The Old Dogs Have Learned Some New Tricks

Many will be surprised by the enhancements that B2B Service Providers (the ones we used to call Van’s) have added to their service portfolios.  Five years ago, a lot of folks thought that the days of the providers of EDI document exchange services were numbered and that they would fade away into the sunset.  But guess what – it didn’t happen. 

The main reason why it didn’t is that these vendors aggressively sought out new ways of providing advanced integration capability and services and bolstered their long term chances of survival in the process.  GXS accomplished this via key technology partnerships with leading providers of advanced integration solutions.  Inovis and Sterling Commerce chose the route of internal development with key acquisitions to bolster internal capabilities.  Either way, the result was the same; vendors capable of providing a wide range of hosted integration features that include not just EDI/B2B, but also BPM, SOA and MFT features as well.

These new hosted solutions allow customers to leverage their existing B2B infrastructure while providing easier integration with back-end systems and business applications.

Another trend is the emergence of smaller B2B Service Providers like Axway, Crossgate, Hubspan, Seeburger, and SPS Commerce that are bringing new B2B solutions to the marketplace that will continue to drive innovation in this key sector.

Everything considered, the B2B Service Provider space has become a lot more dynamic than many thought it would.  What do you think?  Take a second to drop us a line.

 

Check out my latest research: The Forrester WaveTM: B2B Service Providers, Q4 2009

Twitter: integrationman 

Business Rules Technology Belongs In Your Architecture

Checkmate! You're Toast.

Those are words you don't want to hear when playing chess. Similarly, you don't want to be checkmated in the rough and tumble of the business real world.

To win at chess and in business to you have to make smart decisions constantly and consistently - decisions that are guided by a carefully crafted strategy designed to checkmate your opponent or, at a minimum, to stay in the game. Deciding what moves to make in chess is hard enough even though it is just you and your opponent. The decisions businesses have to make everyday can be much more complicated and the stakes are much higher.

Where Is Your Decision Logic Implemented?

Most firms embedd them deep within its application code far from the businesspeople who understand the business rules best. That might be OK for business rules that do not change frequently. But, for business rules that change frequently or need that need to change quickly, there is a better way. Forrester has identified business rules technology as one of the Top 15 Technology Trends Enterprise Architects Should Watch and one of the 5 key changes app dev shops should make in 2010 (attend or replay the free Webinar Live: Tuesday, October 20, 2009, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time).

Avoid Checkmate. Include Business Rules Technology In Your Architecture

Business rules platforms (often called decision management) allow decision logic to be authored and executed external to you application. The result is better management and faster change of your business rules because:

• The business rules are not embedded deep in application code such as Cobol, .NET, or Java code that only a programmer can change.
• Business rules are executed consistently across all applications that need them because they are implemented once and shared for all applications that need the.
• Businesspeople who understand the business rules can author and maintain the rules directly instead of explaining the rules to programmers who then have to code them in a programming language.

The result for your business: faster change and consistent decisions.

Research For Application Development And Enterprise Architecture Professionals

John Rymer and I consistently published research on business rules platforms, best practices, case studies, and technical architecture. If you are interested in learning more about business rules technology please feel free to schedule an inquiry with John and me and check out the research documents below.

The Forrester Wave™: Business Rules Platforms, Q2 2008

The Truth About Business Rules Algorithms

Best Practices In Implementing Business Rules

Case Study: California Association Of Realtors Innovates With Business Rules

Case Study: Hypo Real Estate Enables Credit Risk Professionals With Business Rules

Must You Choose Between Business Rules And Complex Event Processing Platforms?

Case Study: The Doctors Company Innovates While Rebuilding Its Core Systems

Deputize End-User Developers To Deliver Business Agility And Reduce Costs

Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst

email: mgualtieri@forrester.com

twitter: mgualtieri
 

The Dream Stack For Developing And Deploying Web Applications

I want to develop a Web application - a really good Web app. The kind of Web app that will make me so rich that I can buy an $9.4 million co-op over looking Central Park, a Yacht registered in Monaco, and hire an architect to build my dream-house west of Boston that is a combo of Buckminster Fuller, FLW, and MTV cribs. Throw in a vintage sweet ride like Don Draper's Cadillac and lifetime membership to the Boston Sports Club. I'm set.

The problem: What technology am I going to use to develop and and deploy a pwn-some Web app that will scale forever and never go down. (I need a great idea too!)

The solution: Enlist your illustrious help to come up with the perfect Dream Stack to help make all my dreams come true.

Dream Stack: What Are The Requirements?

The Dream Stack is a perfect combination of tools, technologies, and platforms that meet both development and deployment requirements. But, deciding what combinations of technologies to use is no simple task because there are choices and combinations galore. Here are my requirements for the Dream Stack:

Development

• Low-cost tools (because this is a startup).
• Maximize developer productivity.
• Faster development and faster change.
• Can develop great user experiences.
• Availability of talented developers (we plan to grow fast).
• Will support a scale-out deployment architecture of both data and computing.

Deployment

• Low-cost, linear-cost deployment  (because this is a startup).
• Support scale-out architecture of both data and computing.
• Architected to never go down.
• Employs security features
• Easy to manage and monitor

Your Thoughts? What Is The Dream Stack?

Your Dream Stack should consist of tools, technologies, and platforms that are currently available either as open source, commercialy available products or a combination of both. Your stack will probably, but not necessarily, include programming languages, databases, app servers and/or cloud, IDEs, libraries, and other platform technologies. Any combination is fine as long as it meets the requirements of the Dream Stack.

1. What other requirements should the Dream Stack have?

2. What is your recommended Dream Stack?

Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Follow me on Twitter

Cross-posted at Dr. Dobbs Code Talk

Excuses, excuses: The Business Doesn't Know What It Wants

I have grown weary of hearing excuses (for 20 years)  from application development professionals about why they are challenged when it comes to developing and delivering applications that meet the expectations of the business. Excuses such as:

• The business doesn't know what it wants.
• The requirements keep changing.

 

Application development professionals are not served by these lame excuses because no one gets what they want or need. The business is left lacking and application development professionals deserve their reputation. If you have no excuses, then I salute you. If you want to stop the excuses, here's how:

Solution 1: Get Over It

Stop denying reality. The business either doesn't know or can't always articulate what application features they need to make their business more productive, more responsive to customers, and more flexible to market changes. And, they often change their minds because they are just thinking this through themselves and that often results in new needs or missed requirements. This is the nature of the beast. Accept it and stopping beating your head against the wall. It's not good for you.

Solution 2: Understand The Business And Your Users

What's a poor app dev gonna do? You must learn the workings of the business, understand what customers want, what competitors are doing, and what it will take to create a great user experience for users. This will give you a much better context when you speak with the business and you can work together in the requirements, offer new ideas, and head-off many of the gothcha's that come up later. This is your job and you have to start doing it to the n^th degree. Keep being strictly a tech-head if you want, but stop the excuses, please. Learn the business.

Solution 3: Build For Change

Things change constantly. You need to choose technologies, architectures, and processes that enable you to respond to change. This requires getting creative and being open to new combinations. For example, maybe an event processing architecture is a more natural way to respond to what is happening in the business than a service oriented architecture. Or, maybe you can build a more better user experience by using Adobe Flex rather than JSF. Building for change is a lot easier when you know the business because it helps you to anticipate future requirements.

Solution 4: Get Passionate About Your Craft!

The industrialization of software development has been an epic fail. Developing software is not like building a car on an assembly line or bottling beer like Laverne and Shirley at the Shotz brewery. Software development is a creative craft more akin to making a movie where talent, creativity, discipline, and passion result in great creations. For years, app dev pros have been told to keep their heads down - that all you need to do is follow the project plan and write your code. Wrong. Lift your head up, find your passion, understand the business and then use your technical creativity to make beautiful applications that users find useful, usable, and desirable.

What's your excuse?

 Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Follow me on Twitter.

Complex Event Processing Is Cool - And Very Hot!

The founding Fathers of the United States understood all too well the importance of complex events when on July 4th, 1776 they wrote:

"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to...etcetera, etcetera, and etcetera".

Similarly, many of today's business and IT leaders understand the importance of reacting to business events as they occur in real-time and how that can dramatically change the performance and agility of their business.

Event processing, often called “complex event processing” (CEP) is a hot new enterprise middleware category. CEP answers the question: “What is happening right now in our business”? Sometimes the answer is as simple as ordering more products when the inventory dips below safety stock, but often it involves recognizing patterns of business events that foretell critical business situations that require immediate action.

CEP platforms analyze streams of data as they flow from live sources such as transaction flows, click streams, market data feeds, and myriad other sources of data swirling around inside a business environment. The platforms then prompt either downstream applications or people to react to the information by resetting processing priorities, changing online sales strategies, buying and selling stocks, or performing some other action.

The Forrester Wave™: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Platforms, Q3 2009

Mike Gualtieri and John Rymer evaluated nine complex event processing (CEP) platforms using 114 criteria. Please see the complete results of the evaluation in August 4, 2009 The Forrester Wave: Complex Event Processing Platforms report. The products included in the Wave evaluation include:

 

 

Notes From The Field - Literally.

My wife and I attended an outdoor wedding yesterday at the Blue Horse Farm in the beautiful Catskills mountains of upstate New York. The beautiful ceremony and reception was set amidst the backdrop of sunny fields, ready-to-pick arugula, a big old barn, grazing horses, and a baby calf named "Johnny".

You never know who you will meet at a wedding and you never know what you may learn from them. Among the distinguished guests attending the wedding I had the pleasure of meeting were Martin Johnson, a freelance Jazz music reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, and  France (yes, like the country), a graphic designer for Lord & Taylor.  France has to design appealing promotional graphics that result in sell through and Martin has to craft his music reviews to make his readers hear without hearing. To be successful, both Martin and France have to be extraordinarily in-tune with their audience.

Application Developers Also Need To Be Extraordinarily In-Tune With End-Users

My upcoming research on Best Practices In User Experience Design (expected publication August 2009) reveals, among other things, that application developers rely far too heavily on asking end-users or stakeholders what their "requirements" are when designing applications. The best application developers also have a six sense that I call design imagination that helps them fill in the holes left by inarticulate end-users, unknowing business stakeholders, and the evolving business context. Both Martin and France support the design imagination sentiment:

• France taps into the culture of her customers. France has her own sense of fashion, but she has to set that aside when designing promotional graphics. Instead she needs to get inside the head of her target customer and design something that will make them buy more couture. That means looking at sales data but, it also means tapping into the culture of her customers. Similarly, application development professionals, need to understand that they are not designing applications for themselves. Listening to end-user requirements though is only part of the equation because they often do not know exactly what they need or are often not able to articulate it. Exceptional application developers must have a "design imagination" to fill in the blanks.
• Martin writes for his brother and sister. To insure that his writing is compelling to the right audience, Martin writes his reviews to his brother and sister. He says they are representative of his target audience. Likewise, applications development professionals should walk in the shoes of end-users to deeply understand them and design for them.

Design Imagination Is Under Attack

Application development shops that adopt Agile methods should be very careful that rapid fire iteration doesn't kill design imagination. If developers relegate themselves to coders who are corrected every two weeks by stakeholders the resulting application may miss the mark of creating a great user experience. The problem: 1) stakeholders are not often not the end-users, 2) developers become more code focused.

Worse, Waterfall methods usually rely only on upfront requirements gathering from dispassionate business analysts that are often far removed from the trenches. The result: Nothing is left to the imagination.

A balanced approach is needed if application development professionals are to create great user experiences. Please read my upcoming research on Best Practices In User Experience Design next month for more in this.

 

Mike Gualtieri

Senior Analyst

Monday’s Musings: Master Data Management - Do Styles of MDM Matter Anymore?

Three Architectural Styles Represent Different Technologies To Build MDM

In 2003, customer data hub (CDI), product information management, and master data management (MDM) vendors strived to differentiate themselves by architectural style.  Each approach had its advantages and disadvantages.  A religion about styles emerged overnight along with a hard core following.  Here's a quick recap (see Figure 1):

Cloud Or No Cloud You Still Have To Write Code

I am experiencing Cloud fatigue already. If I hear anyone even come close to uttering the word "Cloud 2.0", I might be found hiding in the Forrester fitness room in a fetal position. I am a fan of Cloud computing and my colleague James Staten has a great report on cloud in the enterprise. I think that cloud computing such Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google AppEngine, and others are legitimate and have a great future in infrastructure. What I am not a fan of is the buzzword grab going on by many technology companies saying they work in the cloud, have a cloud strategy, or have a new cloud offering à la SOA, Web 2.0, and whatever is next. Vendor X can work in the cloud. Well, no kidding. You just spin up your platform in the cloud and run your app on it. Of course, that doesn't mean you can take advantage of some of the value-added services in the cloud right off the bat but there is still value in having an infrastructure on-demand. The buzzword grab vendors are the source of my fatigue.

What Do Application Developers Need To Know About Cloud?

On one level, the cloud is just another deployment option. One day when you are happily writing code in front of your NetBeans, Eclipse, or VisualStudio IDE there will be a button that says "Deploy". You will click the button and then see a list of deployment platforms such as: local, enterprise server, cloud provider. Just pick cloud. A wait dialog box will come up for a a few seconds. Then you are done. That should be the application developer's view of the cloud. The details are abstracted away. Easy breezy.

Now, many of the clouds also offer services such Amazon's SimpleDB. You'll be able to code to those using APIs just as always. If you are in Java you'll bring in the package to NetBeans and voilà you can start instantiating services and use them.

Cloud Vendors Will Seduce You With Services To Lock You In

Be careful when choosing value-added services offered in the cloud. Despite what the cloud vendors say about utility computing, they would love to make it harder for you to leave them. Remember how J2EE was designed to allow you to deploy to any server. Or, SQL was embraced as a database standard. What happened? Both app server and database vendors seduced you with features that made it difficult to leave them. Some of these features add value and are worth the lockin. Just know what you are getting into.

Cloud Security Is Still A Concern

The popular thing to say about Cloud security is to snicker and then to say that it is probably more secure than your data center or no different than outsourcing your infrastrcuture to a hosting firm. That kind of dismissiveness is unwise. Security is always a concern on any deployment platform - PC, Blackberry, corporate server, hosted server, mainframe, or Florida voting machine. Be concerned about the Cloud as you would any deployment platform, but don't be afraid.

Infrastructure professionals and perhaps CFO trying to save a few bucks should be concerned with the Cloud. But, cloud or no cloud, application developers still have to write code.

What do you think?

Federated SOA - What does it mean to you?

I've been working on a major report on this topic:

Title: Building Interoperability And Federation Into Your SOA Platform Strategy

Exec Summary:

As large and heterogeneous enterprises reach greater SOA maturity, enterprise architects often find that different business areas or domains need different things from an enterprise-level SOA platform. Accommodating these requirements may require architects to segment their SOA platform strategy and build in an extra level of interoperability and federation between different SOA domains. SOA platform federation may be driven by heterogeneity of SOA infrastructure and products across domains, but can also occur in a homogeneous platform that is configured differently for each domain. Architects should separate true business requirements from accidents of history which may reflect weak architectural governance, decide which patterns of interoperability and federation are truly necessary, and then expand the SOA platform strategy to accommodate these requirements.

One of the things I needed to do in this report was define SOA federation. In researching the report (mainly by interviewing six SOA architects in IT organizations, and also a few key industry thought leaders like Marc-Thomas Schmidt at IBM, Miko Matsumura at Software AG, Hub Vandervoort at Progress Software, and some folks who worked for BEA at the time, but are no longer there), I learned that there is some overlap and confusion between the definitions of interoperability and federation. So here's what I came up with in the report, working with Randy Heffner and Larry Fulton to refine the definitions, and also taking feedback from the folks I interviewed, like Skip Snow:

SOA interoperability is the ability of SOA services and infrastructure to seamlessly work together, through the exchange of information using common formats and protocols, which may be accomplished, at least in part, using mediation.[i]

SOA federation enables multiple domains of SOA services and infrastructure to interoperate, seamlessly and transparently across an entire enterprise, by delegating among these SOA domains responsibilities such as service location, security, activation, mediation, policy enforcement, ensuring high quality-of-service (QoS), and many others.

Of course, you may need to read the whole report before you can really comment, but I'm interested, what do you think now, just based on this language? What do you know about SOA federation? And what problems have you been encountering from a lack of federation, from the Balkanization of your SOA into a bunch of SOA silos?

[i] IEEE defines interoperability as the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. IEEE Standard Computer Dictionary: A Compilation of IEEE Standard Computer Glossaries.

Meet One-On-One With Forrester Analysts At Our Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008

Consistently rated as one of the most popular features of Forrester Events, one-on-one meetings give you the opportunity to discuss the unique technology issues facing your organization with Forrester analysts. Business & Technology Leadership Forum attendees may schedule up to two 20-minute one-on-one meetings with the Forrester analysts of their choice, depending on availability. Registered attendees will be able to schedule one-on-one meetings starting on Monday September 15, 2008. Book early!

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B

William Band
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management applications, customer experience management, stakeholder alignment, enterprise CRM
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Matthew Brown
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Marketing and advertising, enterprise portals, intranets and extranets, information and knowledge management
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Peter Burris
Research coverage for Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals
Enterprise marketing platforms, marketing automation, high-tech, application development
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C

Bobby Cameron
Research coverage for CIOs
IT governance, risk, and compliance; the marketing of IT; serving the business; security and risk
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Marc Cecere
Research coverage for CIOs
Designing IT organizations, changing the culture of an IT organization, IT strategic planning
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Patrick M. Connaughton
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Supply chain management services, supply chain management applications, enterprise mobility, RFID
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Alex Cullen
Research coverage for CIOs
IT organization; IT strategy, planning, and governance; organizational design and change management, IT management
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E

Boris Evelson
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business intelligence, OLAP, data warehousing
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G

Chip Gliedman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, help desk/service desk, customer service and support, packaged applications
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H

Paul D. Hamerman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
ERP, human capital management, financial management, business performance solutions
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Brian W. Hill
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eDiscovery, archiving, records and retention management, enterprise content management (ECM)
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Bradford J. Holmes
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Tech marketing tools and best practices; government, high-tech, tech marketing strategies
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K

Rob Karel
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, integration technologies, metadata management, extract
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Rob Koplowitz
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information Workplace, collaboration strategy, collaborative platforms, SharePoint
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L

George Lawrie
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Retail information technology; consumer goods supply chain; pricing, promotions, and revenue optimization; collaborative processes such as trade promotions management and sales; and operations planning
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Sharyn Leaver
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Packaged applications, business process management, ERP, application strategy and selection
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Craig Le Clair
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
ECM, BPM, output management, document processing services
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M

Pete Marston
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, sales force management, software-as-a-service, outsourcing
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Kyle McNabb
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, document imaging, eForms and information capture, enterprise content management
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Thomas Mendel, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Product portfolio strategies, mobile services, business service management, data center management
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Connie Moore
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business process optimization, IT organization, enterprise content management
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O

Leslie Owens
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, taxonomy and classification, enterprise search platforms, text mining and analytics
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P

Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer service and support, customer experience, customer experience management, business strategy for customer experience
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Lisa Pierce
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Voice services, telecommunications services by region, remote access infrastructure, networking
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Tom Pohlmann
Research coverage for CIOs
Business models, high-tech, corporate strategy, tech sector economics, product and solutions strategies
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Stephen Powers
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, Web content management
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R

Stefan Ried, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Enterprise architecture, Service-oriented architecture, application platforms and programming strategy; application development
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S

Ted Schadler
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Real-time collaboration tools (instant messaging, presence, document sharing, etc.), cloud-based collaboration and email, mobile collaboration tools and applications, virtual worlds for the enterprise
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Claire Schooley
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eLearning, information and knowledge management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing, enterprise collaboration, new workforce, retiring workforce
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Scott Tiazkun
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Financial management; governance, risk, and compliance; financial management applications; security and risk
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Zach Thomas
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Human resources management applications, compensation, recruitment strategies, packaged applications
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Tim Walters, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Web content management, enterprise content management, digital asset management, information and knowledge management
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R "Ray" Wang
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Enterprise apps and ERP, software contract negotiations, software partnerships and ecosystems, customer data integration
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Doug Washburn
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Green IT, IT organization, IT infrastructure and operations, IT management
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Gil Yehuda
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Enterprise Web 2.0 and Social Computing; collaboration strategy, tools, and culture; virtual communities of practice; virtual team collaboration
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