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JackBe Enterprise Mashlets

The slide deck said “Proprietary & Confidential” but I was assured by the presenters that I was welcome to blog about JackBe’s webinar on enterprise mashlets. They’ve done a number of webinars in the past that are available for replay, and also have several videos available at JackBe TV (which would be great if I were able to subscribe to it in iTunes)

Today’s presenters are Deepak Alur (VP Engineering) and Kishore Subramanian (“Chief Electrician”), and Deepak started by covering widgets and mashups, and how JackBe advanced those concepts to what they call mashlets: a platform for enterprise mashup widgets. We’re all inundated with widgets these days — everything from badges that we add to our website sidebars to our own customizable dashboard of widgets such as iGoogle — but many of the consumer-oriented widgets provide access to only a single source of information and allow a minimum of customization. They’re useful points of data visualization that can be easily assembled into a portal environment, but typically don’t interoperate and may be display-only. Enterprise widgets have to have a bit more than that: they need to live within the enterprise stack with respect to security, access to enterprise services and data, and proper IT management.

A mashup, on the other hand, integrates content from more than one source, but has often been too technical for a user to create. Mashups are gaining acceptance within enterprises, since they provide lightweight methods and platforms for creating situational applications that can be deployed quickly, with very little development effort.

There’s a number of reasons to consider widgets and mashups together, since they share a number of characteristics — using building blocks to quickly assemble new web applications — which drove JackBe to create mashlets. In their definition, mashlets are user-oriented micro-applications that are secure and governed for enterprise use, providing the visualization, or “face”, of a mashup to be embedded in a web page. Unlike simple widgets, they’re context-sensitive and dynamic, allowing multiple mashlets on a single page to interact. Comparing widgets and mashlets on a number of factors:

Factors	Widgets	Mashlets
Consumer/Enterprise	Consumer	Both
Novelty/Business	Depends	Business
Display/Input	Display	Both
User/Programmer	Programmer	Both, governed
Visual/Non-Visual	Visual	Both
Client/Server side	Client side	Both
Web services/data	Programmer	Plug and play
Secure	Depends	Enterprise
Ability to embed	Yes	Enterprise
Managed	No	Enterprise
Shareable	Ecosystem	Enterprise

We saw a number of quick demos of using the mashlets created in JackBe’s Presto platform. There’s some nice built-in features for the mashlets, for example, exposing the code to embed a mashlet within another page (much like what YouTube gives you to embed a video in a web page), and the code to embed it within a MediaWiki wiki, as well as allowing them to run as standalone pages. We saw an example of a stock trading page with multiple mashlets, where entering a trade in one mashlet caused data in the portfolio positions mashlets to update automatically.

Presto is compatible with portal standards, so can be embedded within a standards-based environment such as Oracle Portal, or in environments such as Netvibes and iGoogle.

All of the early examples showed using mashlets that had been created by developers, but we then looked at what’s required to actually create a mashlet. This is done in their visual composition tool, Wires (hence the “Chief Electrician” title), where you can drag services onto the workspace and connect them up to create a mashup — visually, somewhat similar to Yahoo Pipes — and save the results as a service that can be published and made available for consumption. The services can be run at any point to check the output, making it easy to debug as you go along. Once that’s done, a mashlet can be created from that mashup service by specifying the visualization form, e.g., a specific chart type, or a data grid. Like many über-techies, the JackBe guys casually stated that this could be done by “end users”. Um, I don’t think so. Or, at least, not most of the end users that I see in my day-to-day practice. But it is pretty easy for anyone with a bit of a technical background or inclination.

Presto appears to also act as a repository/directory for the mashup services and mashlets, serving these up to whatever pages are consuming them. Mashlets can be hosted on any web server, and once delivered to the browser, they live in the browser until the session ends, communicating with the mashup server via their PrestoConnect connector.

There’s a few key differentiators for JackBe’s Presto mashlets:

Enterprise security for authentication and authorization
Inter-mashlet publish/subscribe to allow mashlets to exchange information
Consumption of a wide range of data and services sources
UI framework independence

This was a full hour with not a lot of time for Q&A; I look forward to seeing more of this at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in a few weeks.

IT360: Web 2.0 – Now and its future for business

Mike Fox of Brightlights, a recruiter serving small and medium-sized software companies, is giving a talk on Web 2.0 and business; I started out unsure of why a recruiter is talking to us about Web 2.0, and ended up pretty much of the same mind.

He started with some very basic concepts, like the original Web 2.0 meme map and the themes it contains, and discussed some well-known (and well-worn) Web 2.0 case studies, such as Proctor&Gamble’s crowdsourcing of research, and Barack Obama’s online campaign presence. He asked questions like "has anyone heard of the $100 laptop?", "have you ever seen Slideshare?" and "has anyone heard of the ‘long tail’?", which I think you’d have to have been living under a rock not to know about, but maybe I’ve been drinking too much of the Koolaid.

He moved on to talk about Web 2.0 in the recruiting world, including the use of information aggregation tools such as ZoomInfo. He spent some time talking about using LinkedIn as both a recruiting tool and a job search tool, although I tend to think that this audience is probably pretty aware of what LinkedIn does. He mentioned some other recruitment-focused search sites like Jigsaw, and then stepped us through how to use Google Advanced Search for finding more information about companies and individuals — again, a bit basic, particularly (I think) for this audience.

He went through how to apply Web 2.0 thinking to business, based on the different goals and expectations for different generations of workers. He’s definitely been reading too much Tapscott. He did look at how to apply Web 2.0 to some fundamentals of adding value to a business, such as SaaS as both a cost reduction technique and a channel for offering products to customers.

He considers sending a monthly PDF newsletter by email and using Skype for long distance to be part of how he incorporates Web 2.0 into his business, which is a bit sad, although he does use a SaaS recruitment management system. There’s so much more that could be done with Web 2.0 in recruitment for a small recruiter like him: collaboration on resumes and job postings via Google Docs; blogging to show thought leadership in recruitment and engage the audience instead of a static monthly newsletter in PDF; publishing job postings listed on his site via RSS; hosting a discussion forum for job applicants.

That’s it for my coverage of IT360; I have to get back to some real work for the rest of the day. The Google talk was definitely the highlight for me, although I did really enjoy making the Director General of Industry Canada squirm yesterday, too.

IT360: Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise

I’m at the IT360 for a couple of hours this morning, mostly to hear Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise. It’s a sad commentary on the culture of Canadian IT conferences shows that this session is entitled "Meet Matthew Glotzbach of Google" in the conference guide, as if he doesn’t need to actually talk about anything, just show up here in the frozen north — we need to work on that "we’re not worthy" attitude. 🙂

Google’s Enterprise division includes, as you might expect, search applications such as site search and dedicated search appliances, but also includes Google Apps which many of us now use for hosting email, calendaring and document collaboration functions.

Glotzbach’s actual presentation title is "Head in the Clouds", referring to cloud computing, or more properly in this context, software as a service. He made an analogy between SaaS applications and electricity, referencing Nicholas Carr’s book The Big Switch, talking about the shift from each factory generating its own power to the centralized generation of electricity that is now sold as a service on the power grid. Just as it took a cultural shift to move from each company having their own power generation facilities (and a VP of electricity who was intent on defending his turf), we’re now undergoing a cultural shift to move from each company managing all of their own IT services to using best-of-breed services at a much lower cost over the internet.

He discussed five things that cloud computing has given us:

Democratization of information, giving anyone the chance to have their say in some way, from Wikipedia to Twitter to blogs. This is dependent upon and facilitated by standards, particularly simple, easy-to-use standards like RSS; in fact, all public APIs for Google Apps are RSS-based. What IT can learn from this is to keep things simple, something that enterprise IT is not really known for. Cloud computing also allows for a much freer exchange of information between people who don’t speak the same language, through real-time translation capabilities that aren’t feasible on a desktop platform: for example, add en2zh ([email protected]) to your Google group chat so that you can have a text chat with someone with one of you typing in English and the other in Mandarin Chinese.
Economics of the new information supply chain. Cloud computing fundamentally changes the economics of enterprise IT: the massive scale of cloud-based storage (e.g., Google Apps, Amazon S3) and computing (e.g., Amazon EC2) drives down the cost so much that it’s almost ridiculous not to consider using some of that capacity for enterprise functionality. Of course, we’ve been seeing this manifested in consumer applications for a couple of years now, with practically unlimited storage offered in online email and photo storage applications, but more companies need to start making this part of their enterprise strategy to reduce costs on systems that are essential but not a competitive differentiator.
Democratization of capabilities, allowing a developing nation to compete with a developed country, or a small business to compete with a major corporation, since they all have access to the same type of IT-related functionality through the cloud. In fact, those without legacy infrastructure are sometimes in a better position since they can start with a clean slate of new technology and become innovative collaborators. It’s also possible for any company, no matter how small, to get the necessary Googlejuice for a high ranking in search results if they have quality, targeted information on their site — as the cartoon says, on the internet no one knows you’re a dog.
Consumer-driven innovation will set the pace, and will drive IT. The consumer market is much more Darwinian in nature: consumers have more choices, and are notoriously fast to switch to another vendor. Businesses tend not to do this because of the high costs involved in both the selection process and in switching between vendors; I’m not sure that Glotzbach is giving enough weight to the costs of switching corporate applications, since he seems to indicate that companies may adopt more of a consumer-like fickleness in their vendor relationships. As more companies adopted more cloud computing, that will likely change as it becomes easier to switch providers.
Barriers to adoption of cloud computing are falling away. The main challenges have been connectivity, security, offline access, reliability and user experience; all of these have either been fully addressed or are in the process of being addressed. My biggest issue is still connectivity/offline access (which are really two sides of the same coin) such that I use a lot of desktop applications so that I can work on planes, in hotels with flaky access, or at the Toronto convention centre that I’m at today. He had some interesting stats on security: 60% of corporate data resides on desktop and laptop computers, and 1 in 10 laptops are stolen within 12 months of purchase — the FBI lost 160 laptops in the last 44 months — such that corporate security professionals consider laptops to be one of the biggest security risks. In other words, the data is probably safer in the cloud than it is on corporate laptops.

He finished up with a slide showing a list of well-known companies, all of which use Google Apps; alarmingly, I heard someone behind me say "just show me one Canadian company doing that". I’m not sure if that is an indication of the old-school nature of this conference’s attendees, or of Canadian IT businesspeople in general.

Glotzbach’s closing thoughts:

On-premise software is not going away
Most of the interesting innovation in software and technology over the next decade will be "in the cloud"
Market will have lots of competitors
Your new employees are the cloud generation, both welcoming and expecting that some big part of their social graph lives in the cloud
We (Google and other cloud providers) need to earn your trust.

Great presentation, and well worth braving the pouring rain to come out this morning.

IT360: Social Networking for Business

I’m dropping in on a few sessions at the IT360 conference being held in Toronto this week — nice to be able to walk a conference for a change — and attended John Reid of CATA Alliance talking about the value of social networking for business. He’s a stand-in-the-audience sort of guy, and is standing about 4 feet from me, so I’m here for the duration. 🙂

He started with some pretty mainstream stats and information about social networks, such as a new blog being created every 2 seconds, then moved on to discuss the degree of risk that comes from publication and dissemination of information, starting with a bit of an obscure story about being threatened with a lawsuit for some information that he distributed in a spammy sort of fax operation several years ago up to how some companies are starting to ban Facebook access from inside the firewall.

He’s doing the presentation almost completely with audience participation; having first done an audience poll on whether we fell that social networks had high, medium or low value for business, he’s selecting people from each of the respondent categories to say why they feel the way that they do about social networking. We’re hearing about how social networks can be used to get closer to your customer, although this is dependent on the industry, the target audience and the company’s corporate culture. There’s a lot of old-school types in the audience, those who raised their hand for "low/no value"; more than one person said that they use no social networks at all, and these were people who appear to be considerably younger than me. One of them even referred to "this blogging thing" in a somewhat derisive tone. This is not, as Don Tapscott proposes, an issue of age; it’s an issue of culture and position. In fact, the most vocal supporter of social networking from the audience declared himself to be 59. There are a lot of self-declared skeptics in the audience who say that they’re going to wait and see what the value is; one person said that he could spend the 8-10 hours per week that he believes is necessary to maintain a Facebook presence; he has 70 contacts on LinkedIn but it’s never really come to anything; and he wonders what happens to all those blogs that have a lot of effort put into them but no one reads them. Get real: if you put effort into blogging about something that’s of interest to someone and put some effort into being a good citizen in the blogosphere, people will read it. This blog is proof.

The business owners who are speaking up really seem to be in command-and-control mode: one stated that they’re blocking Facebook because they’re concerned that employees will put confidential information on it; doesn’t he know that if he hires untrustworthy people, they’ll do that from their home computer, so that blocking Facebook at work doesn’t solve that problem? He also said that people will spend too much time on sites like this if they’re allowed to do so, but you have to consider that people do have to take breaks sometimes, and allowing them to read their personal email or check Facebook while they’re on a break is no different than allowing them to make a personal phone call on their break. If you have sufficient technology to block specific sites, then you likely have the ability to monitor the usage and raise flags if people appear to be abusing the privilege rather than just blocking things outright.

Keith Parsonage from Industry Canada (who is speaking later today) popped up and admitted that he can’t access Facebook or a personal email service like Gmail from his office, but that the federal government is on a campaign to hire young people. This is definitely going to come back and bite them, since people who expect to be able to access sites like Facebook and Gmail while on their break at work aren’t going to be happy in an old-school corporate environment where they’re treated like irresponsible and unprofessional children.

Reid is really trying to get to the key points of how to incorporate social networking into business in terms of outward-facing communications, such as blogs; it’s unfortunate that this turned into too much of a discussion of who does and doesn’t use Facebook, and whether they’re allowed to do so at work.

Unfortunately, there’s no free wifi at the convention centre; in fact, the only available wifi is that geared for exhibitors and priced at an extortionate $395 for access for a single computer. I grabbed a couple of 30-minutes online passes in the press room, but I’m tempted to boycott it just so that MTCC doesn’t get the conference organizer’s money for this.

Upcoming conferences

I’ll be attending three conferences in the next three weeks (after a hiatus of over two months, it’s going to be strange to get back on a plane), and live-blogging from each conference, wifi permitting.

Next week is the Gartner BPM summit in Las Vegas: one of the key BPM conferences of the year (at least, until Gartner watered it down by running a second one in September last year). The presentations are typically a mix of Gartner analysts discussing BPM, SOA and related subjects, and customers discussing their implementations. The trade show includes every BPM vendor who wants to be taken seriously in this market. Expect to see some of my posts from this week syndicated over on Intelligent Enterprise, plus I’ll be doing a wrap-up article at the end of the week exclusively on their site.

February 13-15 is ARIS ProcessWorld in Orlando, IDS Scheer’s user conference. I attended this last year and enjoyed it; last year was only the second time that I’d been to any sort of process modelling user conference (having attended Proforma’s conference in 2006), and it’s really valuable to see how the front-end modelling tools fit together with the BPMS that automate those processes. IDS Scheer is paying my travel expenses to attend.

February 18-20 I’m back in Orlando for FASTforward, which is sort of a user conference for FAST enterprise search (which is being acquired by Microsoft), but really goes beyond that cover a lot of Enterprise 2.0 territory. Featured speakers include Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport and Don Tapscott, all of whom I’ve written about in the past couple of week. You can register for FASTforward here, and put my name (Sandy Kemsley) in the reference field so that they know where you came from. FAST is paying my travel expenses to attend. All of my live-blogging posts will be cross-posted to the FASTforward blog, and I’ll do a daily wrap-up post exclusive to their site.

As an aside, I’ve consolidated all posts for all Gartner BPM coverage under one category regardless of year, and all for ProcessWorld under their own category.

If you’re going to be at any of these events, look me up.

Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport debate the viability of Enterprise 2.0

I missed the McAfee/Davenport debate when I arrived a bit late to the Enterprise 2.0 conference last June, so I’m happy to be listening in on today’s version.

McAfee kicked off with some examples of where he’s seeing Enterprise 2.0 making a difference: a construction company that encouraged its employees to blog; a large financial services centre using an internal wiki for their customer service people to share information, which has reduced their average call time; and Intellipedia within the US intelligence community.

Davenport countered that organizations are even more hierarchical than before, and that Enterprise 2.0 is not having the collaborative and flattening effects that were expected, and that if it was just about the technology and not transforming the enterprise, it should have been called “Knowledge Management 1.5”.

There then ensued a wordsmithing debate over what it should be called, what version number it should have, and whether the functionality provided by today’s Enterprise 2.0 collaborative software is really all that innovative, or just a natural progression from previous groupware applications like Sharepoint and Lotus Notes. As the debate goes on, Davenport continue to drive the point that this technology isn’t revolutionary relative to corporate information management/sharing tools, it’s evolutionary.

Davenport stated that if you don’t do the organizational preparation in advance, then Enterprise 2.0 will fail at its goals; McAfee disagreed, saying that he’s seen examples of organizations that were very poorly suited to engaging in Enterprise 2.0 collaboration (such as the intelligence community) have some key people latch onto the tools once they’re in place and help to shift the organizational culture.

In other words, is the technology driving the collaborative effects, or does the organization have to be collaboratively-minded before the technology will be used? That seems to be the core issue that’s being addressed in this debate so far.

McAfee feels that Enterprise 2.0 tools don’t make it any easier to engage in bad behaviour (harassing other employees, sharing company information externally) that people could have done before these tools; I tend to agree with this: if employees are educated about what is and isn’t appropriate behaviour, they’ll make their choices on how to behave regardless of the tools available.

30 minutes into the debate, and process was just mentioned for the first time, in the context of how Enterprise 2.0 is impacting the business processes between a company and its customers/partners. Davenport states that Web 2.0 is having a bigger impact here, since he sees Enterprise 2.0 as purely behind the firewall, whereas McAfee said that his definition of Enterprise 2.0 includes interactions between a company and its partners and customers that happen on the web. Does this include Facebook groups sponsored by a company, or just a company’s own websites?

There was an interesting discussion on control, on which they mostly agreed, and how the “gatekeeper” model of enterprise knowledge management systems is giving way to a more wiki-like “gardening” model: let everyone contribute then clean up the results, rather than restricting who can contribute.

For the second time in this debate, Davenport refers to McAfee’s language as “messianic” in terms of how he promotes the capabilities of Enterprise 2.0 tools; Davenport insists that older-style tools could provide much of the same collaborative environment, and although there is some great new functionality, the technology is not driving the type of organizational change that is suggested by the definitions of Enterprise 2.0.

In summary, Davenport feels that companies should be exploring the technology and loosening control over information creation, but not expect the deployment of these Enterprise 2.0 technologies to change organizational culture. McAfee agrees with the first part, but not the second — he feels that putting these technologies in place will cause emergent applications that will create organizational culture changes.

The debate was recorded and will be posted at the FASTForward blog.