The TIBCO Blog

Don’t Tank a Great Cloud Strategy by Maintaining Legacy Silos

Chris Taylor — Fri, 24 May 2013 12:02:13 +0000

There’s no doubt the world is enthralled by the promises of cloud computing. What’s not to like about freeing up enormous capital expenditures in favor of subscription-based services for functionality that someone else has to worry about? Well, the fact is that most SaaS applications are merely silos of their own, not significantly improved from the legacy systems they were designed to replace.

What about APIs, you ask? David Linthicum dispels the API warm and fuzzy when he talks about early attempts to organize cloud APIs: “…while it makes an interesting conversation, consumer concerns still surround vendor lock-in and portability issues.” He’s absolutely right. Most companies are already using several cloud applications and are being forced to choose standards that could be a big problem down the road if they decide to change vendors or add new applications. APIs can and do change with unnerving frequency, creating points of failure and headache.

For all of the great things cloud can deliver, unless a business has a way to quickly integrate cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise software, it’s just replacing today’s problems while creating tomorrow’s.

The promise of Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

There is good news in the midst of what could be considered dark clouds (pun intended): There is a cure for the woes of silo’d cloud. On Tuesday, TIBCO announced the launch of Cloud Bus, putting down a significant marker in the iPaaS arena.

They’re not the first vendor into this new market, but they certainly enter the ring with a reputation as the integration heavyweight champion, with nearly 20 years of bringing together enterprise information through their enterprise service bus technology. Their iPaaS offering will allow companies at different stages in their cloud evolution, be it early or late, the “…freedom to choose and move across a set of cloud infrastructure partners.”

This is the real future of cloud computing: the ability to create business value and solve problems without the need for investment in hardware and software. By choosing ready-made connectors to common cloud applications like Salesforce, or adapting templates for their own business context, innovation can accelerate without the downside of vendor lock-in and limits to portability. By offering flexibility to its customers, iPaaS platforms like Cloud Bus stimulate innovation and competition, that can only be a good thing for cloud as a relatively new and immature marketplace.

TIBCO’s Cloud Bus promises what every enterprise cloud strategy is looking to achieve: drastically shorten time to market while lowering costs as they migrate applications and workloads to the cloud

There is No Glass Ceiling When it Comes to the Cloud

Kevin Jordan — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:02:47 +0000

The glass ceiling for IT has been broken when it comes to cloud. Unlike before, companies now have the ability to cut out the hardware, and even the software if they choose to, with a cloud solution that reduces costs and shortens time to market. Companies with options can become more agile to better serve their customers. The cloud is the starting point to breaking IT’s reliance on the old ways of doing business.

Companies often get so overwhelmed with the idea of cloud and integration that completing either seems like victory enough . However, with seamless integration and a cloud that comes along with it, companies can go well beyond deployment to find real business value.

Not All Clouds are the Same

As popular as cloud is for businesses, and as important as it is to innovation, cloud projects are often viewed as daunting because of time and cost. These are the two factors that can torpedo any business venture. Companies often think short term when it comes to their systems, so they fail to recognize the necessity of integration and cloud’s ever-increasing value.

Not one cloud looks the same as another and not every company is at the same stage of their cloud deployment cycle. This kind of variation demands something flexible. Companies need the freedom to test different ideas before deployment and the flexibility of a cloud solution (that does not trap a company into a vendor) reveals how companies can make the most of their investments.

Experience as a Service

Although the cloud can offer great platform as a service (PaaS), the benefits of the cloud are not just to provide an integrated platform – it is to create an experience. The IT people interested in improving processes, the customers who use a product, and everyone invested in a company’s success want an experience that makes their lives easier. Having a central system that allows for rapid deployment, and even quicker responses to situations that demand attention, creates seamless flows where customers are served in real time. Consumers then experience better quality of service and the business wins all around.

The cloud is no longer the superfluous ideal people once thought it was. It is actually the future of IT innovation companies that need it in order to stay competitive. Companies just want the flexibility and option to move an entire organization to the cloud, but still not notice or get interrupted by the transition upward.

Introducing: TIBCO Cloud Bus. Read about TIBCO’s new service, just launched Tuesday, that enables fast, flexible, ready-made integration for your key applications on the cloud or on-premise.

Take the Cloud to a Higher Altitude

Matt Quinn — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:02:58 +0000

This post was originally featured on May 21, 2013 in VentureBeat as a guest post by Matt Quinn, CTO of TIBCO.

We’re well beyond any question about whether cloud computing is the future. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paved the way for the idea that organizations can operate some of their most important systems in an on- or off-premise cloud. Small, medium, and even large businesses accept that cloud computing delivers flexibility, cost, and scalability that business has never had before. Companies are gravitating to cloud because it brings very short time to value and doesn’t impact the current business model. Lower cost and less risk are very attractive propositions.

How big is this move? Forrester estimates that the average company has 9.3 different SaaS applications in use. Consulting firm Capgemini reports that 78% of new applications are deployed into the cloud — and that’s just the applications that are being tracked. In reality, workers today are practicing BYOS (Bring Your Own Service) as they experiment with SaaS in broad ways that IT, and even business managers, may not know about.

Cloud has its challenges

As cloud computing continues to mature and its use expands, it hasn’t been without challenges. The most significant limitation has been the increasing pain of a lack of integration between cloud applications and the rest of the business. This is a pain that becomes more acute as the cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise system invariably becomes more complex. On top of the integration challenge, the mechanics of cloud expose organizations to increased risk of data integrity, process latency and security. Oftentimes, SaaS applications are being marketed to the business, which likely looks at risk in a different way than IT or compliance. This is a challenge itself as the organization faces risks that aren’t understood or moratoriums on SaaS use that aren’t followed.

A way to solve this problem is to stay within a single SaaS vendor “stack,” but that leaves an organization beholden to a single vendor – a risky position. But there’s a reality of the still-maturing cloud: SaaS applications are typically limited in capability, a necessary evil of the SaaS paradigm that creates economies of scale for users by requiring customers to use highly standardized interfaces and functionality. To build out the same level of capability that’s commonplace in the on-premise world, organizations need to blend custom functionality within their own walls with multiple, disparate cloud applications and storage options. The reality of Cloud is that nearly all enterprises will need to operate a hybrid model for years to come.

TIBCO Cloud Bus

With these challenges in mind, TIBCO released TIBCO Cloud Bus yesterday. This is an entirely new integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) that uses ready-made templates and connectors to integrate cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise systems and applications, and includes integration with social networks. In keeping with the nature of the cloud, TIBCO Cloud Bus is a subscription, pay-as-you-go service without a large upfront investment or infrastructure.

The immediate benefit of this iPaaS platform comes from being able to rapidly connect SaaS applications without having to program, by using the latest graphical tools in a business-friendly user interface. Considering how critical time-to-value has become, this kind of ease of use is essential. Let’s face it: What matters enormously today may not be necessary tomorrow; and likewise, business needs to constantly innovate through technology that seems to change daily.

http://www.capgemini.com/sites/default/files/resource/pdf/simply._business_cloud_where_business_meets_cloud.pdf

Customers Have Been Stretched Too Thin by Company Service Agreements

Laura Lau — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:03:01 +0000

Our lives are becoming increasingly elastic with businesses who empower our constantly changing lives as our greatest allies. Service relationships used to be agreed upon as strict packages measured in multi-year contracts with hefty cancellation fees. Mobile phones, insurance plans, and cable subscriptions – anything you couldn’t own outright, involved an ironclad, unchangeable contract. But that’s increasingly passé as businesses tap into the natural ebb and flow of consumer and business life. Namely, if you want to use, rent, or borrow something for a month, a week, or just this moment, an arrangement can be made.

Consistently Inconsistent

These new service relationships make sense when looking at how change is the only constant in our lives. A team can be rapidly growing a business one moment, freezing everything to handle a crisis at another, and then be back expanding at a breakneck pace, all in the same quarter. Naturally, they’d like their services to keep pace.

In our own personal lives, we can be traveling nonstop for what feels like weeks, then come back to a monotonous daily commute for two months. While all of this is going on, we always wonder to ourselves why we are paying for what we often don’t need and can’t increase what we need when we do need it. Why am I paying for utilities when I’m never home? Why can’t I increase my data plan for my phone without entering into another agreement? Why can’t I rent the office space I need, instead of these giant spaces that are available? These were all questions that challenged established businesses to change their perspective on service, and modernize their business models through innovation and flexibility.

Challenging the Status Quo

It’s been exciting to see how a challenge to the status quo has created new and interesting services that empower our lives to grow, contract, and experiment with more ease. From short-term apartment rentals around the world to pay-as-you-go car insurance, every seemingly inelastic service has become flexible and brought with it a growing following of people looking to plug in on their own terms.

With the popularity of the pay-as-you-go economy, it’s funny to look back at how companies once feared these business models because they thought short-term options would translate to short-term loyalty. But, as we’ve seen, when you empower people to make a choice, and they truly like your service, they’ll be back.

Read about TIBCO’s new service, launched today, that enables fast, flexible, ready-made integration for your key applications on the cloud or on-premise.

How Retail Data Management is More Difficult than Just Remembering Your Shopping List?

Amitava Kundu — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:03:30 +0000

Visiting the neighborhood supermarket on weekends to shop for groceries has become a weekly occurrence for most working people. We all know buying food everyone in the family likes can be a difficult task. I normally have a lot to purchase during these visits because my wife and I have different kinds of breakfast. I am a person who loves the full English breakfast while my wife prefers the delicacies of Indian cuisine.

The Grocery List

Listing our shopping items is a simple process carried out easily in our minds and through conversations. However, for companies that produce the items we buy at the supermarket, maintaining product catalogs is more complex and difficult. Each product is made up of ingredients vital to the nutritional value, flavor, and aroma of the product. For my frosted flakes with honey and almonds to taste perfect and be marketed with the right labels, companies use a data management system to ensure that the right ingredients go into the right products at the right time. Consolidation of information about core products and optimizing product information workflows, increases operational efficiency by providing people and systems in the company with a single source of accurate and consistent product information.

Lion, a leading beverage and food company in Australia and New Zealand, with a portfolio of market-leading, household-name brands in beer, spirits, wine, milk, fresh dairy foods, juice, cheese and soy beverages, did exactly this – implementing a master data management (MDM) solution. Lion created the right balance of product lifecycle management (PLM) and master data management capabilities. Besides product data, other master data such as vendors and customers, multiple inter-related catalogs, complex hierarchies, and data integrity across all catalogs were accurately maintained.

An Easy Checkout

With the help of MDM, Lion streamlined new product development and change processes, reducing the process from 60 steps to approximately a dozen steps. MDM enabled Lion to facilitate compliance with GS1 standards, allowing it to seamlessly exchange electronic product and shipment information with major customers. These benefits play a major role in the expansion plans of Lion.

We can only be overwhelmed by the importance of GS1 compliance, when we realize that our favorite brand of sea salt with cracked pepper chips is available in the store because GS1 compliance enabled quicker delivery of the product across the supply chain from the manufacturer to the store. Next time you go to the supermarket, reflect and wonder at the technology that makes shopping for your desired products convenient and satisfying.

For more information on Lion, read the full customer success story.

I Know What You Did and Which Aisle You Did It In

Jeanne Roué-Taylor — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:03:56 +0000

Loyalty in the Enterprise: This is Part Two of a series on loyalty best practices in the Enterprise. Read Part One and discover what are the Four Holy Grails of Marketing.

Indoor mapping of consumer location is the latest arrow in the quiver of the retail marketer. When marketers know where things are happening, they can develop interesting patterns for where to put resources like people, signage and information technology. Geolocation also provides the remarkable ability to spot the patterns that predict what to expect from consumers, and can be tested and continuously refined based on effectiveness and cost.

Marketers can also send messages directly to the consumer based on where they are in that very moment. They can say, “Hey, you were in Aisle 5 and showed interest in that new phone—here’s an offer for 10% off.”

Service versus stalking

But where does it start to look like stalking and less like helpful service? The difference between creepy and convenience is found in whether consumers are knowingly and willingly sharing details about their path through the store, mall or city, and how long they spend in any one spot. When they’re not agreeing to this level of data collection and use, the outcome looks much more like Big Brother.

Pretty soon, they’re not agreeing to share their location and turning off that app that tracks their location. Who wants that?

Loyalty to the rescue

There is a simple way to make the same information useful both for prediction and messaging. Loyalty programs are the permission that consumers give because they see the benefit of having a closer, more open relationship with the seller. Anyone considering geolocation software as a way to get closer to the shopping cart has to first take into consideration the permission required to stay above the creepy line.

It is that easy. Loyalty programs are the de-creeping of big data and the answer not just to today’s monitoring and analytics tools, like geolocation technology, but also to what’s certainly coming in the not-so-distant future.

Learn more about the tools and technologies that are helping to reimagine loyalty marketing in this webinar.

What are the Four Holy Grails of Marketing?

Jeanne Roué-Taylor — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:03:16 +0000

Loyalty in the Enterprise: This is Part One of a series on loyalty best practices in the Enterprise. Tune in tomorrow for the next part in the series.

The remarkable amount of change in the consumer world is ushering in a new definition of loyalty. What have long been static programs of points and plastic cards are becoming dynamic, individualized and much, much more engaging.

The old way of simple ledgers and confusing redemption schemes was a fundamentally flawed proposition. Customers were able to accumulate points but struggled to keep track of and gain real value in return. Something had to change.

Enter Customer Loyalty Management

Customer Loyalty Management is the new, holistic approach to driving higher levels of loyalty to brands. It puts a focus on what have emerged as the four “pillars” of loyalty:

Loyalty programs
Wider event streams
Marketer-driven relationship marketing
Test & learn

Each of these four is key to finding the “Holy Grail” of marketing: creating “fans”—people who think of a brand first and represent a much higher lifetime value. But today’s technology combines social, mobile and analytics to create new ways to drive another layer atop the four pillars, including higher trust, greater insight and relevance, and recognition leading to virtuous cycles of increasing value.

These are lofty goals that would be impossible without the new approach in technology and strategy offered by Customer Loyalty Management.

Aligning the Tools and Techniques

As consumers’ buying patterns change, the tools and techniques of loyalty need to change alongside them. There are four specific areas where the tools and techniques align with the four pillars and matter the most for the new Customer Loyalty Management:

Social
Mobile
In-store
On-line

Each of these areas is impacted by those changing buying patterns, and there’s an opportunity for brands to avoid disruption and benefit from the shift. These points of personal and digital engagement are the new realities of letting consumers engage in ways that increase their experience and create true fans.

Cloud Integration Needs to be Better, Faster and Cheaper

Chris Taylor — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:57:37 +0000

Gartner’s Massimo Pezzini spoke this morning at the AADI Conference in London on the topic of why integration is even more critical in the ever-expanding world of cloud computing. Pezzini started out by commenting that application integration was a science that we were finally beginning to master just as the game changed with the arrival of cloud computing. With this game change comes new realities and consequences for cloud services integration (CSI) that Pezzini laid out as follows:

Realities

Your organization plays in one or more “virtual enterprises”
Cloud services (e.g. SaaS) hold some of your data
Cloud services manage “chunks” of some of your business processes
Your application portfolio will include both on-premise and cloud apps

Consequences

You wil have to increasingly share data with your partners and participate in their business processes (and vice versa)
Your data will be fragmented across cloud and on-premise
Your end-to-end processes will span cloud and on-premise

He followed up this foundation for his discussion with what he described as the three key issues facing businesses looking to integrate cloud and on-premise applications:

Key Issue #1: Will cloud service integration affect integration competency centers’ established methodologies, organizational settings and governance models?

Pezzini talked about what hasn’t really changed about CSI integration. For starters, he is of the opinion that integration issues remain roughly the same. Companies still need to integrate processes, pay attention to time to market, ensure agility and perform data aggregation. As well, there’s still the challenge of data consistency, multi-step processes and managing composite applications. According to Pezzini, the core technologies required to support these things remain still mostly the same.

Where Pezzini felt that CSI changes the game involves new expectations coming from a new breed of buyer: “Business leaders expect to deliver functionality in a matter of hours or days.” He provided the following additional differences that indicate that the old methods need to be re-thought in a cloud environment:

CSI requirements can be more opportunistic and informal than traditional methods.
On the positive side, many SaaS applications provide end-user-oriented integration functionality.
SaaS projects manifest integration requirements incrementally rather than the more traditional longer release cycles and fewer phases.
SaaS APIs usually hide data schemas and semantics.
CSI security requirements are more demanding than traditional application to application. The security requirements, in fact, are more similar to B2B applications.
SaaS and external Web API’s life cycle are not subject to bilateral agreements. APIs can change at any time and what worked yesterday may not work today.

Key Issue #2: How will integration PaaS enable cloud service integration?

Pezzini said that most obvious answer is that cloud software is delivered as a service and comes without a significant IT operations burden. Beyond that, model-driven development tools, packaged integrations, self-service, crowd-sourcing tools, subscription-based pricing and elastic infrastructure are all powerful enabling features that can’t be ignored.

He laid out four specific use cases for iPaaS use as a cloud integration tool:

Cloud services integration (common)
E-commerce B2B integration (common)
Web API publishing (emerging)
Classic on-premise integration (emerging)

The last point may seem surprising but Pezzini provided that iPaaS is gradually evolving to allow companies to integration globally in circumstances where technical support isn’t feasible across in all locations. Once iPaaS tools become familiar, this use case will become more common.

Pezzini also reported that vendors are moving rapidly toward the iPaaS market as more companies recognize their customers’ needs to provide cloud integration. Likewise, SaaS vendors are beginning to embed iPaaS technologies in their platforms as a necessity that customers are demanding. Rather than build their own, many SaaS vendors are embedding 3^rd-party tools to provide this functionality.

Pezzini believes that by 2016, at least 35% of all large and mid-size organizations worldwide will be using one or more iPaaS offerings in some form. This will be driven by ease of use, embedding by SaaS vendors, classic vendors joining the market, and by mobile integration combined with the need for integration of the “Internet of Things.”

Key Issue #3: Which mix of iPaaS, traditional integration middleware and outsourcing services will best support your business?

Pezzini laid out four ways to integrate cloud, each offering benefits and risks:

Point-to-point – Often the least expensive on a project-by-project basis, but costly as complexity increases. This can easily lead to “spaghetti integration.”
On-premise integration platform – A familiar approach with known skills but complex and costly.
Integration PaaS – Great for rapid integration with low internal cost but suboptimal for demanding platforms (e.g. B2B). This is the best approach when integration is primarily for the cloud.
Integration brokerage – This approach takes advantage of the provider’s infrastructure, but there’s a risk of losing project control. This also brings the risk of loss of intellectual property and vendor lock-in.

Pezzini believes that within a few years, most enterprises will need to manage a hybrid of cloud and on-premise applications. This reality will force organizations to embrace CSI or be left behind by more efficient competitors that can rely on integrated systems. He concluded by urging organizations to clearly identify CSI requirements before choosing the best approach.

TIBCO is here at AADI and we encourage you to stop by our booth and talk about the future of cloud integration.

Gartner on Building Big Data Solutions

Chris Taylor — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:18:24 +0000

Gartner’s Ian Finley spoke this afternoon at the 2013 Gartner AADI Conference in London. In what was a primer on Big Data, Finley predicted that there will be 4.4 million jobs in Big Data by 2015, but only a third of those positions will be filled due to a lack of resources in the labor market. He used that prediction to emphasize the value of first understanding the business need for a Big Data solution and formulation of solid use cases.

Finley provided examples of common Big Data opportunities that Gartner is seeing:

Public sector: real-time monitoring of traffic flows, vehicle locations, resource use
Public safety: Forecasting the extend and impact of natural and man-made disasters as well as surveillance
Utilities: Understanding individual use patterns and improving demand management
Retail: Web and e-commerce by analysis of clickstream and customer feedback. Providing faster and more accurate customer responses.

Finley referred to retail as the most popular use case and said that it attracts the greatest number of resources and publicity.

Iterative experimentation

Finley brought up the need to experiment with technologies and analytics to find the right combination that works for the organization. As a relatively new technology for most companies, working with Big Data will likely be a very iterative project. Part of being successful is being able to recognize when an answer is valuable or not, and for that he recommends being skeptical of outcomes. Finley also said that being successful is very much a team effort that draws in multiple skills sets.

This iterative approach allows “tinkering” to happen at the data level that can be moved into production as it proves useful to the business. By keeping production and Big Data development separate, the flexibility required to find solutions can happen unhindered by the structure and security of business operations. In the same way, Big Data projects can happen in parallel by operating multiple data environments that take advantage of inexpensive storage and computing. Each project may have different data types and sources, meaning that flexibility is a key part of the development environment.

The data scientist

Finley touched on the skill sets necessary for Big Data projects. He said that a good data scientist needs to be able to understand the business, data and analytics in equal measure. While the business may create requirements, Finley said that a data scientist works as a consultant to the business while also being comfortable with the IT department and its language.

In wrapping up, Finley talked about NoSQL and unstructured data. he listed the biggest challenge to NoSQL as the need to code features of that we’ve come to expect from relational databases, like access control.

His advice for the near term was to inventory existing and potential sources of data and to review analytics and development capabilities. In the medium term, he recommended identification of ideas from outside one’s industry to drive an agile program that takes a new approach to data. Lastly, Finley recommended refocusing investment and resources away from BI report development and into diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics. And of course, his final point was to update organizational skills to be ready for the Big Data future.

Minding the talent gap

Catching up with Ian afterward, he said that organizations will need to cobble together the resources necessary to make up the shortfall in resources. He pointed out that there are over 50 degree programs around the world that are related to the data scientist role. Finley felt that smaller organizations will likely need to contract experts on a temporary basis as the training investment could be outsized.

Of course, underlying the need to have the right talent for Big Data is the need to be able to find, understand and act on the things that matter to the business. A common topic in Big Data discussions is the need to have strong data integration capabilities that feed these solutions.

Come see us at the Gartner AADI TIBCO booth for a continuing discussion of Big Data and integration.

Gartner AADI and Dragging Your Technology Past Into the Future

Chris Taylor — Thu, 16 May 2013 05:42:02 +0000

Gartner’s AADI Conference kicked off this morning at the Park Plaza in London with the keynote Gartner Keynote: Integrate the Past. Embrace the Present. Shape the Future delivered by Gartner’s Andy Kyte and David Mitchell Smith. Kyte and Smith talked about the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information) that is driving both change and uncertainty. They framed their conversation against the skills and assets that organizations bring from their past, but also about the technology and process “baggage.” To move forward, they said, “…organizations must not just integrate legacy but also do so in a way that minimizes dependencies on legacy thinking.”

What to Do with Legacy Systems

The single biggest problem most organizations have today is exactly what to do with legacy systems that are crucial for the business as both systems of record and as business process support. David Mitchell Smith started off the conversation by saying that the key to embracing the future is making a choice to shape it and not be passive about the change that’s coming.

Shaping the future, Smith said, is about understanding what got us to today. That requires understanding the intersection points of the Nexus of Forces. He said that while each element of the Nexus is strongly disruptive, in combination they set the stage for innovation to happen.

Ripples on a Pond

Smith used the analogy of ripples on a pond, saying that the key for organizations is to understand the effect of the pond’s ripples, but to pay particular attention to the points where the ripples intersect. Smith gave the example of what he called the mobile imperative, where mobile needs to fit into IT, but where IT also needs to change and not treat mobility the same way as previous technology waves. Smith said that mobile strategies should not work in a vacuum and that mobility should be part of every other strategy, including security, integration and development. Don’t outsource mobility, he said, because the skills required are going to be more important in the future. His mobility points were as follows:

Mobile changes everything
Mobility is about people, not devices
No platform, vendor, device or form factor will win; many will co-exist
Mobile is a key enabler in the Nexus of Forces
Mobile strategies should not be in a vacuum
Leverage existing skills and assets is a key goal
Consumerization sets the agenda

Smith turned the stage over to Andy Kyte, who asked the audience to think about what’s happened in application development over the past five years and then compare that with expectation for the next five years. He offered three scenarios:

Demand for application capability is going to decline because the work has been mostly done
The level of demand will remain mostly the same, with organizations living with a backlog and working their way through it
The demand for application capability is going to grow because user expectation is going to grow dramatically, driven by the Nexus of Forces

Growth of Demand

Clearly, Kyte believes that demand will grow significantly and isn’t shy about it:

Growth in demand is going to be relentless. With IT budget cuts and with the huge amount of time and attention to managing the legacy systems, our ability to meet that growth in demand is extremely limited. There is a massive amount of unsatisfied demand.

Kyte said that even worse, technology vendors are coming to the business and saying, “We can satisfy your demand.” This is a problem, as the solutions being sold to the business complicate the job of IT, making life stressful for IT personnel.

Kyte said that the vast majority of organizations are struggling to cope with current demand and will be inundated by the demands that are coming down the road.

The Team, The Team, The Team

Kyte feels that IT is made up of warring teams that defend their applications and refuse to share artifacts across other teams. These teams see it as a battle for declining budget. On the opposite side, Kyte said that the most successful IT groups operate as a single team and share resources. The best IT is highly collaborative and open to external ideas. He challenged the audience to move from “toxic baronies” that exist in most organizations to teams of people who work cooperatively.

Right Things Right

The best organizations know what’s truly needed and can say, “This is what we should be working on now.” Kyte said that the challenged IT departments he sees are putting enormous effort into things that are “a great landing… wrong airport” because of siloed funding that goes to equally siloed business managers. The siloed managers are in competition for budget in a zero-sum game.

Respect

Kyte feels respect is usually delivered more often through very flat organizational structures. Organizational charts in the most challenged organizations read like “long scrolls,” with the people doing the actual work many levels down from the leadership. The smart and innovative people at the bottom aren’t listened to and have limited positive effect on the organization.

In the flat structured organizations, on the other hand, managers aren’t expected to deliver innovations and instead recognize the individuals who are thought leaders and structure teams around them. Time in grade has little to do with the influence and the organizations are true meritocracies.

Design for Life

The best organizations are focused on “design for life,” which is what Kyte calls the, “Shocking difference between the best and the rest.” Kyte said that, “Most IT organizations are ‘stuffed to the gunwales’ with project stuff,” and the culture is all about the success of the project alone. People in challenged organizations want to be attached to big projects that have longevity and less risk of near-term failure. Success in the poor environment is constituted by being on time, budget and quality, but each of those three “legs of the milking stool” is highly subjective and not necessarily aligned to the organization’s needs.

Designed for life, on the other hand, is focused on functionality, reliability, maintainability, usability and things that create systems for life rather than satisfying short-term need for “screens.” The ability to design for life satisfies the attributes for success today and into the future. The challenge? It takes greater design work done by “designers” and not necessarily by the ubiquitous architect.

Everything as a Service

These designers are focused on “everything as a service” rather than focusing on architectures that don’t satisfy future needs. Highly stable, highly predictable and persistent systems are developed within organizations that put capabilities under a layer of services. To do this, they’re using application architectures based on Greek mythology, and in particular, the Ship of Theseus. Without getting too historical, the Greeks had to constantly replace the planks of Theseus’ ship, a monument to his military victory. Eventually, the ship was no longer the original ship, but had been completely changed out.

For Kyte, the Ship of Theseus is a model for IT, where services can be constantly replaced and for transformation to take place constantly and gradually without having to bring in new architectures or throw away large portions of legacy systems.

Reuse

The best organizations are focused on reuse. Kyte expressed this as an IT maturity model that looks like this:

I reuse what I have written
We reuse within the team
Departmental reuse — we share between teams (advanced level)
We reuse within the company
We reuse what we find outside our organization

Traditional IT is stuck at levels 1 and 2, where the best IT organizations are able to consistently reuse at levels 3 and 4 while embracing the idea of level 5.

Selfish Software

Selfish software is about writing services that are designed defensively so that they can be used in environments that are unknown to the designer. These services must be self-testing, self-monitoring and “selfish” in a very positive way. Invocation of these services is safe in many environments, including with third parties that want to reuse this “paranoid” work. Kyte pointed out that it costs more upfront, but these services can be reused much more readily and will survive much longer.

Kyte summarized with, “Services should not trust their environment.”

Quality Embedded

Kyte noted that leading organizations invest a significant amount in quality assurance. They see QA not as something that happens at the end of the development process, but instead throughout delivery. Kyte described this practice as QA being done through design reviews before coding. In Kyte’s opinion, 60% of QA should be done in design review with only 20% coming at the end of development.

I’d love to have a conversation about the Keynote and information technology at the TIBCO Booth and hope to see you there.

Andy Kyte is a Vice President and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research, and is a member of the Application Strategy and Governance team. With more than 30 years of experience in the applications arena, his research now concentrates on the challenges facing CIOs and business management teams in maximizing the return on assets for the application portfolio.

David Mitchell Smith is a Vice President and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research, where he specializes in the impact of catalytic technologies such as the Internet, Web technologies (such as the mobile Web and HTML5), cloud computing and consumer technologies.