Stefan Ried

A Social Process Community could go beyond the recently announced Alignspace by Software AG.

Is there a motivation for customers to share business processes? Large enterprise customers run a lot of individual business processes and legacy applications. Some of them are considered as intellectual property and competitive differentiator. They never share any of those on a social process community. However, there are a lot of contextual standard processes in addition to these core processes and obviously it is not efficient to implement them from scratch on their process platform. Until now, most customers ran ERP systems and use some standard modules to supply these context business processes in addition to their customer business process landscape.

www.alignspace.com could be a breakthrough to share standard business processes in an open source style from one customer to the next. This would move more and more standardized business processes from the ERP vendors to the middleware vendors’ process platform. The customer’s challenge will be to sort out carefully their core differentiating and secret processes from the commodity stuff that can be shared without loosing any value.

See the full comment on Alignspace on Forrester’s blog.

SUN’s Glassfish Portfolio shifts to commercial open source business models.

SUN announced the Glassfish portfolio today and makes a significant move towards a commercial open source business model.

The “portfolio” subscription can be ordered like any other commercial SUN product starting today. Although the offering consists mainly out of the usual already existing suspects, the approach is new to SUNs. While many open source products has been maintained by local systems integrators in the past, the Glassfish portfolio is an official and commercial SUN product, which simply happens to be based on well know open source products. This puts SUN themselves again in the pole position for maintenance contracts. Other small but important differences are obvious on a second look: Already the first product, the Glassfish Enterprise Manager, is only available to commercial subscriber paying maintenance fees and will not be available to the open source community. SUN might branch the open source base of other products and makes high performance enterprise feature only available for the commercial subscriber. The SUN Glassfish portfolio indicated that the market of web application platforms has reached the next step of maturity. After the consolidation of the initial vendors, the commoditization paved the way for massive open source adoption. This diversified the market again into multiple competing open source app servers from various open source communities. The final step of today introduces the consolidation of the again crowded (open source) web application platform market. These products with the best commercialized maintenance backing of large vendors will establish a strong position in enterprise software stacks.

The Glassfish portfolio in detail: Read the rest of this entry »

The SOASaurus was a successful Proof of Concept

Well known Burton analyst Anne Thomas Manes bloged recently about the dying species of the SOAsaurus hit by the sudden economic catastrophe.

I can’t believe that this is the same person that used to raise millions of VC in her former role as executive of Systinet. But that’s the beauty of being an analyst. You have to re-assess the market again and again and change your mind if the market (hype) changed.

There are many indications that Dinosaurs died in a big bang of climate change. And that’s my major point: The change of the economy and the climate change that killed the dinosaurs had nothing in common. So what has the SOAsaurus and the real dinosaurs in common then?

The dinosaurs and the SOAsaurus are significant proof of concepts for major innovations. The dinosaurs have been the first very large vertebrate with a backbone or spinal cord, a brain case, and an internal skeleton. Even though the direct further “development” of a pure dinosaur failed, the concept was a major breakthrough and paved the way for the vertebrates including human beings. (I am not a biologist; please take this as an analogy…).

I believe SOA has not suddenly died. Everybody who still believed (until Anne’s blog) that SOA would bring a cost saving or business value as a stand alone initiative missed the evolution of SOA of the past two years. SOA proofed that it is the outstanding concept of integration across application silos, across technology tanks and vendors. I totally agree with Anne that pure SOA has no return of invest, but this comes from the BPM, ERP, Business Event, BI and other systems that are directly related to business value contributions.

How many muscles would an upright walking animal or human being require without having a skeleton and backbone? Bones, Muscles, and a well protected brain, that’s the concept that survives in symbiosis. Therefore SOA will decline the hype – no question – but continue to be a major ingredient of future enterprise software concepts.

Have a Great Year 2009

Stefan

Adobe is emerging to an enterprise application platform through the backdoor.

Just coming back from Adobe’s Max conference, I’d like to share a major impression. Adobe is actually maturing to a vendor of software development tools. Having the roots in creative tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, their main target group was and continues to be the creative people working on cool design. However, the product portfolio goes far beyond this. More and more developers of serious business applications like ERP apps and custom apps, share the same pain. Their original vendor thought that business apps have nothing to do with fun.

Originally published on Forrester’s blog for vendor strategy.

Read the rest of this entry »

The IT to BT shift.

Read the full article with George Colony in the Business Technology Magazine here:

George F. Colony: Auf dem Weg zu Business Technology (english)

George F. Colony is founder and CEO of the independent technology and market research company Forrester Research. At the end of 2006, he has published “My View: IT to BT” in which he announced the necessary change from Information Technology (IT) to Business Technology (BT). The Business Technology magazine had the opportunity to talk with George Colony about the progress of this change and the change in the self-understanding of IT and the new challenges for business and IT executives.