Friday, February 1, 2008

OEM - Balancing Control and Innovation

Presenter: Michael Ogrinz, Principal Architect, Global Markets Technology, Bank of America Securities, LLC

architect role is liason between business and IT, get to work with technology but don't have to worry abbout 2am support calls
Showed the Froogle example with rebates
Ease of Use = Business Value, who cares about the exact definitions?
Example at BOA - people joining conference calls, mashing up data from AT&T call center, whitepages.com to show who is on the conference calls
When bringing in new tech at BOA, it sounds like products go through levels of acceptance, such as "emerging"
They'll never use a mashup to broker a trade, but they would use mashups to quickly prototype how the UI should look for these systems
Generation Y vs Generation BabyBoomers
Leverage mashups for dashboards, discovery (of new ways to relate data), usability (quick testing of new UIs), application monitoring (quick, not really reliable, but useful in some circumstances)
Drawbacks: regulatory for who provides the data, brittle (who provides the SLA?),
SIFR - product for helping to secure mashup data so it doesn't get reused where you don't want it to be, basically renders the sensitive data as images

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WSO2 Mashup Server Architecture, Apache licensed, make money from support and training.

OEM - The Right Approach

Presenter: Bob Buffone, Chief Architect, NexaWeb

What is a mashup?
Why mashup? Productivity, agility, efficiency
Everyone can be a user of mashups
Does the creator have to be in IT or not?
Need to define what people are good at... creating content, consuming content
making decisions
Evolution or Revolution? Probably an evolution from SOA and RIA
Programmable Web - largest inventory of the mashups available
Downfall of mashup market - there are really no standards
Things to consider if you were to develop a Mashup Servers - cxn to SOA governance, hot deployable widgets, integration w authentication, role-based access, federated mashup repository, handling portal users
Steps to success - production (need services to feed into the mashup, leverage companies like kapop, mashery, strikeiron), consumption (look at complete platforms, standards, open, mission critical), proof of concepts

OEM - Web Services Management Infrastructure

Presenter: Oren Michels, CEO, Mashery

How easy is it for two companies to partner and get a beneficial work relationship started?
Mashery is designed to help with this, particularly for solutions in which are independent of the IT organization
Facebook as a reverse API - as long as you code an API to their definition, they'll distribute your app to millions of people
Would we ever want to open our API to external clients?
An open is all about business, not data (what does this mean?)

OEM - Delivering Data as a Service

Presenter: Bob Brauer, CEO, President and Co-Founder StrikeIron

Overview of StrikeIron, "Like is easy, data is hard."
State of external data today: authentication, different development key structures, SOAP headers with email address, ip address throttling
Business models and their associated data are all different, how can we reconcile these differences?
Presentation is still focusing around StrikeIron....uggg
StrikeIron intends to simplify the details around consuming a lot of different backends
Be aware of the context by which you describe mashups to the business so they understand the benefit, rather than get scared away

OEM - Building the Future of Enterprise Mashups

Presenter: Scott Feldman, Senior Director, Global Customer Communities, SAP Americas, Inc.

Must be careful about using mashups and consider IP laws, especially when considering other people's data or sites
In the enterprise sense of things, must balance governance with freedom (both have their place)
Enterprise service - bringing together disparate backends using a tool that till allows them to be loosely coupled
Business Network - what can be done from a creative perspective from the user base
SAP CEO one of the biggest proponents of value networks
Business leaders generally are not driving mashup development
mashups are part of a broader social context of Webb 2.0 leverage power of the net to augment collaboration and communication among individuals
SOBA apps are rooted in business context
Enterprise SOA delivers flexible IT resources to meet continually changing business needs
Users are the ones developing solutions with mashups, where with SOA IT is the one developing the solutions
What is the difference in definition between SOA and Mashups?
Example App - an entire application based on mashup technologies that allowed power companies to view information in Google Earth. Better view than in an table

OEM - Keynote, Mashups are here

Presenter: Rene Bonvanie, Serena Systems, Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing, Partners and Online Services

There will be no product pedaling in this presentation
We're in the infancy of mashups
Mashups may already exist, but just not recognized as a solution to these problems
Can't silo the people who innovate, and the people who must use this innovation
Is IT the sole source of IT innovation? Probably not
SOA problem - like building a currency that can't be used outside of IT
The more we inhibit people, the more people will find suboptimal solutions like spreadsheets and SharePoint, rather than truly innovate
Must foster innovation throughout your employee base
Innovation prospers in times of tight budgets, we must find out ways to do things for much cheaper
The more money humans have, the less innovative they become and the more wasteful they are
Similar to Facebook, let's use SAP, PeopleSoft, CRM system to create a mashup (a la Facebook application) that helps us expand or better understand our customer network
Provide a platform for innovation, expand the general definition of mashups to include business (processes and users)
Influence executives about how they can use mashups to propel business growth
Example mashups: prediction markets, industry associations based on this data
Innovation vs Governance: I want to innovate without asking for permission vs I'm on the hook for security, reliability, and compliance
This is a natural imbalance in any organization
Innovation side: automate business processes, connect existing systems, design user interactions, deploy without infrastructure, use without worry. Notice that none of these aren't indicative of huge new applications, but a little bit of this and a little bit of that
Governance side: expose services securely, govern mashups transparently (versioning and rollback, deployment privileges, approvals & notifications), fine grained security, collect detailed audit information
Mashups are not a development or coding platform, but instead a type of artwork
There's no way to determine if there's a facebook application available with the functionality that you want (for instance using SAP and salesforce.com to run a credit check on a company)
There has to be a strong collaborative relationship between IT and the business for mashups to work. If the end user doesn't want them, they simply won't be used. If IT doesn't want to open up systems, then the end users will be frustrated that they aren't able to access the data
The need for mashups cannot be generated solely from IT

OEM - Mashing up Networks

Presenter: Patti Anklam, Author, Consultant, Hutchinson Associates, Author of "Net Work"

How do you want to mashup a network?
Purpose of her presentation - understand how mashups can help networks grow and prosper
Networks are the medium for individual and organizational fulfillment (communities, church networks, etc)
Network's Purpose: Falls into one of five categories, mission, business, idea, learning, personal
Network's Style: What is it like to be in this network? What does it look like? What are the cultural norms? How is it led?
"Let me describe my network." (Then out comes the org chart) - Is this really the best way to describe it?
Analyzing your network (not org chart) can help bring out thoughts about external contacts that may not be obvious from the network
ONA: Organizational network analysis - often referred to by more generic term, social network analysis. Basically just documenting a view of personal interactions among individuals
Benefit of network analysis: are those people with a ton of connections leaving the company?
How do we get this data? Observe how emails flow within the organization (drawback: we don't really know the logical contents of the email).
Microsoft's investment in Facebook - intended use is to observe the relationship's between people, not really targeted advertising
Creating a social graph isn't that hard, but it's associating value of the relationships contained there
VNA; Value Network Analysis - view of the web of relationships that generates economic or social value. Requires physical access to the people, can't really automate the collection of this data
Microsoft has such a heavy footprint in the workforce via the software systems people use (Windows, etc), yet they missed the boat on including builtin analytics systems
What would we want in a network mashup? But also keep privacy, superficiality, accessibility
OpenSocial - mashing up people and technology, hammer home the context of role in a network
http://www.byeday.net/weblog/networkblog.html
http://www.theappgap.com

OEM - Crossing the Barriers of Adoption

Presenter: Sam Ceccola, North America CTO of Capgemni

We don't want mashup technology going the way of SOA, adoption is dropping
What customers got with SOA didn't live up to what they thought they were getting with SOA
Drucker's Seven Sources of Innovation - ?
Governance and Management - personalize, differentiate, organize, comply
Barriers to crossing the divide - security vs trust, information overload vs the creation of knowledge, the aging workforce, finding the novelty vs marketing to the masses, a successful implementation strategy
Instead of locking a system that you have to be granted access to, instead, grant everyone access to the system but keep careful watch on them, and as soon as someone does something wrong slap the handcuffs on them (government A-Space program to change their security for the analytic community to leverage Web 2.0 technology)
Can this work in the financial industry?
Spectrum of "Unique & Value" to "Commodity & Cost" Where on this pendulum do the financial industries lie?
Demographics of today's workforce is U-shaped, one side is 40+, one side is 30-, and then a little between 30 and 40
If the governance walls are maintained, a companies workforce will lose out on the younger crowd if the new technology is not adopted
How can we combine a company's org chart with the actual social networks contained within it that actually represent how the business gets done

OEM - The Language of Enterpise Mashups

The Language of Enterprise Mashups
Presenter: John Crupi, CTO of JackBe

JackBe, founded in 2003 as an Ajax company, and repositioned the company as an enterprise mashup company
Do mashups enable users to control their own software's functionality? Almost abstracting the actual development into a point and click interface for creating the mashup
Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Areas: Mashups at #7
Incoming workforce - grow up on myspace, gmail, facebook, do it yourself, don't like to conform, born after 1977, expect to be paid more, expect to have flexible work schedule, expect to be promoted within a year, expect to have access to state of the art technology
Gen Y - doesn't want a corporate portal, instead they want to customize their entire experience (a la iGoogle of PageFlakes)
Collaboration Example - Nintendo DS with 8 year olds and their networking technology
Demo
Everything in an enterprise is authenticated and authorized with each request, but the key with enterprise mashup is mixing external free data, with proprietary and secure internal data
Product handles the big 4 - RSS, REST, WSDL for Silk, Databases, and web clipping
Two parts of mashup - the data part, and the UI part
Value the fact that the UI of the mashup should be reusable and portable. It shouldn't matter that the mashup is in a portlet, or contained in someone's website, even if it's only internal to a company
Should there exist a standard for mashups such that they are wrapped in a reusable abstract way?
Tomorrow's Data-driven web - integration of data happens at the edge of the server, no longer in the client browser. This data is moved outside of the firewall
Forced Mashup 1.0 - The practice of collaborating on a spreadsheet via email, an outdated and error prone process. There is no governance on the data.
Enterprise Mashup Characteristics - tag/shared/search-able, user-driven, dynamic/ad-hoc, UI (mashlet) accessible. The IT people want to wrap this data with APIs, secure it, drive it from the server,
Web 1.0 Tiers - presentation, business, integration
Web 2.0 Tiers - presentation, mashups, business, integration
Mashups shouldn't care where they are shown
Demo #2 - JackBe Wires - Tibco like GUI for wiring data together to eventually be shown as a mashup, looks interesting

OEM - Understanding the value and applying to business

Presenter - Stefan Andreasen, Founder of Kapow

Kapow is a .com survivor
250+ customers across US, Asia, and Europe
Partnerships with Oracle, IBM, BEA, Attachmate, FAST, EMC/Documentum
Products - Kapow Mashup Server 6.2 - 8 years in the making
OpenKapow - free version, but catch is that you have to share everything you do
What is a mashup? Comes much more from the situation in which it was created, than the technology used to create it, we're already doing it! It's just an evolutionary thing, we finally put a name to it, can be management data mining, business reports, price comparison, rss feeds. An application, dashboard, spreadsheet, portlet, widget which is combining multiple data sources to create new insight, business decision, intelligence, and additionally the situation in which the mashhup is created is teh most significant differentiator for being a mashup (self service, adhoc, sharable, collaborative, distributed, automation of manual process, comes from the long talk of business
Systematic Projects for conservative reliability vs opportunistic projects for competitive agility
Systematic Projects for conservative reliability - old way of IT, doesn't give us much these days, this is just :running the machinery"
opportunistic projects for competitive agility - biggest opportunity for ROI, especially from mashups, this is where we "create the value"
Mashup can be presented as: portlet, web application (housing maps), spreadsheet, rss feed, smartphone
Data can come from competitors, pricing, market data, reputation, customers, and suppliers (which is all freely available on the web!)
Kapow - two versions either one that will run inside your firewall, or another that will be released soon
Typical mashup - Google Maps and craigslist data in one view
Business mashup - BP oil rig warning system in Gulf of Mexico, create a warning system using five free web sites to show oil rigs on a map with weather, rig names, water temperature, and send alerts via text messages to a cell phone
Core data vs Intelligence data - breaking up the data layer into two pieces
Core data - private, systematic, structured, subscribed
Intelligence data - public, unstructured, knowledge, often no standard API or feed, and hard to get to (this are kind of like the wild websites)
Only the largest free websites have a public API, most websites don't, so how can we access the data on these websites to mash it up?
#1 obstacle is getting access to this raw data, this is where Kapow's product comes into play
Kapow's Product Family - Portal Content Edition, data collection edition, web 2.0 edition, content migration edition (ETL for the web)
OpenKapow - 3500 users
Transactional mashup - When creating an account in Facebook, if you already have a LinkedIn account, you can provide your LinkedIn credentials to Facebook and they'll suck you information from there
Demo - create an RSS feed of information on a certain stock based on data returned from Google Blog Search. Kapow was primarily a GUI in which you interact with, kind of like a browser in which you specify the area of the screen to capture. Seemed like a lot of manual work just for an RSS feed. Can't TIBCO do this for internal data from the backend? It got impressive when he service enabled the demo, and the data was ultimately fed live into a spreadsheet (from the web)
So how fragile is this manner of "screen scraping?" Since a website author can change their structure and potentially break someone's Kapow mashup. This is apparently the most asked question from customers of Kapow, and the answer is that ...

Open Enterprise 2.0 Mashups - Introduction

Today I'm attending the Open Enterprise 2.0 Mashups Summit on in NYC. I'll be posting a separate blog entry for each presentation. I'll use "OEM" as a prefix for the titles of these posts so I can fit the actual name of the presentation there as well.

SharePoint Site for the summit
http://colabria.sharepointsite.net/emu/default.aspx

John Maloney's Opening Remarks
Intangible assets - the real wealth of individuals, nations, and ecosystems
Value networks are dynamic system views of roles and relationships
Value networks generate true wealth, prosperity and sustainable success
Analysis and modeling is important in planning these networks
These are not just business or IT specific networks, but apply to all areas of life (and science)
First, understand the as is value network, how do you tap that intangible wealth?
These value networks may be treated as ecosystems themselves
smallest type of exchanges are tangible and intangible exchanges
Tangible Exchanges -
Intangible Exchanges -
Business Analysis Methods - process, value network, social network
Value networks look at : what's in the network, what's flowing, what's contained in those exchanges, move from a process mentality to a framework mentality (?)
Goal is to have the intangibles working for you and making wealth
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Mashups as the spreadsheet analogy, the data comes from somewhere else, we just let the user control how they slice it and dice it