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SOA

Peek inside the Kitchen: Why SaaS customers should care about SOA?

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If you are a customer that is using on-demand CRM, HR, Reporting, you may think that you probably need not bother about SOA. After all, SaaS is akin to ordering a meal at a restaurant rather than cooking one yourself.

But actually you should care about how the meal is prepared, metaphorically speaking, for several reasons esepecially when evaluating a new restaurant (SaaS vendor):

  • Reliability: Will their service be as good tomorrow as it is today? Any time you make a long-term commitment to a service, you need to be able to predict that the vendor will be around a year (or decade) from now and the quality will not deteriorate. In real life, we do this by relying on brands and reputation, and so is true in software. However, when dealing with a new restaurant, you may need to peek inside the kitchen.
  • Quality of Service: Will my food be free from E-Coli? Will my data be secure? How do I ensure compliane with HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley etc? You need to know that the burger meat was cooked to a certain temperature. In SaaS, you need to know that the software is hosted at a world-class data center, that the service provider is using a technology stack that provides security at all tiers (data, process and user interaction).
  • Manageability: Will my waiter understand what I need and help me pick the wine I want or should want! As you adopt SaaS, you will want a solution that not only provides the functionality be it CRM, HR or whatever but you also want to make sure that the users and IT will be able to manage their accounts, integrate with existing systems and processes, monitor usage, etc.

So, even though you as a customer are not responsible for development and on-going maintenance of the software, it is imperative that you have a good idea of the architecture and operations of your SaaS vendor. After all, as we all know thanks to Verizon when you buy a cell phone, what you are really buying is the network.

You don’t want your SaaS vendor to drop your calls when it is time to close your quarter.

In another blog post, I will discuss why SaaS ISVs should and do care about SOA. This blog post was originally posted on http:blogs.oracle.com/zen

Organic growth story is now just a story

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Organic growth works for human beings and cows. Not so well for large enterprise software companies. After beating up on its competitor for pursuing an acquisition-led growth strategy, SAP failed to meet its numbers this quarter.

Message to Waldorf, Germany- let’s leave organic to California’s Yoga-loving Hybrid-driving meditation-praciticing vegans. For growth, you need to eat some beef.

On a more serious note, the two areas where SAP showed weakness may also be leading indicators:

North America: Is it possible that SAP is getting beat by its arch-rival Oracle?

Asia (outside Japan): SAP had made claims of making great inroads and betting on the emerging market economies. Here, the issue could be either local software companies or custom built software. In either case, it does not portend well for the SAP strategy.

(Another Infosys, India building: by reidmix)

It is my (very personal) opinion that the large enterprise vendors may have to look into acquiring companies that are focused on mid-market and/or emerging economies. It is nigh impossible to take your first-world overly complex software requiring massive infrastructure and compete with local vendors selling low-priced limited functionality software. In fact, some analysts have predicted that at least one large software vendor will emerge from India/China over the next few years on the global scene. Kingdee is one such aspirant that InfoWorld talks about here in “China’s Kingdee wants to take on Oracle/SAP”.

Jeff Nolan wrote an excellent piece “SAP, Oracle under the SOA, On-Demand gun” highlighting the issues facing enterprise software leaders. Vinnie Mirchandani (or Microchandani, his tech name) wrote on similar theme in “Oracle and the 29.2 factor“. With the coming IPO of NetSuite, the focus will once again be on mid-market and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).

(Disclaimer: As is the case with all my posts, this reflects my personal views and does not in any way reflect the opinions of my employer or anyone else. See profile for detailed disclaimer.)

Holistic is not just for Yoga anymore: Identity & Security

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There has been a lot of interest in security and identity management in light of regulatory pressures and in response to incidents of theft and loss. I recently wrote the following article for Security Magazine- an excerpt follows.

A Holistic Approach to Physical and IT Security
When a famous bank loses thousands of credit card numbers or a hospital loses medical records, the customers and patients do not ask whether the theft happened over the wire or because of a break-in. There is loss of trust and damage to the value of the brand regardless of the method of breach. But many businesses continue to treat physical and IT security as unrelated silos. This approach is no longer acceptable against the changing realities, and many companies are beginning to realize the value of an integrated approach to security.

Oracle OpenWorld is here to dominate San Francisco

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Did I say dominate San Francisco? I meant Software!


Yes, Oracle is taking over San Francisco for the next week with its annual gala that has grown to over 40,000 attendees this year. I will be attending as a member of the Oracle Identity Management team- we have a signficant presence with demo booths and over 10 sessions. I will be presenting on “Managing Security in the World of Web2.0 and SOA”. The aim of my presentation is to bring out the key common themes between Web2.0 and SOA, and at then address some of the common security concerns around web services. Another key enabling technology for Web2.0 and SOA is Federation that allows businesses and consumers to collaborate across organizational and network boundaries. I will also touch upon what is Enterprise2.0 and how do you apply mashups to enterprise services.

The event this year will include a much larger audience interested in applications with Siebel (Oracle|Siebel) and Peoplesoft (Oracle|Peoplesoft) having joined the ranks over the last 2 years. Fusion Middleware and Fusion Applications with emphasis on standards-based open architecture of SOA will be one of the key focus areas.

And yes, Sir Elton John will be performing. This should be fun. If you are attending, you should visit our Identity Management booth and say hello. And if you are not, visit the website to read material and watch the webcasts. And yes, Larry Ellison will be giving a keynote in addition to technology development leaders Chuck Rozwat and Thomas Kurian (his debut keynote at OpenWorld), and applications head John Wookey.

CNET’s News.com has some nice pictures.

Enterprise 2.0 is same as Web 2.0

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I think some of us are over thinking the Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Mashups. The key is to learn from history and apply the knowledge to the present. Jeff Nolan has nicely summarized some of the discussion around Enterprise 2.0. Rod Boothby has raised the question of mashups in the context of Enterprise 2.0 I find Vinnie Mrichandani’s post to be the best description of issues we need to consider and resolve.

However, the idea of Enterprise 2.0 seems inside-out to me. People from the enterprise world used to large ERP-style applications and deployments thinking in traditional terms with a willingness to tweak the model to incorporate 2.0 from Web 2.0. This will not suffice. The square (pun intended) peg of Enterprise software will not fit into the round hole (no pun intended) of Web 2.0

A lesson in history

The IT departments and software vendors that had significant investments in client-server tried to simply adapt client-server to the web rather than moving to true N-tier architecture. Slapping a portal on top of client-server software helped SI’s and vendors make some money but they were no competition for applications designed from the ground up for the web. A lot of companies are now trying to do the same by trying to ‘service-orient’ their existing applications. I find the tone of discussion on Enterprise 2.0 suffering from the same problem.

Principles of Enterprise 2.0

The real Enterprise 2.0 applications are the SaaS applications (On-demand) from the likes of Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Siebel On-Demand etc. Some key characteristics of Enterprise 2.0 applications will be SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) delivery model, SOA architecture, simple web services based integration, extensiblity and open-ness.

SaaS & Long-tail: I would argue that all Web 2.0 applications are hosting-capable if not entirely hosted. The benefits of the long tail come into effect only when you have large number of users and but for a few very large companies it is hard to see how this effect will play out if the application is not hosted.

SOA, Web Services & Mashups: The Web 2.0 mashups were enabled by open standards-based APIs with many of them using either web services or other standards such as ATOM. In the enterprise, you need similar capabilities to do end-user integration. And SOA & web services help you expose your internal applications for integration. Rod Boothby poses an interesting question on what will Enterprise 2.0 mashups look like. I strongly believe (that’s what blogs are meant for, right?) that Enterprise 2.0 mashups will look just like Web2.0 mashups. Just as your internal web apps for email and procurement now look just like Yahoo! and Amazon, in time your internal Enterprise 2.0 apps will look like the Web2.0 apps. Here is an example- you are browsing a catalog in your procurement application. As you mouse over the price, a bubble pops up (AJAX style) to tell you whether this is within your purchasing authority. This is a mashup of procurement and financials.

Why is this so hard?
If Enterprise 2.0 looks, feels and behaves like Web2.0 then why is it so hard. It is not hard, its hard for the existing enterprise applications that will in five years be legacy just as client-server applications became legacy and mainframe apps before that.

Are we done?
No, we are not done with building out Enterprise 2.0. The CRM space has made a good beginning and there are several others in various stages of development. With a new class of Enterprise 2.0, there will be new problems. Rather than looking for how to morph Enterprise 1.0 (did we ever finish 1.0, btw) into Enterprise 2.0, the key is to look at the Enterprise 2.0 and fill gaps. Some of these gaps are in the areas that have been brought up by Jeff Nolan and others. These include:
– Integration 2.0: How will Enterprise 2.0 applications integrate with each other? Will it be a hosted integration model?
– Identity 2.0: How do you enable single sign-on in Enterprise 2.0? Again rather than thinking about simply connecting your existing LDAP to Enterprise 2.0, look to online identity service providers.
– Customization 2.0: (I am as annoyed with having to say 2.0 after every term that applies to this new class of apps but couldn’t resist it.) The question is how do I customize the new applications for specific verticals? Again look for the emergence of experts from verticals and regions. A Chinese company that customizes your vanilla Financials system to deal with national regulations. And then yet another company customizing that offering for clothing manufacturers to account for specialized business processes to deal with QR (Quantitative Restrictions) on clothing imports. And so on and so forth. Essentially, you end up with a network of service providers rather than customization by internal IT.

There are other issues of service-level monitoring and guarantees, analytics, bulk upload, security etc. Rather than trying to solve all these problems a priori before we build Enterprise 2.0, these concerns will get sorted out as we build out the services for the 2.0 world. Those of us who fall into the not good enough trap need to go back and re-read Innovator’s Dilemma. The barely good enough for some will, in time, with iterative innovation become good enough for most.

I think this is an interesting discussion and I look forward to more exchanges and posts on this topic.

Update: FASTForward Blog’s Joe McKendrick has picked up and extensively commented on this post at Fitting the Enterprise 2.0 Square Peg into the Web 2.0 Round Hole

Update: ZDNet’s recent post entitled Facebook for Enterprise = Enterprise appears to agree with my viewpoint.

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