With all the fuss being made
over widgets – and there is much more looming – will a commentator
someday say that the cute little services known as widgets were like
the small furry animals that stole the dinosaurs’ eggs, driving whole
breeds into extinction? And if so will that be accurate? It will
depend, as it often does, on the aggregations of individual users, the
innovations that arise and the new habits that form.
Even as the major CRM vendors are pursuing strategies of vertical consolidation (and more from us on this in a future post), SAP at least has turned part of its labs over to the exploration of these small services. As SAP sees it, in its paper “Widgets and the Rise of Niche Enterprise applications”,
“Both producers and customers want suites of software
that work seamlessly together. Custom Bred applications are
applications tailored to smaller and smaller user bases. This allows
for use specific customization of UI interaction and client-side
mash-ups on top of service enabled Best in Class suites…Widgets are an
extreme case of the decomposition of monolithic business functions and
applications.” [full story]
Perhaps this most closely illustrates in part our
own philosophy at Dovetail Software. We deal with enterprises that have
extensive legacy investments in Clarify™ data as a part of their
overall deployment. Our design philosophy, from our earliest beginnings
as a third-party, post-install customizer, has centered on solving
inflexibilities by delivering overkill. We’ve always created add-on
solutions that are prompted by specific user requirements, but provide
an entire class of custom capabilities. For example we added to the
original install functions as useful as a right-click context-sensitive
menu system. This function is itself customizable in turn by the
in-house IT team, using the API library, in numerous ways, for user-specific data views and execution calls.
We
understand on-premise, best of class deployments, and we understand the
great need for whole-enterprise integrations, and thin-client, remote
access, web-based capabilities, founded on service oriented
architectures. We observe with great interest (and passionate
involvement) the lessons offered to the local area network by the
Internet itself, the world’s great operating system. These lessons
include: interoperability, user-centricity, lean performance, and rapid
custom mashup.
The on-demand market offers again its simple sketch of our on-premise future:
“When it comes to Web 2.0, providing less features to a broader audience may actually be more valuable.” – Less May Be More
“API services form the foundation layer. These are the
raw hosted services that have powered Web 2.0 and will become the
engines of Web 3.0 – Google’s search and AdWords APIs, Amazon’s
affiliate APIs, a seemingly infinite ocean of RSS
feeds, a multitude of functional services, such as those included in
the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace, and many other examples. Some
of the providers, like Google and Amazon, are important players, but
there is a huge long tail of smaller providers. One of the most
significant characteristics of this layer is that it is a commodity
layer. As Web 3.0 matures, an almost perfect market will emerge and
squeeze out virtually all of the profit margin from the highest-volume
services – and sometimes squeeze them into loss-leading or worse.” – What to expect from Web 3.0
Underneath it all, of course, is software, which
is ever evolving. The advent of small services is the great force
massaging and challenging the monolithic installation into reinvention,
integration, and ultimate efficiency. Everything points to the users as
individuals, either the agents facing the case-open end consumers, or
the customers themselves in friendly menus of self-service and
context-sensitive mashups. The Forgotten Space of Service and Support
is being recalled into memory from the bottom up by the forces at work
within the enterprise itself, within its markets, and within the World
Wide Web, with its surging, tidal push for democratic software.
