XML-Empowered Documents Extend SOA’s Connection to People and Processes

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on XML structured authoring tools and dynamic documents’ extended role in SOA.

Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: JustSystems.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, a sponsored podcast discussion about two large growth areas in IT, and these are two areas that are actually going to coalesce and intersect in a relationship that we are still defining. This is very fresh information.

We're going to talk about dynamic documents. That is to say, documents that have form and structure and that are things end-users are very familiar with and have been using for generations, but with a twist. That's the ability to bring content and data, on a dynamic lifecycle basis, in and out of these documents in a managed way. That’s one area.

The second area is service-oriented architecture (SOA), the means to automate and reuse assets across multiple application sets and data sets in a large complex organization.

We're seeing these two areas come together. Structured documents and the lifecycle around structured authoring tools come together to provide an end-point for the assets and resources managed through an SOA, but also providing a two-way street, where the information and data that comes in through end-users can be reused back in the SOA to combine with other assets for business process benefits.

To help us understand this interesting intersection and the somewhat complex relationship between structured documents and SOA, we are joined by Jake Sorofman. He is the senior vice president of marketing and business development, for JustSystems North America. Welcome to the show, Jake.

Jake Sorofman: Thank you, Dana, great to be here.

Gardner: There has been a lot of comment around SOA. It’s been discussed and debated for some time. What I'm seeing in the market is the need for bringing more assets, more information, more data, and more aspects of application activities into SOA to validate the investment and the growth.

Tell us what it is about SOA, in the sense that it is data-obsessed? What is it that we need to bring more of into SOA to make it valued?

Sorofman: We’ve all heard the statistics for ages about 80-plus percent of all the information and the enterprise being unstructured information, and how it’s contained within documents, reports, and email etc., and doesn't fit between the columns and rows in the database.

That’s the statistic we’ve all grown comfortable with. The reality, though, is that the SOA initiative today and the whole SOA conversation has really centered on structured data, transactional data, and hierarchical data, as opposed to unstructured content that’s stored within these documents. The documents, as they are created and managed today, are often monolithic artifacts and all the information within those artifacts is locked up and isolated from the business services that comprise our SOA.

Our premise is that you need to find new and unique ways to author your content as extensible markup language (XML), to make it more richly described and widely accessible in the context of SOAs, because it’s an important target source for a lot of these services that comprise your SOA applications.

Gardner: So, there are a number of tactical benefits to recognizing the dynamic nature of documents. Then, to me, there is also this strategic benefit from XML enabling them to provide a new stream or conduit between the content within the lifecycle of these documents and then what can be used in applications and composite applications that an SOA underpins. Help us understand the tactical, and then perhaps the strategic, when it comes to a lifecycle of document and content.

Sorofman: That’s a really good way to think about it. A lot of companies will take on this notion of XML authoring from a tactical perspective. They are looking for new and improved ways to accelerate the creation, maintenance, quality, and consistency of the content that they produce.

It could be all their branded language, all their lock-down regulated language, various technical publications, etc. They need to streamline and improve that process. So, they embrace XML authoring tools as the basis for creating valid XML, to manage the lifecycle of those documents and deliverables.

What they realize in the process of doing so is that there is a strategic byproduct to creating XML content. Now, it’s more accessible by various line-of-business applications and composite applications that can consume it much more readily.

So, it’s enriching the corpus that various applications can draw from, beyond traditional or relational databases, and allowing this more unstructured content to be more widely accessible.

Gardner: In the past, we’ve seen this document management and content management value through some very large, complex, cumbersome, and frankly expensive, standalone management infrastructure that would, in a sense, find a way of bringing these structured and the unstructured worlds together. It seems to me you’ve found a quicker and more direct way of doing this, or am I overstating it?

Sorofman: I think that’s largely right, to the extent that, at author time, the content is created as XML, particularly when that XML is organized within a taxonomy that makes some sense and makes it discoverable in context. Then, that content can just be reused. It can be reused like any other data asset that’s richly described and that doesn’t require heavyweight infrastructure or sizable strategic investments in content infrastructure.

Gardner: Another thing that fascinates me about this topic is a problem with SOA, and that has been the disconnect between the people and the processes that the IT systems can support. We've heard it referred to as "human-oriented architecture," versus SOA. The people that are in the trenches, that are in maintenance types of activities, that are in a highly compliance-oriented environments, need to adhere very closely to regulations, and that the documents become the way that they do that.

It seems to me that if you take the documents that these people thrive on and create en masse, and make those available to the SOA and the composite business processes that that architecture is supporting, then you are able to bridge, this gap between the people, the process, and the systems. Help me understand that a little better.

Sorofman: That makes a great deal of sense. Thus far we’ve been talking about the notion of unstructured content as a target source to SOA-based applications, but you can also think about this from the perspective of the end application itself -- the document as the endpoint, providing a framework for bringing together structured data, transactional data, relational data, as well as unstructured content, into a single document that comes to life.

Let me back up and give you a little context on this. You mentioned the various documents that line workers, for example, need to utilize and consume as the basis for their jobs. Documents have unique value. Documents are portable. You can download a document locally, attach it to an email, associate it with a workflow, and share it into a team room. Documents are persistent. They exist over a period of time, and they provide very rich context. They're how you bring together disparate pieces of information into a cohesive context that people can understand.

Documents allows information to stand alone. They're how knowledge is transferred, and how information is shared between people. Those are all the good things about documents. But, historically, documents have been a snapshot in time. So, even when you have embraced an XML publishing processes, the documents as published as a static artifact. It’s a snapshot in time. As the information feeding these documents changes, what you see within the documents as a published artifact is effectively out of date.

Gardner: I suppose one way that people have gotten around that is to create portals and Web applications, where there is a central way of controlling the data that gets distributed through many views and could be updated. I suppose there must be some drawbacks to the portal perspective. What do we do in here? We take in the best of a Web and portal application and the best of a document and try to bring them together?

Sorofman: Bingo! It’s really about blurring the lines between documents and data or documents and applications. So the portability, the persistence, and the rich context of a document, because documents matter and sometimes and on the glass portal-style application experience, is just not a substitute for what you need out of the document.

But, providing a container for much more dynamic and interactive information and ensuring what you find in that document is always authoritative is just the direct reflection of the sources of truth in the enterprise. All this information is introduced as a set of persistent links back to the sources of record. What you are looking at isn’t an embedded snapshot. You are looking at a reflection of these various systems of record.

Gardner: I was reminded of the importance of the format of a document, just recently when I was doing some tax forms. It’s fine for me to have all this information on my computer about the numbers and the figures, but I have to then present that back to the IRS through this very refined and mandatory format. I need to bring these two together, and, once I have done that, I can see that the IRS is benefiting from the standardization that the format and document brings, and I am of course benefiting from the fact that I can bring fresh data into that.

But, we are now proposing instead these documents that hold value based on their format, their taxonomy, their relevance to a specific regulatory impetus or a vertical industry imperative. What we get beyond that is not just bringing that data from a Web application out, but from perhaps myriad applications and/or this entire SOA, and using the policy-driven benefits of an enterprise service bus (ESB) and governance to help direct the right data to the right document.

Sorofman: Absolutely. The other thing that I mentioned is making these documents semantically aware. The document actually becomes intelligent about its environment. It knows who you are as a user, what your role is, what your permission profile is.

Gardner: And that’s because of the XML that they can make that leap to intelligence?

Sorofman: Well, it’s actually because of the various dynamic document formats that are emerging today, including xfy from JustSystems. We provide the ability to embed this application logic within the document format. The document becomes very attuned to its environment, so it can render information dynamically, based on who you are, what your role is, and where the document is within a process. It can even interact with its environment. The example I would like to use is interactive electronic technical manuals (IETM) for aerospace and defense. These are all the methods and procedures for maintaining the aircraft, often very, very complex documents.

Gardner: We're talking about large tomes, not just a document, but really a publication.

Sorofman: Exactly, and there are really a couple of different issues at work here. The first is the complexity of a document makes it very difficult to keep it up to date. It’s drawing from many different sources of record, both structured and unstructured, and the problem is that when one of the data elements changes, the whole document needs to be republished. You simply can’t keep it up-to-date.

This notion of the dynamic documents ensures that what you’re presenting is always an authoritative reflection of the latest version of the truth within the enterprise. You never run the risk of introducing inaccurate, out of date, or stale information to field base personnel.

The second issue is pinpointing the information that someone needs in the context of the task they are performing, so, targeting the information appropriately. You can lose valuable minutes and hours by thumbing through manuals and trying to find the appropriate protocols for addressing a hydraulic fluid leak, for example.

The environment can actually ping the document. For example, a fault is detected in-flight, and the fault detection that happens in real time can actually interact with the document itself, ping the document, and serve up the set of methods and procedures that represent the fix that needs to be made when the plane reaches its destination. The maintenance crew can start picking the parts and preparing to make fix before the plane lands.

Gardner: It almost sounds like we are bringing some of the benefits that people associate with search into the realm of documents, because they are now structured XML-published and authored documents. There’s XML integration among and between them and their sources. You could do a search and not just come up with an 800-page document, but a search within discrete aspects of that document.

Sorofman: That’s exactly right. You start seeing some blurring some between all these categories of technology around information, search and retrieval, semantics, and document management and data integration. It’s all resulting in a much a richer way of working with and utilizing information.

Gardner: So, we are bringing together what had been document management, content management, data integration, data mashups, compound documents, forms, and requirements for regulatory compliance. That’s why I think it relates to SOA so well.

We're finding a commonality between these, rather than having them be completely separate things that only people physically shuffling complex documents around their desktops could manage. We're starting to automate and bring the IT infrastructure to help in this mixing and matching between these formally siloed activities.

Sorofman: Yes, pretty much so.

Gardner: Alright. One of the things that is a little bit complex for me is understanding the way that the content, the XML, and the data flows among and between documents, and then also how it could flow within the SOA. I think this is still a work in progress. We are really on the cutting edge of how these two different areas come together.

Maybe we could go a little bit into the blue-sky realm for a moment. How do you think the SOA architects should start thinking about dynamic documents, and, then perhaps conversely, how should those that are into structured document authoring start thinking of how that might benefit a larger SOA type of activity?

Sorofman: Great questions. To start with, I don’t think that SOA architects have given a great deal of thought to date to unstructured content and how it plays into SOA architectures. So, there certainly needs to be consideration paid to how you get the information in, in a way that makes it rich to describe, reusable, more akin to relational data than documents themselves.

Structured authoring needs to be part of the thinking around any company’s knowledge management (KM) strategy in general and with a specific importance around how it feeds into the overall SOA strategy. Today, I don’t think that there has really been an intersection between KM and SOA in this respect.

Structured authoring professionals need to start looking beyond their traditional domain of technical publications and into other areas where XML authoring is relevant and appropriate in the enterprise. That’s becoming much more broadly deployed and considered outside of traditional domains of tech-docs.

There’s also this convergence that’s happening between structured documents, structured authoring, and application development, particularly as it relates to this notion of dynamic documents that we are talking about. The creation of business-critical documents becomes much more akin to application development processes, where you are essentially assembling various reusable fragments and components from across the enterprise, into a document that’s really treated more like an application than a monolithic artifact itself, an application that has its own life cycle and needs to be treated and governed in more of an adaptive centric way. So, it’s starting to really impact people’s role in thinking, both from the architect side and on the traditional structured authoring side.

Gardner: Sure, it’s really about people, process, and policy coming together, not just inside the domain of IT, but in the domain of where people actually do their work and where they have traditionally done work for generations.

Sorofman: Very true.

Gardner: Okay, I think I get it now. But to help better understand this it's not just "tell." A lot of times it helps to "show." Can you give me some examples in the real world, where people are starting to move towards these values, where there are some use-case scenarios around dynamic documents extending beyond the document function and getting into application development too?

Sorofman: Absolutely. There are three usage patterns I like to speak about that are illustrative of dynamic documents and how they are being applied today. The first I call "information sharing" sort of broadly. It’s the idea of one-to-many dissemination of information in the form of a document, to various distributed field-based personnel.

A good example of that is the IETM, any kind of business-critical technical manual or a publication that needs to be shared with a variety of different people and where there is a very high cost of that information being either poorly targeted or easily out of date.

This is the idea of bringing together all these different information sources mashed up into the single dynamic document that comes to life. So, as the source information changes, what you see in that document changes and it also has the ability to be semantically intelligent about its environments, about the person who is accessing it, so it can render a view of information that’s appropriate to the context of its usage.

The second example is really taking the same concept of dynamic documents and applying it to collaborative processes, where you need to bring together various stakeholders internally and externally toward the goal of getting some sort of team based process executed or completed.

Think about something like sales and operations planning (S&OP), where you have various stakeholders cross functionally come together periodically, maybe monthly or quarterly, to make trade-off decisions, horse-trading decisions, about which projects to invest in and which ones to disinvest in, how to optimally align, supply and demand.

That’s typically the sales and marketing group, the manufacturing group with a view of capacity and a view of inventory, and then the finance team with a view of a return on it's investment, return on assets, and internal rate of return. These teams are coming together to work on making these decisions, and they often do this by sharing documents. They pull reports from all their various systems of record, manufacturing execution systems, inventory control systems, ERP systems, supply chain, CRM.

Even though these systems have fairly authoritative trustworthy information within them, as soon as you pull a report, it’s frozen in time. So, these teams tend to wrestle with validating and reconciling all this disconnected and static information, before they can make decisions. The dynamic document allows all this information to come together as an authoritative reflection of all these different source systems, but still allows these teams to work in the format they are most comfortable with, which is to say, documents.

Gardner: Because there is a semantic and intelligent aspect of this, this content has been shared collaboratively and would present itself to each of these individuals through a different document format, based on what it is that they are doing within their traditional role.

Sorofman: That’s exactly right. It will serve itself up dynamically, based on what’s appropriate for stakeholders to see, based on their permission profile or on their role. It could be a different level of abstraction or a little different level of detail. It can actually change the information that’s being displayed, based on where it is in a workflow process. The document can actually become aware of its workflow lifecycle state and render a different information based on where it’s been, where it’s going, and where it is in the process.

Gardner: This is strikingly different than what's done by many organizations that I am aware of. They have one big spreadsheet that everyone shares, which really is sort of one-size-fits-all, which isn’t the way people really work.

Sorofman: Everyone has had some experience with spreadsheets gone wrong and the high cost and perverse consequences of trying to force-fit spreadsheets into critical planning process. So, I think most people can empathize with this specific challenge.

Gardner: Alright. Let’s talk about the business case for this. Now, it sounds good theoretically. We’ve certainly got a technology that can help this productivity improvement by extending data in the formats that people are familiar with. There is compliance, and regulatory and risk reduction as a result.

And, of course, as we mentioned earlier, there is the sharing and repurposing and reusing of this across the SOA value stream in the business. But, dollars and cents, how do people go and say, “Wow, this sounds like a good idea. I want to convince somebody to invest in it, but I need to talk to them about return on investment.”

Sorofman: You can make a business case for this sort of approach from a very basic to a much more sophisticated level. At the most basic level, the ROI around XML authoring is pretty straightforward. Rather than creating document authoring as sort of monolithic artifacts, creating them as reusable components helps to accelerate and reduce the cost of creating new documents and deliverables, and it makes information much more reusable. That has a cost implication and a time-to-market implication.

If, for example, you are launching a product that’s highly dependent on documentation -- and documentation is typically one of the things that we do at the end of the product launch cycle -- that becomes a bottleneck that can have implications for revenue that’s foregone, excessive cost, and missed deadlines, etc.

There is also an issue around localization, multi-format output, and multi-channel output of this various content, taking the content, translating it into different languages and into different output formats.

Gardner: Localization. So, you have the same document format, but the input and output can be in a variety of different languages.

Sorofman: That’s exactly right.

Gardner: That would save a lot of time and money. Instead of the full soup-to-nuts translation, you only have to translate exactly the metadata that’s required.

Sorofman: That’s exactly right, and that’s a tremendous ROI. There are many companies that look at the ROI of XML authoring exclusively from the perspective of localization, and it’s often said to have between a 40 and 60 percent cost impact on localization itself.

Gardner: In fact, you are automating a large portion of the translation process.

Sorofman: Yes. Also, think about the change time implications of what we are talking about. In the traditional monolithic model, when you need to make changes to documentation, you are making changes across all the various documents that consume information fragments in all the various formats, in all the various localized versions, and all the derivations and permutations of an information source. That becomes extremely complex, extremely costly, and error prone.

In the XML authoring world, you are authoring once, publishing many times, and maintaining a single native format. So, you are maintaining that one reusable component and allowing those changes to be propagated across all the various consuming documents and deliverables.

Gardner: And, because we are doing this separation, it also strikes me that there is a security benefit here. One of the things that troubles a lot of IT folk and keep them up at night is the idea that there are different versions and copies of full-blown documents and databases, in some cases, on each and every PC and laptop, some of which may disappear in an airport. It strikes me that by separating this out, what might only go into some notorious hands at the airport would be the form, but not the data.

Sorofman: It’s a great point.

Gardner: So, there’s a security benefit here as well, when you are able to control things, and not have all the dynamic data distributed at the end point, but, in a sense, communicated to that end point when it’s the right time.

Sorofman: Absolutely. I guess the benefits we are looking at are really these sorts of operational benefits of the XML authoring and how that impacts the bottom line and time to market etc. There are also bigger benefits that come from the actual consumption of dynamic documents, and how you ensure that you are only putting information in the hands of the people that need it, that it's always up-to-date.

That clearly has an implication for risk and compliance in many different application areas, and accelerating, improving, and optimizing business processes by eliminating the error introduction that comes from the re-keying of information between disconnected process steps, where documents are involved.

Gardner: So the human error factor goes down as well?

Sorofman: Dramatically.

Gardner: How does that work exactly?

Sorofman: Let me give you a quick example of one of the other usage patterns that’s worth speaking about. It's what I like to call "document process transformation." If you think about any business process flow, there are typically silos of automation, and these are the flows within the process that are highly tuned, very transactional, with virtually no human intervention.

They are highly automated, because they can be. Everything can be reduced down to a transaction and thus handled by machines, but then there are manual gaps between these silos of operations or automation that often eliminate, or at least erode, some of the benefits of automation.

This is typically highly human-centric phases of a process, often very document centric. It’s where people need to get involved. For example, if you think of a loan application, in the front end of the application there is a form. It’s very form based, and it’s about capturing information about the applicant.

Some of the information can be handled transactionally, so the form is able to send the information to a back-end system where it’s processed transactionally, but some of the information needs to be viewed and analyzed by human beings, who actually have to look at it in context and make a judgment about the applicant.

In the front end of the form, it becomes a transaction, and then it needs to be served up as a set of document renditions, based on the various personal roles within the process that needs to be viewed to make a judgment about the loan.

The document can actually morph as it moves through the process, based on what that person needs to see or what’s appropriate for them to see. At the end of the process, a judgment is made about the loan. It’s either approved or it’s rejected and it becomes a transaction again.

The information can be extracted from the document set itself automatically, pulled down to a back-end process, like "open the account," the account opening procedure, and then information can be extracted from the document set to serve a traditional publishing pipeline to send a custom acknowledgment letter back to the applicant, welcoming them to the bank, and letting them know that the loan has been approved.

So, you've gone from silos of automation separated by manual gaps, to a much more streamlined and straightened process, where you have transactions driving document renditions and document renditions driving transactions.

Gardner: This is a great example of why this is relevant for SOA. First off, you're talking about how the human input of the data needs to be improved -- and that’s the garbage-in, garbage-out value. If you are going to be reusing this data across multiple applications, you want to make sure that‘s good data to begin with. So, that’s one value.

The other is this controlled workflow, an event-driven workflow, which again is part of what people are trying to build that SOAs will support, these composite workflow process oriented types of activities that are very much core to any business.

Then, the last fascinating aspect is the notion that we are combining what needs to be a human judgment with what is going to be a computer-driven process. These dynamic documents in a sense giving little stop signs that say, “Stop, wait, let the human activity take place.” The human can relate back to the document, the document relates back to the business process, the business process is managed and directed through the SOA.

Sorofman: That’s exactly right. As long as people are involved, there will be documents, but traditionally documents have been fairly unintelligent and inefficient in how they have been authored, organized, managed, and used as a basis for consuming information. This is just what documents have always wanted to be.

Gardner: I dare say that documents have been under-appreciated in the context of SOA.

Sorofman: I couldn’t agree more.

Gardner: Well, great! Thanks for shedding some more light on these issues. Tell us a little bit about how JustSystems works its value in regard to the dynamic documents that are now holding much more relevance in a larger SOA.

Sorofman: JustSystems has two product lines that are very relevant to this discussion. The first is the product called XMetaL, which is one of the leading structured authoring and publishing solutions that provides the basis for creating valid XML content, as part of the authoring process. I mentioned this idea of being able to create valid XML, as opposed to monolithic document artifacts at author time. This provides a basis for both technical authors, but also business authors. It’s sort of the occasional contributor or the subject matter expert, the accidental author, the occasional author to create valid XML without ever seeing an angle bracket, so a very intuitive WYSIWYG environment for creating XML as a byproduct of a very intuitive authoring process.

That’s how you feed the beast, how you get the XMLs into the systems, to make it much more richly described and more reusable, this part of downstream processes.

On the other side of the equation, we have a product line called xfy, which is a document-centric composite application framework that allows you to bring together all these various information sources, structured and structured, and mash them up within a single dynamic document application.

It’s blurring the lines between documents and applications, providing the user experience that people appreciate from a document, but with the authoritative, dynamic and interactive information that has been most closely associated with traditional business applications, the document becomes the application.

Gardner: Of course, we are using XML, which is a standardized markup language. We are also going to be using vertical industry taxonomies and schemas that are shared, and, therefore, this is a fairly open opportunity to share and communicate and collaborate.

Sorofman: That’s right.

Gardner: Well great! Thanks again. We’ve been talking about XML empowerment of documents and how to extend Services-Oriented Architecture’s connection to people and process through these types of documents and structured authoring tools. To help us to understand this, we have been talking with Jake Sorofman. He is the senior vice president of marketing and business development at JustSystems North America. Thanks for joining us, Jake.

Sorofman: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks, and comeback next time.

Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: JustSystems.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on XML structured authoring tools and dynamic documents’ role in SOA. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.

Platform as a Service Enables Cloud-Based Development While Accelerating Role of SaaS

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on platform as a service and on-demand applications deployment trends.

Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: Bungee Labs.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, a sponsored podcast discussion about platform-as-a-service (PaaS). We're looking at an entire lifecycle approach to services on the Web for development, integration, and deployment. We are going to be talking about Bungee Labs, the sponsor of our podcast and take a deep look at how they approach PaaS.

I think it’s important for us to get into this topic to understand its wide-reaching implications. PaaS is really taking the best of some of the old and the new that’s now available to developers and architects -- and it really puts a new spin on Web-oriented architecture (WOA).

For example, many developers can use tools that are fleet and easy as they approach rapid application development (RAD) and Agile development. But when it comes to the flip side -- the deployment -- there are still gaps in many cases a hand-off. There is also an opportunity, now that users are increasingly on the Web, to use mashups and open APIs.

To take advantage of data independence -- data that can be acquired, used, and mashed-up from the variety of sources -- including services-orientation from inside the firewall, from within legacy applications. What's nice about the PaaS approach is that the scale on the deployment can go up very rapidly and scale down efficiently in terms of cost.

In many respects, we are now leveraging the incredible value that comes from not having to pay upfront in capital expenses for applications and infrastructure, but instead can take advantage of the pay-as-you-go, metered approach.

To help us better understand PaaS, we’re joined by Phil Wainewright. He's an independent analyst, the director of Procullux Ventures, and a ZDNet software-as-a-service (SaaS) blogger. Welcome to the show, Phil.

Phil Wainewright: Good to be here again, Dana.

Gardner: We are also joined by Alex Barnett, the vice president of community at Bungee Labs. Welcome to the show, Alex.

Alex Barnett: Many thanks, Dana, for having me on.

Gardner: Now, as I mentioned, this on-demand platform value brings together a lot of the old and the new. But in some regards, the current state of development for applications and Web services is still a tricky business. We're still in a period where friction between the developer and what the operational environment is expected to be.

There are often integration issues. We are also having to deal, of course, with on-premises software acquisition and downloads, licenses, upgrade paths -- just maintaining the software on premises for development and for testing.

Phil, could you help us understand what is it about the current state of development that will benefit from moving all of this into the cloud?

Wainewright: One of the factors is that IT is getting more and more complex, and obviously there is a lot of emphasis on governance and oversight and so on. So, provisioning a new system for a development project can be a very long-winded process.

On top of that the world seems to be moving fast ... because of the Web, because it’s connecting us in much more immediate ways. And therefore, business people want to have much more record intervention, and they need automation of new processes a lot faster. You’ve got these two processes: On one hand, it’s getting more and more complex, difficult, and time-consuming to bring new projects online. At the same time, there is this pressure to have those new projects faster and faster, and to have an adaptable and agile development environment. It’s a collision course, really.

Gardner: And I suppose with the way teams are dispersed now, and with people leveraging globalization and offshore development, that you want to bring groups of people together without also having to maintain and oversee the on-premises software at each location that’s supports new development along with application lifecycle management (ALM) ?

Wainewright: Yes, that’s absolutely true. The web enables this collaboration, whether you are developing on on-premises platforms or in the cloud. You want to do it via a distributed team, because that’s the way that you get to this scale, and you can get the best minds on a project. And so you are going to be doing that collaboration in a kind of Web-connected environment anyway.

Gardner: I suppose it’s also important when we look at the speed of development to appreciate that three or four folks in a garage in Northern California can come up with a mashed-up service and go out and create a social networking company, for example, quick and easy -- and at low expense. And then, here you are in an enterprise, taking six months to work through a requirements process. It seems as if something has got to change.

Wainewright: This is a rewind back to the late '90s when people looked at the Web and they thought, "Well, how is it that my daughter or son can look up the information of some arcane homework project in a couple of seconds, while it takes me three weeks to find out what's happening in my own business?"

Now what we are seeing is my daughter is able to hook out to these applications from some guys working off in a garage for Facebook, and do it all in a couple of days. And, again, I am kind of trying to get similar functionality on my corporate network -- but it could be 18 months before I see it.

People are asking, "Well, why, why is that? Why are we so far behind what these people in garages, these teenagers, are able to do so much out there on the Web?"

Gardner: That’s a reason why we are seeing very rapid uptake in what's known as Enterprise 2.0, WOA, mashups, rich Internet applications (RIAs) -- and it's not just startups, but really starts to move across the board. It’s just a faster, better way of getting a fairly large class of applications going -- and also managing the integration of data on the back-end.

Wainewright: Well, let’s be cautious, Dana, because I think that a lot of people are experimenting with it for the moment. I wouldn’t say enterprises are necessarily doing things that are business-critical or mission-critical right now. They are still working out what the utility is, and what the risks are from this model.

Gardner: Let’s take that over to Alex. Alex, tell us a little bit about how you perceive the rates of adoption around SaaS and WOA. Do you see this as something that is just building; and what about that issue about risks security, control and management?

Barnett: The context from the big picture point of view is that everything we know is moving to the Web. And what that means in tangible terms is that businesses and service providers and software companies are providing layers of functionality and data that are native to the Web or are Web-oriented.

Things like Web services and even less-sophisticated and increasingly popular things using REST and XML offer interfaces into the functionality and data. This ongoing trend is being driven by a frustration in what we’ve inherited from the previous generation of computing, where everything was essentially behind a proprietary protocol or proprietary set of APIs. This required that you to buy a platform set, or toolset, across the board, just so you were able to get the data that you owned as a company.

If you think about customer relationship management (CRM) systems or a certain kind of database -- they are in silos, they are disconnected, or they are very expensive and require lots of proprietary knowledge in order to be able to access the data, and therefore the value.

What we are seeing with things like WOA is a materialization of how we get out of that frustration as an industry -- how we get out of that frustration from business. We want the data and the business intelligence from it, and to be able to get at that from a business perspective.

The IT managers feel the pressure to be able to more rapidly to develop applications and access the data that are based on and being made available through Web APIs. And developers are able to then connect, develop, and build-out new applications based on distributed data, on distributed functionality and react to the business needs.

If you look at ProgrammableWeb.com, for example, at the end of last year, you would have seen that there were something like 500 Web APIs catalogued. There is a combination of commercial and public APIs. And now, here we are in April and we’ve got 650 APIs from the public and commercial space. So exactly the same trend is occurring behind the firewall, within organizations, as they create these layers of connectivity and programmable end-points to gain functionality and data.

Wainewright: It is important to say that the interfaces being published on ProgrammableWeb.com are not just some stupid little kind of stock market data feeds or what's the weather in my area tomorrow, the sort of thing we saw in the early days of Web services. These are actual, complete and functional API sets of the kind that an enterprise calls to applications like Salesforce.com, and to many other resources.

Gardner: So we have some significant new opportunities for taking advantage of the Web with these mashups and the data portability. And, again, we want to take advantage of the old as well as the new, with the old being characterized by lower-risk control and management.

So what does PaaS do conceptually, Alex, and how does that bring together the best of the old and the best of the new?

Barnett: If we define "old" as being that you are locked into a stack, that you aren’t able to get up through using open standard protocols such as SOAP, or even just standard XML interfaces, then that "old" is typical to get around. That’s what we’re seeing in terms of investments to upgrade system to unlock that value.

Gardner: I guess by "old" I mean enterprise-ready and mission-critical, that’s what I mean.

Barnett: Right, and once they’ve got to the point whether they have allowed that services layer to occur, the question is, "How do we get to the next step? How do we quickly derive value from the systems we have?" What we hear businesses crying out for is getting at the data, getting at the applications that are open.

Now, there are some companies that are moving ahead very quickly with this, being able to take the leap of faith of providing CRM-type data on a hosted service. Or, they may want to maintain it behind the firewall, behind their existing systems, and then just be able to provide limited, yet secure, access to that data through applications that are inherently secure in terms of their architecture.

Wainewright: What we're seeing develop at the moment is kind of a two-tier information technology. On the one hand, you have all of the existing on-premise, legacy applications and all that data that Alex was describing. It's locked away, and IT managers are really puzzling over and grappling with the issue of how to unlock that data. How do they make it more accessible? How do they build more agility into applications infrastructure?

They are looking at things like service-oriented architecture (SOA) and other ways of connecting and integrating the data, while automating business processes within the organization. So that’s one tier.

The other tier that’s developing is this Web-oriented tier, all of these APIs and in-the-cloud resources and applications that are out there on the Web. To take advantage of those connections, you need to build a completely new infrastructure, which is different from the existing infrastructure within the firewall. It has to cope with connecting to external resources, and it has to have different kinds of security, different kinds of identity management.

Building a robust infrastructure to do this is very, very hard. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of enterprises are holding back, and are therefore missing agile opportunities. That’s one of the roles that the PaaS can provide.

Barnett: What they have tried is failing, or they haven’t got the right level of investments, or they have other priorities.

Wainewright: Yes. And, we see some tremendous disasters happening where people in e-commerce are, in a very limited way, opening up to customers to transact with them. And they have to do that. They are losing customer data, because they're not getting the security right. So, yes, people have to be wary of that whole area, that Web tier -- because it’s full of pitfalls and traps.

Gardner: Okay, we’ve established that the tide is turning to the Internet, that there are some great Web-based services available, that technologies are now bubbling up to allow for better and easier connectivity. And yet, there is still a need for the right platform and the right infrastructure to make this all mission-critical and enterprise-ready.

So let’s get into PaaS as a possible stepping stone that, in a sense, bridges the best of the Web-oriented architecture and the available SaaS and the APIs-world with what developers inside organizations -- be they ISVs, service providers, or enterprises -- need to make these approaches acceptable and within the acceptable risk parameters.

I noticed that Bungee Labs does not call this "Development-as-a-Service" or "Deployment-as-a-Service" or "Integration-as-a-Service" -- but "Platform" as a service. Alex, give us the primer. What does "Platform-as-a-Service" really mean?

Barnett: That’s what we are trying to define at Bungee Labs. PaaS is one of those terms that we’re going to be hearing more and more. And they are going to be different -- varying levels of definition and interpretation of what that means.

But what we’ve done is put a stake in the ground in this respect, and then saying that in order to really be a PaaS -- and not just any one of those single pieces that you’ve mentioned plus more individual pieces -- that you need to be able to provide the end-to-end services to really call it a "platform."

From the developer’s standpoint, which is the development cycle, this means the tools that they need to develop applications, to be able to then test those applications, to be able to connect to Web services and to combine them, and to have all those kinds of capabilities -- and to then deploy and to make those applications instantly available to the business users.

Literally, we mean a URL that is the end-point for the end-user. From that, they can start consuming the application.

So, PaaS means having an environment in which you deploy inherently and have built-in scalability, reliability, and security. Once you’ve deployed your application, you know that you don't have to take care of all the infrastructure in the datacenter and the capital investments and the bodies that are required to make it scale when newer applications increases in use.

There is also the ability to connect to the various distributed data sources or functionality that the application needs to be able to consume. You can get that inside of that platform, the ability to be able to do that in a Web-native way, and so take advantage of the architectures we descried earlier, such as SOA.

There is also the ability -- and we touched on it earlier -- for developers to be able to collaborate on projects that are built-out in the cloud. They can share code, check in code, do all the standard revisions and collaborative-type functionality that developers need when they’re working on projects with teams distributed across the world or across your offices. And they can do this without having that entire infrastructure on-premise.

And then, the last, but critical, piece is having deep instrumentation and an analytics ability around the use of the application -- of how it’s being used, of where the connections are -- right across the board from the "glass of the window," the browser, for example, and right on through to the Web services in the CPU, or the rest of it.

As a result, you are able to understand performance. You are able to understand your billing, if it’s a billing proposition that you have. And all of what I described is comprised within six pillars [of Bungee's offerings]. All of that is delivered and available purely as a service, so there are no on-premises requirements for any of those components across the development and platform used in a utility model. You use it as much as you pay for, or as much as you use in a utility-based model -- all in the cloud. No bit needs to be installed on any machine at the enterprise in order to take advantage of all those Web services and functionalities.

Gardner: For our listeners who are just getting used to this concept of PaaS, let’s just get right in quickly and describe what Bungee Labs is. It’s a young, innovative company. And you’ve come out with a service called Bungee Connect. This is essentially one place online where you can go to develop, mash up, and access data, to put together Web-based applications and services, and then instantly -- with a click of a button, and perhaps I am oversimplifying -- develop and deploy in basically an integrated continuum. Is that correct?

Barnett: Yes, and provide very rich user experiences as part of that, with highly interactive application functionality. We’ve built out essentially that stack that I’ve described earlier. We've made that available for organizations to take advantage of. We're specifically targeted at developers who really want to be able to build very sophisticated Web applications that leverage orchestration workflow around connecting to Web services.

We are not in the business of being able to provide non-programmers with the ability to do these nice simple mashups.

Gardner: Well, if you can do that, let me know, because that would be a very good trick. I am sure the world would love to have development by anybody!

Barnett: Yeah, and that’s a great dream to be able to have, but inherent in that is inflexibility, because you are simplifying it all for the end-user. What we really offer is for the developers who are tasked with building sophisticated Web applications to do just that, deploy that, and then deliver very rich user experiences out on the Web.

Gardner: And to be clear, this is not just open source. This is commercial code, if they wish. The people who develop on this system, that code is their intellectual property. Is that right?

Barnett: The intellectual property of the code that is developed by the developers is absolutely their own intellectual property and remains so. We do have a community side of things that allows developers -- just as in the open source world -- to be able to share code and even entire applications as open source running on our grid.

But in terms of a company, it’s entirely their intellectual property that they developed and they are able to literally export the code. And if they want then re-factor that for a different kind of a grid or runtime, it’s their property.

Gardner: Phil, how do you see the relationship between PaaS and what Bungee Connect is doing, and then the larger SaaS trend? Do you see a relationship of one aiding and abetting the other? Or are they in separate orbits? How does that work out?

Wainewright: I think they are very much in a similar orbit. And to an extent, I don't think of PaaS as being part of SaaS or vice versa. It’s just everything moving to the cloud. These are two examples of that happening.

One of the things I want to highlight, as Alex was saying, is the useful experience. When people start developing for the Web, for the cloud, then it’s not just building the infrastructure -- it’s also learning what is involved in writing applications for that environment.

There is much more emphasis on the user experience. There is much more emphasis on reusing what other people have done, whether it’s by mash-ups or by reusing other people’s code, as opposed to reinventing the wheel every time. There is much more emphasis on developing applications and programs that can adapt and change to future opportunities in business conditions.

All of those things also have to be learned, at the same time as building the infrastructure. Using PaaS enables you to tap into that shared expertise in a way that you can’t do, if you try all by yourself.

The other thing that’s happening here is that we’re connecting into the resources of the Web, and getting onto the Web, so that we can interact with partners and customers and connect into those other Web resources. This is what we're really expected to do as businesses today, in order to stay competitive. So, there’s a tremendous pressure building to be able to do this kind of thing.

Now, there are three ways you can get onto the cloud. You can go to a cloud-computing provider and basically build your stuff in that cloud, which gets to some of the infrastructure, but, there's still the issue of how do I write applications in this environment and connect to other client resources.

Second, you can go to pure SaaS whereby you get a ready made application and you can do some customization, but there are going to be quite a few gaps around what that provides and what you actually want to do. There are going to be quite big gaps in terms of integrating that into your existing on-premises applications and to the other client application that you use.

Third, where PaaS comes in, it allows for the ability:

A) To get much faster to the custom applications that you need to build for that environment

B) To do the integrations to fill in the gaps and to access other SaaS applications and services, and to patch and connect back to the existing on-premises applications.

Gardner: Well, great. Now to the point a little earlier that if you read a lot of the blogs that are out there you might think that this is all widespread. But PaaS is just in its early stages. Yet one place where SaaS has really become quite popular and in a full enterprise usage is the CRM space.

First, why is it do you think that SaaS has taken off with CRM, and then secondarily, what is it about the nature of the data in CRM that might be something that this PaaS approach might be well suited for?

Barnett: In the early days, CRM took off because SaaS automation allowed a sales manager to get to the functionality he wanted. In the eyes of the IT manager, he said. "Well, okay, this is just a standalone application inside of Salesforce.com. The sales department is not going to hurt anyone else, so go ahead with it." And the sales manger just signed up on the credit card, and perhaps didn’t even tell IT about it and got on with it.

So it was very easy to establish on-demand CRM. Now what has happened more recently is that enterprises have realized that they have a lot of on-demand CRM being used. And perhaps they’ve decided that they want to harness it because it does kind of enable them to give functionality to the sales team faster than they can, if they built it themselves.

But they would have to do that in the context of their IT infrastructure, and they are looking at things like integration and to make sure a customer record in the on-demand CRM system is the same as the customer records in the ERP system. If a salesman closes a prospect, then how do you translate that closing from the CRM system into an order on the ERP system of records so it gets invoiced and the salesman is properly compensated? How do you then take back the data and functions into the SaaS system?

Gardner: So, we have a lot of fast-changing data that is actually essential to a business. This is what makes their sales happen and how they then fulfill those sales and get them into the processes that their back-end systems will perhaps manage and drive to create the actual products and services. This is certainly mission-critical. It’s distributed across a number of people, with many of them scattered and mobile, and it’s all quite dynamic.

Barnett: Right, and they need to do even more functionally. The on-demand CRM providers like NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Oracle, and now we’re hearing Microsoft Dynamics, are providing Web services layers over the functionality that they provide to the end users.

We’ve always been able to do a certain level of functional customization around those applications, but when you have the Web services that provide access to the data -- on the programmatic level -- you gain a whole new opportunity to merge, in terms of levels of customization against an existing CRM application, or ERP systems.

This pushes out the expansibility and the increased functionality of the investments that they’re making. It allows for those services to be able to expand that further in a cloud-orientated, Web-orientated way.

Gardner: Now, back to Phil. What is it about the CRM and PaaS from your perspective that demonstrates a larger opportunity in the market?

That is to say, if we can take advantage of the mashups and services and high level of on-demand CRM -- we can bring PaaS in to help integrate data or the take that data and some of the interfaces and views from a CRM activity and bring it and relate it to either a channel or a supply chain and/or backend systems.

Does that mean that CRM now highlights what will be repeated across other types of business applications?

Wainewright: Yes. I think it’s great for the on-demand CRM vendors, because it really starts to hammer home the benefits of being an on-demand application. Now you’ve got this Web context that you can take advantage of.

As you look to the huge advantages of being able to consolidate community insights into a better application, of being able to connect into API resources and aggregate data for doing composite processes, then that means these are mashups, data mashups and user interface mashups -- it’s all the same kind of thing.

So you gain this ability, and you really destroy the misconception that if you go to SaaS you can’t do customization and you can’t do integration. It means that we’re actually doing better customization and better integration than you are capable of doing with many on-premises systems, because it’s actually a more flexible customization. It’s more cost-effective integration because it’s a shared service.

What previously seemed like disadvantages of the SaaS model can be turned on their head and turned into advantages.

It shows the way to using these applications in other areas. We talked about CRM -- because that’s a very big area that gets a lot of media attention -- but there are other areas that are equally successful with on-demand, such as people management, human capital management, the whole e-commerce area, and, of course, content management. There are lots of opportunities to take this model further.

Gardner: It’s been interesting for me as I look into Bungee Labs and Bungee Connect because it appears that the PaaS value forms a stepping stone to allow more use and exploration of the SaaS applications and services that are available. And the more you use those services -- in a virtuous adoption cycle -- the more you want to customize and integrate. And so you might then look to PaaS as a means for doing that. I think they play off of each other quite well.

Wainewright: They do. And I think probably the biggest takeaway for anyone listening to this is that as a business, you need to know how to work in this Web environment. Your customers expect you to be connected to allow them to participate. Your partners expect it too. You’ve got to be open to the Web. You need to play in this environment.

And secondly, if you are a developer, you need to learn how to do all this stuff, because this is going to be a big, expanding field where the skills are going to be in demand.

A lot of the focus at the moment in IT is on getting all of the internal systems operating together. I think there’s very little budget available for doing a lot of new stuff. So, you can’t afford to build the infrastructure for all of this Web stuff. You really need to go to outside providers to be able to start playing with it quickly, but if you don’t start playing with it now, you are going to left behind.

Gardner: Great points. Also, if you build services and applications on a PaaS approach, they are going to be public facing. Putting it onto a grid, or utility/cloud-type of deployment allows you to then scale up very rapidly without you having to worry about that forklift upgrade of your blade servers or your datacenter. And, of course, you can also scale down if needed if the services impact just a handful of people in a supply chain environment, for example. You can build a service that might be for a small group of people, but at a price-point that makes that worthwhile.

Barnett: I’d say that’s the beauty of what the whole SaaS trend has allowed us to be able to do.

Going back to the CRM example, the sales managers have been able to just start up a test account using their credit card. And, all of a sudden they can start seeing the value instantly of having this CRM on-demand, through a browser. And, then they can just slowly, slowly increase the activity that’s going on there because they see the value and it’s becoming cost effective.

But if you take the same kind of concept and now bring it back to the IT department, they can just try a simple application that has business value, as long as they’re happy on the security side of things. Then maybe they try a composite of two Web services, and provide instant value back to the business. There it is. It’s a URL. It’s secure. It’s locked down, and it’s all the rest of it. And nobody can get access to it except for the end users that you've decided on.

It just slowly builds up. There's no long-term cycle around this massive kind of evaluation, cost and ROI studies, TCOs, and infrastructure investments and projections. You can just like try it out slowly, and if you like what you see and you get in that kind of positive feedback as a developer or as an IT manager or from an end user -- you just slowly build it up and only pay for what you use. And you have the instant ability to scale if it really takes off.

That’s great thing for anybody in business: To be able to try before you buy, without any kind of commitment or contractual commitment or cost-commitment upfront.

Gardner: I am afraid we’re going to have to leave it there, we’re out of time.

We’ve been discussing PaaS and how Bungee Labs has been bringing that concept to market with a service called Bungee Connect, which fulfills much of the underlying functionality for PaaS.

To help us better understand the market opportunity and the trends that support this, we’ve been talking with Phil Wainewright, an independent analyst, director of Procullux Ventures, and a ZDNet SaaS blogger. Good to have you on the show again, Phil.

Wainewright: Pleasure to be here.

Gardner: We’ve also been joined by Alex Barnett, the vice president of community at Bungee Labs. Thank you, Alex.

Barnett: Yes, many thanks for having me on, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks, and come back and join us next time.

Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: Bungee Labs.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on platform as a service and on-demand applications deployment trends. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.

New Eclipse-Based Tools Offer Developers More Choices, Migrations and Paths to IBM WebSphere

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on Eclipse-based tool choices for IBM WebSphere shops.

Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: Genuitec.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, a sponsored podcast discussion about choices developers have when facing significant changes or upgrades to deployment environments. We'll be looking at one of the largest global installed bases of application servers, the IBM WebSphere platform.

Eclipse-oriented developers and other developers will be faced with some big decisions, as their enterprise architects and operators begin to adjust to the arrival of the WebSphere Application Server 6.1. That has implications for tooling and infrastructure in general.

The platform depends largely on the Rational Application Developer (RAD), formerly known as the WebSphere Studio Application Developer. This recent release is designed to ease implementations into Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and improve speed for Web services.

However, the new Rational toolset comes with a significant price tag and some significant adjustments. Into this changeable environment, Genuitec, the company behind the MyEclipse IDE, is offering a stepping-stone approach to help with this WebSphere environment tools transition.

The MyEclipse Blue Edition arrives on March 15, after a lengthy beta run, and may be of interest to developers and architects in WebSphere shops as they move and adjust to the WebSphere Application Server 6.1.

To help us understand this transition, the market, and the products we are joined by Maher Masri, president of Genuitec. Welcome to the show, Maher.

Maher Masri: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Also, James Governor, a co-founder and industry analyst at RedMonk. Welcome, James.

James Governor: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: James, let’s start with you. We’re looking at a pretty dynamic marketplace around tools. There are certainly lots of different frameworks and approaches floating around. Folks are dealing with SOA, with Software as a Service (SaaS), with agile development. They are dealing with mashups and Enterprise 2.0 issues. We’re seeing increased use of REST and SOAP. This is just a big, fluid, dynamic environment.

On the other hand, we’re also seeing some consolidation around runtimes. Organizations looking to cut cost and infrastructure and trying to bring their data centers under as few runtime environments as possible. So, we’re left with somewhat of a conundrum, and into this market IBM is introducing a major upgrade.

Maybe you could paint a picture for us of what you see from the enterprises and developers you speak to on how they deal with, on one hand, choice and, on the other hand, consolidation.

Governor: It's a great question. In this industry we can expect continuing change. If anything is certain, it's that. When we look at this marketplace, if we go back a couple of years into the late 1990s, there was a truism that you could not make money as a tools company. The only way you could really sustain a business would be connected to, and interwoven with, the application server and the deployment environment. So it's interesting that now, sometime later, we’re beginning to rethink that.

If you look at a business like Genuitec, the economics are somewhat different. The Eclipse economics, in terms of open source and the change there, where there is a code based being worked on, have meant that it's actually easier to maintain yourself as an independent and work on a specific set of problems.

In terms of your question about Web 2.0, agile development, and so on, there are an awful lot of changes going on. That does create some opportunities for the third parties. Frankly, when you look at the very largest firms, it's actually quite difficult for them to maintain the sorts of innovation that we’re seeing from some of the smaller players.

In terms of the new development environments, it might be something like the fact that we’re seeing more Ruby on Rails. P scripting languages continue to be used in the enterprise. So, supporting those is really important, and you are not always going to get that from the lead vendors.

I'll leave it up to Genuitec to pitch what they do, but one of the interesting things they did, which you certainly wouldn’t have seen from IBM, was a while back, when they bridged the Eclipse world with the NetBeans ’ Matisse GUI building application development set.

Crossing some of those boundaries and being able to deal with that complexity and work on the customer problems, it's not surprising to me that we’ve seen this decoupling, largely driven by open source. Open source is re-enabling companies to focus on one thing, rather than saying, "Okay, we've got to be end-to-end."

Gardner: So, we've got a dynamic environment. We have some amazing uptake in Eclipse over the past several years becoming a dominant job oriented IDE. We have WebSphere as the dominant deployment platform.

As you pointed out, the economics around tools have shifted dramatically. It seems that the value add is not so much in the IDE now, but in building bridges across environments, making framework choices easier for developers, and finding ways of mitigating some of these complexity issues, when it comes to the transition on the platform side.

Let’s go to Maher. Tell me a little bit about why Eclipse has been so successful, and do you agree that it's the value add to the IDE where things are at right now?

Masri: Let me echo James’ point regarding the tools environment, and software companies not being able to make money at that. I think that was based on some perceived notion that people refuse to pay money for software. In fact, what we've found is that people don’t mind paying for value, and perceived value, when it’s provided at their own convenience and at their own price point.

That’s why we set the price for the MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench at such a low point that it could be purchased anywhere in the world without a series of internal financial company decisions, or even a heartbreaking personal decision.

Although the product was just the JSP editor when it was first launched, today it's a fully integrated development environment that rivals any Tier 1 product. It's that continuity of adding value continually with every release, multiple releases within the same year, to make sure that, a) we listen to our customer base, and b) they get the value that they perceive they need to compensate for the cost that we charge them.

Eclipse obviously has become the default standard for the development environment and for building tools on top of it. I don’t think you need to go very far to find the numbers that support those kinds of claims, and those numbers continue to increase on a year-to-year basis around the globe.

When it started, it started not as a one-company project, but a true consortium model, a foundation that includes companies that compete against each other and companies in different spaces, growing in the number of projects and trying to maintain a level of quality that people can build upon to provide software on top of it from a tools standpoint.

A lot of people forget that Eclipse is not just a tools platform. It's actually an application framework. So it could be, as we describe it internally, a floor wax and a dessert topping.

The ability for it to become that mother board for applications in the future makes it possible for it to move above and beyond a tools platform into what a lot of companies already use it for -- a runtime equation.

The next Ganymede 3.4 and the 4.0 extension of Eclipse is pushing it in exactly that direction. The OSGi adoption is making a lot of people reconsider their thought in terms of, "What application do I write for productivity applications internally, for tools that I provide to my internal and external customers, for which client implementations?"

It's forcing quite a bit of rethinking in terms of the traditional client/server models, or the Web-only application model, because of productivity requirements and so on.

IBM was the company that led the way for all of the IBM WebSphere implementation and many of their internal implementations. A lot of technologies are now based on Eclipse and based on Eclipse runtime.

Gardner: So, we have this big bear, Eclipse, in the market and we have this big bear, WebSphere, in the market. Why is there a need for someone like you to come in between and help developers?

Masri: The story that we hear internally from our own customers is pretty consistent, and it starts with the following. "We love you guys. You provide great values, great features, great support, except I cannot use you beyond a certain point." Companies for whatever internal reasons, from a vendor standpoint, are making the choices today to move forward with WebSphere 6.1, and that’s really the story we keep hearing.

"I am moving into 6.1, and the reason for that is I am re-implementing or have a revival internally for Web services, SOA, Rich-net applications, and data persistence requirements that are evolving out of the evolution of the technology in the broader space, and specifically as implemented into the new technology for 6.1."

Gardner: They need to modernize it.

Masri: But their challenge is similar. Every one of them tells us exactly the same story. "I cannot use your Web service implementation because, a) I have to use this web services within WebSphere or I lose support, and b) I have invested quite a bit of money in my previous tools like WebSphere Application Developer (WSAD), and that is no longer supported now.

"I have to transition into, not only a runtime requirement, but also a tools requirement." With that comes a very nice price tag that not only requires them to retool their development and their engineers, but also reinvest into that technology.

But the killer for almost all of them is, "I have to start from scratch, in the sense that every project that I have created historically, my legacy model. I can no longer support that because of the different project model that’s inside."

For example, Rational 7.0 is only one of the few versions of WebSphere that supports 6.1 and supports all of the standards for Web services, for AJAX support, for persistence requirements that they need to modernize. They have to implement it, but cannot take, for example, an existing WSAD project, import it into Rational 7.0, and continue development. They pretty much start from scratch.

Gardner: Let’s go to James for a moment. James, you’re familiar with the IBM stack and their road map. Why are they doing this? It seems to me that there is an application lifecycle management (ALM) set of benefits that the Rational toolset and platform bring that IBM is trying to encourage people to take advantage of. It does require transition, but they have a larger goal in mind. Perhaps we should address this ALM, or do you have other thoughts about this transition?

Governor: From an IBM perspective, it’s a classic case of kind of running ahead of the stack. If you see the commoditization further down the stack, you want to move on up. So IBM looks at the application developer role and the application development function and thinks to itself, "Hang on a second. We really need to be moving up in terms of the value, so we can charge a fair amount of money for our software," or what they see is a fair amount of money.

From an IBM standpoint, I think they really looked at players such as Genuitec, looked at where Eclipse was going, and they thought, "Wait a second. We really do need to be moving forward with this notion of software development."

If you talk to a lot of developers, they don’t really think of the world that way, but many of their managers do. So, the idea of moving to situation where there is better integration of the different datasets, where you've got one repository of metadata moving forward with that kind of stuff, that’s certainly the approach they are taking.

The idea is you've got "auditability," as you build applications. You’re going from a classic distributed development, but you’re doing a better job of centralizing, managing, and maintaining all the data that’s associated with that.

The fact that IBM is making that change is indicative of the fact that when they look at the market more broadly, they think to themselves, "Well, where is our margin coming from?"

IBM’s strategy is very much to look at business process as opposed to the focus on just a technical innovation. That certainly explains some of the change that's being made. They want to drive an inflection point. They can't afford to see orders-of-magnitude cheaper software doing the same thing that their products do.

Gardner: As we mentioned earlier, there are so many complexities involved in decision making now, different approaches to creating services, that the operators and the vice presidents of engineering are saying, “Wow, we need to manage this complexity.”

They are looking for life cycle approaches, ways of bridging design time and runtime. IBM is addressing some of these needs, but, as you point out, developers are often saying, "Hey, I just want my tool. I want to stick with what I know." So we’re left with a little bit of a disconnect.

I’m assuming, Maher, that this is where you’re stepping in and saying, "Aha, perhaps we can let the developers have it their way for a time to mitigate the pain of the transition, at the same time recognizing that these vice presidents of engineering and development are going to need to look at a much more holistic life-cycle approach. So, perhaps we can play a role in satisfying both." Am I reading too much into that?

Masri: No. We understand internally that different technologies have different adoption life cycle behind them. ALM is no different. It’s going to take a number of years for it to become the standard throughout the industry, and it is the right direction that almost every company is going to have to face at some time in the future.

The challenge for everybody, us and IBM, is the bottom-up sale process, to provide the tools and the capabilities for companies to embrace, for people to embrace those technologies, and, at the same time, putting the infrastructure in place for managers to be able to continue to manage projects into success.

Our decision is very simple. We looked at the market. Our customers looked back at us and basically gave us the same input. If you provide us this delta of functionalities, specifically speaking, if you’re able to make my life a little easier in terms of importing projects that exist inside of WebSphere Application Developer into your tool environment, if you can support the web services standard that’s provided by WebSphere.

If you can integrate better with ClearCase from a code management standpoint, and if you could provide a richer deployment model into WebSphere so my developers could feel as if they’re deploying it from within the IBM toolset, I don’t have the need to move outside of your toolset. I can continue to deploy, develop and run all my applications from a developer's standpoint, not from an administrator's.

Obviously if you are an administrator and have one to three people within the company that maintain a runtime version of WebSphere, you will need specific tools for that. We’re not targeting those one to three people. We’re targeting the 10 to 500 developers internally that need to build those applications. That’s really where Blue is coming from.

Governor: Maher, can you be a little bit more specific about it. You just used the top-down bottom-up or top-down in terms of your argument. Can you talk a little bit more to sort of that and your sales staff?

Certainly, from RedMonk’s standpoint, we do tend to be more aligned with the bottom-up, just in terms of our customer and community base. But, in terms of what you’re seeing and saying, how is what you do different from IBM? I didn’t quite get that from your last comments.

Masri: I'll give you a very simple example. Just take the experience of a developer installing MyEclipse or installing RAD from ground zero. MyEclipse, you can install in a two-megabyte root install. It installs a 600-megabyte version on your desktop that contains all the tools. You no longer need to buy additional tools from somewhere else. If you need to do UML development, if you need to do UI design, all that is included as one bundle within MyEclipse.

If you install RAD, you need a multi-DVD, six or seven gigabytes, I understand, in order just to begin the installation. The configuration is a nightmare. Everyone is telling us that it's a very difficult configuration process just get started.

MyEclipse is part of a very rich, simple profile that a user can download directly through the MyEclipse site or through our managed application environment inside of Pulse. You can be up and running with tools, with runtime configurations, and with examples, literally within minutes, as opposed to within hours or days beyond that.

On the issue of simplicity, the feedback that we keep getting is that our response level in terms of request for features, request for innovations, request in the technologies, we can deliver within months, as opposed to years or multi-months, when looking at the competition. All of that becomes internalized from the developer standpoint into, "I like this better, if it can bridge that gap that I now have to use this technology, in order to satisfy my business requirements."

Gardner: Perhaps another way of asking a similar question is: you are in beta now. You’re going to be coming out on March 15 with MyEclipse Blue Edition. What's the difference between MyEclipse and MyEclipse Blue Edition?

Masri: Excellent point. MyEclipse Blue Edition is inclusive of all MyEclipse professional features. It’s roughly on the order of 1,000 to 1,500 features above and beyond what the Eclipse platform provides, as well as the highly targeted functionalities that I mentioned. It can import and manage an existing project that you had previously inside WebSphere application developer and can develop to the Web services SOA standards that are specified into the WebSphere runtime.

It has much better integration into IBM code management, ClearCase technology, and almost an identical implementation of what you possibly could see inside Rational for deployment model and the ability to debug an existing project or a new project into the runtime environment.

Gardner: Developers, of course, are hard to come by in a lot of regions around the globe. There’s a lot of competition. Organizations like to keep their developers happy and productive. At the same time, they need to deal with some of the complexity issues of moving to SOA. If they're WebSphere shops, they know that they are going to be tied into that for some period of time. It does sound like you are trying to give both of these parties something to be a little bit cheery about.

Governor: The one of the things that I think is important about open source and understanding open source in the enterprise, but also more broadly. Sometimes you think about open source as a personal trainer for proprietary software companies. You've got these fat, flabby toys and they need to get a life. They need to get on the treadmill. They need to get thinner and more agile. They need to get more effective. Frankly, it was ever thus with IBM. IBM is a pretty big beast.

Let me go back to the old mainframe times to think about Amdahl as a third party. When the IBM salesperson came in, you always made sure you had an Amdahl mug on the desk, right in front of the salesperson. Obviously, we’re a few years on now, but that dynamic remains important. As much as organizations balance BEA WebLogic and WebSphere against one another, or WebLogic and JBoss Application Server against one another, you would also want a balance in your toolsets.

One interesting thing here is that because you've got the specificity around WebSphere, and the sort of value prop the third party is putting forward, you're able to start that balance, that conversation to drive innovation, to drive price down. That’s one of the really useful things that Eclipse has enabled and delivered in the marketplace. It helps to keep some of the bigger vendors honest.

Gardner: So, the need to support heterogeneity is going to remain in both tools and runtime, but we’re also facing the time when heterogeneity isn’t going to include hybrid approaches to deployment. And so, we’re seeing more people interested, particularly if they are ISVs or perhaps small- to medium-size businesses in taking advantage of some of these cloud-computing options. I'm thinking of course of Amazon and some others. Tell us, Maher, how this choice in tool and heterogeneity plays into some of these hybrid approaches of deployment in a cloud of some sort.

Masri: Let me expand on James’ point and then I’ll add to it. I just want to make sure that we’re not trying to present MyEclipse Blue as if we are trying to compete with IBM, which is really could be easily perceived there. What we see is an under-served market and people that are trying to make the decision, but cannot afford to make that decision.

There are companies that are always going to be a pure IBM shop and no one is going to be able to change their mind. The ability to provide choice is very important for those that need to make that decisions going forward, but they need some form of affordability to make that decision possible. I believe we provide that choice in spades in our current pricing model and our ability to continue to support without the additional premium above that.

Going forward, I fully agree with you that the hybrid model is very interesting, and we see it in the way that companies come back to us with very specific feedback on either MyEclipse or our Pulse product. There's quite a bit of confusion out there, in terms of how Web 2.0, Rich Internet Application (RIA), and Rich Client Application are designed and geared to provide and all the underlying technology to support that in terms of runtime.

There seems to be a dichotomy. I could go in the Web 2.0 world and provide a very rich, all Web enabled, all Web centric technologies for my end-users because I need to control my environment. The other side of that is the rich client application, where I have to have some form of a rich client implementation with full productivity applications for certain people, and I have to divorce the two because there is no way I can either rely on the Web or rely on the technologies or rely on anything else.

Everyone that we’ve talked to so far has a problem with that model. They have to have some form of very strong, rich implementation of not necessarily a very fat client, but some form of a client on the end-user’s desktop. They need to be able to control that, whether you are using very specific implementation of Web Services, talking to somebody else’s Web services, need to use a very specific persistent architecture, or have to integrate with other specific architectures. It gets very dicey very quickly.

That’s really where we saw the future of the market. This is probably not the right time to talk about this specifically, since the topic is Blue, but that’s why we also moved into the managed-application space and into our other product line called Pulse. This is for end-users who are using Eclipse-based technology right now, and in the future far more than that. They'll be able to assemble, share, deploy and manage a stack of applications, regardless of where those applications reside and regardless of the form of technology itself.

Take, for example, a rich-client runtime of Eclipse running on someone’s desktop. All of a sudden, you have a version of software that’s you can deploy and manage, but it already has an interface into a browser. You can provide other Web 2.0 and RIA models, as well as other rich Internet technology, such as a Flex and Flash. These technologies are merging very quickly, and companies have to be right there to make sure they meet those growing demands.

Gardner: It sounds like you're really talking about risk mitigation, trying to find some focal point that allows you to support your legacy, move to the rich-client and SOA activities, as well as be ready to go to what some people call Web Oriented Architecture, and take advantage of these new hybrid deployment options. Does that sound like what you're doing?

Masri: That's a fair statement.

Gardner: James, is this something that we can expect to shake out soon, or are companies going to be dealing with heterogeneity -- not just in terms of technology, but in approaches -- for some time?

Governor: We actually see an acceleration in this area -- tools and apps that span clients and the Web. I’ve taken to calling it the "synchronized Web." How can you have two different sets of services talk to one another? In terms of how you develop in that environment, you’ve got to develop conversationally. It’s about message passing. Because of that, we all are going to see some changes around the language choices.

We're seeing some interest in terms of some interesting new development languages, such as Erlang and Haskell. We are certainly seeing interest from developers in those areas.

It's like enterprise software companies not having an open-source strategy. Basically, you need one. From an economic standpoint, you just don't have a choice. Any software company that doesn’t have a thorough-going strategy for understanding and developing both for Web modes and offline modes is really missing the point.

Whether we're thinking of our clients that come from Google Gears, whether we are thinking about offline clients using an environment like Adobe's Apollo Integrated Runtime (AIR), we're already thinking about spanning clients and websites.

From an enterprise standpoint, the same choices need to be made. User expectations now are that, they are going to be able to have some of those benefits and centralization, but they are also going to be able to have rich experiences that they're used to on desktop clients.

This is a very important transition and, whether it’s Pulse or any number of the Web apps we're seeing this from, we are definitely seeing this in enterprise Web development. It's really important for us to be thinking about the implications, in terms of the language support and in terms of runtime. We've already mentioned the Amazon Web services back end. We're going to be seeing more and more of that stuff.

There’s a little company called Coghead, and it’s really focused on these kinds of areas and it’s now excellent. They've chosen Amazon Web services as a back end and they've chosen Derby Flex as a front-end to give that interactivity. The Amazon model teaches, or should teach, a lot of software companies some important lessons. When I look at developers, certainly grassroots developers, it has almost become a badge of honor that you're getting, "This is what Amazon charged me this week."

The notion of the back end in the cloud is growing in importance again. That’s probably why IBM just announced yet another one of its, "Hey, we're going to take a billion dollars and move it towards cloud-computing" kind of initiatives.

Gardner: Right. We’ve obviously seen a lot of change in the market. Organizations and enterprises that depend on an ongoing evolution on a single-stack approach need to try to come up with the tooling and framework and environment that allow them to accomplish what they need from the backwards-compatibility perspective. They also need to put themselves into as low a risk position as possible for taking advantage of these dynamic environments and the change in the economics and the landscape.

We've been talking about the transition to WebSphere Application Server 6.1 and the implications for tooling, the pending arrival of MyEclipse Blue Edition from Genuitec, helping companies find some additional choices to manage these transitions.

Helping us weed through some of this -- and I have enjoyed the conversation -- we have been joined by Maher Masri, president of Genuitec. Any last words, Maher?

Masri: Just a reminder that the Blue Edition first milestone releases will be available in February. There will be a number of milestone releases that will be available for immediate access and we encourage people to download and try it.

Gardner: Very good. And, also James Governor, co-founder and industry analyst at RedMonk. What's your parting shot on this one, James?

Governor: Let’s get specific again. Some of this has been a little bit blue sky. I think it’s very interesting that IBM is has posted a pretty good set of financial results today.

Gardner: They're not going away, are they?

Governor: They are not going away. That’s exactly right. It used to be said that IBM is not the competition; it is the environment in which you compete. It seems to me that Genuitec and many others are probably a pretty good example of that. That was well put by you. IBM isn't going away.

Gardner: Well, thanks. This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks, and come again next time.

Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: Genuitec.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on tool choices for WebSphere shops. Copyright Interbarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.