The mushrooming SaaS industry likes to think of itself as the main driver of the sea change occurring within enterprise CRM,
but there are several forces at work, all of which could be embraced by
the concept of evolving software. The software underlying SaaS – not
simply SaaS’s ease of distribution and consumption – is what makes its
market offerings so attractive to the leaner budgets of enterprise IT.
“SAAS is really just the next stage in how IT
applications are being delivered, and forms part of an evolution that
has been going since the advent of the PC, over 20 years ago.” – Procurement Technology: The Skills Deficit
“If all SaaS was meant to be browser-based, it would
have been called ‘Web Apps As A Service’ (WaaaS). So let’s not forget
that when we’re talking about SaaS, we’re talking about the evolution
of software, not just web apps. Given that, it’s a bit incorrect to say
that SaaS is the natural evolution of Web 2.0. Instead, consider Web
2.0 to be an augmenter in the evolution of software. Perhaps SaaS would
more accurately be called Software 3.0, rather than Web 3.0.” – Forget Web 3.0 – Let’s Talk Software 3.0
It is impossible to discuss services in general
without looking to the Web itself for examples of their extraordinary
power. The “social community” proliferations that characterize Web 2.0
obscure the underlying and enabling technological revolution. This is a
revolution of interoperability that allows the “mashup” of services
into specific, often user-customized, datasets, and that allows the
real time creation of user-contributed content.
Both on the Web and off, within on-demand and on-premise systems, the mashup technique is coming to be called Composition instead of integration :
“No middleware – Users are much smarter than software.
When they bring data into composite documents and screens on their own
desktop, they understand where it’s come from and how to interpret it.
This is different from integration software, which needs to have
everything that can possibly be known about the data pre-programmed
into it before it can do a similar operation. All that pre-programming
is what makes integration middleware so unwieldy, inflexible and
expensive. Integration at the desktop eliminates it. Users already have
all the metadata they need inside their heads. Giving them control of
composition lets them apply it directly, without having to code
software.”
But perspective is everything and SOA
and custom services are revolutionizing the on-premise deployment from
in-house development. Just as not all the sea change we’ve described in
Part 1 is caused by on-demand delivery systems, so it must be said that
mashups, widgets, and tiny custom services do not spell the end of
tightly coupled, narrow-focus, applications.
“Lightweight, user driven integration will grow
dramatically in 2007…I’m not so sure that it spells the end of
middleware though. There are masses of complex business transactions
that run without much user interaction, these won’t be mashed up
anytime soon.” – SaaS and Composition
Mashups appear as combinations of
services-at-need within a larger host such as your computer desktop or
a web browser window. Examples are RSS feeds
popping up a window on the desktop with a new item, or a continuously
updating weather or latest-comment scroll in the corner of a browser
window. One of the tools within the mashup architecture is the widget.
“Widgets are ‘helper applications’—mini-applications
that allow the user to monitor or interact with an application without
needing to launch the full application…Widgets offer the next step in
technology to aid the information worker. Widgets can sit beside
information worker applications on the desktop, grabbing attention only
when something important happens, and enabling information workers to
act quickly for common activities.” – Widgets for the Enterprise
Widgets are a mushrooming industry on the Web,
probably soon to become mainstream news, and even a cultural icon.
Given the influence of Web habits upon the workers within the
enterprise, and the underlying software evolutions that enable the
habits in the first place, widgets bear closer study (coming tomorrow).
