PracticalSOA

Imagine walking up to a soda dispenser and mixing your own flavor. (Please try and get past the “what about the calories and sugar” argument for a second here ;)) You can experiment with different recipes, go for some outlandish tastes, whatever. The old promise of mass customization, right?

A prototype project at Coca Cola called “Freestyle” allows consumers to do just that. (Link to a press release by Coca Cola.)

What interests me here is not the promise of exotic flavors (though a lime-cherry-orange-grape-vanilla thing would be - theoretically, at least - welcome on a long, hot summer afternoon) but the brainstorming and collaboration that must have gone on behind the scenes.

Then of course, there is the application of technology:

“Ingredients include Windows CE, wireless networks, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager for Mobile Devices, Verizon VPN, Verizon wireless cards, SAP point-of-sale management software, Tibco middleware, SAP Business Warehouse, SAP CRM system/portal, and RFID readers and sensors.”

The big deal here is that this high-tech kiosk allows the marketers at Coca Cola to study consumer preferences in real-time and make faster decisions about “productizing” a flavor before a Jones Soda or a Sobe gets in on the action.

I am sure people in SAP are following this story with great interest. It should make for an excellent case study for how SAP products can truly drive top-line growth.

Bob Evans of Information Week makes many more excellent points in his article about this innovation. Do read the article as well as the original story, also in Information Week.

Now back to my no-flavor, low-tech water….

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.