The Connected Web

Listen to my interview with Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker Software, whose open-source software, WaveMaker 5, is a popular platform for developing Java-based Web applications.

In this podcast, learn how developers use WaveMaker to create applications that can be delivered as SaaS on a common code base, while still giving their customers the ability to add their own extensions.

Listen to or download the 9:14 minute podcast below:

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PW: So Chris, tell us a bit a more about WaveMaker. What do developers like about it as a development platform?

CK: Well, WaveMaker is web-based development platform that enables self-service customization of SaaS applications by business users. So effectively, we've got an IDE in the cloud. From the developer side, it delivers a drag-and-drop interface for creating rich internet applications, and the applications that it creates are then based on industry standards. The applications that we create run in any Java server and they use the Dojo toolkit for their front end.

From a SaaS developer's perspective, we have two, I think, very compelling benefits. The first is that, by using a drag-and-drop interface — a visual what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface — for creating your rich internet application, you can build those applications much more quickly. And what ISVs typically report to us is that you can build the front end about twice as fast as if you were to build it by hand — doing hand-coded JavaScript or something like that.

Then the applications that you build with WaveMaker can be customized by the end user. Our IDE lives in a browser and WaveMaker [itself] was in fact built with WaveMaker. So it's very easy to ship elements of our WaveMaker Studio along with the finished SaaS application and then that allows the end user, based on their role, to be able to make certain modifications to the application — again, using a drag-and-drop visual interface.

Right, okay. So really, this is a development kit, which is very — which provides a lot of support to developers building web applications. But on top of that, it's a development kit that also the developer, once they've finished building the application, can ship it out to their customers, who can then do further the modifications to the same application, using the same toolkit.

Yes, we think that — or in fact an interesting quote that I read recently from Sarah Friar of Goldman Sachs, was that in the year 2010, SaaS will only capture about 14% of its addressable market. And she believes that the lack of ability to customize and integrate SaaS applications is the biggest barrier to SaaS adoption. In other words, the kind of one-size-fits-all model to SaaS is really the biggest thing holding SaaS back now, and that having some sort of an infrastructure that allows end users to customize elements of their SaaS application is a critical element for having SaaS companies be able to compete — but more importantly, have them be able to grow the overall market.

Yes. Now, of course, the benefit of users not being able to customize the code of their SaaS applications is that the SaaS vendor then only has one code base to support. So if WaveMaker is allowing all the individual customers to go off and fork their own versions of the application, doesn't that negate the benefit of the SaaS model?

Oh Phil, that's a really important point. So what we're not advocating is that the individual users change the source code.

Let me give you a concrete example. Kana [Software] just released their Kana 10 customer service platform, and that platform comes with a level of built-in flexibility for the end user that's driven by WaveMaker's role-based customization engine. So when a call service representative or a call center executive logs into their particular Kana 10 dashboard, they would be able to, for example, personalize that dashboard. If they had the right authority, they would be able to add custom data fields. If they had the right level of authority, they would be able to integrate in various web service components — for example, integrating in a component that looks at your information in Salesforce while you're in the Kana application — and for call center executives, they actually have the ability to modify the workflow.

Now, of course, none that is actually changing the underlying code of the application; the code base remains the same. So when we say personalization, we're not talking forking. I don't know what the good parallel is, but we're really talking about being able to have a level of extensibility built into the application that allows it to accommodate a lot of common customer requirements.

Okay, so what Kana have chosen to do effectively is to freeze the common code base that is their application, but then ship the capability to extend and customize above that — in a way that presumably is compatible with being able to then upgrade to a new Kana version and not have those customizations break the version that the customer's got.

Precisely. And we think this is something that SaaS vendors in general will be called upon to provide to their customers. So for example, if I go to an iGoogle or a My Yahoo!, I get a menu of items that I can put into my dashboard. That's a very common capability. You could call it kind of one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 and it's very rare in the SaaS world. Typically, SaaS applications have fairly static interfaces and don't give the user the ability to personalize their own dashboard. So that's one small example of being able to self-service your application and focus on the things that you care about.

Let me give another example. The Federal Health Architecture Group has started a pilot with WaveMaker to make WaveMaker the development platform for their universal client. This is the universal client that will make electronic medical records portable across the US. Their vision is to have a series of workflows — they're using all open source software, so they're using the Drools workflow engine — and have researchers and senior medical clinicians be able to actually adjust those workflows that adjust the standards of care for medical care, from a visual interface. So this is all about allowing business users, business executives, to actually get into the workflow of their applications and adjust it to meet changing business requirements — without needing to code.

Right. So this is actually giving ISVs the kind of capabilities of delivering customizable, multi-tenant applications to their customers that's conventionally associated with the platform-as-a-service model — where you'll not only have all those capabilities, but you're also locked in to a particular platform-as-a-service provider — whereas what you're offering with WaveMaker sounds to me as though it's different from that.

Yes, and I think that's exactly the contrast that we would draw. It's that there are a set of platform-as-a-service options out there, which have real benefits in terms of multi-tenant data models and things like that — but also have some real drawbacks, in terms of locking you into a particular cloud delivery platform, as well as locking you into proprietary languages and proprietary technologies. With WaveMaker, at the end of the day, you get many of those benefits, particularly on the development side of a platform-as-a-service. But what you get as artifact — as the generated result — is standard Java applications that you can deploy anywhere in any Java server.

And I guess there is a quid-pro-quo, because it means that the ISV then has to worry about some of the infrastructure stuff, like security and scalability and identity management provisioning — all the SaaS plumbing that a platform-as-a-service provider would give you. But then, on the other hand, you've got that great freedom that you can choose which infrastructure you use.

I think that's true to some extent. What WaveMaker is doing is creating an open platform. WaveMaker is actually based on an open-source product, and so we are integrating then with other cloud providers who provide various elements of this solution. So for example, WaveMaker comes with built-in security — the Acegi package from Spring. We partner with RightScale, which provides elastic flexibility of scaling on the cloud. So what we believe is that the ultimate platform for cloud computing will not be a monolith like a Force.com, or even an AppEngine from Google, but rather more of a heterogeneous combination of best-of-breed components.

Right. And as you say, you've been able to build links into — or hooks into some of those best-of-breed components — into WaveMaker's IDE, which is what you would expect really from a development environment, but one evidently that's designed with the cloud in mind.

Right.