Readers who lived in the UK in the 1970s will have been surprised at IBM's announcement of SMash. IBM’s SMash isn’t in fact a relaunch of a rather chemical instant potato mix made famous for its slogan ‘For Mash get Smash’ and iconic robots of its adverts . Instead, SMash is a potentially significant development in the maturing of the mash-up in the enterprise. (I say potentially because IBM isn’t telling us much until April.)

To quote form the press release:

“SMash addresses a key part of the browser mashup security issue by keeping code and data from each of the sources separated, while allowing controlled sharing of the data through a secure communication channel.”

The possibility of leakage between sources is a key issue not only from a security perspective but also from an Intellectual Property perspective (the content may be licensed for specific use and this sharing may incur additional fees). I look forward to discovering if IBM’s proposal manages to balance the need for security against the need for usability. While this is the classic trade off with all security, it is particularly acute for Mash-ups which have the ease of creation at the heart of the value proposition.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Market Trends • Mash ups • Product news • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For all the claims of some OSS enthusiasts, OSS came to the SOA game a couple of years later than the closed source vendors. Coming in later has its benefits of course: the needs are clearer and the late comers benefit from the experiences of the early innovators. This 'second mover advantage' is particularly strong with SOA as the market has developed quite slowly. This slow growth stopped the early innovators on the closed source side from getting any sort of market dominance.

Most of the OSS SOA solutions have up until recently focused on the base infrastructure required for first generation SOA projects (I say most as Bosteq for one took a different tack by focusing on the major 'higher level' problem: developer productivity). What has been lacking or weak with the OSS offerings has been the enterprise level capabilities such as management and application connectivity which are essential for any widescale deployment of enterprise infrastructure software.

Alex Fletcher's blog on RedHat's ambitions for its SOA strategy highlights two recent partnership announcements which shows RedHat is the latest OSS SOA vendor to start to address these gaps: Partnering with iWay on enterprise application connectors and with Hyperic for management.

iWay has become the standard port of call for most if not all SOA vendors needing an enterprise application connector story - I say story because while end-users like to know that such connectors are available, they do not necessarily end-up buying them. For RedHat, it presents some interesting issues: iWay is not an OSS vendor - and hence the customer is forced into a hybrid model of OSS and closed source. While this may not be a problem (IONA follows a similar model within its own family of closed and open source products), it seems to be a major disparture for a company such as RedHat so closely aligned with OSS.

The Hyperic relationship is also a little me-too as it follows the path already followed by MuleSource. In this case there are no 'religious differences' as Hyperic is also OSS. And me-too has some obvious advantages for the users: It is better if vendors converge onto one solution as any widescale SOA deployment is bound to include multiple SOA platforms which need to be managed as a whole.

Which makes both announcements positive steps for RedHat. However, they still have a long way to go before they are ready to win the 50% of the market which Alex points out is their strategic goal. And in my opinion they must greatly accelerate their moves to make their platform enterprise grade if they are to have any chance to achieve that goal by 2012 as is their stated aim.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Market Trends • Product news • SOA Predictions | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is almost 9 months since I have blogged on ebizq. In 2008 I intend to make this my main blogging platform although I will continue to blog from time to time on the Lustratus blog as well. While I intend to change the focus of the blog from exclusively SOA related issues, I am restarting almost from where I left off 9 months ago. In particular, the hot topic was then and remains how to build a SOA business case. Joe’s SOA in Action blog returned to the topic quoting from David Linthicum

“SOA proponents need to redouble efforts to emphasize the business case, and de-emphasize the technology aspect, he said. "It all boils down to architecture." Still, he said, the reuse inherent in SOA can be made to work, and projects where CEOs can see demonstrable value -- such as a real-time analytics dashboard -- can achieve quick success.”

Meanwhile David’s ZapThink colleague, Jason Bloomberg told SearchSOA that

"Furthermore, enterprise mashups are becoming the killer use-case for SOA, that is, the ostensible reason for doing SOA from the perspective of the business. So, SOA is stronger than ever, it's just becoming part of the woodwork. Enterprise mashups are the part that shows."

I think that for better or worse these quotes reflect the reality. SOA is not an easy proposition to sell to business on its own – it is about what you use SOA to do. SOA is certainly a better way of doing internal application integration but these traditional application integration projects are not particularly interesting to the business sponsors. Lack of interest means that cost is everything and SOA can be a very hard sell as early projects have to bear the brunt of the SOA set-up costs (called the SOA tax by some). Therefore, SOA is more likely to flourish in areas where the additional initial overhead can be justified by greater returns and more importantly returns that are of greater interest to the business.

The concept of an enterprise mash-up has been attracting interest outside of the IT department. The concept is inherently attractive to business users as it suggests that there is a way to easily combine the information the business user cares about without apparent interference of IT departments with their long and expensive project cycles. Potential applications from CRM to executive dashboards quickly jump to mind.

Unfortunately, there remains no such thing as a free lunch. Enterprise mash-ups rely on the availability of reliable mechanisms to access the data and suitable access controls to ensure that only authorised users get to what could be very sensitive information. While it is possible to roll out pilot mash-ups, over time proliferation of mash-ups will have a much greater impact than the casual observer might expect: Each mash-up user touches potentially many systems and mash-ups often rely on directly polling the system at regular intervals. This means that large scale roll-out of mash-ups will put large and potentially unexpected pressure onto the applications and infrastructure if not carefully controlled.

Which brings us back to SOA: Large scale deployment of mash-ups will require enterprise grade integration infrastructure as provided by SOA. The challenge for IT departments will be to explain to the irate business user that the reason why their mash-ups don’t work so well any more is because they have to invest more in those vague and intangible concepts: middleware and architecture. We may arrive back to square one but at least our business colleagues may better understand why we need to be there!

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Market Trends • Mash ups • SOA Predictions • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)