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SOA - quick wins rule..
I read this blog today by Loraine Lawson (To SOA or Not to SOA During Economic Turmoil?) and it contains so much applicability around SOA in one place, that I had to comment.
I think this blog says a lot. No doubt at all I am seeing many IT budgets being slashed and no doubt most people think SOA means big IT budgets. So, how could you not conclude SOA is stalling? Easy, because we are seeing the opposite. What is different and is reflected in the article, is that we are clearly seeing people looking to more innovative approaches to SOA to match the depleting budgets. We see this because OpenSpan is a perfect fit. As the article makes clear and we all now know, there is real value from quick iterative approaches to SOA. However, since SOA often means a rewrite of working (for many years) business processes, or a lot of integration around existing processes, it?s hard to imagine the words quick, iterative and SOA all being used in the same article, let alone the same sentence!
But, that is exactly what OpenSpan is all about. Taking working legacy applications that users use every singe day and quickly wrapping them to expose their workflows as services. Real-world, working Web Services that can be consumed by other enterprise services or other automated workflows. Take the applications out of the users eyes and hands and have those existing application workflows become a set of services! Everyone gets to see quickly what services offer up the most ROI. The ROI (which can be big with quick wins) can go towards funding a long-term strategy of the re-architecture. Since many existing legacy applications are too hard to rewrite anyway, OpenSpan?s almost ?instant-on? web service enablement of existing applications has never been more applicable in today?s? economy. The continued OpenSpan growth says it all. Feel free to comment.
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FInancial Services - a silver lining
There are a lot of things to come from this financial crises we are now in but most of what we hear is on the negative side. That doesn't always have to be the case. Therefore, I thought it was about time I blogged about why, for these financial companies, the right technology choices are even more critical to make the most of what is going on in their world.
Financial IT executives have to deal with the brunt of the fall-out around Acquisitions, Mergers, Layoffs, retraining etc., IT and business are expected to continue to build a consistent experience for their customers (existing and acquired) whilst bringing on significantly more applications and processes and doing so with tighter and tighter budgets. Business is expected to deliver improving customer service because M&A tends to mean customer loyalty is tested and they will start migrating to competitors after even just one bad customer service experience. Less people, dealing with more customers makes this a very challenging environment to say the least.
It's almost the perfect storm for IT and business because even without all this change, they were struggling to improve customer service because of the shear number of applications and manual processes in their front, middle and back offices. IT and business need to seek out technologies that can not only weather the storm, but can actually calm it. The big ol' "we need to do more, with less", whilst sounding like an old record sometimes, has never been more relevant than today.
At OpenSpan, it is no surprise that in this quarter alone, we will see sales of over 30,000 seats sold into financial services and contact centers globally. Companies that were feeling this pain even before this crises began are benefitting quickly from the unique OpenSpan integration approach. OpenSpan has shown over and over, that automating existing manual user processes reaps massive rewards for business and IT. It goes without saying, that this approach reduces costs, increases security, compliance, accuracy and just plain makes sense because customer satisfaction levels are raised . The whole customer experience is improved.
In the past, "doing more with less, quickly" has been difficult. That's where OpenSpan is unique. OpenSpan can, iteratively tackle the everyday burden of users manually navigating their way through a multitude of desktop applications and just automate them in the most robust and secure manner available. In the OpenSpan studio, as we build out those automations quickly, we can insert new business processes or controls, we can add new rules or ensure compliance on existing rules. In addition, OpenSpan does this in such a way that users may not even need to see or touch many of those applications again! This is not an all or nothing approach that most people think about integration, which would typically mean potentially years before any results or benefits are seen. OpenSpan does this so you can choose to automate the manual processes that cause the most pain immediately and roll automations quickly to users for immediate ROI. Then you can build on that, adding more and more benefits, so you see progress constantly (and ever increasing ROI).
With OpenSpan 4.0, taking those automated user processes and moving them (along with the applications) to the server side, means we can at last also start thinking about getting those applications off of the desktop. OpenSpan can take any automated process and expose it as a web service and access them from any mid-tier architecture technology. Game changing.
So, I did say, you need technologies that can not only weather, but calm the storm. That's exactly what OpenSpan is doing for it's customers and it's doing it every single day. Our growth and width and breath of our growing customers in the financial services sector, speaks for itself.
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WOA or SOA or SO-A-WOT
Thought this was a neat snippet entitled;
I replied to the blog but upon reflection felt it was worth while adding a link here to see if anyone is inclined to comment further. I did.
To me, the aged ol' problem with SOA is not that there's anything wrong with it, but more, it really is nothing new. If anything, many people still fail to understand that SOA, like EDI or any "distance" API is really hard to implement and benefit from wide reuse. Heck, even a simple subroutine in a piece of code on the same system is hard to reuse and more often, is copied and modified. Welcome to "legacy" application support. SOA does not change that. IMHO.
If anyone tries to convince themselves that an SOA is not going to be a legacy problem a few months or years from now, perhaps they need to re-read the techno history books. The problem has never been how hard it is to write re-usable components, the problem always is, the legacy code needed to bring those components together. There's always something else someone wants to do with a component but you can't risk breaking it so you copy it instead. And/or as soon as you break this compatibility (which is a no-no), your break re-use.
So, is WOA any different? I think so as it really reminds me of the difference between solving the problem for the business or waiting forever for IT. You can have something that works right now or get in the back of the queue (read years) until I (maybe) write perfection. Businesses cannot wait, especially today.
At OpenSpan, we can quite literally turn any business user process into a Service and consume it from anywhere else - RIGHT NOW. It also helps IT, because they get time to do it right whilst not sacrificing what business needs - RIGHT NOW. Is that WOA? 
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Web 2.0 - "near its dreaded Trough of Disillusionment"
You see, I had Web 2.0 down really as primarily asynchronous communications between browser and something else ( real time events). The Web 1.0 as was, led to mostly uninteresting web pages based on the mainframe synchronous concept (fill in a form, submit and get another form (page) of results). After the mainframe came the unix/dec mid-range systems that supported asynchronous applications - Enter a field, see real-time results/validation/events - All sounds like Web 2.0 to me ;)
I love all asynchronous applications, emulation, client server or web (2.0). The concept of instant event based communications is not only great, it's for the most part, the only right way. I remember building asynchronous web applications in 1998 (using a legacy host to activex as the "broker"). It was really cool and now it's Web 2.0. What's missing now, is how to take enterprise applications to the next level with it.
Sure with CSS/XML/DHMTL/JSCRIPT/VBSCRIPT (Ajax), you can get a web page (Web 2.0) looking good but it's a real lot of work. Did I hear someone say legacy applications were hard to support - good luck supporting web 2.0!
I can say I saw this coming - because I did - the hype description around web 2.0 is hardly surprising because it's wrapped around old thinking (The Browser legacy). New mash-up vendors are out there, competing to be the next 4GL (power builder) for the web and in my view, whomever REALLY gets that right, will have the killer Web 2.0 IDE on their hands. I can't wait, I feel someone is really really close. Will it be Adobe (Flex) or Microsoft (SilverLight).. Jackbe.. Wavemaker... We shall see. Let the fun begin.
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OpenSpan has a new CEO
I am excited to announce the appointed of Eric Musser to CEO of OpenSpan. After an extensive search, we found an awesome candidate who is now at the helm to take OpenSpan to the next level. After 3 - 1/2 years as CEO of OpenSpan with an awesome team by my side, I am excited to now have Eric here. He shares the same passion as myself in the OpenSpan technology, it's customers and partners and the markets in which we serve. His track record (see Press release to the left) is second to none and there could be no more of a perfect match for his talents here. Welcome Eric.
I am very pleased to announce also, I will be moving into the role of Chief Evangelist, where I can continue to play a major role, well yes, continuing to Evangelize our unique approach to integration. The technology over the last 3 - 1/2 years has progressed beyond even my own expectations. The real problems we are solving right now for large customers, whom have been strangled by integration problems for many years, is personally rewarding to see. There's a clear reason OpenSpan saw 440% plus growth in 2007 and already exceeding that revenue in the first half of 2008 - the product solves real pain points and the product works. That my friends, is proof beyond doubt.
So, I am very excited about the future, as now with Eric on board, I'll have more time to devote to the technology and working with our customers, prospects and partners to share our joint visions for the future of the product and the company. I look forward to blogging more too. 
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