Survivor's Guide to 2007: Enterprise Applications

In 2007, you'll hear plenty of pundits going on about architecting "agile, competitive, strong-performing" apps that help your organization reduce costs internally, while maintaining customer satisfaction. Easy to say, hard to do. And it's even more challenging to figure out how to make those technologies work together to meet specific business needs.

Take customer churn. Recurring revenue streams aren't only for subscription-based products; selling a widget once is great, but any sales guy will tell you his forecasts include a high percentage of return business. Although not all applications running in your data center affect customer retention rates directly, they do influence the ability of customer service and sales representatives to have a positive effect on that rate. Conventional CRM and homegrown systems, for example, often require customer service representatives to page through two or three different screens of data to assist a customer. This process makes the call longer than necessary. When applications aren't tightly integrated, the rep may be forced to re-enter information. If you've ever been asked to repeat the spelling of your name multiple times, you know how cumbersome and inefficient the procedure can feel to a customer.

If your customer is the business, you might think this doesn't apply to you. Think again. Professional-services organizations across the globe are ready to step up if management decides to outsource your services. The ability to satisfy the business' needs directly translates to how well it can satisfy customers--you know, the people who ultimately pay your salary.

Mashups And EII

If you've surfed the Web in the past few months, you've experienced Web 2.0 and the applications it enables, including aggregated news feeds, instant communications and mashups.

Mashups combine a wide range of data from disparate sources and present that information in a new way. Chicagocrime.org, for example, mashes Google maps with the Chicago Police Department's database of reported crimes. Although enterprise mashup technology is in its infancy, it's taking significant strides, with specific apps to help customer-service organizations access key data in a single screen, and the toolkits to build them.

Take the customer service rep busily retyping a customer's address: Enterprise mashups and EII can alleviate this problem by aggregating customer data from disparate systems for display within a single screen. Vendors such as Composite Software, IBM and Metamatrix have been working to address this issue by expanding the number of packaged applications that can be aggregated. EII vendors currently support PeopleSoft, Salesforce.com, SAP and Siebel, and give IT an opportunity to collate and display all the information about a customer in a single screen.

Enterprise mashup technology will also take great leaps in 2007, as vendors begin to provide toolkits to build these interactive and dynamic applications. Already, companies like ActiveGrid and Laszlo Systems are offering nearly codeless development environments, in which Web 2.0-like interfaces can be developed quickly. These new mashup tools will take advantage of the newest technologies available to build applications that provide a competitive advantage.

Look Into My Call

While increasing efficiency in a call center is important, self-service capabilities reduce the burden on internal employees by empowering the customer as a key part of the process. For example, smart companies are designating their Web sites as the first place customers head to manage their relationships. BPM (business process management) tools help enable this interactive relationship. Leaders of this new market include Lombardi Software, Pegasystems and Savvion, as well as Fuego, which BEA acquired in March.

If you tried BPM a few years ago and were disappointed, consider giving these vendors another chance. Early suites were very focused on workflow and queue management--but rapid evolution is occurring.

In recent years BPM suites have been transformed by the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) standard and Web services. Last year's BPM suites don't have the abilities a BPM suite will require in 2007. For example, demand for capable business-rules engines is growing. In the newer models, a business analyst should be able to change the discount on widgets based on seasonal demand, without the assistance of IT. Such externalization of rules is based on sound SOA principles and shifts the responsibility for defining those rules from developers back onto the business itself--a huge step toward true agility. But BPM doesn't stop there.

Customers typically hit your Web site to purchase something, leave feedback about a product or service, or inquire about the status of an order. While you've probably got the first two items down, the functionality that supports order-status requests might be less robust. If you think you have this service down to a science, answer this: Is it truly integrated with your current CRM and tracking systems? Probably not.

Also, don't underestimate the importance of communicating. Visibility goes both ways, and while customers desire visibility into the shipping process, your customer service reps need visibility into the health of your relationship with each customer. That includes feedback--both negative and positive--received through your Web site. A BPM suite can create this visibility by automatically routing requests to the proper system, say, a queue reps can use to handle customer requests, or a defect-tracking system developers can access to examine complaints and prioritize according to impact on the system.

And remember: 80 percent of the revenue comes from 20 percent of the customers. BPMs help make the most of that top 20 percent by prioritizing customers' requests. Integrated into the application infrastructure, a BPM system with a well- constructed set of business rules can easily pull order and revenue data from back-end systems and determine a customer's importance to the business. The BPM system can then route the most important requests to a customer service rep for immediate attention, rather than keep your best clients lingering in FIFO limbo.

BPEL Is People

Also fitting squarely into SOA is the much-maligned BPEL standard, which BPM vendors were still shakily implementing while adopting Web services. While the BPEL4People initiative, proposed jointly by IBM and SAP AG in August 2005, has yet to pick up much steam, it was a step in the right direction. BPEL 1.1, its machine-oriented predecessor, dealt poorly with "human integration," which admittedly sounds more like something out of a bad Sci-Fi Channel Original horror flick than a technology initiative. But the intention was good--to address the lack of people in the would-be-standard markup language that describes business processes.

BPEL 2.0 is moving in the same direction as WS-Policy. BPEL 2.0 will support separate subprocess definitions, in much the same way WS-Policy is designed to be a framework upon which domain-specific policies are defined. Unfortunately, it isn't getting there very fast, so the ISV community has been left with BPEL 1.1 as the primary standard upon which it can claim its products are standards-based.

In the coming year, BPM vendors will improve crucial visibility options, both for external and internal customers. You'll also see better support of externalized business rules from existing and new vendors in the space.

SOA Payday

We've said it for several years now: SOAs will change the face of enterprise application infrastructures. In 2006 the technology finally started to pay off for applications in general. SOA hugely simplified the most painful of IT chores by decreasing the time and cost of integration projects and leaving more time for developers to implement applications.

In 2007, enterprises without a strong plan of execution for SOA will start to encounter problems, primarily around management and governance, which are not the same. Management tasks include load balancing, monitoring SLAs (service-level agreements) and enforcing policy, while governance is about managing the metadata associated with the whole system. SOA management will continue to evolve and be an instrumental piece of the SOA landscape in 2007, providing an opportunity to control the deployment and run-time behavior of services in every corner of the enterprise.

That's the run-time story. What about design-time? Governance suites, also known as the registry/ repository, were almost all acquired by the big guns in the last half of 2006. Within a two-month period, WebMethods snatched up Infravio, Hewlett-Packard got Mercury (which had previously acquired Systinet), and BEA Systems picked up Flashline. LogicLibrary still stands alone, relying on extensive partnerships with ISVs such as BEA, Oracle, Reactivity, SOA Software, and Sun Microsystems to keep it in the running, at least for now.

The ability to enforce standards and compliance with defined enterprise architectures is paramount to controlling services. As the number of services grows, so do the relationships between them. A massive change in one can adversely affect the behavior and availability of countless other services or applications. Governance suites provide the control necessary to keep services aligned with organizational standards, as well as the ability to map out the dependencies and relationships among services--an absolute necessary in a rapidly evolving SOA.

You'll want to dig into governance options in 2007, but wait for the second quarter--the dust from the scrambling and acquisitions should have settled by then.

The New Open-Source Model

When open-source software first hit the scene, it was a radical idea that left many enterprises tempted, but uneasy about support. Once Red Hat proved the OSS model could work, a herd of vendors tried to play the same game. Many failed.

Then, IBM had an interesting idea, based on the common practice of giving away development versions of its products to win the hearts and minds of developers. Big Blue adopted a hybrid model that crossed the free "development" version of software with the open-source model. And thus was born the "community" edition of so many products. With this new model, ISVs and customers alike reap benefits. Even TIBCO Software recently entered the fray, open-sourcing its General Interface, an Ajax-like set of libraries the integration giant uses within its other products. Adobe, IBM and Laszlo all have similar offerings, with more sure to join the fray in 2007.

Sure, it's an old twist on the "try before you buy" game, but this new approach is more successful than the cripple-ware gambit ever was. After all, the old evaluation software lacked full functionality, so it was impossible to truly evaluate the applications. Open-source editions are full-featured, completely functional, and enterprises don't pay for any of it unless they need support.

Unfortunately, we don't think this will ever be a popular model for hardware vendors, so stop watching for your free Cisco 6500.

Monday Morning Quarterback

ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS

We predicted that the registry/repository arena would be very important and active. Over this year, almost all the vendors were acquired by big guns. Think we were right about the hotness of this market?

Just look at the growth of vendors like SOA Software and you can see how important services-oriented architecture has been this year. No doubt about it, SOA management is going to continue to grow and expand its reach into other areas within the enterprise.

We said in our last Survivor's Guide that CRM on-demand was hot and would continue to grow, and look who jumped into the market this past year just to prove us right: SAP.

We said SOA nirvana wouldn't be attained in 2006, and it wasn't. We're going to go out on a limb to say it won't happen in 2007, either.

Lori MacVittie is an NWC Senior Technology Editor as well as a former software developer and network administrator. Write to her at [email protected].