Open Source will drive BPM adoption
The release of a complete BPMS under an Open Source license should significantly reduce any barrier to adoption. The leading Open Source BPM vendor will capture the largest market share, while more companies will start BPM projects than in the prior three years combined.

Google will acquire a complete Office 2.0 suite
Google Docs is like ThinkFree’s Quick Edit mode: it works, but the feature set is way too limited to convince a large-enough number of Microsoft Office users to make the switch. Something akin to ThinkFree’s Power Edit mode is necessary, and buying it will certainly be quicker than building it. Google, which doubled its workforce to almost 10,000 employees in 2006 would rather spend cash and stock than waste time. ThinkFree or Zoho look like perfect targets, even though convincing the good folks at AdventNet won’t be an easy task. Apple Computer might make a similar move too, significantly enhancing the capabilities offered by the excellent .Mac online service. On the mobility front, Palm will likely be acquired as well, possibly by a telecommunication service provider.

Office 2.0 will start getting adoption in the corporate world
While early adopters will continue to be very small businesses and academic users, the corporate world will start playing with the technology as well. Individual users will favor large collections of applications such as Zoho, while corporate departments will prefer feature-rich suites such as ThinkFree. This movement will be acknowledged by several Gartner reports, as well as a cover article in BusinessWeek magazine.

All top ten off-shore software development firms will have a BPM practice
The Capability Maturity Model for Software (also known as CMM) has been retired, and the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) replaced it, with a stronger emphasis on business processes. The model-driven development approach enabled by Business Process Management (BPM) technologies makes it easier to measure and improve the quality of development processes compared to traditional software development approaches based on the writing of code. Off-shore software development firms have known that for a long time — Infosys was one of the first companies in the world to develop a working implementation of the BPML language back in 2001 — and will take advantage of it, now that commercial implementations have matured enough.

Open Source vendors will grow faster than their closed source competitors
More user accounts will be created on SugarCRM and vtiger combined than on Salesforce.com. Compiere will announce the successful migrations of several large Oracle E-Business Suite customers. Intalio will sign more new customers than Lombardi, Pegasystem, and Savvion combined. The vast majority of SOA projects will be using Open Source solutions such as Axis, Mule, and ServiceMix. And the first Open Source database vendor (EnterpriseDB, Ingres, or MySQL) to release a plug-compatible replacement for the Oracle database that can support the SAP R/3 application for over 10,000 concurrent users will get the best home run in database history since Sybase, but that might take a couple more years…

Apple Computer will make online data synchronization really work
Once the iPhone — or PodPhone, or whatever Steve decides to call it — is released, people will realize that its killer feature is not that it can play tunes, but that it can synchronize contacts and events in a wireless fashion more easily than any other system. Granted, such synchronization has been working fairly well with the BlackBerry+Exchange combination for quite sometime now, but who really likes to administrate a Microsoft Exchange server? Also, a Mac-compatible version of QuickBooks Online Edition will be released, unless a competitive offering steals the show first.

SOA will get simpler
The Java Business Integration (JBI) API will go the way of CORBA and be relegated to specific vertical industries such as telecommunication services. Large corporate users demanding very high transaction volumes — think Wall Street brokers & dealers — will favor lightweight application servers with streamlined stacks for Web services such as Apache Axis, and MuleSource will emerge as the leading Open Source ESB player. Production-grade ESB functionality will come for free with all major Open Source stacks, accelerating the demise of the few propriatery EAI vendors left standing.

Enterprise 2.0 will establish itself as a sticking meme
High-profile conferences originally focused on collaboration and e-Business will adopt the moniker, Oracle and SAP will incorporate Enterprise 2.0 stacks similar to Intel’s SuiteTwo within their respective product lines, and the SEC will issue new guidelines for corporate blogging.

Standards for online services will be adopted
Enough services supporting OpenID and Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) will become available for early adopters to build a working Office 2.0 Setup that provides single sign-on and remote data storage. Open Source frameworks offering plug-compatible alternatives to Amazon’s EC2, S3, SQS will be released as well, enabling truly distributed backup strategies to be developed.

That’s it for now. Happy new year to you all again!

Disclaimer: I work for Intalio and serve as an advisor for ThinkFree and Zoho.

BPMS will go mainstream: Draw
The concept for a Business Process Management System (BPMS) has been gaining momentum, but I would not call it mainstream yet. The ground for BPM 2.0 has been laid, and the first Open Source BPMS has been announced. Nevertheless, customers are still trying to figure out what BPM really is, and which flavor for it will best address their needs initially. Gartner recently came to the rescue, suggesting that an Open Source solution might be a good way to get your feet wet initially. But a commonly-accepted compeling event for the deployment of a BPM platform — think e-Commerce for an application server — remains to be found. SOA might very well be it, but it’s losing ground as well, as illustrated on this Google Trends analysis, also mentioned in this earlier post. Like it or not, BPM is a complex concept, and it will take time for corporate buyers to get their arms around it. In the meantime, the best way to get there is to lower any possible barrier to adoption, and this is what Intalio is all about.

Industry consolidation will accelerate: Miss
No game-changing mergers or acquisitions were made in the enterprise software space this year, and IBM did not come back to the enterprise application game. Smaller deals have been stealing the show, especially Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss, which must have compelled Oracle to finally make a move on the Linux front. The real question now comes down to this: how long will Salesforce.com remain as an independent company? IBM, Oracle, and SAP would all make pretty good buyers. Another option would be for Marc to finally extend his platform with ERP functionality, which could be achieved in several ways, one of them being to acquire Compiere or Intacct. Let’s hope the later comes true.

Office 2.0 will become a reality: Hit
Within less than nine months, the Office 2.0 Database, announced on this post, grew from nothing to over 330 applications. The concept introduced exactly a year ago got its first conference, with over 450 participants, 105 speakers, and 56 sponsors. Zoho emerged as a likely winner in the space, and ThinkFree demonstrated that web browsers are now powerful enough to support most of the features that are offered by traditional Office 1.0 productivity suites today [Disclaimer: I serve as an advisor for both companies]. Google’s release of
Google Docs on the first day of the Office 2.0 Conference also gave a clear signal that things are getting serious now, and that past involvements with OpenOffice.org were just smoke and mirrors. Next year, it will be interesting to see wether Microsoft finally releases something of substance under the Office Live brand, and who gets their hands on ThinkFree. The later would be a perfect acquisition for Google, but in the meantime an OEM deal with Intuit or Salesforce.com would make a lot of sense as well. Investors might also be interested to know that the company is giving serious thoughts to the idea of raising a small round of venture funding…

Software off-shoring will go further West: Hit
If your Indian off-shoring partner made you lose sleep over high employee turn-over, you might have considered going further West. During the past year, Eastern European countries such as Ukraine became a popular destination for the off-shoring of software development projects, so much so that the unescapable law of supply and demand kicked back in full swing. And because these countries are so much smaller than India, its effects were felt stronger, faster. Down the road, it seems that off-shoring is a dynamic process rather than a singular event, for which target destinations keep changing as local markets mature. Next steps? Latin America, Northern Africa, and China of course.

Open Source business models will prove themselves: Hit
Following on the footsteps of JBoss and SugarCRM, more and more enterprise software companies went the Open Source way, including Hyperic, Intalio, and Terracotta. Learning valuable lessons from their predecessors, many commercial Open Source upstarts are being liberal with licensing terms, which compelled some industry observers to challenge their claims. Next year should see a clarification of the rules, with the addition of generally agreed-upon terms for attribution to the ever more popular Mozilla Public License (MPL), with the blessing of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) hopefully.

All software will go the service way: Hit
Alongside the emergence of credible Office 2.0 solutions, all categories of software saw the release of online alternatives, including drawing, music playing, and video editing. A year ago, guessing the next category of software to go online was challenging. Today, the game has changed, and the challenge is to identify the one that will be the last. At this point, only one application is missing from my Office 2.0 Setup: a good online accounting tool.

SOA will get more complex: Hit
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was supposed to make integration simpler. Instead, it made everything a lot more complex, and the introduction of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) did not really help. Standards for Web Services kept multiplying, and the market kept fragmenting itself, with the Java Business Integration (JBI) API on one side, and slightly more pragmatic approaches such as Apache Axis on the other. Too many options create confusion, which vendors of proprietary solutions are the only ones to benefit from. Clarity and simplicity are much needed, but I’m not sure where they’ll come from next year.

Corporations will discover the beauty of social: Hit
LinkedIn will most likely sign its tenth million users in the coming quarter, and TIME Magazine named You (and that includes Me) as Person of the Year. Most searches made on Google return entries from Wikipedia within the top ten results, while the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) usually tops official websites developed by major studios for any new movie. During this past year, the corporate world started to pay attention, and the concept for Enterprise 2.0 was born, followed by commercial implementations such as Intel’s SuiteTwo. Next year should see an acceleration of the trend, with more and more practical use cases and success stories being released.

Standards for online services will emerge: Hit
Bugs have been added to the Office 2.0 Bug Tracker faster than standards have been released to fix them, nevertheless, a couple of initiatives have been gaining some significant traction, among them JSON and OpenID. Also, and against all expectations, Amazon started to release a set of commodity services (EC2, S3, SQS) for online computing that’s giving us a very good preview of things to come. Next year should see Google and Microsoft following on Jeff’s footsteps. The creation of a full fledge standardization body for Office 2.0 is not out of the question either.

Score: 7 Hits, 1 Miss, 1 Draw
Let’s call it a 83% success rate. Not too bad… In fact, it’s a little bit too good, and the reason for it might be that my inferences for ‘06 were a little bit too open ended. For next year’s, I will try to be a little bit more specific, which should make the challenge more interesting. See you next year!

Tim Clark suggested ‘Mobility’ as 11th flattener, Jeff Zwelling made a very convincing case for ‘Instant Feedback Loops’ as a comment to my original post, and all participants agreed that the flattening of the world is a process, not an outcome. Sanjay Kalra and Jeff Nolan also had good things to say about the event. I would like to thank everybody who partipated. Also, many thanks to Lohika for their sponsorship of the event.

The next breakfast will take place in the Bay Area sometime in May and will be dedicated to BPM 2.0. If you’re a BPM vendor or a BPM practitioner and would like to contribute to the definition of this new market category, drop me a line and I will add you to the guest list.

Weblogs are great networking tools, but nothing can beat good old-fashioned face-to-face meetings, especially when they come with nice food and drinks. With that in mind, I have decided to organize regular events during which readers of this blog will be able to meet and discuss about recently-covered topics. The first event of this type will be a breakfast to take place at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA on Tuesday, April 18, 2006, from 8:00 AM to 10 AM.

The theme for this meeting is The World is Flat, based on Thomas L. Friedman’s excellent book. We will discuss how Friedman’s ten flatteners can be put to use by software vendors today, using Intalio and a couple other start-ups as reference cases. This event is sponsored by Lohika — our offshore development partner — and will feature their CTO, Mark Phillips, who will share his experience working with small and large software companies that successfully offshored part of their software engineering process to Western Ukraine.

If you work for a software company and want to learn about hybrid business models that blend open source and commercial software, understand the benefits of offshore development beyond simple cost reduction, become more familiar with our Demand Driven Development process, get a preview demo of the upcoming Intalio|BPMS 4.1, or simply eat the best croissants you can get in the Bay Area, please register here and join us to this free breakfast.

And because I would fail my duty as Chief Office 2.0 Evangelist if I did not inject some neat online service into the mix, our registration form was developed with the ultra cool Wufoo form editor. I might very well be the first production user for this service, which still is under heavy development as I am writing these lines, and the good folks at Infinity Box literally worked around the clock from Sunday night to Wednesday morning to give me access to a preview release. I cannot say how much I appreciate the effort, and am eagerly waiting for the public release. In the meantime, all I can tell you is that Wufoo rocks and that I have added a new project to my Office 2.0 Mashup List that consists in integrating Wufoo with Salesforce.com. If that sounds like fun to you, come give us a hand in developing one of these mahsups.

Flattener #1: 11/9/89
When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up
The fall of the Berlin Wall made the world an open playing field. Today, Intalio does most of its business in North America and Western Europe, but we’re getting more and more demands from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, Asia, and Australia. The Wall has been down for more than sixteen years, but as an American company, we still cannot do business with Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Flattener #2: 8/9/95
When Netscape Went Public
The Internet is the infrastructure that made BPM possible. It gave us web services and a Service Oriented Architecture that allows processes to be integrated with existing systems at a fraction of the cost of traditional EAI approaches. It provided the communication vehicle for the Open Source movement to really catch on and dramatically lower the cost of commodity software components. Finally, it gave us the vehicle through which we can market and sell our software, using participative communication tools such as this blog, and circumventing the physical packaging of software, thereby allowing us to conduct our business in a purely electronic way.

Flattener #3: Work Flow Software
Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application
Standards such as BPMN and BPEL are enabling interoperability across Business Process Management Systems in a way that early workflow pioneers could only dream of. Public APIs for popular online services are turning the BPMS into a mean and lean mashup machine, paving the way for truly componentized IT architectures where system architects simply assemble existing components, and software code writing is reserved for the most arcane applications.

Flattener #4: Open-Sourcing
Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities
More than 80% of the code developed by Intalio is Open Source and in the process of being donated to the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation. This code forms only 20% of the software we ship to our customers, the remaining 80% being borrowed from existing Open Source projects. This participative model is pushed a step further with the introduction of a Demand Driven Development model, whereby smaller communities of users participate in the funding of specific product features, which are in turn donated back to the Open Source community. This creates an accelerating factor that turns traditional closed-source development into a massive competitive disadvantage.

Flattener #5: Outsourcing
Y2K
Most functions that are not core to the business are outsourced. This includes facility management, human resources management, public relations, advertising, finances, legal, software development, quality assurance and testing, consulting, and customer support. The only functions that are kept in house are the ones that are critical to the development and distribution of a complex software tool: architecture design and customer training. Most of the engineering team that remains on our payroll is composed of highly talented architects, while we use our training group as the most technically-aware pre-sales organization.

Flattener #6: Offshoring
Running with Gazelles, Eating with Lions
Most of our software engineering is done out of Western Ukraine, where we find extremely talented developers at a rate similar to what we would pay in India, but with a yearly turnover of less than one percent. Our software quality assurance and testing is done out of Bangalore, India, where we are also setting up a support infrastructure that will be available from 9 AM GMT-1 (Paris) to 6 PM PST (Tijuana, CA). We are also working on the development of telesales organizations to be based in India and Ireland.

Flattener #7: Supply-Chaining
Eating Sushi in Arkansas
Several customers have asked us for the packaging of our BPM software into a hardware appliance. The question is not whether we will do it or not, but when. Because we want to remain a software company and do not want to manage an inventory of expensive hardware products, we’ve been discussing with supply-chain partners that can take the most recent version of our software, install it on hardware appliances, and get it shipped to customers in less than 48 hours, anywhere in the known world.

Flattener #8: Insourcing
What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts Are Really Doing
Our decision to release our first BPM appliance will be driven by a single metric: volume. We will pull the trigger as soon as customer demand will be sufficient enough to allow us to work with in-sourcing partners such as DHL or UPS in order to provide technical support for the hardware part of our solution.

Flattener #9: In-forming
Google, Yahoo!, MSN Web Search
Intalio’s marketing budget is pretty low. In fact, for the time being, it does not even exist, and this blog is the only marketing investment we’ve made over the past three months. We do not go to tradeshows, unless we’re invited to speak there and travel expenses are paid by the event’s organizers. We do not advertise in any trade magazine, and instead work hard to get the BPM 2.0 section of this blog to be syndicated by online publications such as BPMG, BPM Institute, and BPTrends. Moving forward, the only marketing expense we are planning to make will be for Google Adwords, but we will do it in such a way that it directly pays for itself, by tracking the conversion of paid-for clicks into paying customers for our training services, using Google Analytics in combination with Salesforce.com.

Flattener #10: The Steroids
Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual
Our biggest productivity enhancer is called Office 2.0. All our customer information is managed by Salesforce.com, our software documentation is developed through Confluence, an enterprise Wiki platform, and our internal communication is conducted through blogs, email and Skype.

Looking at it from that angle, the world seems pretty flat indeed…

Many thanks to Alex for recommending Thomas L. Friedman’s great book.

BPM will go mainstream. Integrated BPM solutions will be made available for free and will include everything you need to design, deploy, execute, monitor and optimize business processes. They will be supported by commercial vendors, dramatically raise the bar for competitors and radically lower barriers to adoption for all users.

Consolidation will intensify. Very few pure play BPM vendors will remain standing. Those that do will go vertical by selling specific business applications and getting their core BPM capabilities from Open Source projects or established vendors such as BEA, IBM and Oracle.

All major System Integrators will have BPM practices. The most innovative will be found in India and will blend BPM with BPO (Business Process Outsourcing). Most will standardize on standard methodologies such as BPMN. A few will adopt specific products at a corporate level.

The Apache Software Foundation will acquire a BPEL server, or two. Both the Geronimo project and the Web Services project will add a BPEL server to their respective stacks. One will become the most widely used BPEL implementation in the industry, much as Apache’s HTTP server is the most widely used web server on the Internet today. Competition from JBoss will fail to materialize for lack of focus on a user base that cannot write Java code.

BPMN will be extended to support Human Interactions Management. The BPM community will realize that having two separate notations, one for web service orchestration and the other for human workflow, defeats the whole purpose of BPM. One unified notation will emerge. This notation will be called BPMN and will incorporate most of the concepts found in HIM.

BPEL 2.0 will become the de-facto standard for BPM. All BPEL vs. BPML discussions will be put to rest. Support for distributed transactions will be made available, finally. A formal BPEL4People specification will be released and many proprietary extensions will emerge. Standardization efforts will keep most of us busy for very many years to come.

A first set of standards for BAM will emerge. IBM will lead work, with the participation of some Business Intelligence vendors. First implementations will be available before the end of the year.

All ESB offerings will support BPEL. Most will embed a lightweight, non-persistent implementation, coupled with a rule engine such as Corticon or Drools and will be used for advanced message routing and complex event processing. Some will embed a more advanced BPEL engine that supports persistence and distributed transactions.

BPM as a Service will not materialize. Lack of customer demand, inappropriate user interfaces and security concerns will prevent the Software-as-a-Service model to become successful with BPM. Only workflow automation services sold to specific vertical industries such as banking and insurance might have some limited traction. The situation will change only when Office 2.0 models establish themselves in the corporate IT world, toward the end of the decade.

The first BPM appliance will be released. It will accelerate adoption by simplifying purchasing and installation. It will be available in two forms, as a desktop appliance for development and as a data-center rack for production.

The first grid-enabled BPEL engine will be released. It will be deployed on thousand of servers for CPU-intensive tasks. Similar engines will be ported to Network Attached Processing solutions such as the Azul Compute Appliance.

This is it for now. Let’s reconnect on December 31, 2006 to check which of these inferences actually materialized. Until then, happy BPM to all!

Our primary goal with offshore had been to reduce costs, but cheaper does not necessarily mean better if you cannot capitalize on a team that remains together over a long-enough period of time. At least this is my personal experience with software engineering. In that game, your most valuable assets walk through the door at the end of the day, and this is true offshore as much as it is onshore. This post tells the story of what changed my mind about offshore, and how we are doing it today in a very successful manner.

In the Summer of 2005, I had long forgotten about my dreams of cost-cutting through offshoring, when an old friend of mine called and told me about his new job as CEO of an offshore development company based in Ukraine but headquartered in San Mateo, CA. The company had about 250 software engineers in the Western part of Ukraine and was offering software development and QA services to independent software vendors. He gave me a pretty convincing pitch, and after a thorough due diligence, we decided to give it a shot, starting with a team of 7 back in September 2005.

Four months later, I can say that I have been blown away by the results. It took our offshoring partner less than 3 weeks to get the team up and running, and they delivered a first working product two months later. We initially started with one project — a new management console for our process server, then added a second one — a brand new human workflow suite, and are in the process of starting two other projects. We now have 10 people working for us in Ukraine and expect the team to grow to about 20 people by the end of Q2 this year.

What makes it all work for us is that instead of having to provide detailed technical specifications to the offshore team, we just give them a set of marketing requirements and high-level architecture guidelines, such as using a particular J2EE API or adhering to a defined set of coding standards. The offshore team then goes on to designing the specification, developing the code, doing the testing, and writing the documentation. And because our partner accepted to adopt some of our standard development tools such as Jira and Confluence, we are capable of monitoring their progress in real-time, without changing our own development processes. We know each of their developers by name, had beer with all of them last time we went to Ukraine, and I can call their Bay Area based CEO if I have anything to talk about.

Such an organization is made possible for two main reasons: first, a large part of our offshore staff has a Ph.D. education, which grants them the level of creativity that is required for handling the software development process end-to-end, from specification to implementation and testing; second, with an employee turnover of less than 1% a year, they are capable of investing up to six months of training with each new employee, and up to a day a week of English classes. As you guessed, English speaking is not as good as with Indian firms, but written English comes pretty close, therefore most of our communication is done in a written form, either via email or Confluence, our enterprise Wiki. As a side benefit, we get an audit trail of all communications, something we would not get with conference calls.

From a pricing standpoint, Ukraine is pretty much on par with India now. Once you’ve added the cost of an offshore project manager, you get a ratio of roughly 2 to 2.5 developers offshore for the cost of one developer onshore. An other benefit is that we do not have to pay for a full-time onshore program manager. Because our offshore partner handles the entire product development lifecycle, we could start with a part-time onshore program manager working for us 20 hours a week, then reduced it to about 10 hours a week. Today, most of our communication with the offshore development team is handled directly by our Director of Product Development, and we expect that we won’t need any onshore help by the end of the quarter. That being said, other companies working with our partner feel much more comfortable doing all their work through an onshore program manager, and this is fine too. Pick the process that works best for you and make it evolve over time in order to get the best possible results out of it.

There is a lot more I could tell you about this experience, and I am learning new lessons every day, so if you want to know more about it, feel free to contact me directly and I will be glad to make a direct introduction to the CEO of our offshoring partner. Part of our success depends on their ability to maintain and grow a best-in-class team of software engineers, and nothing excites these guys more than a challenging project, so if you have one you ever thought about taking offshore, give it a shot!

Everybody does it, so here are my inferences for ‘06:

BPMS will go mainstream
With BPEL gaining support for distributed transactions and human workflow while BPMN is receiving the blessing of the OMG, industry standards are making the BPMS ready for mainstream adoption. Just in time for Gartner to release the first BPMS magic quadrant in Q1 ‘06. Hint: keep an eye on Intalio, which is about to change the economics of the game (disclaimer: I work for them).

Industry consolidation will accelerate
Last year saw the enterprise application market consolidate around two major players, Oracle and SAP. This year should see similar consolidation at the middleware level, while mid-tier application vendors will find it increasingly difficult to compete with Oracle and SAP on one end and Microsoft on the other. Question: when — and it’s a when, not an if — will IBM come back to the enterprise application game? Software as a service might be a good way of doing it without alienating much-needed partners.

Office 2.0 will become a reality
Learning from the failed experiment of office.com in 1999, a new breed of Web 2.0-branded application service providers have released AJAX powered prototypes of online office productivity suites last year. I call it Office 2.0 and expect this year’s prototypes to mature to the point where they actually become usable. Pioneers will give way to early adopters and very interesting things should ensue. Google, but even more so Yahoo!, should make several low-profile acquisitions in the space. Microsoft: get ready for some healthy competition! Question: why is Google interested at all by a fat client office productivity suite? This totally escapes me.

Software off-shoring will go further West
Sky-high employee turnover in India makes it impossible to capitalize on past investments, while intelectual property issues in China make off-shoring of core software developments a very risky proposition. Eastern Europe, with costs that are getting close to India’s, single-digit yearly employee turnover, great talent pools and cultural proximity makes for a great alternative. Hint: Western Ukraine is a good place to start with today.

Open Source business models will prove themselves
Last year saw new open source players such as SugarCRM come out of nowhere and shake the foundations of established enterprise software markets. In the new year, expect open source vendors to emerge in most market segments and to successfully establish hybrid business models that blend open source code and commercial software. Hint: when going the Open Source way, don’t forget to check the IP integrity of your software with tools such as Palamida.

All software will go the service way
Value Added Network: expired. Application Service Provider: tired. Software as a Service: wired. Names might change, but concepts remain the same, and this is a winning one. With Salesforce.com’s successful IPO last year, the investment community is looking at enterprise software again. With Open Source, this might very well be the only way to start a new venture today. Everything that does not require massive computing power on the client side — CAD, video editing and gaming are obvious exceptions — will go online. The benefits are just too many for it not to happen. Question: how will we deal with security concerns without having to package the service into an appliance?

SOA will get more complex
With the multiplication of standards for SOA and the layering of new technologies on top of an already thick stack, some are starting to suggest the development of a WS-Complexity specification. For SOA to succeed, we need to ensure that it remains simpler than past efforts at establishing distributed computing architectures. We might have to wait for 2007 to see the release of WS-Simplicity. Advice: look for Open Source implementations of an Enterprise Service Bus, they are a good insurance policy against changing technologies.

Corporations will discover the beauty of social
LinkedIn has proven to be the most efficient recruiting tool around. Wikipedia has passed ahead the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica and vendors such as Socialtext are bringing wiki to the enterprise. Corporate blogging is gaining momentum. In 2006, employees will discover new ways of making friends and their employers will encourage it. When capital meets social, interesting things happen. Question: who will come first with aggregation tools for linking multiple social networking sites together?

Standards for online services will emerge
Last year, RSS has proven to be a simple yet effective way of syndicating content. More is needed to enable the convergence of online services into a unified platform. This year, look for many more initiatives like Structured Blogging to “untangle the web” and connect the pieces together. Tip: if you cannot wait, give SuprGlu a try.

With this category, we will share direct experiences, outline trends and feature best-in-class offshore providers. Offshoring brings distant shores closer to each other, and that in a by itself should be considered a good thing.

IT|Redux identifies three major trends that are in play today and are expected to remain so over the coming years: Reduction, Interconnection and Delegation. This weblog is organized into categories and sub-categories that mirror this classification, following the Minto Pyramid Principle:

Reduction relates to the need for simplification of the IT world. IT systems have become to complex and are reaching a point of diminishing returns. This theme will address topics such as methods of abstraction, processes of consolidation, and efforts of standardization.

Interconnection refers to the adoption of network concepts as focal points for the development of new IT strategies. This theme will cover areas such as the emergence of a new office productivity suite, here called Office 2.0, the development of a service oriented architecture, and the need for sophisticated forms of social networking.

Delegation encompasses the various approaches leveraged by IT organizations to maximize the value that can be delivered by existing assets and reduced budgets. This theme will focus on strategies such as software as a service, offshoring, and open source.