PracticalSOA

This post by a Gartner analyst-blogger left me a bit confused. (Link Via)

Yes, Anthony is right, there is no such thing as a “data mashup”. Good. But a part of me can’t help but wonder why, or to whom, that question is relevant. Anyone other than an industry analyst, that is.

My company builds and delivers composite applications for SAP customers. Not one of them has ever asked us for a definition of a composite application or if what we are building is indeed a true mashup. The question “are you using HTTP/REST/SOAP/RSS/XML/ATOM?” has not been asked even once. What they are asking us are questions like “will your application make our sales operations process better?” and “our account planning cycle takes too long - how can you shorten it?”

No disrespect to Anthony Bradley, but seriously, why should customers care for vendors’ descriptions of their offerings?

Do you know what Derek Jeter’s batting average is? Against Red Sox? In the 9^th inning? When Yankees are trailing by 1? And the count is 1 ball 2 strikes?

Does anyone care? If you ask me today, in March, the answer is no. But wait till Yankees are trailing Red Sox by 1 and Derek Jeter is batting with runners on 2^nd and 3^rd in the 9^th inning of a game in September. At that instant I care.

Sports statistics/analytics are quite frankly meaningless unless you happen to be a very small group of die hard sports nut like me. But put those analytics in context and then suddenly you have a much wider audience who can benefit from the cool analytics and stats. ESPN’s Gamecast (live baseball scorecard) is a perfect example of a really powerful composite application – live scores with situational analytics/stats all in one place. Fantasy games is another great example of composite applications that widen the use of ESPN’s traditional assets – live scores with analytics/stats.

What does this mean to the business world? Just think of all the great BI analytics and reports that SAP customers have invested in. They have spent millions in gathering data and building intelligence over a period of time. The problem? How many users use this intelligence with the fancy pivot tables, drill downs and slice and dice views? Probably 2% who have the training and the knowledge of how to run those fancy reports.

For example you might have a great BI report that gives you the break down of sales by product category for the last 3 years. Yeah, its a cool report. But put that in the hands of the Sales person who is preparing for the visit to a prospect in the Hospitality industry, it is invaluable. Your sales person now suddenly knows what products/solutions to concentrate upon during the sales call. And yes, don’t ask the sales people to go figure out the SIC code of the customer from CRM system, and then run a BW query (if you remember the query name) with the SIC code as the input. They will not do it. I know I wouldn’t.

What you need is the ESPN Gamecast type composite application that delivers this Situational and actionable intelligence to the sales person when he/she is preparing for the sales call.

What makes this possible? Without breaking the bank? SOA and Composite applications – of course. More on that later.