AJAXWorld 2007 - Enterprise Mashups Depend on the Availability and Accessibility of Enterprise Information

When I submitted my abstract for AJAXWorld 2007 West, I was thinking with only my enterprise hat on as I was interested in seeing how this emerging technology would play in the real world of the enterprise. While the effectiveness of mashups is encouraging news, the enterprise is an all new playing field, replete with new challenges and complexities of mega proportions. Even the title of my submission was awkward and meant to simply state the fact as it is.

http://www.ajaxworld.com/general/sessiondetail0907.htm?id=163

As the "consumerization of the enterprise" moves from hype to prototype, what is becoming more and more apparent is the need for tapping into enterprise information that can be spread across diverse data sources ranging from traditional databases to employee documents.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=155

I believe that at the heart of the problem is the easy access of powerful and complex information. As the convergence of SOA and Web 2.0 continues and evolves, I see data focused and purpose-built services as the key to this engaging problem. With modular and re-usable data services getting produced on a foundation of approved data sources, IT departments can probably find some peace of mind as far as governance is concerned.

Enterprise Mashups and Governance?

But of course...

Mashups are nothing more than interaction endpoints that like any application, business process or data integration endpoint also need visibility, accountability and control from an IT and corporate governance point of view.

This point is very well raised in the article "The Enterprise Promise of Mashups."

http://www.businessinnovation.cmp.com/articles/archit_070108.jhtml

I would like to point you to the following snippets as below:

Until now, mashups have been a phenomenon of the wild and wooly Web. Combining databases and applications from external sources to create a valuable new service has become the hot new thing. Consider the innovative zillow.com Web site. It combines satellite imagery plus county real estate assessor residential property information, plus sales data from other sources, to produce a compelling real estate valuation service complete with a picture of each house.

But for IT, the real mashup movement is the decentralization of application development, points out Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst, with ZapThink in Baltimore, Md. "That's going to be the revolution, if there is one," Schmelzer says. IT's role may evolve into that of a provider of capabilities, while the lines of business create the applications they want.

A hotter topic, Schmelzer says, is so-called mashup governance. "Just because something can be mashed up doesn't mean it should be," he says. Enterprises need to take care not to mix, say, customer-facing information in a portal with public data. "The big question to ask is, 'What are the unintended consequences of a particular mashup'? That's a corporate policy issue."

AJAXWorld 2006 - Enterprise Mashups and Workflow?

When I saw my name in the list of selected presenters for AJAXWorld Conference and Expo held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in October 2006, one thing was certain that AJAX and Web 2.0 were getting ready for finding real value for their explosive growth and hype.

http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/255017.htm

As I have been doing for years now, I tried to point the arrow of innovation towards a real target, the enterprise.

My topic, "Enabling Inter-Mashup Interactions Using Composite Data Services," was delivered with some success as far as attendee curiousity is concerned and I am hopeful that this was the start of the snowball effect for many such real world applications of these attarctive technologies.

Probably the greatest proponent of this paradigm is Dion Hinchcliffe who's blog is one of my favorites. In particular, his blog "Web 2.0 definition updated and Enterrpise 2.0 emerges," serves as testimony to the initial thoughts presented at AJAXWorld.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=71

SOA Forgot the Data: Enter Composite Data Services

Yes, SOA has indeed forgotten the data. I spoke on this topic at the OASIS Symposium 2007.

http://www.oasis-open.org/events/symposium/2007/schedule.php

In my mind, most organizations today are moving steadily toward implementing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for standards-based software interoperability and business flexibility. However, most organizations forget about the data integration, governance and management issues associated with true interoperability until it's too late.

This problem stems from organizations not treating “data” or “information” as a critical asset, contrary to how most organizations view their people, capital equipment and inventory as valuable assets. In order for organizations to be successful with their SOA implementation, they must first recognize “data” as a business critical asset.

As organizations strive to build loosely-coupled systems based on SOA principles, data integration, quality and harmonization issues are exacerbated and become significant barriers to successful integration efforts.

According to Gartner, Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs) require a robust set of services that capture, manipulate, transform and reconcile data and semantics. Data Services that accomplish detailed transaction manipulation and provide a transparency of business rules, semantic mappings and metadata management enable the necessary linkage and binding between process and information when deploying composite applications via SOA techniques.

The concept of Data Services are rapidly gaining interest as an approach for ensuring that data governance and data integration challenges in SOA are adequately addressed. Data Services will increasingly become recognized as a critical component of SOA initiatives.

The Power Behind the SOA Repository

Although I pointed out, spoke about and wrote about the need for a SOA Repository long before the whispers became loud enough to warrant articles and analyst reasearch, there is still much debate about this critical component in a SOA.

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2005/jw-0627-webservices.html

Almost a year and a half after I wrote this article, the crux of the matter still is:

An SOA repository is a mechanism that handles the persistence of distributed SOA data. It is a complex and sophisticated enterprise-grade technology that not only handles persistence and caching, but also enables lifecycle management, security, discovery, and transformation of distributed data from diverse service-oriented applications such as silo applications, Web portals, business processes, and mobile applications.

SOA data is basically transient and streaming in nature. It thus necessitates a native XML data storage that aggregates the data relevant to a specific service, regardless of the applications used, rather than assigning the data to the individual applications that make up that service. Otherwise, data becomes difficult to access and cost-prohibitive to store and replicate.

Blue Ocean Strategy

Here is a book that speaks of using innovation as an effective way to walk around the competitive hurdles that lie in the path of a product's success and achieve not just much needed momentum but competitive differentiation as well.

http://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/

Blue Ocean Strategy is a way to make the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for both the company and its customers. What resonated the most for me about this book is the line:

Don’t Compete with Rivals—Make Them Irrelevant.

SOA for the Real World

Recently, I wrote this article with a colleague of mine with the intention of pointing out the key issues that lie in the path of realizing the benefits of SOA in the real world:

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-2006/jw-1129-soa.html

A key aspect of real world SOA in my mind is data, which seems to be completely ignored:

Organizations not only want to manage data better, they also want to manage better data. It is important to ensure that the data being produced and consumed across the organization and its trading partners is clean, reliable, secure, well-governed, and fast. One of the goals of SOA is to provide a composite data services platform with a unified set of components for data access, quality, transformation, governance, and caching, among many other data-centric services.

What do you think?

JavaOne 2006 - Validation for the Need for SOA Repositories!

Even though we got the last day slot at JavaOne to present our story "Supercharging SOA Registries Using XML Persistence and Management," it was heartening to note that what was an ALTERNATE submission was turned into a CONFIRMED technical session based on the sheer strength of the subject matter.

It was a magical one hour during which we were able to speak to a very focused group of technologists who understood and appreciated the need for supercharging a SOA Registry with something more natural and scalable than rigid relational databases.

The coverage for this presentation can be found at:

http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2006/coreenterprise/

http://www.rainingdata.com/company/pressroom/javaone.html

http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2006/coreenterprise/TS-8098.pdf

A brief summary of my talk was covered by TheServerSide.com as below:

http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=JavaOne2006Day3

Tools, Techniques to Go Beyond SOA Basics
In a nice complement to Jonathan Robie's introductory XQuery session, Ash Parikh from Raining Data showed the XML-centric tools SOA developers need when they get past their initial SOA projects. Parikh told developers that the keys to long term SOA success are in three areas: how quickly your code will implement data and service models, scalability and performance, and how to achieve governance and retain flexibility.

Parikh told developers the core challenge of SOA governance is to provide an adequate governance infrastructure that scales while still providing the agility and flexibility that SOA architectures require.

He showed examples where metadata management - the information about services and data - became key to corporate visibility, policy management, and governance. While some of the industry thought leaders at JavaOne questioned the details of SOA itself, Parikha talked about the dynamic business environment an enterprise creates when it chooses SOA and how metadata becomes more important in these environments.

Parikh then attacked relational database and file system approaches to storing metadata and SOA payloads. He told developers that SOA payloads are fundamentally hierarchical (XML) data and do not do well in relational stores because SOA uses quickly evolving and often ad-hoc schemas, especially as business requirements change.

Parikh demonstrated sophisticated search of a metadata repository using XQuery and a native XML database. He demonstrated a policy-based service caching system to accelerate SOA performance and a service federation mechanism where multiple services are queried on the backend and the union of the results is presented through a single service interface.

Hardware to Software to Hardware to Software...Now Back to Hardware...

Accelerating XML operations and replacing middleware seems to be the mission statement for this new buzzword called "XML Appliance."

http://www.looselycoupled.com/stories/2005/aon-infr0811.html

Agreed that processing stuff on the chip can have a performance and scalability advantage...

Here is the meat of the posting:

Application-oriented networking — the concept behind AON — isn't a new idea, even though Cisco claims its variety will prove more advanced and pervasive than current products. A number of vendors — some with track records dating back five years or more — already offer dedicated hardware devices to speed XML operations between distributed applications. Customers have successfully used their products to cut costs and boost performance in SOA environments.

But the potential contribution of network devices is largely overlooked in mainstream SOA design, and there is little best practice to draw on.

The XML appliance sector had always seemed something of a backwater niche until network equipment vendor Cisco arrived on the scene in June. Having enlisted influential partners including SAP, IBM and Tibco, Cisco has forced a re-evaluation. Existing vendors have of course welcomed Cisco's market entry as a huge validation of what they've been doing.

"The biggest network company and the biggest enterprise software company in the world are both agreeing that there is a new [layer] of hardware infrastructure needed to make this work," says Reactivity VP of marketing Joelle Gropper Kaufman, referring to Cisco's AON partnership with top application vendor SAP. "Can I do it all in software? Even SAP is saying you can't," she concludes.

I believe this is a natural cyclical journey that has been happening ever since computers were invented. Hardware and software are the two dimensions of a computer's capability and it is but healthy that one moves ahead and the other tries to catch-up.

Innovation...TOGETHER!!!

Ideas are like footprints in the sand...one minute they lie there glistening in the sun and are so very well-formed, and then suddenly they are gone forever...either covered by another footprint or washed away by waves of irrelevance or timing.

This blog is dedicated to the millions of fantastic ideas that take form somewhere, someplace, everyday...ideas that could change the world, or atleast the world immediately around us. One idea at a time, let's make this a better place to live...

Here's to collective thinking!!!