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?

Google Wave’s demo video is way, way cool. No disagreements there.

But try conveying the coolness of it to someone who hasn’t seen the video and you are almost certain to receive reactions ranging from “meh” to “but that’s just IM!” to “I don’t get it”. Which is as it should be. The most brilliant and the most idiotic ideas often evoke such responses and if you can correctly guess which is which ahead of the market’s adoption of the idea, well, you should be in a different line of work

A bunch of us at work sat down to watch the video the other day. We were (and still are) curious about what this innovation could mean for our customers and our business. Does the Google Wave mean anything at all to enterprise software and related technologies? I don’t know yet.

Google Wave, from what I understood from the video, is really made up of three “Ps”: product, platform and protocol. The first “P”, showcased so wonderfully in the video, points to a collaboration/communication use-case; a dramatic re-imagining of email and instant messenger. But it’s the second and third “Ps” that could help enterprise software developers and users. Those will drive future use-cases. Two obvious targets for these include complex Engineering Change Management or Product Lifecycle Management scenarios. Maybe this innovation will help the companies and their suppliers to integrate and collaborate even better than they can today. Maybe it will simplify the lives of enterprise IT development teams, in their quest for building the perfect business requirements document

Tim O’Reilly is clearly excited by Google Wave, as is Matt Asay, who goes on to boldly conclude that “Google Wave is much bigger than Google”. I don’t believe that yet, but I do think he is spot-on when he says “…some of the best Wave innovation is yet to come”.

These trends are important to watch and understand because they will impact the development and consumption of enterprise software, sooner or later. Here’s a sign of things to come: SAP SDN already has a post up on the Wave and what it could mean for SAP users.

From Sapphire ‘09, an excellent (and geeky) presentation by SAP founder Hasso Plattner on the concepts of “in-memory databases”, “columnar storage” and how these could revolutionize the enterprise software business as we know it. (Link to an .asf video file.)

A minor nitpick - I wonder why couldn’t SAP simply put the video up on YouTube. Aren’t these innovations worthy of spreading across all enterprises rather than just SAP’s customer base?

You can also learn about the differences between “columnar storage” and traditional storage from this helpful blog. (Link to EnterpriseGeeks)

Newsflash: The leadership in organizations hates IT. (Link goes to CIO.com)

The writer of the article ascribes this hatred to “cost, complexity and customization”. The last one should read “lack of customization” but that makes the list asymmetrical and not as catchy

What surprises me is that while executives always rant about those three factors, very few complain about the lack of innovation coming from their IT organizations. I do not mean to imply that all IT organizations fail at innovation. But seriously, when was the last time you heard a CFO or a CEO get genuinely excited about an IT innovation that helped solve a major business problem?

Rightly or wrongly, the average IT department has transformed - some would argue it was always so - into an implementor of technology. It evaluates software, it implements them and it keeps the software running. Who has the time to innovate?

Should not that be making business executives mad? Unfortunately, unlike the 3Cs, it is not so simple to blame IT for not innovating.

Part of that blame clearly belongs to the company’s leadership.

It’s refreshing to read someone in the media asking businesses to stop worrying so much about Twitter and Facebook and focus instead on SAP and ERP apps. (Link to Thomas Wailgum’s column in cio.com)

It is obvious that people working in enterprise software are suffering from a serious case of “buzz envy”. Newspapers, blogs and magazines talk endlessly about the social networking revolution and how it will completely transform the world as we know it. Enterprise software, that relic from the mid-1990s, is not worthy of any attention at all.

If that’s not a case of utter lack of self-confidence, I don’t know what is. We are talking about software that keeps businesses running, right? The same software that helps Apple design, manufacture and ship its computer to some Twitter user who then posts a terse-but-witty 140-character message that lets everyone know he plans to sleep through the rest of his weekend?

I have no doubt that there are some interesting ideas in the social networking/Web 2.0 world that could make enterprise apps more useful. (Link to ZDnet).

But why not make enterprise software business simpler and more fun to use? Is it no longer a worthy goal to drive user productivity through better designed ERP and CRM apps?