These businesses are born out of the Internet. They have 50 employees or less, spread across 5 locations or more. They sell technologies and services to either businesses or consumers, over the Internet, or through indirect distribution channels. Even though they have very few employees, every single one counts, and keeping them happy is one of the CEO’s top priorities.

A good example for such a company would be Caucho Technology, developer of the Resin application server, which last month surpassed both JBoss and Tomcat according to Netcraft. Caucho has 7,500 corporate customers around the world, served by no more than 10 employees. The CEO lives in San Diego, CA, the CTO and a couple of engineers live in San Francisco, CA, and one of their senior developers currently lives in Tonton, ON, but is about to move to Vancouver, BC.

In order to get their job done, these guys need three things: a place to work outside of their homes so that they can focus, places to meet once a week for those who live in the same area, and very good communication tools to stay in sync. What they do not need is the hassle of setting all this up, especially if it means doing it across 4 or 5 locations, in 3 or 4 countries. Here comes Monolab|Workspace, the concept for which the Monolab|Incubator is a real-life experiment.

The idea for Monolab|Workspace is to develop a network of shared office spaces around the world. Unlike Regus and their 900 offices located in corporate areas, we’re looking at 25 to 50 locations only, strategically located in trendy neighborhoods. Think Embarcadero Center vs. Potrero Hill in San Francisco, CA, Shinjuku vs. Daikanyama in Tokyo, or La Défense vs. Le Maris in Paris.

Instead of private offices, we want open spaces, because our target users prefer email and IM to phone conversations. And when they really want to talk to someone, they either do it in person while sipping an espresso, or with the best videoconferencing system money can buy. And besides, nobody likes to sit in a box all day…

The main concept is to give very small businesses access to an infrastructure that only large companies can afford. For example, a good videoconferencing system costs north of $10,000, and a company of 10 people scattered across 5 locations just cannot justify spending the equivalent of a full year salary for it. But if you can spread the cost across 50 or 100 users, it all starts to make sense. The same is true for a nice meeting room that could sit a dozen people and could be used for sales presentations or training sessions. If you’re going to use it only once a week, how do you justify spending $5,000 to $10,000 on chairs alone? Sharing is the answer.

Then comes the question of locations. The audience we’re addressing with our concept is rather young, free spirited, and cosmopolitan. They could make a lot of money working for large corporations, but they would rather preserve their independence and develop their own ideas. As a result, they cherish smaller offices, smart architecture, green surroundings, and the proximity of good restaurants. They like mingling with creative types, visiting art galleries, or getting a drink with friends after a long day at work. For all these reasons, our workspaces will be located in historical downtown areas rather than corporate office complexes, and our spaces will look nothing like The Office.

There is also a notion of aesthetics, elegance, or style. This might be more a matter of personal taste rather than business rationality, but we like good design, quality materials, and smart user interfaces. At the risk of being dubbed as elitists, we’d rather spend more money on good equipment and furniture that make you feel good about your workplace, and less on staff whose job can be largely automated. As a result, you can expect our workspaces to be quite amazing, not in a luxurious way, but in the sense that no amount of efforts will be spared in our inhibited attempt to make them as effective and inspiring as possible.

Another aspect of the concept is locality and mobility. You can think of it in the context of the Global Village. Our users are bedouins who travel from place to place for a living, but do not want to lose the concept of Home, and want to engage with their destinations to the fullest. If this sounds a bit too abstract, just remember the feeling of loneliness you got the last time you traveled around the world for business, and found yourself in a normalized hotel room that looked exactly the same as the ones you stayed at in five other locations, down to the bar of soap in the bathroom. For a split second, you could not even remember where you were. Was it Sydney in Australia? Or maybe Austin, TX? And of all of sudden, you started questioning why you did all this traveling to begin with. We think life is too short for this.

Our belief is that business traveling should be leveraged as a way to discover the world and engage with local cultures. Unfortunately, time constraints make it extremely difficult, and the more we travel, the less we know how to engage. If you’re like me, you’ve discovered that shortening your trips help reduce jet lag. In fact, making your trips shorter than 3 days at a time can remove jet lag altogether. Earlier this week, I was in Tokyo for 3 days. A week before, I went to Australia for 19 hours. And next week, I will go to Singapore and Thailand (for business), for just a day and a half. Definitely extreme, yet highly effective.

If your traveling schedule is anything like mine, your main challenge is about optimization of time spent on the ground. Which is another reason why we want our workspaces to be located in culturally rich neighborhoods, in places where you will find a great restaurant serving local food, in areas where you will meet real people who look nothing like you, but might share your vision of the Global Village. Essentially, Home away from Home, for people who have a slightly expanded view of Home.

We’re doing two things to fulfill this vision: First, our buildings will be typical of the places where they are located. In San Francisco, CA, we will look for a converted warehouse. In Paris, an old atelier, or a vintage garage maybe. In Japan, a traditional house, or an old temple. Second, 20% of our real estate will be used for bedrooms. That’s right, bedrooms. The idea is to flip the concept of hotel business center. Instead of having a cramped business center located in a large hotel, we want a small yet comfortable hotel located in a spacious business center. In each location, we will build two or three bedrooms, using furniture found in places like Qbic Hotels or Yotel. These bedrooms will be reserved to members only, and will be priced at $99/night, just enough to amortize the furniture and pay for top-quality cleaning services.

With that in mind, our concept is taking a whole new dimension. For $1,500 a month, you essentially join a club that gives you access to a fantastic workplace, anywhere around the world, or at least in the top 25 to 50 destinations you might find yourself doing business in. You also get access to conveniently located hotel facilities that will reduce the time you spend in taxicabs. And because all the facilities will use the exact equipment, you won’t have to read the manual next time you’ll want to print, sign, and fax this all important contract from halfway across the globe.

Of course, with such a model, we’re faced with a pretty challenging catch 22 problem: the value of our network is directly proportional to the squared number of locations, and we’re starting with just one (Palo Alto, CA). Nevertheless, we strongly believe in the vision, and have faith that we will find like-minded people along the way who will help us turn it into reality. So if that sounds like fun, here are the first 12 locations we have selected. If you live there and think you could take advantage of a local workspace, or would like to help us out, just drop us a line.

And if you still don’t get it, read Monocle!

OpenSAM (Open Simple AJAX Mashup) is an open ecosystem of online office applications created by EditGrid, iNetOffice, Preezo, and ShareMethods. This consortium of software-as-a-service (SaaS) application vendors is developing a set of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming recommendations that allow multiple online applications to interoperate. OpenSAM enables the Internet as a platform for “plug and play” office productivity suites tailored for specific business needs. OpenSAM was initially announced and demonstrated via a multi-way mash-up and proof-of-concept at the first Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, CA in October 2006. Commercial availability was unveiled at the Software 2007 Conference in San Jose, CA in May 2007.

Leading online application vendors Caspio, EchoSign, EditGrid, iNetOffice, Joyent, Persony, Preezo, ShareMethods, and Sheetster are initial members of OpenSAM. The companies are working together to support OpenSAM so that systems integrators and end users can create their own online suites of integrated applications to improve productivity, better serve customers and users, solve business problems rapidly, and avoid vendor lock-in.

OpenSAM was created to address a set of user and application provider limitations for Office 2.0 services including but not limited to the fact that: (1) users log into each Office 2.0 application separately; (2) users download and upload documents to and from each Office 2.0 application separately; and (3) users are unable to copy and paste content across Office 2.0 applications, or if they can do so, there is often a loss of fidelity and appearance. These limitations inhibit a more widespread use and utility of Office 2.0 applications. And so OpenSAM combines open standards and techniques respectively for single sign-on, document sharing, and cut & paste to solve these important end-user and application provider challenges. The OpenSAM recommendations make use of proven standards, are easy to adopt, and support some of the most important user scenarios.

To create a suite of OpenSAM-based applications, a user selects a home application that includes a repository for file storage such as ShareMethods, a document-management application. The user can then select any other productivity applications such as iNetWord from iNetOffice for word processing, EditGrid for spreadsheets, Preezo for presentations, and other applications as needed. Productivity applications can be launched from home applications, and may be replaced, upgraded, or added at any time. Documents are stored in common file formats, so there is no concern about proprietary data formats in the event that a user wants to switch applications. OpenSAM is targeting the Internet as a platform for an application ecosystem that any vendor can join where users can create and modify their own customized application suites, with no vendor lock-in; gone are the days of single-vendor monolithic application suites that try to be all things to all people…

OpenSAM benefits from an innovation called the “Internet File System”, or IFS, which enables an open-standards document repository where multiple applications can read or write documents to a common location, even if each application was developed independently by different vendors. This type of “building block” approach is completely new for the online office space, and provides significant flexibility to interconnect services from different companies into a single end-user solution.

An example of OpenSAM at work is ShareOffice, the first commercially available online office based on open standards that was launched in May 2007. ShareOffice combines an online office based on open standards with enterprise document management on-demand bringing major product categories together into an Office 2.0 application for the first time. With ShareOffice, sales teams can easily create, edit, and share documents and spreadsheets online, and can automatically generate common sales documents such as proposals, contracts, quotes, and letters in a single browser interface using customer data from Salesforce.com. Marketers are likewise able to easily and quickly create, manage, and share marketing documents online, such as newsletters, news releases, and product brochures.

Membership in OpenSAM is open to any SaaS vendor that wants to participate by making its applications able to integrate and share data using the OpenSAM recommendations. OpenSAM based applications can run within stand-alone integrated suites, or within Salesforce.com’s AppExchange ecosystem of online applications integrated with Salesforce.com. OpenSAM applications can all write to the same user-defined storage repository for easy file management. OpenSAM invites any SaaS application vendor to participate in creating an open ecosystem of online applications that gives users the power to create and modify their own solutions, and gives vendors of any size a wider audience and broader application potential for their solutions. For more information, visit www.opensam.org.

The Office 2.0 Conference 2007 will have a special focus on OpenSAM, including a plenary session, detailed breakout sessions, live demonstrations from multiple OpenSAM members EditGrid, iNetOffice, Preezo, and ShareMethods, and more…

This article was contributed by Eric Hoffert, CEO of ShareMethods.
]]> http://itredux.com/2007/07/26/opensam-is-promising/feed/ 1 http://itredux.com/2007/04/04/get-your-bpmn-schema-today/ http://itredux.com/2007/04/04/get-your-bpmn-schema-today/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2007 02:46:47 +0000 Ismael Ghalimi http://itredux.com/blog/2007/04/04/get-your-bpmn-schema-today/ article published by Intelligent Enterprise, my friend Bruce Silver laments that BPDM is essentially useless, and that the BPM industry badly needs an XML schema for BPMN. I could not agree more with him, and I am happy to report that Intalio recently donated such a schema to the Eclipse Foundation, complemented by a ridiculously-good-looking object model for it. Not only did we give the schema away for free, but we also donated a complete implementation for it. [Continue...]]]> In a recent article published by Intelligent Enterprise, my friend Bruce Silver laments that BPDM is essentially useless, and that the BPM industry badly needs an XML schema for BPMN. I could not agree more with him, and I am happy to report that Intalio recently donated such a schema to the Eclipse Foundation, complemented by a ridiculously-good-looking object model for it. Not only did we give the schema away for free, but we also donated a complete implementation for it.

BPDM, currently developed by the OMG, is presented by its promoters as a universal interchange format for business processes. In reality, it’s an utterly confusing metamodel that brings very little to the table, and is used by legacy workflow vendors as a way to fight against the upcoming dominance of the BPMN+BPEL standard combo. Workflow vendors like nothing more than to protect their respective little niches, and have done a phenomenal job over the past fifteen years of ensuring that no useful standard would ever be developed in the space.

Over time, smarter vendors grew tired of playing such games, and developed BPMN and BPEL. Unfortunately, a semantic gap exists between the two, and BPEL cannot be used as an interchange format for processes modeled in BPMN. Instead, an XML schema for BPMN is needed, and this is what Intalio has made available through the STP Project managed by the Eclipse Foundation.

This schema is focused on the semantics of process models, rather than the presentation of process diagrams. For the later, extensions can be developed by vendors, and the need to standardize them is not entirely clear. An interchange format for BPMN processes should focus on the process semantics, and this is what this schema does, in a very straightforward, unambiguous manner.

As anything developed by the Eclipse Foundation, this schema is “open-source”, in the sense that anyone can use it for free, as is or in a modified version. But because a schema is not of much use to most people, we also made sure to provide a complete implementation for it, in the form of a collection of plug-ins for the Eclipse development environment. The STP BPMN Modeler developed by Intalio is a complete implementation of the BPMN standard, built using Eclipse’s latest technologies, including an EMF object model bound to a graphical notation via the GMF project.

For business analysts, this modeler supports the development of standard BPMN process models. For developers, it allows the creation of BPMN diagrams, the generation of org.eclipse.stp.bpmn EMF objects that can be traversed, annotated, and transformed to generate BPEL or other process execution code, and the extension of the editor to support other application-specific usage.

So here we are — as of today, you have no excuses for not sharing your BPMN models.

“It’s always more fun to share with everyone.”

If you take a very good Business Process Management System (BPMS) and a very good Content Management System (CMS), I could think of at least three ways to get 1 + 1 equal more than 2. Two take a process centric approach, while the third one takes a document centric one.

First, you can use the CMS to manage the lifecycle of documents that are attached to process instances. Say you’re building a procurement process, and you need to capture the multiple revisions that will be made by members of your procurement team to a contract that was drafted by your supplier. You could try to model such a process in BPMN, but it would be cumbersome and overkill. Instead, you’ll be much better off using a separate CMS to manage your contract, let people interact through the CMS when they need to create revisions to the document or comment on it, capture these orthogonal interactions through the Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) component of your BPMS, and only store a reference to the document within the process instance that is managed by the BPMS. This is what Intalio is doing with Alfresco for a couple of customers, one of them being the government of a country which GDP puts it in the top 15 worldwide. For this first scenario, there is no industry standard I could think of, especially if you want to cover integration with both the process engine and the monitoring component. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the former is fairly trivial, and there is no standard for BAM anyway, so the problem is not specific to this BPM+ECM discussion.

Second, you can use the CMS to manage all the artifacts related to a process model, instead of using a source control system such as CVS or PVCS. There, you’ll find two schools of thought that rarely agree with each others. Business-minded people view process models as documents rather than pieces of code, while technical-oriented folks have the reverse outlook on them. Both approaches have their respective merits, and I won’t try to list them out now. Instead, I will focus on the first category of users. For these, all artifacts related to a process model, including business requirements documents, spreadsheets, process diagrams, services definitions, user interface mockups, and the like, should be managed by a full fledged CMS. Even better, this CMS should be coupled to a blog and a wiki that would allow discussions to be carried on, in a semi-structured manner, both at development time and at runtime, and you’re trying to optimize some of its parameters. Again, Intalio is using Alfresco to come up with such an architecture, working for another set of customers. For this second scenario, I must believe that the good old WebDAV standard, or the slightly more powerful but less platform-neutral JSR-170, are pretty close to what you would want.

Third, you can use the BPMS to manage some advanced review and approval processes for documents that are managed by a CMS. Such an option makes sense when your processes become too complex, or too volatile, or both, to be hard coded within the CMS, or you want users of the CMS to be able to modify them themselves, without having to learn complex APIs. In this case, what you’re looking for is an embeddable workflow solution that you could integrate within your CMS. For this purpose, you would not need the power and complexity of a full fledged BPMS, but rather take some of its pieces: a simplified version of a process design tool that would use pre-packaged services only, a streamlined BPEL process execution engine that would provide only one connector — the one for the CMS native API, and some primitive management APIs that you could invoke directly from the CMSs’ management console. This is exactly what a couple of CMS vendors are doing today, either starting from scratch, or replacing alternative workflow solutions that do not natively support BPEL, nor provide the right development tool that could be used by pure business analysts. For this second scenario, the only standard I can think of is Wf-XML from the WfMC. It would not give you everything you need, but it would be a good starting point.

So here we are, BPM and ECM intersect in at least three distinct ways, and each of them has a set of business cases that would make it a good thing to have. You should expect Intalio to support all three in some fashion, sometime this year, and you’re more than welcome to fund one of our Demand Driven Development projects if you’d like it sooner, or according to your set of specific requirements. We already have three customers doing exactly that. And if you can think of additional ways of extending the intersection area across BPM and ECM, feel free to post your thoughts on this forum.

On this, I wish you all a very good week end. See you Monday!

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!

First, I would like to understand how SAP NetWeaver will really support BPMN and BPEL. And I would like to know whether SAP is afraid that Oracle could eventually acquire IDS Scheer, following the recent announcement of a partnership between the two companies. IDS Scheer ARIS is a key component of NetWeaver’s BPM offering, and losing it to Oracle would certainly not be a good thing for SAP and its customers.

Second, I would like to see how SAP plans to integrate some Office 2.0 technologies within its offering. As said before, Duet is nice but duos are better. Zoho has been invited to participate in the Web 2.0 in the Enterprise think-tank session organized by SAP, and I am very curious to learn more about SAP’s plan in this area, especially following Edwin’s comments to this post.

Third, I would like to better understand SAP’s strategy with respect to SOA, and especially how it defers from Oracle’s, as claimed in this very interesting article published by TheServerSide, and shared with me by Assaf Arkin.

If you have any other SAP-related questions, feel free to send me an email, and I will do my best to get answers from the right people. In the meantime, here is what I wrote during SAPPHIRE:

Many thanks again to SAP for being so supportive of the blogging community. And congratulations to Jeff Nolan for having secured support for a second event. This definitely proves that the first one was successful, and not one of these blue birds that you see only once in your lifetime.

Question to IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce.com: when will you jump on board?

When a schmuck like myself makes such a prediction, nobody really pays attention, and it might be better that way. But Richard Monson-Haefel is no schmuck. In fact, in the world of J2EE, he is as much a mensch as anyone else. And when someone of his caliber goes on the way he did, it gets noticed.

I worked with Richard six years ago when Intalio contracted him and David Blevins to develop our Open Source EJB container, called OpenEJB. The code he and his team wrote went on to become the foundation for Apache Geronimo, the only serious competitor to JBoss. Through this experience, I developed a great deal of respect for Richard’s technical wizardry and pragmatic judgement, which is why I got interested by his recent positions.

Without getting back into the core of the debate — others are more qualified than I am for that — I must agree with Richard’s main point that J2EE as a platform has reached a level of complexity that makes it virtually unusable for even the most sophisticated Java developers. And for the rest of us, VB guys, PHP folks, or HTML crafters, J2EE is so arcane that we only wish we will never have to deal with.

That is not to say that J2EE won’t be used anymore — in fact most of Intalio|BPMS is built on top of the J2EE platform, but the primary developer using it will work for software vendors rather than be part of an IT staff. J2EE will be everywhere, but very few people will touch it directly, much like very few people actually write assembly code today.

For simple things, simpler frameworks such as Ruby on Rails will be used. And for the more complex tasks, developers will turn to bottoms-up or middle-out BPM solutions, using a BPEL editor or a BPMN designer to model fully executable processes in a Zero Code manner.

J2EE is dead! Long live J2EE!

“We are 100% committed to the XForms standard. We are implementing new features of the upcoming XForms 1.1 and we are actively contributing to the development of the specification as members of the XForms working group.

I have to say that I am particularly happy with the new additions in XForms 1.1. The essence of these improvements is well summarized in the XForms 1.1 abstract: “address the immediate needs of the forms community”. Improvements in XForms 1.1 are often simple, but add a lot of power to XForms, and ultimately make the job of the form author even easier.

In addition to supporting features from XForms 1.1, there is also more coming up in PresentationServer, our AJAX-based XForms server. For instance, we’ll have very soon a number of cool new AJAX widgets, including an auto-complete field (think Google Suggests), a menu, and a tree. All these widgets are implemented using a special appearance on an existing XForms control. So as a form author, there is nothing new to learn to use these new widgets, and most importantly, no JavaScript programming is needed.

We have already implemented some of the items mentioned in John Boyer’s post:

DELETE method
We do support the DELETE method and we use it today in a number of applications to interact with the eXist XML database directly from XForms using the eXist REST API.

Dynamic submission URL
We support this using with “attribute value templates”, as in XSLT.

Detailed information about an XForms submission error
With XForms 1.0, you know when a submission fails, but you don’t have detailed information on why it failed. For instance, assume you are POSTing an XQuery with XForms to your eXist database. If everything works well, you will get the result of your XQuery back. But if the query fails, for instance because the XQuery is invalid, you would like to know how to access the error returned by eXist to give detailed feedback to the end-user. This will be possible with XForms 1.1, and our customers have requested it, so we’ll be implementing this soon.

If only one more feature of XForms 1.1 had to be mentioned, it would be the conditional execution of actions, which we also have recently implemented in our XForms engine. It goes without saying that adding an “IF” construct is not a minor feature. Now the form author can implement more business logic in a declarative way directly within XForms.”

Now, there are a couple of things that make Orbeon’s PresentationServer a good alternative. First, at $25,000 a CPU, IBM Workplace is not exactly cheap. PresentationServer is free. Second, Intalio|BPMS 4.1 now comes with a WYSIWYG XForms editor running in Eclipse, which makes it a lot easier to develop complex forms than having to write the code by hand.

Even better, the upcoming 4.2 release scheduled for early July is adding support for magnetic grids and process-driven pageflows, while the 4.3 release that should become available in September or Ortober this year will add support for the graphical definition of complex event handlers. The later might even be part of a project we will manage through our Demand Driven Development program.

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!

The problem I was trying to solve was the following: how could I display on my webblog a list of bookmarks managed by Simpy without having to write any PHP code? The problem was easily solved when I was using del.icio.us, which offers a service called Linkrolls. All you have to do is specify the tag for which you want a list of bookmarks to be displayed and Linkrolls gives you a snipet of JavaScript code that you just copy and paste into the HTML code of your weblog. Unfortunately, Simpy does not support this feature yet, so I had to look further.

I got the answer from Jonathan Aquino, the guy who wrote the excellent YubNub, which is best described as a command line for the web and which I have included into my Office 2.0 setup. Jonathan pointed me to Peter Cooper’s FeedDigest, which is one of the most advanced feed processing services currently available. Here is how it works: first, I built a list of bookmarks using Simpy. Second, I copied the URL for the corresponding RSS feed into FeedDigest. Third, I configured the digest in FeedDiggest to order items by title, show only live items, and specify the appropriate HTML template using <ul> and <li> tags. Fourth, I got FeedDigest to generate a snipet of JavaScript code that I copied into my WordPress template. Voila! The following list of Top Office 2.0 Posts was generated that way:

To summarize, three services have been cascaded with each other in order to achieve this result: Simpy for generating the RSS feed of bookmarks, FeedDigest for processing the feed and generating the Javascript code to be used, and WordPress for displaying the information. The standardization of JavaScript and RSS is what makes this interoperability possible, and even though this example is rather trivial, it demonstrates that multiple services can be used in combination in order to achieve results that a single service cannot offer.

Last comment on FeedDigest: because FeedDigest actually processes the RSS feed, it allows me to do things that del.icio.us’ Linkrolls could not, such as reordering feed items or aggregating multiple feeds together. The downside is that it creates a single point of failure between the feed’s producer (Simpy) and the feed consumer (WordPress), but the value it adds to the chain seems to be worth it. I will meet with Peter Cooper later next month and suggest a couple of enhancements to his service. If you have some creative ideas yourself, feel free to send them my way.

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.

The 2006 BPMS Report, available for free on BPMInstitute.org, effectively summarizes the current state of BPMS technology by walking through 7 offerings in depth — IBM, Fuego, Savvion, Pegasystems, Global 360, Adobe, and Vitria — and highlighting the similarities and differences. While they all implement a similar process improvement lifecycle running from modeling and analysis to solution design without programming, execution on a process engine, and integrated performance management and BAM, they differ widely in specific capabilities, technical architecture, and target process use case. And while they all pay lip service to SOA, only one of the 7 is BPEL-based. The report gives a flavor of what vanilla BPEL engines are missing when they claim to “do BPM,” as well as the wide variety of life-forms this technology can take as it adapts to specific use cases.

Part of the problem is that services do not freely fall from the sky, but rather have to be built from objects deployed on existing IT systems. For many organizations, this is achieved using development platforms such as J2EE, which itself adds quite a bit of complexity to the picture. Most of the J2EE stack has been developed prior to the emergence of the concept for a Service Oriented Architecture, and as a result is more object oriented than service oriented. This gap was supposed to be addressed by specifications such as JBI (JSR 208), but competitive issues very well described in Ian Thomas’ recent post prevented wide industry adoption.

IBM, BEA and a host of other vendors recently announced yet an other attempt at addressing the issue: the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications, which “aim to provide developers with simpler and more powerful ways of constructing applications based on SOA.” In a perfect world, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems would have been part of this effort and things would indeed have become simpler. In the world we live in though, Microsoft will not be part of this work and Sun Microsystems will keep promoting JBI and others specifications that largely overlap with SCA and SDO. But because this overlap is not perfect, one cannot just wish that one camp will win over the other and life will be good again.

Without getting into too many details, JBI does two things: One, provide a component architecture similar to SCA. Two, provide a way by which specific containers such as an EJB container, a Servlet container or a Process container can be deployed on top of multiple J2EE application servers. The later is no addressed by SCA or SDO, and therefore makes something like JBI necessary for any software vendor looking for portability across application servers. Even though vendors such as IBM and Oracle have little interest in such a thing, the rest of the industry, including customers, would benefit from this portability. As steward of the J2EE platform, it is Sun Microsystems’ responsibility to make it happen. At this stage of the game, my advice to Sun would be the following: adopt the SCA and SDO specifications, rewrite JBI accordingly and deliver an Open Source implementation certified for the major J2EE applications servers, including BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and Oracle Application Server. This would make a lot of things a lot simpler for a lot of people.

BPEL is not a business process modeling language, first and foremost because there should not be such thing (our naming of BPML was misleading in this respect). Business analysts do not use languages, they use notations. As such, BPEL is not usable by business analysts, but the Business Process Modeling Notation  (BPMN) is, and BPEL is a great execution language for business processes because one can go from the BPMN notation to the BPEL execution automatically, without having to manually write code. Nobody said it’s easy, but it’s possible.

BPEL does not provide support for human workflow because it should not. Human workflow is just an other type of process — some would say a process pattern, and as such can be modeled as yet an other BPMN process. As a result, and as long as the software vendor has done a good job of supporting the BPMN and BPEL specifications, one can come up with pretty much any workflow pattern known to man, design it in BPMN and get it deployed in BPEL. What is needed is a set of standard workflow patterns that can be described in BPMN, translated into BPEL and support interoperability with existing workflow engines. BPEL4People is one such pattern, and even though it’s not complete yet, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

In and by itself, BPEL is not of much use to anyone getting into BPM. What is needed is the combination of BPMN, BPEL and workflow patterns such as BPEL4People. This 3B combo really forms a stack of standards for BPM, and a BPMS that can support it sure beats any proprietary product out there.

Within this category, we will follow the progress of standards that we believe will have a profound impact on the way enterprise software gets developed in the future. Among them, BPMN, BPEL and most Web Services standards will form the focus of our attention.

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.