Middleware field consolidates in services direction as Workday acquires Cape Clear

On-demand business applications provider Workday has acquired SOA and enterprise integration middleware vendor Cape Clear Software, the companies announced Wednesday.

The acquisition is novel in several respects. A middleware software vendor is being absorbed by a software as a service (SaaS) provider to expand its enterprise solutions role -- not to sell the software itself -- demonstrating that the future of software is increasingly in the services. It also shows that integration as a function is no longer an after-thought to business applications use -- it is fundamental to any applications activities, be they on-premises, online, or both.

Workday, Inc., of Walnut Creek, Calif., is an on-demand financial management and human capital management solutions vendor. It was founded by David Duffield, best known as the co-founder and former chairman of PeopleSoft, which grew to be the world’s second-largest application software company before being acquired by Oracle in 2005.

Cape Clear Software, of Dublin, Ireland, and Waltham, Mass., develops and supports enterprise service bus (ESB) platform software, designed to help large organizations to integrate their heterogeneous application, content, and processes environments. Disclosure: Cape Clear Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.

Details of the deal between the two privately owned companies were not disclosed, but the deal is expected to become final in less than 30 days. Cape Clear becomes a part of Workday, forming its new integration unit. Cape Clear CEO Annrai O'Toole will become Workday's vice president of integration and head up the new unit.

The Cape Clear SOA solution set will no longer be offered standalone, and will be available only as part of Workday Integration On Demand online offerings. Both companies stressed, however, that all of Cape Clear's current 250 customers will be supported on-premises at those client sites as Workday customers.

"All customers will get support for as long as they want, but we will not take on any more [on-premises] customers," said O'Toole.

Instead of taking the Cape Clear portfolio to market as SOA infrastructure and middleware offerings Workday plans to broaden its ability to help its customers exploit SaaS, both on an application-by-applications basis as well as in playing an "integration as a service" role. That role also expands into, in effect, a brokering position between complex hybrid arrangements where digital assets and resources can come from many hosts.

"We need to be part of an application sale, not a standalone middleware sale. [Standalone middleware sales] don't exits anymore," said O'Toole.

Only IONA Technologies, of which O'Toole was a co-founder, and TIBCO Software remain as major standalone middleware vendors, now that BEA Systems has been acquired by Oracle, said O'Toole. Consolidation has incorporated middleware into larger stack or business applications offerings. And SOA infrastructure has also seem a bout of consolidation, even as open source SOA components and commercial-open source providers have entering the field aggressively.

The combined Workday-Cape Clear plans to take "Integration on Demand" to market on several levels:

Workday said it intents to assume greater responsibility for customer integrations, expanding its investment and focus on integrations in three areas:

• Packaged: Workday offers a growing number of common integrations to solutions such as payroll. These connections are managed by Workday as a service, and the company will continue to add to this portfolio.

• Custom: Workday and its partners deliver tailored connections between Workday and third-party or custom applications. These links can be provided as a Workday service or implemented on premise, based on customer requirements.

• Personal: Workday offers business users easy ways to link productivity applications, such as Microsoft Excel, to live Workday data, making it simple to create and share reports and tools with users across the enterprise.

Future focus will also include:

• Hosted integration services for large enterprise customers, beginning with human resources activities.

• Partner integration, to bring, for example, payroll providers like ADP and other business service ecology players into a larger offerings mix, managed by Workday.

• RESTful integration with the Web 2.0 community, including mashups, social networks, web services, and mobile commerce services and endpoints. Such mashups will also allow the integration of personalized and custom content via Microsoft Office and Google docs/applications.

“Integrating business applications has always been much too difficult. At Workday, we made integration a core capability from the very start, and adding Cape Clear to our portfolio serves to deepen our focus and capability in this vital area,” said Aneel Bhusri, Workday president, in a release. “Increasingly, customers are looking to Workday to build and manage integration as a service. With Cape Clear’s ESB, we expect to rapidly increase our portfolio of both packaged and custom integration capabilities.”

In effect, Workday is expanding its role to not only provide business applications, but to assume the functions of integrating those applications with a client's existing and future environments.

I recently moderated a podcast discussion with fellow ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright and O'Toole on the new and evolving subject of "integration as a service."

As Cape Clear's functional set becomes the basis for services integration and management, Workday aims to solve the integration is a business requirement problem in new ways. "Enterprises are sick of buying software and then being left with the integration," said O'Toole.

I also see an opportunity for Workday to grow its role substantially, to take what Salesforce.com has pioneered to a greater scale and to the back-end business services that companies will increasingly seek to acquire as online services. Once the integration function is inculcated as services, many other elements of business and process, content and media, can be assembled, associated, and managed too.

The provisioning details and policies that manage the relationships among people, processes, resources, providers and application logic components also become critical. It will be interesting to see if the Workday value will extend to this level, in addition to integration.

Indeed, service providers and cloud computing-based providers will need to crack the integration AND federated policies nut to fully realize their potential for reaching enterprise and consumer users. The ability to solve the integration and policies problems could place Workday at a very advantageous hub role among and between many of the major constituents in the next generation of enterprise computing and online services.

New ways emerge to head off datacenter problems while improving IT operational performance

Listen to the podcast. Or read a full transcript. Sponsor: Integrien.

Complexity in today's IT systems makes previous error prevention approaches for operators inefficient and costly. IT staffs are expensive to retain, and are increasingly hard to find. There is also insufficient information about what’s going on in the context of an entire systems setup.

Operators are using manual processes -- in reactive firefighting mode -- to maintain critical service levels. It simply takes too long to interpret and resolve IT failures and glitches. We now see 70-plus-percent of the IT operations budget spent on labor costs.

IT executives are therefore seeking more automated approaches to not only remediate problems, but also to get earlier detection. These same operators don’t want to replace their system’s management investments, they want to better use them in a cohesive manner to learn more from them, and to better extract the information that these systems emit.

To help better understand the new solutions and approaches to detection and remediation of IT operations issues, I recently chatted with Steve Henning, the Vice President of Products for Integrien, in a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast.

Here are some excerpts:

IT operations is being told to either keep their budgets static or to reduce them. Traditionally, the way that the vice president of IT operations has been able to keep problems from occurring in these environments has been by throwing more people at it.

This is just not scalable. There is no way ... (to) possibly hire the people to support that. Even with the budget, he couldn’t find the people today.

If you look at most IT environments today, the IT people will tell you that three or four minutes before a problem occurs, they will start to understand that little pattern of events that lead to the problem.

But most of the people that I speak to tell me that’s too late. By the time they identify the pattern that repeats and leads to a particular problem -- for example, a slowdown of a particular critical transaction -- it’s too late. Either the system goes down or the slowdown is such that they are losing business.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) and virtualization increase the management problem by at least a factor of three. So you can see that this is a more complex and challenging environment to manage.

So it’s a very troubling environment these days. It’s really what’s pushing people toward looking at different approaches, of taking more of a probabilistic look, measuring variables, and looking at probable outcomes -- rather than trying to do things in a deterministic way, measuring every possible variable, looking at it as quickly as possible, and hoping that problems just don’t slip by.

If you look at the applications that are being delivered today, monitoring everything from a silo standpoint and hoping to be able to solve problems in that environment is absolutely impossible. There has to be some way for all of the data to be analyzed in a holistic fashion, understanding the normal behaviors of each of the metrics that are being collected by these monitoring systems. Once you have that normal behavior, you’re alerting only to abnormal behaviors that are the real precursors to problems.

One of the alternatives is separating the wheat from the chaff and learning the normal behavior of the system. If you look at Integrien Alive, we use sophisticated, dynamic thresholding algorithms. We have multiple algorithms looking at the data to determine that normal behavior and then alerting only to abnormal precursors of problems.

Once you've learned the normal behavior of the system, these abnormal behaviors far downstream of where the problem actually occurs are the earliest precursors to these problems. We can pick up that these problems are going to occur, sometimes an hour before the problem actually happens.

The ability to get predictive alerts ... that’s kind of the nirvana of IT operations. Once you’ve captured models of the recurring problems in the IT environment, a product like Integrien Alive can see the incoming stream of real-time data and compare that against the models in the library.

If it sees a match with a high enough probability it can let you know ahead of time, up to an hour ahead of time, that you are going to have a particular problem that has previously occurred. You can also record exactly what you did to solve the problem, and how you have diagnosed it, so that you can solve it.

We're actually enhancing the expertise of these folks. You're always going to need experts in there. You’re always going to need the folks who have the tribal knowledge of the application. What we are doing, though, is enabling them to do their job better with earlier understanding of where the problems are occurring by adding and solving this massive data correlation issue when a problem occurs.

Listen to the podcast. Or read a full transcript. Sponsor: Integrien.

Microsoft-Yahoo! combination could yield an Orwellian Web world

About 10 years ago, we used to ask Jim Barksdale, then head of Netscape, a stock question during news conferences. Did you bag any "default browser" deals lately? Inevitably Jim would demur and say they were still trying.

Those were the days when the light was swiftly fading from the Netscape's browser's beacon, and Microsoft's newcomer (and inferior) browser, Internet Explorer, was bagging the default status for PC distributors and online services. That was enough to cement Microsoft's dominance of the Web browser market globally in a few short years.

The fact is, in an online world, convenience is the killer application. For most folks starting up their PCs, whatever comes up on the screen first and easiest is what they tend to use. That's why we have craplets, it's why Netscape bit the dust, and it's why Microsoft's unsolicited bid to buy Yahoo! is Redmond's last grasp at their old worldwide Web dominion strategy. The only way for Microsoft to hold onto its PC monopoly is to gain a Web monopoly too.

And Microsoft would have a good shot at cementing those two as a monopoly with the acquisition of Yahoo!. Because for the vast majority of people who simply do no more than fire up their PCs, click to start their browsers, open a Microsoft Word document, an Outlook calendar entry, an online email or instant message -- they will entering (mostly unbeknownst to themselves) a new default Web services environment.

With both Yahoo!'s and Microsoft's directories of users integrated, the miracle of single sign-on makes them in the probable near future part of the Microsoft advertising network, the Microsoft ID management complex, the Microsoft "software plus services" environment -- all by default, all quite convenient. And once you're in as a user, and once the oxygen is cut off to the competition, the world begins to look a lot more like Windows Everywhere over time.

Indeed, the proposed Microsoft takeover of Yahoo! is really the continuation of the failed (but strategically imperative) Hailstorm initiative. You might recall how Microsoft wanted to use single sign-on to link any users of Hotmail, or Instant Messanger, or Microsoft's myriad Web portals and services (MSN) to all be onramps to the same federated ID management overlay to reach all kinds of services. It was the roach motel attempt to corner the burgeoning network -- use Internet protocols, sure, but create a separate virtual Web of, by, and for Microsoft. The initiative caused quite a donnybrook because it seemed to limited users' ability to freely navigate among other Internet services -- at least on a convenient basis (and for a price).

So Microsoft's first stab at total Web dominance worked at the level of gaining the default browser, but failed at the larger enterprise. Microsoft thought it was only a matter of time, however. And it planned prematurely to begin pulling users back from the Web into the Microsoft world of single sign-on access to Microsoft services -- from travel, to city directories, to maps, to search. Microsoft incorrectly thought that the peril of Web as a Windows-less platform had been neutralized, it's competitors' oxygen cut off. Microsoft began to leverage its own Web services and monopoly desktop status to try and keep users on its sites, using its Web server, and its Web browser and its content offerings -- making for the Microsoft Wide Web, while the real Web withered away for use by scientists (again).

But several unexpected things happened to thwart this march into a Big Brother utopia -- a place where users began and ended their digital days (as workers and consumers) within the Microsoft environment. Linux and Apache Web Server stunted the penetration of the security risk Internet Information Services (nee Server) (IIS). AOL created a bigger online home-based community. Mozilla became a fine and dandy Web browser alternative (albeit not the default choice). Java became a dominant language for distributed computing, and an accepted runtime environment standard.

Dial-up gave way to broadband for both homes and businesses. The digital gusher was provided by several sources (many of which were hostile to to Microsoft and its minions). Software as a service (Saas) became viable and Saleforce.com succeeded. And, most importantly, Google emerged as the dominant search engine and created the new economics of the Web -- search-based juxtaposed automated link ads.

Microsoft had tried to gain the Web's revenues via dominance of the platform, rather than via the compelling relationship of convenience of access to all the relevant information. Microsoft wanted Windows 2.0 instead of Web 2.0.

Social networks like MySpace LinkedIn, and Facebook replaced AOL as the communities of choice. And resurgent IBM and Apple were containing Microsoft at the edges, and even turning their hegemony back meaningfully. Mobile networks were how many of the world's newest Internet users access content and services, sans a Microsoft client.

And so only a mere three years ago, Microsoft's plans for total dominance were dashed, even though they seemingly had it all. Just like Tom Brady, they just couldn't hold on to cement the sweep, and their perfect season ended before the season itself was over. What Microsoft could not control was the Internet, thirst for unfettered knowledge, and the set of open standards -- TCP/IP & HTML -- that sidesteps Windows.

Yet at every step of the way Microsoft tried to buy, bully, create or destroy in order to control the onramps, applications, developers, content, media, and convenience of the Web - even if the genie was out of the bottle. They did their own dial-up networks, they had proxies buy up cable franchises, they tried to dominate mobile software. They created television channels, and publishing divisions, and business applications. They largely failed against an open market in everything but their original successes: PC platform, productivity apps, tools, and closed runtime.

And so the bid for Yahoo! both underscores that failure as well as demonstrates the desperate last attempt to dominate more than their desktop software monopoly. This is a make or break event for Microsoft, and has huge ramifications for the futures of several critical industries.

If Redmond succeeds with acquiring Yahoo!, imagine a world that was already once feared, back some 10 years ago. That is an Orwellian world in which a huge majority of all users of the Internet globally can -- wittingly or otherwise -- only gain their emails, their word processing, their news, their services, their spreadsheets, their data, their workflow -- all that which they do online essentially -- only by passing through the Microsoft complex and paying their tolls along the way.

All those who wish to reach that mass audience, be it on a long tail or conventional mass markets basis, must use what de facto standards Microsoft has anointed. They must buy the correct proprietary servers and infrastructure, they must develop on the proscribed frameworks. They must view the world through Microsoft Windows, at significant recurring cost. Would Microsoft's historic economic behavior translate well to such control over knowledge, experience, and personal choice?

This may sound shrill, but a dominant federated ID management function is the real killer application of convenience that is at stake today. Google knows it, and quietly and mostly responsibly linked many of its services to a single sign-on ID cloud. When you get a gmail account, it becomes your passport to many Google services, and it contains much about your online definition, as well as aids and abets the ability to power the automated advertising juggernaut that Microsoft rightly fears. But at least Google (so far) lets the content and media develop based on the open market. They don't exact a mandatory toll as much as take a portion of valued voluntary transactions, and they remain in support of open standards and choice of platforms.

We now may face a choice between a "do no evil" philosophy of seemingly much choice, or an extend-the-monopoly approach that has tended to limit choice. The Microsoft monopoly has already needed to be reigned in by global regulators who fear a blind ambition powerhouse, or who fear unmitigated control over major aspects of digital existence. Orwell didn't know how political power would be balanced or controlled in his future vision, perched as he was at the unfortunate mid-20th century.

How the power of the Internet is balanced is what now is at stake with the Microsoft-Yahoo! bid. Who can you trust with such power?

Microsoft's Yahoo bids speaks as much of failure as opportunity

Is Microsoft buying Yahoo! because it has succeeded in its own Windows Everywhere strategy and 12 years of lackluster performance on the Web?

Is Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo! because Yahoo! is seemingly at a weak point, unable to dominate in the key areas of search, advertising, and media?

Nope, Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo! because neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! is succeeding on the Web in the ways that they should. And it's not just Google that has an edge: Consider Apple, eBay, Salesforce.com, Facebook, MySpace, Disney.

And how much sense does putting Microsoft and Yahoo! together make now? Not as much as it did two years ago when Yahoo! was stronger and Google was weaker. We should also thrown in that Apple and Amazon are also much stronger now than at any time in the past. The media conglomerates are starting to figure things out.

So once again, we have Microsoft throwing outrageous amounts of money late at what should have been an obvious merger for them a long time ago. I recall is discussion on the Gillmor Gang podcast at least two years ago that wondered when -- not if -- Microsoft would buy Yahoo! Most of those on the call, including me said it was the only outcome for Yahoo! and the only way for Microsoft to blunt Google.

But that was then, and this is now. So the burning question today is not whether a Microsoft-Yahoo! mashup makes sense -- it has made sense for years. The question is whether it makes sense now, at this outlandish price, and if this in fact marks the point where Microsoft makes a desperate and devastating mistake.

Is the Yahoo! cloud built on Windows? Nope. So the model of Windows Everywhere is junked. Accessing Yahoo! services only requires a browser -- so much for the "software plus services." Will the burgeoning Microsoft cloud and the aging Yahoo clouds work well together? Will one be able to absorb the other. I say no to both. These will be separate and ill-fitting infrastructures. Will the Redmond and Silicon Valley cultures work well, or will huge layoffs in California portend even more gridlock in the eastern Seattle suburbs?

What might be even worse -- Microsoft make try and require all the Yahoo! users to get better service via their clients. Would they be deluded enough to try and tie Microsoft client-side software to Yahoo! web services? Watch the flood to Google, if they do. Watch for Google to scream about monopoly abuses if they do. [Good thing the new mega mother of all hairballs will be under anti-trust review for a bit longer, eh?]

Does this mean what Microsoft was wrong about open source too? Because Yahoo! has built its infrastructure on a lot of open source code, including its cloud infrastructure keystone Hadoop. So Microsoft will own one of the world's most massive open source distributed datacenters. As an enterprise, should you choose a Windows platform -- or Microsoft's new choice to win on the web -- open source?

Right, so for the need to win in search, media and adverting, Microsoft is now selling its Windows Everywhere soul. They have been handing you an expensive line of proprietary crap for years, and by buying Yahoo! and its totally different approach to Web infrastructure -- they admit it.

What's more, will the world like getting their news from Microsoft? As a user, which search engine will I get when I log in to Yahoo! or MS Live? Which email will I get when I log in? Can he Yahoo! directory merge with the Live, nee Hotmail, directory? Which company will be the one I think of as the "brand"?

This spells a significant period of confusion. And that's for consumers, IT buyers, enterprise CIOs, and advertisers as well.

And for the enterprises that have invested their fates in Microsoft infrastructure, how will they get their Web services? Will it be Yahoo! for the consumers, and Microsoft Live or the business folk? Or vice versa? Both, a mish-mash? Yikes!

What's more, the Microsoft-Yahoo! amalgamation will become the enemy of the media companies worldwide. There was a certain détente between Microsoft alone and Yahoo! alone and the media world. No more. And Google could position itself as the happy medium (pun intended).

This proposed deal smacks of desperation, not multiplication of growth opportunities. But the price premium probably makes it inevitable. The only way to make this work is for Microsoft to spread itself more thickly as a media, advertising, technology, services, platform, tool -- everything to everybody. The risk is to be less and less of anything to anybody.

Microsoft is perhaps perceiving itself as pouncing on Yahoo!, given its current disarray. There's the weird board action, and the layoffs, and the performance issues. But this is weakness buying weakness, with a large period of confusion, dilution of value and brands, and risky alignments of cultures and technology.

And this from Microsoft - the hithertofore conservative acquirer that doesn't go for the big, blow-out acquisitions. Well, this is the big blow-out media merger of the year. Seems that going in the other direction, of splitting Microsoft up into logical sections that can operate and compete on their own, is out. For some time, no doubt.

The biggest risk is that if this ends up the mess it appears, that it just may end up just driving more consumers, advertisers, and businesses into the waiting arms of the singularly understood and focused Google, Apple, and IBM. It could well backfire.

And I for one will miss both Yahoo! and Microsoft because whatever they cobble together from the two won't be able to do the same that either did separately. It will be hard to define just what it is ... I think I'll call it Amalgamated Digital. It certainly isn't "micro," and it's not "soft." Any yahoo can see that.

WSO2 targets 'Social Enterprise' with combined JavaScript/Web services Mashup Server

WSO2, an open-source SOA provider, has combined JavaScript programming and Web services with the launch of its Mashup Server 1.0.

This open-source offering, which can be downloaded without subscription fees, will allow enterprises to consume, aggregate, and publish information in a variety of forms and from a variety of sources.

At the same time, WSO2, based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Mountain View, Calif., has announced the beta release of Mooshup.com, a hosted online version of the Mashup Server, which provides a community site for developing, running, and sharing mashups. [Disclosure: WSO2 has been a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Each new service in the mashup comes with metadata that is designed to simplify consumption by other mashups and Web services clients, as well as artifacts that simplify construction of user interfaces (UIs) in browsers, rich applications, and other environments. Because it supports the separation of content and presentation, Mashup Server enables recursive mashups, meaning one mashup can be consumer by another. It also broadens the user interface beyond HTML to RSS and Atom feeds, email, and instant messaging.

The use of JavaScript leverages the broad base of developers who use the broad-based language, and mashups can be authored directly within the administrative UI, with a simple text editor, or with any popular integrated development environment (IDE).

The beta version of Mashup Server has already gotten good notices. Ohloh.net estimates that it would have cost an enterprise $571,736 to write this project from scratch, figuring nearly 45,000 lines of code and 10 person-years.

Ganesh Prasad, who blogs at The Wisdom of Ganesh, has a lot of good things to say, based on the beta release:

So is the WSO2 Mashup Server the one that will bring balance to the Force? A powerful programming language. Laughably easy XML manipulation. Simple access to SOAP services and REST resources. Transparent publication of itself as a service or resource in turn. Isn't this the holy grail of service composition?

WSO2 Mashup Server seems to be the industry's best-kept secret for now.

The Mashup Server is built on the WSO2 Web Services Application Server, based on Apache /Axis2, and WSO2’s built-in registry. Key features include:

• The ability to author and deploy mashups using notepad and a Mashup Server virtual directory.
• Auto-generation of Web service and UI artifacts, such as WSDL, REST URLs, JavaScript stubs.
• Try-It feature to help developers invoke and debug mashups or start developing their own rich HTML clients.
• Web 2.0-style console, powered by the WSO2 Registry, which natively supports different users, and allows tags, comments, and ratings and a powerful search capability.

The Mashup Server is available for download. Mooshup.com membership is free, contingent on email verification.

Progress Software adds cross-process visibility with Actional 7.1

Progress Software has beefed up its Actional SOA management offerings with the release today of Progress Actional 7.1, which provides unified visibility into business processes, and connects those business processes to the underlying SOA infrastructure.

Key features of the latest release include an automatic discovery feature that keeps information accurate, allowing users to compare how processes change from day to day. User can also set thresholds for alters about behavior and performance, and policy enforcement will automatically adjust when services or processes change.

Progress, Bedford, Mass., added the Actional product line to its SOA arsenal just a little over two years ago with the acquisition of Actional Corporation in a $32-million deal.

Progress said that Actional 7.1 will integrate with Lombardi TeamWorks, and the company plans to provide native support for other business-process management (BPM) solutions, including offerings from Software AG and Fujitsu. Actional also includes a software development kit (SDK) that allows third parties to add support for other BPM and SOA infrastructure products.

The new version also includes support for non-XML payload data, which is designed to allow users to inspect and analyze message content in such existing services as Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and Enterprise JavaBeanT (EJB).

Last July, I had a lengthy podcast discussion about Software as a Service (SaaS) with Colleen Smith, managing director of Saas for Progress. You can listen to the podcast here.

For more information on the latest offering, see the Actional Web site.

IBM's AptSoft acquistion opens SOA event processing to line of business personnel

IBM has beefed up it's business process management (BPM) offerings in the service oriented architecture (SOA) space with today's announcement that Big Blue is acquiring AptSoft Corp., Burlington, Mass., a provider of business event-processing software. The move also extends event-processing capabilities to line-of-business personnel.

Business event processing identifies event patterns, connections between events, and allows users to establish triggers for action when certain trends appear. As SOA extends the reach of businesses and incorporates data and transactions both from inside and outside the enterprise, identifying both positive and negative trends can aid the company in responding quickly to either opportunities or threats.

IBM already has event-processing offerings in their portfolio, but according to Ed Lynch, business integration portfolio product manager, what AptSoft brings to the table is a set of tools that takes these capabilities out of IT and puts them in the hands of business people. It also moves event processing out of its traditional niche in financial services and enables it across industries and sectors.

Retailers, for example, can use event processing to proactively alert them about the success or failure of a product as goods move off the shelf, allowing them to make changes to pricing, inventory and marketing campaigns in real time; and by fleet management companies, to help them make instantaneous decisions on how to deal with products that are lost in transit or delayed due to unforeseen circumstances.

AptSoft is privately held, and neither company released the financial details of the deal. The AptSoft offerings will be wrapped into the WebSphere brand.

IBM and Kapow on how enterprises exploit application mashups and lightweight data access

Listen to the podcast. Read a full transcript. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.

The choices among enterprise application development and deployment technologies has never been greater. But what's truly different about today's applications is that line of business people can have a greater impact than ever on how technology supports their productive work.

By exploiting mashups, situational applications, Web 2.0 techniques and lightweight data access, new breeds of Web-based applications and services are being cobbled together fast, cheap, and without undue drain on IT staffs and developers. Tools and online services both are being used to combine external web services like maps and weather with internal data feeds and services to add whole new dimensions of business intelligence and workflow automation, often in a few days, often without waiting in line in order to get IT's attention.

And while many of these mashups happen outside of IT's purview, more IT leaders see these innovative means as a productivity boon that can't be denied, and which may even save them time and resources while improving IT's image in the bargain. The trick is to manage the people and new processes without killing off the innovation.

To help weed through the agony and ecstasy of Enterprise 2.0 application development and deployment in the enterprise, I recently chatted with Rod Smith, Vice President of Internet Emerging Technologies at IBM, and Stefan Andreasen, the Founder and CTO of Kapow Technologies.

Here are some excerpts:

In times of innovation you get some definite chaos coming through, but IT and line of businesses see this as a big opportunity. ... The methodology here is very different from the development methodology we’ve been brought up to do. It’s much more collaborative, if you’re line of business, and it’s much more than a set of specifications.

This current wave is really driven by line of business getting IT in their own hands. They’ve started using it, and that’s created the chaos, but chaos is created because there is a need. The best thing that’s happening now is acknowledging that line-of-business people need to do their own thing. We need to give them the tools, environments and infrastructure so they can do it in a controlled way -- in an acceptable, secured way.

... As we opened up this content [we found] that this isn't just about IT managing or controlling it. It’s really a partnership now. ... The line of business wants to be involved when information is available and published. That’s a very different blending of responsibility than we've seen before on this.

There is a lot of information that’s out there, both on the public Web and on the private Web, which is really meant to be human-readable information. You can just think about something as simple as going to U.S. Geological Service and looking at fault lines of earthquakes and there isn't any programmatic API to access this data.

This kind of data might be very important. If I am building a factory in an earthquake area, I don’t want to buy a lot that is right on the top of a fault line. So I can turn this data into a standard API, and then use that as part of my intelligence to find the best property for my new factory.

It’s just not internal information they want. It's external information, and we really are empowering these content developers now. The types of applications that people are putting together are much more like dashboards of information, both internally and externally over the Internet, that businesses use to really drive their business. Before, the access costs were high.

Now the access costs are continuing to drop very low, and people do say, "Let’s go ahead and publish this information, so it can be consumed and remixed by business partners and others,” rather than thinking about just a set of APIs at a low level, like we did in the past with Java.

If you want to have automatic access to data or content, you need to be able to access it in a standard way. What is happening now with Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) is that we're focusing on a few standard formats like RESTful services and on feeds like RSS and Atom.

So first you need to be able to access your data that way. This is exactly what we do. Our customers turn data they work with in an application into these standard APIs and feeds, so they can work with them in an automated way. ... With the explosion of information out there, there's a realization that having the right data at the right time is getting more and more important. There is a huge need for getting access in an automated way.

The more forward-thinking people in IT departments realize that the faster they can put together publishable data content, they can get a deeper understanding in a very short time about what their customers want. They can then go back and decide the best way to open up that data. Is it through syndication feeds, XML, or programmatic API?

Before, IT had to guess usage and how many folks might be touching it, and then build it once and make it scalable. ... We've seen a huge flip now. Work is commensurate with some results that come quickly. Now we will see more collaboration coming from IT on information and partnerships.

What is interesting about it is, if you think about what I just described -- where we mashed in some data with AccuWeather -- if that had been an old SOA project of nine or 18 months, that would have been a significant investment for us, and would have been hard to justify. Now, if that takes a couple of weeks and hours to do -- even if it fails or doesn’t hit the right spot -- it was a great tool for learning what the other requirements were, and other things that we try as a business.

That’s what a lot of this Web 2.0 and mashups are about -- new avenues for communication, where you can be engaged and you can look at information and how you can put things together. And it has the right costs associated with it -- inexpensive. If I were going to sum up a lot of Web 2.0 and mashups, the magnitude of drop in “customization cost” is phenomenal.

What’s fun about this, and I think Stefan will agree, is that when I go to a customer, I don’t take PowerPoint charts anymore. I look on their website and I see if they have some syndication feeds or some REST interfaces or something. Then I look around and I see if I can create a mashup of their material with other material that hadn’t been built with before. That’s compelling.

People look and they start to get excited because, as you just said, they see business patterns in that. "If you could do that, could you grab this other information from so-and-so?" It’s almost like a jam session at that point, where people come up with ideas.

Listen to the podcast. Read a full transcript. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.