Google Patent hints at new dimension of Mobile Applications

Google has filed a patent application which "suggests it is planning to rid users of the need to choose a single network at all. The patent describes a system where instead of always connecting to one network, a phone, laptop or other wireless device invites all available networks to bid for your business."
If this patent comes to reality, it will mean a lot of convinience for end-users - Switching from one network to another multiple times a day to get the best rate for more bandwidth. Yes, changing the cellular/connectivity network and mode of communication on demand!. (Wi-Fi/CDMA or GSM). Ok!. This is purely from economic perspective!.
What does this mean for Mobile apps?. Hypothetically, for this patent to work, a thick client has to be installed in the Mobile device that directly communicates with service providers or to a central Google gateway to perform the tariff negotiations. The negotiations and agreements can be based on pre-configured preferences/business rules or the application can automatically pick up the best rate. Now, doesn't this sound like a B2B scenario where the buyer and seller gets into receiving quotes, negotiating over the quotes and making a purchase order?.
It sounds exactly the same.
So what we are talking about is that - Mobile applications would be Smarter, Intelligent and Do more Hardwork than in the past, Can work in the background while the user is working on some other application on the device. I could see these applications getting directly into the OS layer like Android to enable the app to execute seamlessly in the background.
Am sure more such apps would emerge in the future that would 'quietly' do the value addition. Incidentally, this idea alignes with Microsoft's strategy on Software + Services, where the Services are delivered from the cloud and Software sits on your device and possess the intelligence!

Oracle on Amazon Cloud

Amazon Cloud computing is gaining enterprise credibility. Now with the biggest announcement, Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Manager can be licensed to run within Amazon EC2 Cloud. Customers can even reuse their existing licenses with no additional licensing fees to run in the cloud. These products along with Oracle Enterprise Linux are prepackaged and ready to run in the Amazon cloud. In addition to that, Oracle Developer tools and Middleware are readily availabile to build and host enterprise applications on the cloud.
Thats definitely a welcome change!. Now, Provisioning, Building and Deploying applications on the Oracle suite does not need a huge upfront / capital expenditure on the hardware infrastructure and all can be done within minutes!.
But, this only means that the enterprise customers will get an advantage at leveraging Hardware/Infrastructure-as-a-Service and they may need to wait till the next level of granularity of services arrive, which is Oracle itself becoming available as Software-as-Service.
One more interesting observation was - with recent acquisition Oracle has made out of BEA systems, having double the power of SOA/middlware platforms, Why didn't Oracle decide to build and host its own SaaS platform?. Instead, why did it decide to partner with Amazon's cloud?
The answer only adds credibility to Amazon in the Cloud Market and I believe this move by Oracle may invite some more Enterprise vendors to Amazon Cloud. Would it be SAP?

Social Media - Yet another Delivery Channel?

While we talk about Multi-channel / Pervasive applications, have we ever thought of Social Media websites as one of the delivery channels?. And thats the news today...Gone are the days where the customers will reach out to company's website to access their applications.
The trend today is that...Apps are reaching out to customers where they are...
I was thrilled to see this - Online Banking Module for Facebook called MyMoney. This module offers transactional online banking services to Facebook users such as view account balances, review account history and transfer funds right within the Facebook itself.
What this means is that Facebook / Social Media websites are slowly emerging as Enterprise Application Delivery platforms where company's can unleash a whole new set of services targeted at Generation Y. And the added bonus is the viral marketing where the existing connections among members can be easily leveraged for marketing new products/services. The possibilities are immense.
And it looks like Top banks have realised the potential as well. Its impressive to see what Wells Forgo is doing in web 2.0 / Social Media space. And as of yesterday, Wachovia Bank has ventured into using Twitter to reach out to customers.
And Apple iPhone Store has quite a few serious apps including Financial services.
This proliferation of apps trend in web 2.0 can be taken for granted by the Gen Y customers and companies may need to seriously evaluate the options for venturing into web 2.0 / Social Media. Today, if a company does not have an online presence / very good online presence, its brand value may be affected which may eventually lead to reduced sales / customers. Similarly, in future, the company's may be forced to have a presence in the Social media sites as well..

Can your competitor innovate for you?

Yes, its possible...and thats called 'Open Innovation'. :-)
SAP attempts to innovate in web 2.0 style. It has tied up 'Innocentive', an Open Innovation marketplace. It connects people from various organizations, academia, talented people across the world who are looking for breakthrough innovation. The platform has so far been used for Pharma, and Retail industries and this is the first time a technology company like SAP has ventured into this paradigm. Am sure there would be tons of IP issues involved in terms of incorporating the open ideas into the product and licensing it out.
But, its a good start. Now, anyone in the world can contribute to the product development at SAP. I have been a subscriber to Innocentive mailing list for quite sometime now. It is interesting to see such a quiet firm suddenly getting the media attention by association with industry leader like SAP. I wouldn't be surprised if more such technology industry leaders join the bandwagon!

Do you know what is Imagineering?

Of course, you can guess - Imagination + Engineering. Walt Disney is the pioneer in creating a Organization known as 'Imagineering' that does the master planning, creative development, design, engineering, production, project management, and research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company and its affiliates. Representing more than 150 disciplines, its talented corps of Imagineers is responsible for the creation of Disney resorts, theme parks and attractions, hotels, water parks, real estate developments, regional entertainment venues, cruise ships and new media technology projects.
In simple terms, Imagineering is defined as 'the fine art of deciding where we go from here'. What a simple and elegant definition!.
In this discipline, imagination/innovation is not seen as extra frills. It is blended with the actual engineering work!.
Now, you may be wondering why am I talking about it in Enterprise Technology blog!.
Here is where I come from ... SAP has setup a similar 'Imagineering' organization whose main purpose is to help SAP and its customer navigate the future. You can visualize this department as a Startup within a Large company like SAP. The imagineering dept works on cutting-edge new/futuristic technologies & business models (yes not just technologies, but business models as well) and comes out with Proof-of-Concepts and Pilots within SAP. The dept currently works predominantly on web 2.0 technologies and pilots them in SAP employee community.
Here is a podcast from the Head of Imagineering at SAP. Don't miss it, if you are curious to know where the Enterprise Software is headed in the future.

Remote Infrastructure Management - the 3D way!

If you think Virtual Worlds/Second Life are only for fun & marketing hype, think again!. Big Vendors like IBM, SAP and their partners have started experimenting the Virtual World platform for more serious applications.
If we can have clones for humans, called 'Avatars', Why not 'clone' your infrastructure? - Thats the idea.
Implenia, a Swiss based Building Mangement company is trying unique and innovative solutions to build more sophisticated services such as Remote Building Management, Carbon Emission/Energy efficiency and Temprature control. The idea here is to link your real world buildings to virtual world buildings in real-time. Sounds Exhilarating!.
Have a look at this article. If you have your little window in the house is open, Close it via Virtual world. Control the real world using Virtual world from being anywhere in the World!. And thats the novelty!.
And take this idea and dip into business scenarios and you get intuitive solutions!. And thats what IBM is experimenting with 3D data center management!.
And You may ask - Can't I do all of this in conventional 2D world using Web/HTML interfaces?. Of course, you can. But the intuitiveness and the exploration the 3D could offer is far ahead of 2D interfaces.
The only bottleneck that I see is the bandwidh availability to support those huge amounts of visual elements data transfer over the internet.
But, if the internet bandwidth becomes a commodity like the mobile airtime has, the 3D world would take off!.

Visual SOA on your way!

Have you ever wondered why Google Maps leads over others in the mashups world?. Why do you think iPhone is so attractive over other phones? In India, iPhone 3G was recently launched and it costs $800, twice as much as the US price and people are still buying it. Why? - I strongly believe it is because of its visual appeal, ease of use and the purpose it serves. The user interface doesn't make one to 'think' to figure out what purpose it serves and how to use it. And thats the quality of good UI.
Now, let us come back to SOA world. Have you ever convinced a business analyst about why SOA is required? or beneficial to the company?. If you have had, you would know what I am talking about.
Whether its an Operational SLA explanation, product issue, or new strategic initiative like SOA - The communication between IT and business holds the key. If you are unable to communicate the technical message that is understandable and appreciatable to the business, your success is uncertain. Especially in the case of SOA, without business involvement, its just not qualified to be called as 'SOA'.
Take the case of next level from business owners to business process analysts. I couldnt think of business analysts modeling complicated business process diagrams using the famous, sophisticated modeling tools. I have interacted with those business analysts in SOA initiatives and their experience most of the times is found to be 'messy'. Though they may be able to create and author certain artificats for a while, ongoing maintenance and governance is a nightmare in those modeling tools.
So what is the solution?. - Zapthink has a take here. Zapthink is one of my favorite and admired analysts in the SOA space. And I have heard its lead Analyst Jason Bloomberg speak in one of the events. Zapthink is vendor agnostic and approaches SOA purely from business drivers perspective.
In this article, Zapthink analyst Jason Bloomberg ideates that applying 'Semiotics' to the SOA will ease the communication of Service abstraction to business. Semiotics is a study of sign processes using signs and symbols and typically used in communication. In this article, Jason gives a simple but an illuminating example of how we all use the 'Window' symbol in our Desktop to manage applications within the System.
The point Jason makes is that SOA will not be useful to the business without working visualizations. And we have a living example - Mashups. Consumers all around the world have created so many visual mashups only to prove that, if they find something visually appealing and understandable, they can put their imagniative ideas around it and create a all new business purpose serving mashups. Can we create this magic in the enterprise world?. Can we expose our business services in a Visual appealing environment?. Not in the form of 'Service repositories'.
If we can, and I would call that as SOA tipping point.
And one can see for himself the progressions being made in the visual environments. We are moving from web 1.0 to web 2.0/RIA. And from web 2.0 to Virtual worlds. Intel is actively working on a whole new paradigm called 'Visual computing' to provide a new visual computing environment for graphically intensive computing environments such as Gaming and Engineering.
I strongly believe there is one disruptive innovation that is waiting to happen between RIA and Virtual Worlds. Virtual Worlds interface is just processor-hungry. (When I tried Second Life in my Laptop, it simply hung). RIA is so good but I find it not so mature to front-end business applications. So an interim technology that brings the benefits RIA/Virtual World and a mature programming model coupled with SOA Semiotics is waiting to create a magic.

Phone Banking in 150 languages!

Can you believe it!. Its yet another innovation by Royal Bank of Canada. In order to respect the diversity in Canada and to assit and attract new immigrant customers in Canada, RBC has recently rolled-out a customer service help line that works 24/7 and assits clients in more than 150 languages. I love Toronto!. I had been to the city twice and worked with major banks in the city. I can understand and appreciate how valuable the service would be!. The RBC bank has roped-in 2600 interpreters for this service.
More than this, I found another idea interesting...where in the Bank's website, the new immigrants can locate a RBC branch where their preferred language is spoken by more than three people. Guess what, its a Google Maps mashup!. If an immigrant is going to stay in canada for few months, I am sure this service would be invaluable. Apart from this, the website also provides various such as locating a house where a preferred cultural composition is high (sounds like BI heatmaps to me! :-))
Now, thats what I call Business Innovation that is truly sensitive to the local context!.
On a side note, RBC is also working on a Pilot with Visa to launch Contactless payments in Mobile devices. Just swipe your phone with the cash register at the merchant store and payment is done. Absolutely no contacts and no bills either!.

New way of Banking @ ATM

Bank of America has recently rolled-out an enhanced ATM facility where customers can deposit cash and get immediate credit on their account for the same-day deposits. The ATM also includes a fake currency detector that can immediately alert about fake notes in the deposited cash.
For cheques, the ATM gives out a receipt that contains the 'scanned image' of the cheque that was deposited. On seeing the cheque image in the ATM transaction slip, the customers will be immediately assured of the deposited cheque and the exact amount. There is no need for math and fill-up deposit slips as the ATM automatically adds-up if there are multiple cheques.
Some of the benefits that are quoted:
- Paperless transaction in the deposits
- Improved Customer Experience
- Real-time security
Its interesting to see the way technology & innovation touching consumers' lives. :-).
Slowly, but steadily, innovation is making inroads into the enterprise. Looking forward to the tipping point!

Integrated Tech & Ops

In times where CIOs themselves dont see their positions attractive or influencing in the corporate, the article recently published in CIO magazine raises hope. The gist of this article is that the new role of the CIO could be a SVP for Technology & Operations. One can find many number of instances in the industry where CIO is complemented with additional responsibility to IT. In most cases, the Operations is merged with IT. In other cases, the CIO is given additional responsibility for other support functions such as HR, Infrastructure/Real Estate, etc.
I see this transition as a very good opportunity for bringing IT close to business. Under the unified umbrella of Technology & Operations, IT can influence lot of business process automations/optimizations and Business Processes can benefit a lot from IT. Of course, there is a catch, provided if they both work together.
Having an Enterprise Architecture body that talks to business trying to create a business-IT alignment is a top-down approach, whereas having a SVP who heads both Technology& Operations can be a bottom-up door opener for achieving business-IT alignment. I will be curious to read successful case studies where these two functions really sit along the same side of the table , 'not' across the table to discuss their problems and improve them together.
On these lines, I would like to bring up a fact that a company in India, called iGATE, have sensed the significance of this organization model five years ago and came out with a integrated tech & ops offering for Mortgage/Insurance and Banking industry. It was a really interesting and visionary model for the maket, to start with. It will be interesting to see how this model shapes up and how this model gets adopted by other IT majors in India.
The consequence of my earlier apprehension - only if the tech & ops in the customer organization are really integrated and working together in spirit, not in letter - the vendor outsourcing will happen as a unified entity. Otherwise, it would still be treated as two different offerings - one for BPO and another for IT.

MBA is a course that is dead on its feet!

How is the title?. :-) . This is something I didnt make it up. And its a reference from an interesting article in India business magazine 'Businessworld'.
I was tempted to pickup the last week edition of Businessworld, as it was a special issue having the theme called 'Using Design as Competitive Advantage'. Of course, the title is so tempting to read in detail, because of its one of my favorite subjects and me being an architect! :-)
The point in story is that, in recent past, the companies that are admired most are the ones that have achieved global success though design!. Do you agree?. I do. Examples - Apple, Intel and Sony. Apple was rated as the No.1 Admired company in the World by Forbes magazine recently. The next No.2 being GE. The rating indicates that it does not matter what products that you manufacture - whether its for lifestyle segment or aerospace segment - the question is how well do you manufacture? - It matters how well the product is designed and whether the product explictely demonstrates the company's vision, passion, creativity and innovation. So, the question for successful companies of the future would be - Not how much revenue you generate, but how well do you design your product/service that will truly 'delight' your customers?. Of course, this yardstick cannot be applied to all companies. But, it will be really be applicable to companies that want to make a difference to their respective industries.
Another key point to be noted from the story goes like this - "Design when practiced at strategic level, it can alter the fortunes of the business dramatically as it engages the core offering of the company - be it product or service". Absolutely!. This is exactly what Zachman said in his conference on how Enterprise Architecture can be positioned strategically within the company to give itself a competitive advantage.
Now, coming to the 'impeachment' on MBA, it is a part of a Indian CEO's interview. He states "MBA degree signifies nothing more than the acquisition of a resource allocation skill, and now it is time to move from that to a more creativity-based mode where design becomes the heart of problem solving, the driving seat of business innovation.” And interestingly, the CEO himself is an MBA.
Not to trvialize the degree, the point the story wants us to buy is that that design has to be given equal importance as Management within any company. And I endorse it! :-)

Software+Services gaining momentum!

Internally, we have played with Microsoft Office Business Applications for quite sometime now. But, its very exciting to see industry majors like FedEx experimenting with those ideas.
Fedex has recently launched an application called 'QuickShip' which lets you to execute critical functions like shipping&tracking without leaving Microsoft Outlook. It is basically a Microsoft Outlook add-in that talks to FedEx services. I looked at the demo and I should say it was impressive and exhaustive. It has forms and menus built right into your outlook. Above all, FedEx distributes the app for free!.
Its a paradigm shift where companies are moving away from websites to consumer-side apps. And the next logical step would be composite apps that integrates not just FedEx services but with other external/commercial services as well.
Have a look at a list of other experiments that FedEx is engaged with, in Microsoft Sharepoint / Office areas. In one of the offerings, the FedEx data is integrated with Virtual Earth as well.
I firmly believe that we are few steps away from the tipping point for Composite applications.

What does it take to create Mashup Corporations?

I was recently discussing with a Business Objects report designer regarding a customer's requirement for Ad-Hoc Reports. The Ad-Hoc Reports are targeted for Business Users, who are not really IT savvy. That scenario flashed me an interesting thought on the lines of web 2.0.
If the business-users/Operational users are comfortable in composing 'Ad-Hoc Reports' on their own, why not 'Ad-Hoc Solutions'?. 'Ad-HoC solutions'= 'Mashups'.
If the business users are provided a platform for composing their own mashups, I am sure they would love to compose their own solutions. The million dollar question is - How easy the mashup platform would be for the end users to compose their own solutions?
But beyond Technical limitations, I see the cultural factors play a stronger role in rolling-out Mashup platforms
- Need for educating/informing the business users regarding the new 'Empowerment' of composing apps on their own
- The comfort factor of the new empowerment from all quarters including the security department
- Joint Governance of mashups created by both Business IT

Whether a user constructs a data mashup or a business process mashup, the need for a mashup will typically arise from the respective business user's curiosity/ambition and deeper commitment towards his day-to-day operations. One can correlate this scenario to a well- known situation - How can we make the business users interested towards using Business Intelligence solutions? There is no easy way to sell BI solutions. Similarly there is no easy way to sell web 2.0 or Mashups as well.
They are not just IT solutions. These are solutions have deeper impact in a person's motivation, organization structure and culture.

Risks in Composite Applications

Here is my recent experience on Composite Applications. Yes, Composite Applications are cousin brothers of Mashups in Enterprise World! :-). While Mashups are situational apps that are predominantly built using Web Interfaces (SOAP/REST), Composite Applications are custom applications that are defined around existing assets in the enterprise. The assets can belong to any technology and be available in any consumable form, not necessarily in the form of Web Services.
If you google for Composite Applications, You will get different definitions from different vendors each of them woven around their own set of products/technology stack. But, Ultimately they all define the same. These are the applications that are composed to serve the unstructured needs of the customer. For the same reason, you will find Microsoft weaves around Office Business Applications, IBM tells the story around Lotus Notes and SAP has Adobe Forms. And have a look at this Microsoft blog which explains the architectural differences between traditional apps and composite apps.
Of couse, the very idea of 'Composing' apps (and not 'building' apps) looks tempting and interesting!. Of couse, the idea of getting apps to the clients, instead of clients reaching out to apps, looks enriching and rewarding!.
Some of the interesting apps could be - clients accessing a purchase order information from SAP without even leaving his Microsoft Outlook and working through the Order collaboratively with his peers.
But, be warned for the following reasons:
- We are increasing the number of tiers in the application. Two-Tier / Three-tier no longer hold good.
- We are increasing the number of COTS in one vertical slice of the application. Its no longer pure custom app (100% coded). You will have participants from multiple platforms/products/technologies in a single business process.
- Security. The whole game would be easy if all the tiers in the app belong to single vendor/single technology/single OS. The moment where we compose the app out of assets from different participants, the security reconciliation of ID and Roles will be cumbersome!. In my recent experience, I realized that a Security platform, something like TransactionMinder, that would ensure end-to-end security across all tiers will help.
- System Management. If your custom apps have some footprint of desktop elements, then we are going a couple of decades back (unknowingly) in the app architectures. Performance - In Three tier web apps themselves, there is no single product/tool that is available in the market that would give me end-to-end performance of a vertical slice in the app. Imagine the amount of complexity involved in tracking the performance and other SLAs in a multi-tiered composite apps!.
- Last but not the least - the composite apps are pervasive and multi-channel enabled. We need new set of tools and techniques to manage the SLAs across channels for a single business capability that is exposed as composite!.

Analytics beyond Technology Boundary!

This is another interesting story from Outlook Business. There was an interview with Future Group Chief Kishore Biyani in this month edition. In this interview, Kishore talks about his future plans in retailing & customer experience. Future Group is a large Indian business conglomorate that has its presence in vairous sectors including Retail, Media, Logistics and Finance. The Flagship business of this group is Retail and its one of the pioneers in low-cost large-scale retailing in India.
When we consider Technology and Business Intelligence as key sources of increasing sales in retailing business, Kishore thinks differently. This is what he has to say about his plans...
"We have a chief customer director. We have also appointed mythologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. We monitor everything that is happening in this country, and we try to respond as fast as possible. We’ve been building this team over the last six to eight months.".
I can understand psychologists. But look at the list - he has mythologists, sociologists and anthropologists. And for me who is from a Tech mindset, this perspective was a revelation!.
Yes, Technology, BI and Analytics alone may not be enough for driving business in your stores. While at one end, we are increasingly codifying the user experience using personalization, rule engines, inferencing and recommendation engines, the other end, another set of people are seriously looking for ways that would interact with Humans with Humanity!. And that is unique!.
Am sure, this approach will certainly and significantly improve the customer experience at Retail stores in the days to come...!
My thought is - How to match that unique customer experience in online stores using Technology?

Now, SaaS is a Corporate Social Responsibility!

WoW!. It was quite a revelation when I read the column by Arun Maira, Senior Advisor, Boston Consulting Group in Outlook Business titled 'Look beyond Products and Profits'.
In this column, Arun proposes five new dimensions to the next generation of business models. The article is completely technology-agnostic and talks purely about inclusive growth. When I was reading one of the dimension for the new framework of business, he says - "The second is the distinction between having access to a product or service and owning it. The more business models are geared towards providing access rather than insisting that people own the stuff, the less stuff will be put through our production and supply processes, and the less will be the pressure on the earth’s resources".
After reading this, I said to myself 'Wow!', How clearly this dimension correlates with SaaS business model? It makes the end consumers to access the resources without owning it, and that saves not just money, but lot of resources, including earth's resources'.
Now, I would say 'SaaS is a corporate social responsibility'. Like various other social-sensitive initiatives like recycling paper, green IT - SaaS also makes a company unique by consuming less resources.

A new language for SOA!

While the end objective of SOA is to achieve enterprise agility, the actual path to achieving the same is 'counter-agile', as Thomas Erl states. The actual process of building and hosting the services in a distributed environment is not simple. And on top of it, if you add the products that promise to implement successful SOA, the complexity will only multiply.
This post is a continuation of my two previous posts - IT industrialization and Product Line Architecture. When I was discussing with my fellow Architect in this regard, we concluded that the need of the hour is 'simplicity'. And I can no way refer any of the existing products in this category.
And there is also lot of discussion going on in the web about the promise of SOA. Someone has asked, if SOA is evolutionary and promising to bring tremendous benefits to the enterprise, how come we are building SOA with same old technologies?. - very thought provoking. You may say - Web services is new technology. But, the fundamentals are still the same.
The only way I see the complexity can be reduced is by bringing a fundamentally new technology or language that would simplify 'building' SOA. And I am not wrong!. Check out this language - Somebody is not only thinking but working on those lines.
Another way of looking at simplicity is use of 'Domain Specific Languages'. I see DSLs are the only thing that is common between Agile Camp and SOA. Both of them agree to gain benefit out of them. While the 'Agile' camp approaches DSL for productivity/Accleration in Development cycle, SOA approaches DSL from 'semantics' perspective. Both stand to gain from it. I believe well designed DSLs would make the 'building' part of SOA lot more 'faster', not necessarily 'simpler'.
But unfortunately, it looks like DSLs are going to become obsolete even before they mature! Yes, Microsoft is planning to adopt UML instead of DSLs for modeling SOA.

IT industrialization is a Mirage?

Gartner has recently identified 'Seven Grand Challenges for IT' during next 25 years. Interestingly one of the challenge that is mentioned is - 'Increase Programmer productivity by 100 fold'. Though I find the number - 100 fold - to be too greedy :-), I have to admit that I see this challenge as the fundamental to the IT industry for the years to come.
IBM endorses this view saying IT industrialization is still in early stages. While recent developments like SOA, SaaS and Utility computing have industrialized the buying and selling side of IT, we have not seen anything that is concrete that will truly industrialize the way we 'build' our software.
There are so many enablers such as Open source frameworks, SOA, sophisticated IDEs, but none of them have seems to have solved the problem to a greater extent. I practically experience in my company where developers are still burdened with mundane activities such as UI issues/Table-to-Object mappings. And we have not achieved significant reduction in the development time as well. Am not talking about rapid application languages such as Ruby, etc. They can help to certain extent, but they have not made inroads to enterprise apps yet.
So, the need of the hour is a magic bullet that would slash the development time spent in mechanics of the actual application.
If MDAs, Software Factories are answers to this problem,we would not have seen this in Gartner Report as a challenge for next 25 years.
I believe one way of improving the developer productivity is to enhace the capabilities of application server platforms. Its the right time to elevate the application server platforms to provide application related capabilities from pure infrastructure capabilities.

SOA Vs Product Line Architecture

While I was contemplating with an idea of Product-Line Architecture concept to a series of projects in my company, it triggered me the thought of comparing the same with Service-Oriented Architecture. I plunged myself into this comparison of Product-Line Architecture and Service-Oriented Architecture and the journey was quite interesting and insightful.
I also saw that CMU is doing lot of work in bringing the synergies between the two paradigms. The university views that both paradigms can complement each other and each can add value to the other at broader architecture level - Applying Service-Orientation to the Product-Lines and Applying Product-Line approach to Service-Orientation / Composition. While I completely agree with this idea, I believe a greater synergy can be achieved when they are applied at their respective contexts, where they are best at.
To explain a bit more, in one of the scenarios, SOA and Product Line Approach can perfectly co-exist, where SOA addresses the interface part of Services and Product-Line addresses the implementation of components behind the services. The Product Line concepts can be applied to model the service inventory within a specific domain in the enterprise. Applying Product-Line concepts to the implementation portion of SOA will significantly benefit in terms of accelerating the development time of services.

Rise of new ERP

Came across this interesting article titled 'The Next Revolution in Productivity' in Harvard Business Review few days ago. The article advocates that - To harvest the maximum benefits out of an SOA initiative, it is required for the companies to revisit the fundamental design of their operations & their organizational structure. If they dont do that, all they will achieve is just IT efficiency, while SOA's true potential can achieve lot more than that.
This perspective generates a lot of thought process. I always tried to understand the value proposition behind the SOA strategy of bigger ERP vendors. The ERP vendors' SOA stack primarily unwraps its huge monolithic bundle in the form of prolific services and encourages the ecosystem to innovate and compose new business processes. However, I would see this model as 'innovation' happening on the 'Edge'. The true innovation in this space would be the one that could be applied at the 'roots' of the business processes.
As mentioned in the above article, using ERP vendors' SOA stack, is it possible to fundamentally redesign a specific business process?. Is it possible hot swap, sell or buy the inner most activities of a business process that is composed around ERP?. If the HBR hypothesis cannot be delivered out of today's ERP ecosystems, then as the article states, one may not leverage the fullest potential of SOA. And the one that supports the complete enterprise transformation with innovative business processes would be the new ERP...