SOA - quick wins rule..

I read this blog today by Loraine Lawson (To SOA or Not to SOA During Economic Turmoil?) and it contains so much applicability around SOA in one place, that I had to comment.

I think this blog says a lot. No doubt at all I am seeing many IT budgets being slashed and no doubt most people think SOA means big IT budgets. So, how could you not conclude SOA is stalling? Easy, because we are seeing the opposite. What is different and is reflected in the article, is that we are clearly seeing people looking to more innovative approaches to SOA to match the depleting budgets. We see this because OpenSpan is a perfect fit. As the article makes clear and we all now know, there is real value from quick iterative approaches to SOA. However, since SOA often means a rewrite of working (for many years) business processes, or a lot of integration around existing processes, it’s hard to imagine the words quick, iterative and SOA all being used in the same article, let alone the same sentence!

But, that is exactly what OpenSpan is all about. Taking working legacy applications that users use every singe day and quickly wrapping them to expose their workflows as services. Real-world, working Web Services that can be consumed by other enterprise services or other automated workflows. Take the applications out of the users eyes and hands and have those existing application workflows become a set of services! Everyone gets to see quickly what services offer up the most ROI. The ROI (which can be big with quick wins) can go towards funding a long-term strategy of the re-architecture. Since many existing legacy applications are too hard to rewrite anyway, OpenSpan’s almost “instant-on” web service enablement of existing applications has never been more applicable in today’s’ economy. The continued OpenSpan growth says it all. Feel free to comment.

FInancial Services - a silver lining

There are a lot of things to come from this financial crises we are now in but most of what we hear is on the negative side. That doesn't always have to be the case. Therefore, I thought it was about time I blogged about why, for these financial companies, the right technology choices are even more critical to make the most of what is going on in their world.

Financial IT executives have to deal with the brunt of the fall-out around Acquisitions, Mergers, Layoffs, retraining etc., IT and business are expected to continue to build a consistent experience for their customers (existing and acquired) whilst bringing on significantly more applications and processes and doing so with tighter and tighter budgets. Business is expected to deliver improving customer service because M&A tends to mean customer loyalty is tested and they will start migrating to competitors after even just one bad customer service experience. Less people, dealing with more customers makes this a very challenging environment to say the least.

It's almost the perfect storm for IT and business because even without all this change, they were struggling to improve customer service because of the shear number of applications and manual processes in their front, middle and back offices. IT and business need to seek out technologies that can not only weather the storm, but can actually calm it. The big ol' "we need to do more, with less", whilst sounding like an old record sometimes, has never been more relevant than today.

At OpenSpan, it is no surprise that in this quarter alone, we will see sales of over 30,000 seats sold into financial services and contact centers globally. Companies that were feeling this pain even before this crises began are benefitting quickly from the unique OpenSpan integration approach. OpenSpan has shown over and over, that automating existing manual user processes reaps massive rewards for business and IT. It goes without saying, that this approach reduces costs, increases security, compliance, accuracy and just plain makes sense because customer satisfaction levels are raised . The whole customer experience is improved.

In the past, "doing more with less, quickly" has been difficult. That's where OpenSpan is unique. OpenSpan can, iteratively tackle the everyday burden of users manually navigating their way through a multitude of desktop applications and just automate them in the most robust and secure manner available. In the OpenSpan studio, as we build out those automations quickly, we can insert new business processes or controls, we can add new rules or ensure compliance on existing rules. In addition, OpenSpan does this in such a way that users may not even need to see or touch many of those applications again! This is not an all or nothing approach that most people think about integration, which would typically mean potentially years before any results or benefits are seen. OpenSpan does this so you can choose to automate the manual processes that cause the most pain immediately and roll automations quickly to users for immediate ROI. Then you can build on that, adding more and more benefits, so you see progress constantly (and ever increasing ROI).

With OpenSpan 4.0, taking those automated user processes and moving them (along with the applications) to the server side, means we can at last also start thinking about getting those applications off of the desktop. OpenSpan can take any automated process and expose it as a web service and access them from any mid-tier architecture technology. Game changing.

So, I did say, you need technologies that can not only weather, but calm the storm. That's exactly what OpenSpan is doing for it's customers and it's doing it every single day. Our growth and width and breath of our growing customers in the financial services sector, speaks for itself.

WOA or SOA or SO-A-WOT

Thought this was a neat snippet entitled;

WOA wins hand-down over SOA in popularity contest

I replied to the blog but upon reflection felt it was worth while adding a link here to see if anyone is inclined to comment further. I did.

To me, the aged ol' problem with SOA is not that there's anything wrong with it, but more, it really is nothing new. If anything, many people still fail to understand that SOA, like EDI or any "distance" API is really hard to implement and benefit from wide reuse. Heck, even a simple  subroutine in a piece of code on the same system is hard to reuse and more often, is copied and modified. Welcome to "legacy" application support. SOA does not change that. IMHO.

If anyone tries to convince themselves that an SOA is not going to be a legacy problem a few months or years from now, perhaps they need to re-read the techno history books. The problem has never been how hard it is to write re-usable components, the problem always is, the legacy code needed to bring those components together. There's always something else someone wants to do with a component but you can't risk breaking it so you copy it instead. And/or as soon as you break this compatibility (which is  a no-no), your break re-use.

So, is WOA any different? I think so as it really reminds me of the difference between solving the problem for the business or waiting forever for IT. You can have something that works right now or get in the back of the queue (read years) until I (maybe) write perfection. Businesses cannot wait, especially today.

At OpenSpan, we can quite literally turn any business user process into a Service and consume it from anywhere else - RIGHT NOW. It also helps IT, because they get time to do it right whilst not sacrificing what business needs - RIGHT NOW. Is that WOA?

Web 2.0 - "near its dreaded Trough of Disillusionment"

I found this article, it's implications and comments very interesting.  Good News, Bad news for Web 2.0 (Gartner's Hype Cycle). In relation to enterprise Web 2.0 I have a few points of note;

You see, I had Web 2.0 down really as primarily asynchronous communications between browser and something else ( real time events). The Web 1.0 as was, led to mostly uninteresting web pages based on the mainframe synchronous concept (fill in a form, submit and get another form (page) of results). After the mainframe came the unix/dec mid-range systems that supported asynchronous applications - Enter a field, see real-time results/validation/events - All sounds like Web 2.0 to me ;)

I love all asynchronous applications, emulation, client server or web (2.0). The concept of instant event based communications is not only great, it's for the most part, the only right way. I remember building asynchronous web applications in 1998 (using a legacy host to activex as the "broker"). It was really cool and now it's Web 2.0. What's missing now, is how to take enterprise applications to the next level with it.

 Sure with CSS/XML/DHMTL/JSCRIPT/VBSCRIPT (Ajax), you can get a web page (Web 2.0) looking good but it's a real lot of work. Did I hear someone say legacy applications were hard to support - good luck supporting web 2.0!

I can say I saw this coming - because I did - the hype description around web 2.0 is hardly surprising because it's wrapped around old thinking (The Browser legacy). New mash-up vendors are out there, competing to be the next 4GL (power builder) for the web and in my view, whomever REALLY gets that right, will have the killer Web 2.0 IDE on their hands. I can't wait, I feel someone is really really close. Will it be Adobe (Flex) or Microsoft (SilverLight).. Jackbe.. Wavemaker... We shall see. Let the fun begin.

OpenSpan has a new CEO

I am excited to announce the appointed of Eric Musser to CEO of OpenSpan. After an extensive search, we found an awesome candidate who is now at the helm to take OpenSpan to the next level. After 3 - 1/2 years as CEO of OpenSpan with an awesome team by my side, I am excited to now have Eric here. He shares the same passion as myself in the OpenSpan technology, it's customers and partners and the  markets in which we serve. His track record (see Press release to the left) is second to none and there could be no more of a perfect match for his talents here. Welcome Eric.

I am very pleased to announce also, I will be moving into the role of Chief Evangelist, where I can continue to play a major role, well yes, continuing to Evangelize our unique approach to integration. The technology over the last 3 - 1/2 years has progressed beyond even my own expectations. The real problems we are solving right now for large customers, whom have been strangled by integration problems for many years, is personally rewarding to see. There's a clear reason OpenSpan saw 440% plus growth in 2007 and already exceeding that revenue in the first half of 2008 - the product solves real pain points and the product works. That my friends, is proof beyond doubt.

So, I am very excited about the future, as now with Eric on board, I'll have more time to devote to the technology and working with our customers, prospects and partners to share our joint visions for the future of the product and the company. I look forward to blogging more too.

Virtualization - bursting the bubbles

Today apparently is the dawn of the end of XP. Microsoft no longer sells it from tomorrow.

If running your enterprise applications on Vista is giving you problems, you can always run them in a (win 2k or XP) Virtual Machine on Vista. The problem with that alone however, is that you would then have your enterprise applications running in a “Virtual bubble” and all you’d have integration wise is copy and paste (at best). Virtual bubbles are not good for inter-application communication. Not good at all.

Until now that is. OpenSpan can bridge XP and Vista environments and integrate the applications that run in each easily. Use OpenSpan to create a web service API to any of your desktop applications (including office) and from there, use OpenSpan to integrate these applications, across whatever virtual machine they run in, easily.

OpenSpan can even if you so desire, enable you to integrate Apple and Microsoft applications together using the same technique.  We have examples of Apple Mac machines directly integrating with Microsoft applications running in a virtual session on the same Mac. Pretty cool. I'll post some screen shots soon of all the above examples.

Virtualization – in my view – is game changing. And with OpenSpan… even more so.

OpenSpan Enterprise Edition 4.0

There is a revolution here now in the integration space. I promised to update you all on some dramatic new functionality in the OpenSpan platform and now it is here. Sorry for the long post, but this is one of the most important ones for me today because I am proud of what the team here has built and we are already seeing high demand for it!

We all know the vast majority of enterprise users have to have way too many applications running and visible on their desktop. The goal has always been to try and move these applications off of the desktop and out of the users view but that has not happened, it’s just too difficult because all the applications have some process/information a user needs to do their job. A recent survey sponsored by OpenSpan in fact shows that the problem is getting worse, not better. Even virtualization of client applications only moves where the application physically runs and the users themselves see no real benefits because they still have to be trained to use all aspects of the applications.

That is about to change my friends. The OpenSpan technology, as you already know has been hugely successful in breaking up and exposing desktop applications as usable services for powerful integration and automation of user workflows on the desktop. However, what is new, is that now you can take those same desktop applications, move them off of the desktop to a virtualized server (farm or grid) and expose those automations as services to any other application in the mid-tier or client architecture. The journey towards moving the multitude of applications off the desktop and out of the users view altogether, whilst providing all of the same rich functionality to the user, has finally begun.

A simple example. Imagine just one of the many workflows a user has to run through uses just 2 applications (we know there’s usually a lot more). A CRM and a provisioning application to do a password reset for a customer when they phone into customer care. Today, every user who answers the phone in the customer care center has to have those application installed, running and logged in (and be trained in) to drive to the screens/security checks to do the password reset. 

What the new OpenSpan 4.0 enterprise edition enables is for those desktop applications (and probably a lot less of them) to be installed and running on virtual machines in the enterprise, known as a Grid or Fabric or Farm of Virtual Clients (Citrix, VMware, Virtual PC). OpenSpan integrates these same desktop applications and exposes the automated business processes (in this case, the password reset) as methods through web services to be consumed by any technology that can consume a web service. 1 instance of a desktop application running on a server, could now also serve 10, 100 or more physical internal or external users depending upon load balancing and scalability. The ROI and other benefits are huge as you can imagine.

The original applications needed (CRM/Provisioning) for the password reset never need to run on the desktop again for this purpose. The user never needs to even see the applications if not necesary as the automation of that business process in now simply driven through a Web Service. That same web service could be called by a new portal application, a simple button say in a dashboard on the users desktop, or even be integrated directly into the PBX switch to enable the caller to do the reset themselves. Take the same password reset web service and call it from a consumer side web page, phone device or trigger by an automated text message. It’s the same application that’s running in all cases so you know it works, it’s just the new automated version of the business process is available to the enterprise architecture as a web service. Imagine doing this with the 5, 10 , 20 or even 100’s of business processes your users have to run today through lots of installed and running desktop applications. I think this is revolutionary. I don’t think there are many other companies doing this, if any, and certainly not with the breath of Technologies OpenSpan can integrate and automate, in an extremely robust manner. This includes Java Applications, Web Applications (with embedded Java and ActiveX or DHTML or AJAX), Lotus, Green Screen emulators, Windows Applications and yes, even DOS (and a mix of any and all of the above). If it run’s on the desktop, its highly likely OpenSpan will integrate with it out of the box and then it can be moved off of the desktop by simply and rapidly creating the integrations, automations and web services as you need them. The OpenSpan 4.0 Enterprise edition, with it’s virtual broker to manage the desktop applications in this server environment becomes the “new mainframe” of desktop applications, serving up the business functionality of robust desktop applications, as powerful web services.

Let me know what you think, we have 1000’s of use cases, what are yours? Questions? Fire away.