Nexaweb and Kapow team up to bring Web-based mashups to enterprise desktops

Enterprise 2.0 vendors Nexaweb Technologies and Kapow Technologies have teamed up to smooth the way for bringing internal and external data into enterprise mashups and composite and other rich Internet applications.

By marrying Nexaweb's Web 2.0 Platform with Kapow's Mashup Server, the partnership will extend the reach of enterprises to take any application component with a Web interface and repurpose it into an application involving Web-based content, data, or business logic. This real-time access to wide-ranging data sources -- internal or external -- will give businesses the agility they need to become and remain competitive in an increasingly data-driven environment.

David McFarlane, Nexaweb COO, says the combined technologies will allow companies to peek out from behind the firewall. "External data, such as market quotes, politics, world events, weather, traffic, and third-party analysis and commentary can have significant impact on your business," McFarlane said. "They should be available to your workforce to help them make decisions faster."

Nexaweb's Web 2.0 Platform, a standards-based application development and deployment solution, allows organizations to tap into legacy, SOA (services oriented architecture), and third-party data to deploy Ajax-based business applications over the Web.

The Kapow Mashup Server, a Java-based solution, uses the Web front-end as the interface to integrate Web-based content, data and applications. Kapow uses the ability to access the web interface to create mashups at the user interface level (UI), at the application logic level, and at the data level. The mashup server also includes a highly-scalable, robust enterprise-class deployment framework and a visual design environment.

Tony Baer at Computer Business Review Online sees a wide range of opportunities from the partnership:

"That means that, besides data from database sources, you could now treat wikis, blogs, or other web document-centric content as first class data in for the data driven mashups that are more suited for enterprise use than presentation-oriented mashups that literally placed this style of development on the (Google) map."

Nexaweb and Kapow will be seeking customers for deals involving bundled capabilities, and are offering a discount for companies that sign up in the first few weeks of the offer.

TIBCO revs up enterprise Ajax with General Interface 3.5

TIBCO Software gave a boost to Ajax in the enterprise last week when it released Version 3.5 of its open-source Ajax toolkit, General Interface (GI).

The new version of the award-winning package includes improvements to performance and tooling and offers such other enhancements as an integrated context-sensitive help system -- which TIBCO claims is "nifty" -- and reworked vector drawing APIs. When a developer creates lines, shapes and fills with the API, GI will render them as VML for Internet Explorer and SVG for Firefox.

Performance enhancements include faster data display and rendering times, as well as a boost in speed to make IE6 rendering nearly at parity with more up-to-date browsers.

As far as tooling enhancements, a new benchmarks toolbar gives file size, load time, render time, and HTML size, which allows developers to optimize early in the development process. A drop-in debug build can also alert authors of the need to optimize.

GI was voted Best Ajax Toolkit by Infoworld in 2006. Either the Professional Open Source Edition or the Enterprise Edition can be downloaded from TIBCO.

MuleSource fires up MuleForge collaboration site; Apache Tuscany team announces 0.99 SCA release

Collaboration is at the heart of open source, and in that spirit, MuleSource, which provides open-source infrastructure and integration software, this week launched MuleForge a Web platform that will allow developers to explore, download, test, and contribute to re-usable mule extensions.

With over 45 projects already on the site, MuleForge is designed as a development base for the Mule community, and offers tips, documentation, and other resources. It also automates building and compiling code, and collecting dependencies, which should save developers large amounts of time.

Among the projects already on the MuleForge site are a plug-in for AS/400 queuing support, a JavaSpaces integration package, and a session initiation protocol (SIP) connector for integrating data and services in VoIP and other telco applications. There is also a Salesforce.com connector that allows real-time communications between Salesforce.com and internal data sources.

Additional features include:

• Source code control
• Continuous builds
• Issue tracking
• Documentation wiki
• Project statistics

MuleForge is also designed to provide community coverage for individual projects and gives access to hundreds of developers to further develop and test code. To sweeten the pot for potential contributors, Mule is offering individuals prestige -- a gift denoting "elite status" -- and the all important cash. Once a quarter, the developer who submits the best project will receive $500 and a spot on the home page.

In other SOA open-source news, the Apache Software Foundation's Tuscany team has announced the 0.99-incubating release of the Java SCA project. SCA is a set of specifications aimed at simplifying SOA application development.

The current release builds on the stability and modularity of the previous releases and includes more complete implementation of SCA specifications, support for distributed SCA domains, SCA policy, OSGi implementations, and pub/sub support. With numerous bug fixes, the 0.99 release is expected to be the last point release before the 1.0 version.

The release and further information can be downloaded from the Apache Tuscany team's Web site.

IBM's Cell processor looks like a candidate to power numerous infrastructure appliances

News that IBM has announced an upgraded version of its blade server based on the Cell processor this week has me wondering about the versatile and powerful "systems on a chip"'s use in appliances, too.

We're heard some hinting and "that's a logical outcome" statements from IBM officials in the past few months, so the pairing of Cell and appliances would not come as a complete surprise. When the details emerge, the price-performance and ease of deployment benefits of these high-powered, multi-core appliances could be very impressive.

When IBM announced plans to buy Telelogic, the deal made sense to me more when the use of a specialized Cell-fired appliances was made part of a possible future portfolio. When we had Jim Ricotta on a recent BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition roundtable podcast, the IBM general manager of appliances indicated more specialized appliance to come from IBM, though he did not finger Cell specifically.

Appliances from IBM should be expected in more componentized infrastructure roles in the coming months, for sure. They make a great deal of sense for data and content optimization and balancing, for SOA-support functions such as ESB, registry/repository, and as discrete services support stacks in a box (a business service appliance).

Those specifying services or functions will not need to consider the underlying platforms or inherent low-level integration issues, just focus on the largely standards-based interoperability characteristics for these functional units. Appliances allow greater exploitation of open source efficiencies by the vendor, with less complexity for the end user, and a better margin for the seller (more than just service and support).

Indeed, we may see some sort of a face-off in terms of total cost and performance between virtualization approaches and appliances approaches. Why not use both? I expect that appliances may very well be filling up larger list of new requirements for enterprise architects over the next two years.

The multi-core attributes of Cell, plus the proprietary 'Synergistic Processing Elements' (SPEs) for the chips provide the means to exploit parallelism and finely tune each box for the specific functionality at hand. The fact that these specialized and closed functional components (hardware, software, integration, optimization) require much less set-up and life-time support, appeals to architects (if not integrators). They may also help on energy use and heat-dispersion issues as well.

The ability to scale by virtue of adding (or subtracting) boxes, plus the ease of swapping and redundancy -- all bode well for more appliances-driven architecture (ADA [... sorry]) for SOA and high-performance yet specialized computing at the best total cost. These attributes will be of interest to hosters, service providers and telecommunications providers.

IBM's Ricotta told our analysts that appliances can cut costs by half, compared to traditional deployment approaches. When you take such economic common sense and toss in the technological secret sauce of optimized and specialized Cell chip-sets ... the balance of Power could well shift toward appliances in the most competitive datacenters.

SaaS now ready to succeed where ASPs failed -- especially for smaller businesses

Listen to the podcast. Read a full transcript.

There is an entire universe of suppliers and vendors that support the delivery of applications as on-demand services. Indeed, the Software as a Service (SaaS) model is attracting more than end users who acquire their IT via user-per-month service subscriptions. Also attracted to the SaaS market are those vendors creating the means to produce and deliver such services well and efficiently.

That's because the timing is now right for small businesses and ISVs to reach each other through SaaS, with the Web as a platform, and with compelling economics. We're also seeing more Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) support vendors focus their sales on SaaS providers and hosts, with the understanding that SOA may well emerge in the SaaS universe first, and then extend to enterprises more generally.

To help understand the SaaS market, what SaaS providers want and what those seeking to support those providers can deliver, I recently spoke with Colleen Smith, managing director of Software as a Service for Progress Software.

The resulting podcast offers some great insights and better appreciation of the swelling ecology of vendors and providers devoted to SaaS delivery.

Here are some excerpts:

Progress Software had started to look at the application service provider (ASP) model back in the early 2000-2001 time frame to figure out whether there was an opportunity for some of the small ISVs who were using the Progress technology to become more of an application service provider. ... I was basically asked to figure out how to build more of a SaaS partner program and look at ways in which we could work with our partners.

[We looked at] the technology enablement and how to build applications to go to market with SaaS. We also added a couple of other things, because we felt that one of the biggest challenges traditional software vendors had was around the business model, the go-to-market strategy, sales enablement, and figuring out ways in which we could actually help them to be more successful in this new business model. We were thinking of it more as a business model and not just as a technology.

Sure, there are the technical components of multi-tenancy, being able to have a Web-based access, and being able to drive policy configuration and personalization. ... On the software side of it, there is much more of a focus on business-process automation, and the people who are building, deploying, and running those applications have a good, solid knowledge of the business itself. The second thing is that the applications are now architected specifically to be able to run for multiple customers, and it’s not a separate implementation for each customer.

The economy of scale is what killed a lot of hosting providers back in the ASP days and ran them out of business. They were just doing an implementation for every customer, as opposed to a single implementation that can now be used by multiple customers -- personalized and managed. The people who use the application run and use it differently, but the implementation is pretty much the same for all customers.

More importantly, we work with a lot with our partners or these ISVs to make sure they realize that this requires different marketing. It requires a different sales and business model, because clearly there are financial implications in terms of cash flows. There are also a lot of things they need to think about in terms of who is the target market.

We've helped them focus on looking at new markets and going down-market. Our partners have always focused very much on the mid-market, but SaaS has enabled them to target some very niche verticals and go down into the "S" of SMB (small and medium business).

I think the timing is right. There are a bunch of reasons why. Number one, the Web is finally viewed as a business platform. Seven or 10 years ago, the Web wasn't viewed as the way in which business applications were going to be run and managed. ... [Before, SMBs] couldn’t afford the dedicated IT staff to manage and maintain the applications. They didn’t necessarily have the infrastructure and the technology to run these business applications. A lot of business applications are much too complex and require too much manpower to manage and maintain the apps.

ISVs [now] realize there’s a whole new market. There’s that long tail, if you will, of the software market that allows them to be able to go after new people. In the past, software just wasn’t accessible to them, and now there’s a whole new market opportunity.

We stress to our ISVs, "You can continue to be in the traditional software business for your core market and the market that you’ve been going after, but there’s a whole new opportunity for you to look at new markets, whether they be the low-end of your current market, adjacent markets, or even new geographic territories."

Throughout South America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, what we’re finding is tremendous growth opportunity for ISVs to look at these as new markets and to go into those new markets with a new business model. That new business model is SaaS.

On the supply side of how these ISVs can deliver, there’s a new support ecology available to them. They don’t have to create their own data centers themselves. They can find partners. We’ve heard a lot about Amazon, for example, and there are others, of course. These ISVs can focus on what they do well, which is their software, their logic, and then also take advantage of some hosting.

Back in the ASP days, it was all about hosting. I’m not saying that in the SaaS world hosting isn’t important, because it absolutely is. What has changed over the last 7 to 10 years is that now you look at it in terms more of an ecosystem.

You’ve got your infrastructure providers, your application providers, and your hosting and managed-service providers. The biggest change that I have seen now is that each realizes they have a role to play, they have a core expertise, and that through building of this ecosystem and through partnerships you can be much more successful in being able to lower your deployment cost, but still being able to target and go after these new markets.

The SaaS market, in general, is really still in its nascence, and there are a lot of things that have yet to happen. But, the good news is this isn’t just a fad. We see a fundamental change in terms of the business model. ... The only way that the end customer is going to win in this is if we get into a business model where there is that shared risk and shared reward, but the customer pays for only what they need to use.

It's going to come down to pricing models. It still has to come down to some building of ecosystems out there, where everybody knows their role and plays that role, but doesn’t necessarily try to do the other person’s role. There are still a lot of things happening.

I believe it’s going to be vertically focused. I don’t think this is going to be a horizontal play. We’ve seen a lot of success in vertical business expertise. There's going to be content, business applications, data, and services. If all of those can be offered in a single environment through a single service provider, the customer will end up winning.

Listen to the podcast. Read a full transcript. Produced as a courtesy of Interarbor Solutions: analysis, consulting and rich new-media content production.