course of a five year business lifecycle. For every 1 dollar of product license fees, $2.15 dollars can be derived from services and maintenance. That's more than 70% of the cumulated company revenue. In many cases, services on sold products end up being a life insurance against bad economic times. This brings some prospective to the Professional Open Source buzz. After all, a typical software company already ends up generating 70% of revenues from maintenance and services over a 5 year lifecycle. When put in this context, the changes of business model though important, appear less radical that one may have initially perceived. For those doubtful of the viability of the open source business model, I think we get some empirical data making the case for it right there.

Cusumano goes on with his analysis and show how as companies mature, they tend to move towards more of a services model and provides excellent data to illustrate his argument. As we look at the growth of companies like IBM and Oracle, more and more of their revenues are coming from services. This clearly justifies their strategy behind open source where they can capitalize on their strength in services while maximizing the use of their R&D resources.

Finally, I particularly enjoyed Cusumamo's analysis of the factors that make software startup companies successful, with great examples to illustrate his point. Cusumano basically identifies 8 key criteria for assessing software start ups:

The quality of the management team.
Whether the market is attractive and has strong potential.
How compelling is the offering?
How much interest is the offering getting from customers?
Is the company credible?
What is the business model?
How flexible is the management team?
What is the payoff potential?

A great list that applies to most business activity.

My First Post

2005-06-29T18:12:00.000-04:00

I finally decided that it would be a good idea to share my thoughts and experience on software development, open source, and other matters dear to my heart. So here I am . I hope to share some of the lessons learned and best practices I run into through this blog. More to come in the next few days.