Apple – Why they rule, and iPad2: my first impressions

I tuned in to the TechCrunch Live Blog today to get the dish on iPad2. I was skeptical about this launch. Rumors were it would be thinner, lighter, would have a camera, and so on. I didn’t care much for any of that, so I kept my expectations low. I already own an iPad and I wasn’t going to rush and get a new one just because. Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple stuff, but I am not total nuts to get every little version that comes out.

But now after ready the details on the iPad page at Apple.com and hearing about it via the live blog, I am impressed. I am impressed by the two Apps featured in the launch and look forward to getting GarageBand and iMovie on my iPad. I am not so hot on the white iPad, but who knows, I might change my mind after looking at the real thing. I also love the iPad Smart Cover, which is brilliantly designed, so simple.

Coming to why Apple rules…it is all in the way you think about a product.  Steve Jobs said when he closed the show with a statement:

“A  lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in, looking at this as the next PC. hardware and software are done by different companies, talking about speeds just as they would with PCs. Every bone in our body says this is not the right approach.”

This is a fundamental difference between Apple and all the other wannabes, in how Apple (and Jobs) views a product: as an integrated system  (of hardware, software and user experience) and eco-system (Apps, Books, Music, Movies, Videos, …). This is the reason why no one is going to beatthe iPad / iOS for some time to come, in spite of all the hoopla about Android based tablets. Google is just beginning to think about the eco-system, but has no integrated vision like Apple. All the other device vendors are beginning to create their own fragments of marketplace which in my only makes it confusing and difficult for the users. Besides, I am not convinced that users will pay for mediocre content, apps or experience. Apple has set the bar quite high and others are only getting started. Which means, they have a lot of catching up to do. While they do that, Apple is not staying  put, they are forging ahead. So I am convinced that it will be difficult for other tablets to achieve the level of commercial success the way iPad did for Apple. It is not about the OS (Android or iOS) or how many Android devices are shipped compared to iOS devices. Those stats only tell you just that, not how much revenue the devices are generating. The difference is what Apple has been known for for decades: They just “Think Different!”

Are you ready for the Mobile App boom in your Enterprise?

I just saw this article by Larry Dignan on ZDNet titled Mobile app boom will tax enterprise IT. Larry quotes another paper by John McCarthy of Forrester Research called Mobile App Internet: Making Sense Of The 2011 Mobile Hysteria. This caught my eye and got me thinking of how we here at JackBe look at this area and how we try to address some of the issues pointed out by John McCarthy,  which I quote below. In addition to quoting them, I will try to address how we at JackBe address this need with our Presto Enterprise App Store and Apps offering as part of our Real-Time Intelligence solution:

• Issue #1: The innovation cycle. Mobile apps typically require three to four releases a year. Multiply those releases by platform and you see a serious problem for enterprises, which are used to upgrades every two or three years. IT departments just aren’t ready to move that quick.
  How Presto addresses this: Nice one…but, we think differently. You see, when you build Apps using Presto, you are getting a platform on which you build, deploy and deliver mobile apps. Any apps deployed on Presto in your own private Enterprise App Store is easily managed as two distinct copies. One that is gone production in the App Store and on that remains in the Presto App Hub to enable App developers to continue iterating over it and to test those iterations independent of the App in the App Store. You have to use new ways of delivering features and functionality to your users rapidly. You can’t keep to the old ways of building and delivering applications like you used to in your IT department. Presto enables you to achieve this goal with the right set of tools and controls to manage your App development, deployment and post-deployment process.
• Issue #2: Security. Security related issues for mobile app development can drive costs up three to four times.
  How Presto addresses this: This is an extremely important issue for Enterprises and a core architectural principle on which Presto is designed and built to leverage. Enterprises have already invested lot of time and resources to achieve the level of security they need. There is no need to start fresh. With Presto, we work with existing security frameworks and infrastructure and also provide a high-level policy engine that allows your IT department to control who gets to use what Apps and what data can be delivered to that user based on their entitlements and permissions.
• Issue #3: User interfaces are hard. “The diversity of the platforms and the need to develop for the native device coupled with the purpose-built design of the apps will be very different from the browser-based development. This means a much greater focus on the overall user experience, not just the layout on the screen and the interactions but how you actually choose and design the narrow functions of the app,” said Forrester.
  How Presto addresses this: There is no question about this. UI is very subjective and getting an overall consistent user experience across your Apps is important. Presto comes with a tool called App Maker that helps you to generate consistent Apps utilizing many out-of-the-box (OOTB) visualizations that look great. In addition, since all Presto mobile apps are based on HTML, JavaScript and CSS, if you are not happy with the look and feel or the user experience of these ready Apps, you can customize them to your needs with minimal effort. Honestly, we are not totally there yet in Mobile visualizations yet, and this is what our team is working very hard right now. But, give it a try. With a little HTML/CSS/JS skills, you can get far with Presto than without it in your enterprise. Even without those skills, you can get OOTB Apps that provide good value for the minimal time and effort put into getting them out of Presto.
• Issue #4: Back end systems need to deliver data more quickly. Mobile apps mean server-side issues. Mobile apps need data, say account balances and transactions, in 5 to 10 seconds. Enterprise databases may not be ready for big scale.
  How Presto addresses this: I see two problems in this area. First is about latency and scale; access to data in real-time with least latency for the user/device. It is indeed true that Enterprise databases may not be ready for this. However, not all Mobile apps need real-time transactional access. How real-time is real-time enough for your users? Do you want to know the balance as of this second? Or are you satisfied knowing your balance as of say 30 minutes ago? It depends. Presto has different approaches to solve it including real-time access to data sources and ability to cache data for specified time period to reduce latency and server load for data that doesn’t change every instant. The second issue is about how to obtain and deliver that data to the Apps. Presto makes it real simple and easy for you to plug your data sources securely and make them available for mobile Apps to interact with. Security is always guaranteed as the data access is bound by the prevailing security policies and systems in your Enterprise.
• Issue #5: Where’s the budget? Support for these mobile applications is likely to be more difficult than generic email.
  How Presto addresses this: Probably true if you are talking about older ways of doing this. But with Presto, you can get real value really quickly. And supporting these mobile applications is of course going to be different than supporting generic email, but it does not have to be difficult. If you don’t believe me, give Presto a try. You can even get a free version of Presto that you can deploy in production for up to 5 users and see what I am talking about.

In conclusion, I would like to note an important point made in the Forrester report that our friends in the IT Services industry am sure will pay attention to:

Helping enterprises ride out the perfect storm of innovation is a $17B services opportunity. Firms will need help building mobile apps for employees and customers. Corporations will also need third-party services firms to manage the devices and apps as well as to set up and to administer their own private label enterprise app stores. And finally, the CIO and business executives will hire consultants to help their reengineer their business processes to take full advantage of the mobile and tablet apps and innovation.

But I also want to tell these CIOs and business executives that there is a new way to get your own private label enterprise app store and that you can get your own tablet/mobile apps to solve your business needs with innovation. Getting started does not have to break your bank. So, give Presto a try, and let me know if there is any way we can help. We are already helping several customers take advantage of our innovative platform to meet their business needs. I am sure we can help you too. We would be happy to do so!

Tablets : Pay Attention to this growing trend in Business computing

iPad Charts using Presto

Tablets are increasingly becoming / going to become a standard weapon in the arms of biz people for real-time information. We at JackBe have a good emerging story in Presto for those who want to develop and deploy Mobile Enterprise Apps, especially for tablet based computing. Presto 3.1 has several capabilities that they can get started with today to build and deploy mobile apps within their enterprises securely.

• A new article by Bill Ives  talks about this a bit: See JackBe Moves Further into Real-Time Intelligence
• Check out this article is by a Jan Timothy Woodcock from Wipro Tech: Enterprise Mobile Apps Will Transform How We Do Business
• Here is another article that talks about how 5 companies are using the iPad to increase biz productivity: How 5 Companies Are Using the iPad to Increase Productivity

Tablets are here to stay whether they are iPads or Androids, and it really gives an agile and mobile tool in the hands of business people who need information at their fingertips to make their daily decision making process effective and timely. We at JackBe will continue to enhance and enrich Presto for such mobile computing needs by delivering Real-Time Intelligence Apps in the Enterprise.

Using enterprise mashups to save billions

I just came across this from Joe McKendrick on ZDNet Blogs that caught my eye - Study: Increase data usability, save billions.

Here is an excerpt:

Researchers say data usability can be improved by focusing on the following factors:

• Intelligence of data “can be improved through the accuracy of the prediction, trends analysis, recommendations and profile matching/associations made by the associated applications. For example, what percentage of recommendations made by a business intelligence application results in cross-selling?”
• Remote access to data and applications is essential in an increasingly mobile workforce.
• Sales mobility “involves the ability of salespersons to use portable devices and applications to exchange information related to all aspects of a deal or transaction with a customer.”
• Improvements in data quality will result in improvements that “may come through better and timely decisions (which may increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and hence revenues), as well as fewer errors and rework, lower working capital requirements, faster receivables, etc. (which will lower costs).”

A 10 percent improvement can add up to big dollars. Researchers determined that if a median Fortune 1000 business (36,000 employees and $388,000 in sales per employee) increased the usability of its data by just 10 percent, it would translate to an increase in $2.01 billion in total revenue every year, or $55,900 in additional sales per employee annually. – End of excerpt

I find this is very interesting. But, the question is how do you go about achieving this.

1. You don’t want to be spending millions to save millions.
2. You don’t want to take years to achieve this goals.

If you can afford to do either, then I suggest, you read no further.

To me, enterprise mashups have been at this for a few years. Take remote access to data and applications for instance. It is dead easy for us to create a new enterprise mashup that wraps the existing data and applications, creates a specific usable view of that data, and then expose this mashup as a Web Service (SOAP or REST), using Apps to your end users and customers. This does not take years, it can be done in hours and days today.

Consider mobility. You want to not only create a more usable view of data, but in turn ensure that this data is available for your mobile users to interact with wherever they are via any portable device. This too is fairly easy to achieve using enterprise mashups.

Basically, enterprise mashups create that agility layer in your enterprise architecture to deliver concise, specific, usable data and applications to your users, without disrupting your current enterprise architecture. This new agility layer can respond rapidly to new business needs by changing the enterprise mashups and creating new enterprise mashups when required.

Enterprise mashups don’t solve the traditional problem of data cleansing in the traditional way…Extract/Transform/Load (ETL). That’s the whole point. Most customers can’t afford (time or resources) cleansing data that way. I think that enterprise mashups thrive when conventional solutions become expensive and time consuming.

How do you define an ‘Enterprise App Store’?

[Cross-posted from my JackBe blog.]

Lately everyone here at JackBe have been very focused on the latest edition of Presto and all it’s cool App and App Store features. We’ve hosted lots of webcasts, given tons of demos, briefed a lot of the media. And while I admit a certain bias, I think Presto 3.0 with its emphasis on user-driven Enterprise Apps and a user-centric Enterprise App Store has been well received.

But Apoorv Durga, the Portal and Web Content Analyst at CMS Watch, recently wrote ‘JackBe’s App Store is interesting but not new‘. He’s not wrong, exactly, but I think he’s missed the point. He emphasizes that ‘App Stores’ can deliver great ‘time to market’ through reusability and ease-of-use (I agree!) but then quickly condemns most past/present products on these qualities. And that’s where I think Presto 3.0 really is different.

In my last post I talked about how Presto 3.0 provides all the necessary tools and infrastructure to create Enterprise Apps and Mashups. We made every step of the ‘Enterprise App Lifecyle’ easier, from the beginning (secure registration of Mashable information sources), to the middle (easy and secure creation of Mashups), to the end (creation of Enterprise Apps from your Mashups/Mashables. And what I promised at the end of that post was more gory detail on what happens AFTER the Apps are made. In other words, the Enterprise App Store.

I’ve decided to define an Enterprise App Store for you by example. Where do Apps go after they are made? How do users use them? How do user shares them? I’d like to give you a guided tour of the Presto 3.0 Enterprise App Store and ultimately I hope you’ll agree that the Presto App Store is like the Portal ‘App Stores’ (in Apoorv’s article) as much as my car is like my kid’s bicycle: similar in intent, fundamentally different in design and implementation.

Submitting Apps: Apps get into the Presto 3.0 Enterprise App Store very simply. Apps are created by power users or developers and then submitted to the App Store Manager for publishing to the Store. Anyone who has permissions to create an App can submit it, but only the App Store Manager (there can be 1 or more persons in this role) is authorized to allow an App into the App Store.

This is a very important step in the App lifecycle, I believe. As one banking enterprise architect put it, the Store Manager ‘keeps your App Store clean and safe’. Your enterprise can set the guidelines and standards that App creators and submitters must follow to successfully publish an App to your enterprise App Store. If the App Store Manager decides an App is not ready, for whatever reason, they can send the App back to the creator with comments for further development or modification. Once these issues have been successfully addressed, App creators can resubmit their Apps for consideration to be published to the App Store.

Using Apps: What can you do with Apps in the App Store? Once you find an interesting App, if you have the right permissions, you can instantly use it. You can work with any number of Apps simultaneously at any time. Every App you open is shown in the ‘Open Apps’ gallery, and we maintain the state of all open Apps so that you can multitask and switch back and forth between Apps without losing your data. Once you are done using an App, you can close it.

Making Apps Personal: If you like an App and anticipate using it frequently, you can add it to the ‘My Apps’ gallery in the App Store. My Apps lets you add your own twist to the App: customize the App with you own settings (login information, colors, search parameters, etc.) for your very own personalized App. A single App can become dozens of customized Apps for region, data ranges, subjects or whatever parameter(s) you want to personalize.

Sharing Apps: What about sharing? You can easily share an App with other users in the App Store. You can also share with others outside the App Store via email or instant messaging. You can also rate, tag and send comments to the App creator.

Embedding Apps in other sites: You can put your App in other webpages. You get the embed code for an App and stick it into your iGoogle page or your Wiki or web page or even your portal server. You can also publish Apps from the App Store to your Microsoft SharePoint instance as native Web Parts. The point is, you can deliver the App to where the users work and need it – in their wiki, portal, web page, SharePoint, etc. on their desktop, mobile phones, iPads, etc.

Making the Apps secure: All the Apps published in the App Store are secured by authentication and authorization policies configured in Presto by your security expert. Every App can be configured to provide universal access or, if configured, to require the user to authenticate themselves. This can help provide Apps with contextual data or capabilities, if needed. Furthermore, all the data sources consumed by the Apps are protected via Presto security for authentication and authorization. Sharing is secure as well, rest assured. Even if you share an App with me, unless I have the correct permissions, I won’t be allowed to actually use the App.

So, do I think this is a typical App Store? Not in the slightest. The Apps aren’t made, shared, or used by IT with the business people in mind. The business people are the makers, the sharers, and the users. This empowering model is one I’ve rarely seen formalized in the way Presto does. And that’s the part I think Apoorv missed in his post. I am sure that once he gets his hands on Presto, he will surely come to notice all these differences that make our App Store a whole lot different than just a portal server or a gadget server trying to be an App Store.

However, I do agree with Apoorv that, by adopting an Enterprise App Store, you enhance your organization’s time to market. What’s different here is that you can harness and unleash the power of your end users with domain knowledge and let them solve their business needs with self-made or self-discovered Enterprise Apps. And your Enterprise App Store can be the last mile to get the data and new functionality to your users when they need it, where they need it, and how they need it!

Introducing Presto 3.0: Freedom & Power for the User

[Cross-posted from my JackBe blog]

You might have heard that version 3.0 of Presto, our award-winning enterprise mashup platform, was announced just last week. The driving design premise of this release of Presto was simple but challenging: Organizations want to harvest and unleash the creativity of their ‘business developers’ and enhance the effectiveness and productivity of their end user communities. This is what you, our customers, partners and community members, told us.

With that in mind we focused on bringing enterprise data ‘out of hiding’, so to speak, by putting it in the hands of the users, while still adhering to enterprise IT architecture standards for security, governance, portability, and integration. I am happy and excited that most of the new features and enhancements that made their way into Presto 3.0 emphasize and support this goal.

Now that the product is launched, I thought some of you would appreciate a recap of some of the most important innovations in Presto 3.0. Here’s my list of the biggest and the best. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how we responded to your needs…

-Tripling your power: You wanted more powerful capabilities in Wires, our visual drag-and-drop mashup maker. We enhanced our current blocks, and are introducing several new power packed blocks for easier mashing and leveraging the underlying features of the mashup platform. We went from 7 blocks in Presto 2.7 to around 25 blocks in our new version of Wires! New blocks include: Loop, Document, Select, Group, Document, CSV Generator, Data Decorator, Transformer, Mapper, Average, Counter, and more.

-Making you richer: You wanted rich visual views on your Mashups. So we reengineered our product to provide lots of rich visualizations out of the box, and let you apply to them your mashups to create ‘Apps’ (we used to call these ‘Mashlets’). The result is a wizard-driven ‘App Maker’ with lots of rich viewing options that can be configured with no coding. And more of these visualizations will be added in the near future.

-Helping you connect the dots: You wanted easier way to create collections of related Apps and even quickly wire Apps together to create a sophisticated integrated multi-App workspace. We are introducing Mashboard, a powerful drag and drop web based environment to assemble and wire several Apps, again with no coding necessary to make it all happen.

-Letting you get under the hood: If you should need to customize these Apps, whether created using the wizard-driven App Maker or the powerful drag-and-drop Mashboard, you can simply open any App in a new web based App Editor, and edit your App specification, CSS, JavaScript, HTML. The App Editor also allows you to upload and download complete Apps as a package, so you can further customize and code in your own favorite tools (Sencha, Aptana, Dreamweaver, XCode, etc).

-Helping you build bridges: You wanted to mashup Microsoft SharePoint lists and to share your Apps by way of SharePoint. We’ve introduced a new add-on called Mashup Sites for SharePoint which allows you to do just that: consume SharePoint lists into your mashups and to publish our Apps back to SharePoint as native WebParts. You can read more about this in Dan’s post from a few weeks back.

-Making it simple to get around: You wanted an integrated experience with an easy-to-use user interface, instead of myriad of disconnected tools and utilities. We present you the Presto Hub, which integrates all the different tools and components of Presto into a centralized location.

-Giving you more choices: You wanted more easier way to develop, test and publish mashups. Many of you found the jump from visually mashing up in Wires to coding EMML in our Eclipse-based Mashup Studio, a bit too high. So to make it easier and quicker to develop most of your EMML-driven mashups, we are introducing a new web based EMML Mashup Editor ‘lite’. Our Mashup Studio will of course be still offered since it comes with many power features for EMML developers.

-Helping you give your stuff away: Finally, the best part. You have been building Apps over the years with no central place to host them. Sure you could distribute them by embedding them anywhere or publishing them to your portal server. However, we need a place where all these Apps are made available to the user community in your enterprise so that they can easily find, use and share these Apps. We call it the ‘Enterprise App Store’. (More on the App Store in my next post.)

And these are just the highlights! Presto 3.0 represents a massive improvement in capabilities, moving from a simple toolset that creates mashups to an integrated environment to handle the entire lifecycle on a Enterprise App, from ‘feeds’ to mashups to App to the App Store.

I hope you’ll agree that Presto 3.0 makes great strides towards our goal of empowering users to make, use and share the Apps that they need, while letting IT make it safe and secure to do so. We’re quite proud of Presto 3.0 and we’re eager to hear what you think!

OMG! We launched OMA and EMML!

[Crossposted from my JackBe blog]

Today is an exciting day for us at JackBe. It is particularly exciting for our engineering team. Why? Walk down the memory lane with me for a minute…

About 3 years ago, we embarked on a mission to create a new kind of software which today we call an ‘enterprise mashup platform’. And as we started designing JackBe’s enterprise mashup platform (which we ultimately named ‘Presto‘), we knew the basic problem we needed to address was how to make data securely and easily accessible to enterprise users.

That’s not an easy problem, of course. ‘Easy’ and ‘secure’ aren’t often associated with each other. And enterprises are typically heterogeneous collections of data sources, data security solutions, data destinations; web services, portals, databases, spreadsheets, and much, much more. And as we considered the many different options we had to tackle this complex problem, we always came back to one fundamental concept that has proven its worth time and again:

A language is the best tool one can have.

So began our journey towards an ‘Enterprise Mashup Markup Language’ (EMML), a language specifically designed to address the needs of creating and sharing mashups within the enterprise. In conceiving, designing and implementing the language, Raj (our chief architect) and I set out defining the key wants and desires and came up with the following criteria as a basis for EMML:

1. It should be declarative. So we made it XML-based.
2. It should leverage existing standards. So we used XPath and XQuery.
3. It should be domain specific to enterprise mashups. So we added features for user oriented activities.
4. It should be friendly to popular languages. So we allow the embed of Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and Groovy scripts.
5. It should be tooling friendly. So we made it interpretive for construction and execution on the fly. And extensible with your own meta-data.
6. It should be data neutral. So we made it work with all kinds of data from different sources.

While I will refrain from describing the complete language in this blog (instead refer you to the excellent documentation on EMML on the Open Mashup Alliance website), I would like to point out a few key features of EMML here using the following diagram:

As you can see, from each feature, and from the collection of all the features EMML offers, it a robust and powerful language for mashups. And over the last few years, EMML has become an important differentiator for Presto, our award winning Enterprise Mashup Platform. As part of Presto, since its debut, EMML has been thoroughly field-tested and proven. It is time to take EMML to the next level.So now let’s return to the present and let me tell you why it is so exciting for all of us here at JackBe.

Today we launched the Open Mashup Alliance (OMA) to promote and foster interoperability and portability through an open mashup language. As a founding member of OMA, JackBe has contributed EMML to the Alliance and, indirectly, to the entire mashup community. Joining us (see this, this and this)are other industry leaders such as Adobe, Bank of America, Capgemini, Hinchcliffe & Co., HP, Intel, Kapow Technologies, Programmable Web, Synteractive, and Xignite.

So why I am so excited about giving away our vision and our hard work? Why would we want to give away one of our crown jewels? Because…

1. It offers an opportunity for our industry to converge upon an open language that aids interoperability and portability of enterprise mashups.
2. I believe that OMA offers a huge potential in enabling enterprise mashup adoption in the enterprise by promoting standard approaches and reducing risk and cost.
3. As a practitioner, I strongly believe in open and standards based approaches for new and emerging technologies and for enterprise mashups, OMA and EMML are it.
4. By contributing EMML to OMA, we will see a lot more innovation in this space by the members of the mashup community.
5. I look forward to working with other industry leaders who want to collaborate to ensure portability and interoperability for enterprise mashups.

Why should you care? I hope many of the above reasons are also the relevant reasons for you. As a vendor or a practitioner, I hope you share the excitement and passion for openness and collaboration in any technology. Check out what several industry leaders are saying about OMA and EMML and you will get a sense of why I am so thrilled.

As the enterprise mashup market evolves further, OMA will provide a platform to bring together different efforts around enterprise mashups into a collaborative alliance. If you are a mashup developer, programmer, IT developer, IT Manager, software vendor, or someone simply interested in enterprise mashups, join the OMA Support Group, check out OMA website and download EMML reference implementation and start participating now.

This is just the start of things to come.
Mash On!

What a surprise for me on Twitter!

Must save this forever!

I just got this on my twitter account.

Hi, deepakalur (deepakalur).

Gov Schwarzenegger (schwarzenegger) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Gov Schwarzenegger’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/schwarzenegger

Best,

Twitter

On Ed Yourdon Presents: Mashups!

[Cross-posted from JackBe blog]

I am big fan of Ed Yourdon. So, I was delighted to see his presentation on Mashups (here). Discussion on this topic by eminent and experienced gurus like him are heart warming and encouraging to me, since we at JackBe, have been working in the area of Mashups to create a new kind of lite-middleware. I and my colleagues have often written about our work (for instance here and here).

What was not so encouraging to me personally was the fact that Presto, our enterprise mashup platform from JackBe, did not figure in his presentation. Which got me thinking, no surprise really, there must be a whole lot of people that might not know or heard about us since we are such a small company compared to the likes of Google, Yahoo, IBM and Microsoft, which were featured mentions in his presentation.

So, to those, I would also like to take this opportunity to introduce our company, JackBe and our product Presto, which is a pure play enterprise mashup server platform built from the ground up for enterprise mashing! At the core of this is our Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML), which we describe as a domain specific language for mashups. No other product or technology offers such a DSL for mashing, which has been greatly appreciated by our users and customers. Do check it out yourself and let me know what you think.

We also offer Presto to developers in a special developer edition to the community. The Mashup Developer Community (MDC) members can download and use Presto for free here (requires registration).

In Ed Yourdon’s presentation, he mentions Yahoo! Pipes, MS Popfly, etc. Some have described Presto as Yahoo! Pipes on steroids for the enterprise, since Presto‘s visual mashup composer called Wires allows you to create mashups that consume any kind of service / API including WSDL, REST, RSS, Atom, Databases, Excel spreadsheets and so forth. Pipes only deals with public RSS services as far as I know.

Presto also generates Mashlets, which puts a face (UI) in front of each mashup. Mashlets become the embeddable objects that can virally spread within and outside the enterprise (assuming the enteprise security policies allow them to share outside). All of this is done in a secure manner, which is why we are an enterprise mashup solution.

To better understand Presto at a high level, I had previously described the 3 artifacts of mashup process here. I hope this provides you some insight into our technology, and hopefully, you will get to try it when you get a chance. While doing so, if you do need any help, don’t be shy to ask on MDC, the whole community is there to help!

Mash On!

Mashups: New and Agile way to Integrate

I came across this interesting post: How Mashups Could Eliminate Integration Projects by Loraine Lawson. In a related post, she refers to John Crupi’s article Enterprise Mashups Part I: Bringing SOA to the People which I would recommend to readers who want to understand JackBe’s take on defining mashups. Anyway, Loraine’s post led me to Ron Schmelzer’s ZapFlash.

Here are some excerpts of Ron’s article that caught my eye, with my take on it:

A year or two ago, assuming that a mashup was a web browser-based, static, user interface composition of web-based functionality would be a reasonable presumption. But in the enterprise context, none of those assumptions necessarily hold – we might want non-Web access to mashed applications, we might want to change them regularly, and we might want to mash up information that exists below the user interface abstraction. For sure, Web mashups might embody the ideals of the original mashup concept, but we now have the desire to mash up a wide variety of IT resources from application to infrastructure to data that might be exposed with a wide range of interfaces – or without. And, it’s the desire to mash up information freed from the application that diversifies the mashup term to include the concept of the data mashup.

Introducing the Mashup Tier

My take: This hits the point right on what we at JackBe have been saying all along about mashups. While some mashups are done purely in the UI/Browser, in the enterprise, such mashups need to be supported by a new tier, the mashup tier, which sits between the presentation and business tier. So enterprise mashups will have some mashing done in the client, but most of the mashing happens in server side where security, governance, policies can be applied before any mashing can happen in the client.

Another excerpt:

There are many scenarios for composing data, but some are better suited for static, tightly-coupled, IT-driven, non-Service Oriented form. In fact, 80% of the value that businesses derive from data come from the 20% of fixed, highly optimized data integration approaches implemented over decades. In this realm, traditional data integration approaches retain high value. However, it’s the other 80% of data integration requirements, most of which come from the need to meet short-term, often ad hoc, integration requests that cause 80% of the problems. Anyone who has lived long enough in the enterprise IT space knows that business-driven requests for reporting, forecasting, analysis, or other interpretations of data can present significant complications and cost to the IT organization. The reason for this is that the IT organization is set up to meet the recurring needs of the business and not “situational” needs for information.

Long Tail of Enterprise Software Demand

My take: This highlights another issue which we have been talking about at JackBe about the long tail & enterprise applications need which was so nicely discussed here by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Bottom line: Something new and interesting is happening in the enterprise architecture space. A new flexible and agile tier is being introduced in the architecture to meet the increasing demand on IT and  add value to existing architecture, applications, services and data. Question is, are you embracing this inevitable change? If not, it’s still not too late.