Category: Enterprise Software

A Gartner Report’s conclusions:

– Web services won’t trigger a major disruption in financial services over the next two years. The impact will be more long-term.
– Web services will enable business process outsourcing.

Amazon.com Launches Web Services (Press Release): “Amazon.com’s Web Services will allow third party sites to search and display products from Amazon.com’s web site, and enable visitors to those sites to add items to their Amazon.com shopping carts.”

After Google’s API, Amazon is the second major Internet company to offer a programming interface to its database.

Peter Drayton writes about some uses of the Amazon API.

Writes Line56:

According to Forrester, 11 percent of companies (among 292 cross-industry companies surveyed) already have Web services in production, 17 percent are in pilots and 13 percent are in the rollout phase. Thirty percent of companies are considering adoption, while 22 percent have no plans and the remaining seven percent are unsure.

The majority of implementations are behind the firewall, explains Forrester analyst Bobby Cameron, who wrote the report. However, the “knee-jerk reaction [to go] internal first is wrong,” as plenty of companies (notably in the financial services vertical) have had no problem extending Web services to their partner and customer ecology. Another inference of Web services Cameron dismisses is the notion that implementations have to be top-down. Cameron argues the opposite. “The skill sets required are very low. A person with minimal budget and management approval, and no unique skills, can deliver a Web service in a matter of hours.” Cameron says this is “The same formula that led to the website explosion in the 1990s, with no top-down control.”

Writes Jon Udell in InfoWorld:

For years the industry has dreamed of modeling business processes in software and combining them like Tinker Toys. Web services orchestration, the new term for that old idea, becomes more interesting as raw services multiply behind firewalls. But as integration vendors point out, the orchestration layers of the Web services stack aren’t yet baked. The standards pioneers — Microsoft, IBM, and now Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems — are busy in the kitchen.

Two proposed XML grammars for describing the orchestration of Web services — Microsoft’s XLANG, used by BizTalk, and IBM’s WSFL (Web Services Flow Language) — were widely expected to have merged by now into a joint World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) submission. That hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, Sun, BEA, SAP, and Intalio have introduced a third candidate: WSCI (Web Service Choreography Interface). The relationships among these three proposals — and others, including Intalio’s BPML (Business Process Markup Language) and ebXML’s BPSS (Business Process Schema Specification) — are murky.

An article on InternetNews examines ebXML and Web Services:

With ebXML, the focus is a little less broad than Web services, although the computers-talking-to-one-another ideology remains the same. Fostered by standards groups UN/CEFACT and OASIS, the goal of ebXML is to enable a global electronic marketplace where enterprises can meet and conduct business with each other through the exchange of XML-based messages. Or, as Ron Schmelzer, analyst with XML and Web services technology research firm ZapThink, says: “ebXML envisions a future where businesses can describe their interfaces electronically and then allow businesses to dynamically locate those interfaces and then bind to them when they choose to actually do business. It’s a good vision, but depends on two big things: standards and the actual implementation of those standards by businesses.”

B2B arrangements are devised of horizontal and vertical parts. On the horizontal stacks, there are software functions such as messaging, routing and packaging data. On the vertical side, there are business processes, such as a purchase order. That’s in general; there are cases where a PO can be part of the horizontal stack.

As Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler pointed out about ebXML stacks, bottom layers hear each other and understand what the other is saying, the middle layer consist of those that hear each other and know what the other is saying, and the last layer is the actual business process or trade, such as a purchase order. That is what ebXML seeks to enable.

This is a longish and excellent article on ebXML — just what I’ve been wanting to know. ebXML, along with RosettaNet and BizTalk, are creating standards for business processes. What we will need to decide soon is in the context of what we want to do, which of the paths should we follow.

Also see: Can EDI Survive XML Challenge?, OASIS ebXML Presentations

Writes InfoWorld on Microsoft’s new release of its Project Management software:

Microsoft Project 2002 shifts the focus of its project management offering from the desktop to the enterprise and in the process steps up to meet new competitors in both project management and PSA (professional services automation).

With built-in SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and XML support, and an included .Net Enterprise Server, Microsoft is also aiming Project 2002 squarely at Web services developers in search of tools to integrate project management across applications and databases.

Hosting services for project management may gain favor as several Microsoft partners, including Business Engine and eLabor.com, gear up to deliver Project Server as an ASP offering.

Established enterprise project management vendors Primavera and Artemis recognize Microsoft Project 2002 for its strong resource management capabilities, but representatives of both companies said scalability is still lacking.

Project Management is as horizontal and as universal application an application that we will get. As part of the collaboration suite that we will need to build in the Enterprise Software category, a project/task management component is going to be very important. Everyone is part of one or more projects and is involved in multiple tasks. A project management platform integrated with the Digital Dashboard is what we need.

Writes InfoWorld: “The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) has made available the first public draft of a specification aimed at providing a standard way to model business processes across heterogeneous systems both inside and outside the firewall. BPML (Business Process Modeling Language) 1.0 is an XML Schema that defines a formal model for expressing business processes that represent a range of enterprise activities such as transactions, data management, concurrency, exception handling, and operational semantics, according to officials at BPMI.” [BPMI Press Release]

We need to track BPMI for our Visual Biz-ic and Enterprise Software components development.

While making chips, engineers use a emulator to simulate the chip’s working in software. It would be good to have something similar for enterprise software. What we need is a software system to simulate the enterprise and its ecosystem. It is almost like a video game, a kind-of “Sim Enterpri-City”. A software company can then “inject” its software into the system and see how it performs.

Today, we test software at the sub-system level. But, it is very difficult to get a feel of how it would perform in the enterprise world. When I read about Nvidia testing its chips at emulators from IKos costing USD 4.5 million, it struck me that what we probably need is an “emergent system” of enterprises which can simulate the behaviour of companies and thus create a testbed for new software. Maybe, later, just as video games have gotten closer to reality, this could even be used to test-market ideas and advertising campaigns!

One of the areas which has been fuzziest to me in Emergic has been about how we should be creating enterprise software (ESW) components. So far, I had been thinking of building a eBusiness suite integrating ERP, CRM and SCM. Easier said than done! Of course, our approach would be to look at a minimal feature-set which could get us started as we target SMEs. But even there, where do we begin? How will we handle the challenges of customisation that will inevitably come? My solution to that was to build only the components which would do 60-70% of the work, with independent software vendors doing the rest. Basically, build the Lego blocks which make assembly of low-cost enterprise software applications easy.

All this sounded neat in theory. But, implementing would it would be a huge task. Especially, for us, with no experience in the enterprise software space. So, the thinking continued. What should we be looking to do? I did not want to not do anything. When we go to SMEs, we need to go with a whole solution (or at least promise availability in a few months). Server-based Computing (Thin Client-Thick Server) would be the first step which would allow them to build their enterprise IT infrastructure, and have a computer on every desktop. The Digital Dashboard would be the second step, which creates an enterprise knowledge management system based on whats there is peoples heads and not whats sitting in files and databases. The third step had to be with the core business applications.

Edge Services

I have now come up with a different line of thinking on how to tackle this issue. Instead of focusing first at the core, let us look at the edges (the periphery) of business: the interactions between enterprises. In other words, instead of focusing on EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), let us look at B2BAI (Business-to-Business Application Integration).

In EAI, one has to look at legacy data already existing in companies. It would have meant us worrying about their existing applications (if any) and the data that they already had. It would have also meant customising or building adapters for data transformation. We would get into the heart of the company without too many resources. Besides, much of what is done within is very specific to the enterprises.

In B2BAI, the focus shifts from transaction processing to document processing. Businesses are exchanging information between themselves product information, financial information, order details, shipping details, etc. Information is the primary flow. Even for the actual product and money flow, it is the information about them that matters. This is where the last few years have seen the emergence of standards in the form of ebXML, RosettaNet and BizTalk. While Microsofts BizTalk has focused more on information flows, RosettaNet has actually mapped out processes through its PIPs (Partner Interface Processes). RosettaNet provides the model, specifications, format and validation for various processes between enterprises. (There are, perhaps, strengths and weaknesses for each of the standards. This is what we need to take a closer look at: what is good at doing which part best. Can we do value-added aggregation across them?)

So, our focus initially should be building the interfaces between businesses, based on the standards that exist. This is the area where SMEs would be interested in seeing how they can communicate electronically with other SMEs or with their bigger partners. Of course, in the latter case, the partners would set the communication mechanism, but the push is going to be towards standards. Our approach should be to use standards to leapfrog the proprietary communication mechanisms. (Think back to how Oracle used SQL to its advantage in the mid-1970s.)

So, we need to codify various business processes using the process and information exchange standards which are coming into place. What we also should look at doing is seeing how we can build an SME Exchange connecting various SMEs together. This is a good starting point as SMEs do a lot of procurement from each other also. Standardising this using the XML base and Web Services is what is needed.

SME Slashdot

Another related idea is to target SMEs through the industry associations that they belong to. One idea here is to create a Slashdot-like community weblog ASP. This would allow SMEs to come together and share best practices and learnings. It is also a low-cost way of reaching out to SME Clusters. It has the potential to spread like an epidemic, as SMEs see the benefits of belonging to online community networks. Creating self-organising networks of SMEs can only be done online; if we can play an enabling role here, it would solve one of the biggest problems we face reaching out to SME. .

Over time, this edge strategy gives us the network of SMEs to then start building the Lego blocks for use within the enterprise. Sometimes, it is better, especially for newcomers, to chip away at the edges, than attack the core.

Again, this is the theory. But, I feel that this seems a much better approach than the earlier one which I had been thinking of. Theres a lot more to think through, which I am hoping to now do this month. At least, I now feel the problem is solvable. One small step forward.

Two good articles in InfoWorld:

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Next-gen enterprise apps: “With greater amounts of data exposed as XML and tied together via Web services, enterprises are looking to lash together compenentized business processes to attack business problems with the best parts of existing applications. These emerging collaborative or composite applications will combine functions from multiple application systems to execute a larger, near real-time process that will then be published as a Web service.”

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Collaborative challenges: “Several thorny problems need to be solved to make collaborative applications work, including data transformation, business process coordination, and transactionality.”