Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Chris Bucchere Quoted in BEA Research Brief

Off The Record Research, a subscription-based Wall Street publication, recently prepared a research brief on BEA that was released to their customers on May 9th. Although I can’t post the entire article here (as it’s for paying customers only), I will say that I was quoted twice in the research brief. Here’s what I said:

[BEA’s] AquaLogic is different from a lot of the products in this space. IBM [Corp.], Microsoft [Corp.] and SAP [AG] require you to buy the whole suite. BEA with AquaLogic is more agnostic. [The other vendors’ products] break down [in a heterogeneous environment].

Later in the article, I mentioned BID’s new development efforts, to which those in the know are know calling PEP (for Pages, Ensemble and Pathways):

[BEA AquaLogic’s] Ensemble, Pages and Pathways are going to change the world. BEA is doing it again with Web 2.0, with community-centric software. We need to do this for the enterprise. They are cracking open a whole new market.

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Live from BEA Participate: Mark Carges Keynote

I already held Mark Carges in very high esteem — but my respect for him grew immensely this morning when I found out that he wrote the source for Tuxedo some 23 years ago while he was a student at NYU! Very cool . . . .

Mark opened by talking about the reasons that BEA is hosting this conference. Mostly it was a response to the lukewarm feedback about BEA World from ex-Plumtree and ex-Fuego customers who wanted “something more.” (You can read some of this feedback on an earlier post on my blog.)

The focus of Participate is three-fold: Portals, BPM and “Social Computing.” Clearly that maps to ALUI, ALBPM and PEP (Pages, Ensemble and Pathways), the new AquaLogic product initiatives.

Before getting into the meat of his talk, Mark gave some background on BEA’s overall corporate strategy. Their vision entails facilitating the migration from “traditional” applications to “situational” applications. This message is nothing new, but for the benefit of those who are new to the message, I summarized the difference between these two types of application development below:

  • traditional vs. situational
  • permanence vs. constant change
  • silos vs. dynamic, connected solutions
  • tightly coupled vs. loosely coupled
  • application function vs. business process
  • no collaboration vs. built for collaboration
  • homogeneous vertical integration vs. heterogeneous horizontal integration

Mark then went into a short aside about the way long-tail or “rogue” applications have sprung up throughout the enterprise, facilitated by applications like Lotus Notes, Excel and E-mail/IM. My ears perked up a bit because bdg has identified that e-mail distribution of Excel spreadsheets (and other office documents) is one “business process” that prevails in the enterprise and the one thing upon which we could improve drastically with the right web-based, ECM-driven collaborative tool. Project Excelerator, which is something under active development at bdg, attempts to address this problem in a novel way. You’ll be hearing much more about this product as we get closer to a ship date.

More on Mark’s description of the overall strategy of BEA: he commented that BEA’s focus on business innovation, business and IT agility and technology optimization brings a strong competitive advantage to all of their customers. He gave four examples of this:

  1. AflacAnywhere (highlighting their mobile portal and podcasts)
  2. Goldsmith Williams Solicitors
  3. USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure
  4. The Babcock & Wilcox Company (highlighting ordering parts, project management and using BPM to support the sales process)

At this point, Mark shifted gears and started a segment called “Bringing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise.” He highlighted the gap between what you can do at home (consumer web) vs. the enterprise. He then gave several examples of consumer web sites that have compelling use cases for the enterprise. Those examples included digg.com, del.icio.us, Redfin and wikipedia. I’m sure most of you already know what those sites do, so I’ll skip right to the part about how, at least thematically, they could be applied to the enterprise.

The culture of collaboration and participation started by digg could be used to rank the best sales tools or the best content and the rest of the enterprise community could benefit from this ranking. del.icio.us highlights the power in implicit connections and makes research about different topics much easier, including finding content and people. At work, you could use a del.icio.us-like tool to view content by group/experts, create organic groups of business organizations and leverage the wisdom of the crowd. The concepts implemented by Redfin, a slick real-estate mashup started by Plumtree founder Glenn Kelman, could be used to show a single view of the customer (where info is stored in different systems) including purchased products, support incidents, account team, etc. Lastly, the “long-tail” economics proven to work beautifully in the world of encyclopedias (with Wikipedia) could be used to track the competition, collectively write about competitors and share competitive knowledge, add RSS feeds, add anecdotes and edit everything collaboratively.

Mark closed his keynote with a brief introduction to BEA’s three new products: Pages, Ensemble and Pathways. You’ll be hearing much more about these great initiatives as the conference continues, so stay tuned!

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)

  • Not to jump ahead, but here is a good site to get an introduction to Pages, Ensemble and Pathways (PEP for short). The site was recently updated to have online demos of Pages and Ensemble.http://en.terpri.se/

    Posted by: plaird on May 7, 2007 at 6:16 PM

    • BEA Idol: who is the biggest rock star in the Participate speaker lineup?
    • Alex Toussaint: BEA’s most traveled Product Manager? He is a famous alumnus of WLP, which makes him a popular choice in Boulder Colorado.
    • David Phipps: a long time ALUI engineer, at an ALUI technical conference. Could be a winner….
    • Or…Mariano Benitez: newest member of the BEA family of the three. A born speaker if there ever was one. I hear he likes to sing during his presentations.

Answer? Count the number of sessions given by each here: Participate Session List

Posted by: plaird on May 7, 2007 at 6:36 PM

  • But it is an honor to receive this award!! But I don’t know if the user community would really embrace my singing career!! Next year I will do the opening song!

    Posted by: mbenitez on May 7, 2007 at 8:21 PM

  • We value your articles here on arch2arch/dev2dev too Mariano!

    Posted by: jonmountjoy on May 7, 2007 at 8:50 PM

  • Mariano – opening song? What, like Gloria Estevan or something like that? Is that popular in Argentina? OK, Steve Ballmer made it work:Video: STEVE BALLMER is a yelling freak

    Posted by: plaird on May 7, 2007 at 9:10 PM

  • hey, I am in better shape than Steve!! Anyway,I would only sing if I get the opening act at BEA World with these other guys! WHAT ABOUT THIS OPENING FOR THE NEXT BEA PARTICIPATE?? I think they are pretty liquid thinkers 🙂

    Posted by: mbenitez on May 7, 2007 at 9:53 PM

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

BEA Participate Rapidly Approaching

All of us at bdg are starting to get excited about BEA Participate! As you already know, we’re sponsoring this year’s ALUI and ALBPM event and I’m giving a demo of some slick integration between ALUI (ALI and ALI Collaboration), ALDSP and ALSB that illustrates how AquaLogic can be used to implement an SOA.

We’ll also be giving away some cool — yet practical — gizmos that will be sure to brighten your day. Literally.

Be sure to come by the bdg booth, pick up a free gift, and enter to win this year’s grand prize — a 30 Gb Video iPod, in bdg black (of course).

Whether it’s at my talk/demo, at the bdg booth or anywhere else, we look forward to seeing you at the conference.

Categories
bdg dev2dev Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Bringing Web 2.0 to the en.terpri.se

First, let me establish one thing: I don’t work for BEA. Since leaving Plumtree more than four years ago, neither Plumtree nor BEA has paid me a dime. They don’t pay me to write in this blog. They’re not paying me to speak at BEA Participate in May. Although we have a subcontract agreement in place, we have never actually subcontracted through Plumtree nor through BEA. You get the point: what I write here (or anywhere, for that matter) is not endorsed or sanctioned in any way by BEA.

The beauty of that is that I can be BEA’s sharpest critic or their most outspoken advocate. Today, I come to you, dear readers, as the latter.

I am here to tell you that I think the latest marketing positioning to come from BID — in the most apropos form of a “rogue” web site called en.terpri.se — is perhaps the finest writing I have yet to read on the topic of bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise.

This concept — which many of you already know as “Enterprise 2.0” — is not a new one. But just as consumer portals were not new in 1997, they were at that time very new to the enterprise. And today blogs, wikis, tagging and other social software have already infiltrated the consumer internet. But, as we have been saying since early this year and as others have been saying for a while now, these concepts are only being embraced by the early adopters in corporate/enterprise computing.

But with projects Builder (Holland), Runner and Graffiti (now known as Pages, Ensemble and Pathways, respectively) nearing general availability, all of that is about to change. If you want to find out exactly how, I encourage you to read and digest all of en.terpri.se and its more traditionally-branded counterpart, www.bea.com/enterprise.

Just as Plumtree took the world of enterprise computing by storm by introducing the concept of the corporate portal, BEA is about to re-revolutionize the enterprise by injecting it with a strong dose of Web 2.0.

I won’t rehash what they’ve already spelled out so concisely and intelligently on en.terpri.se; instead, I’ll give you my own take on the products based on what I’ve read there.

Pages (formerly known as Project Builder or Holland)

To call Pages a powerful blogging and wiki tool for the enterprise doesn’t really do it justice because it is, well, so much more than that. Imagine if you could use point-and-click/drag-and-drop tools to mash up structured data (RDF/RSS, the output of a SOAP-based web service, or the result of a SQL query) with unstructured, end-user maintainable, version-controlled wiki-like content — now you’re scratching the surface.

For those of you already familiar with AquaLogic products, think of how amazing Studio would be if it were somehow married to Publisher (we used to call this “Contudio” before it actually existed) and if Studio could tap into existing resources and then somehow weave published content into the resulting user interface output. Now put all this in the hands of the end-user (to give it that Web 2.0 magic), add a sprinkle of security/governance, auditing and enterprise administration and you’ve got Pages.

Ensemble (formerly known as Project Runner)

This may not be the best way to envision Ensemble, but it works for me: imagine taking all the tasty bits that Pages gives you, but put it in the hands of IT and developers. Instead of dragging-and-dropping, a developer can embed a runner Pagelet XML tag into his or her legacy (or newfangled long-tail/rogue) application, then proxy the application through the runner “gateway” and, out of nowhere, the application can have, say, a collaboration discussion or wiki page embedded in it.

Not to mention that other enterprise services such as security, SSO and auditing, can be mixed into the application just because it’s running in the Ensemble gateway. With this incredible new product, pretty much anything is possible because it gives developers the tools to provide secure, scalable, audit-able and maintainable mashups of just about anything in the enterprise or consumer web.

Pathways (formerly known as Project Graffiti)

Calling Pathways a next-generation Knowledge Directory may be an easy way to conceptualize it, but again it really doesn’t do it justice. Unlike the top-down, “mother knows best” taxonomies of the past, Pathways puts the power to categorize corporate knowledge in the hands of the knowledge consumer. Like del.icio.us and digg, Pathways is BEA’s recognition of the “many is smarter than any” principle. Unlike its consumer web counterparts, Pathways uses a page-ranking system that’s based on a whole slew of factors, including not just how or how much an entry is tagged, but also how “respected” the tagger is in terms of other entries he or she has tagged. Like the KD of the past, Pathways can import content from file shares, e-mail/groupware systems and even from Sharepoint (gasp) — think CWSs — but very much unlike the KD of the past, control over the taxonomy and how well entries get ranked in search is ceded to the end-user, where many argue it belongs.

Needless to say, I’m very exited about these new product initiatives for many reasons, not the least of which being that I’ve bet my entire company’s future on their success. So maybe I am a little biased. That being said, I’m not here to tell you that BEA invented Web 2.0 or even Enterprise 2.0. However, I am saying that — based on what I’ve experienced over the past ten years that I’ve been pushing the enterprise computing envelope — BEA is poised to execute on the Enterprise 2.0 reality better than any other company right now.

Mark my words: you will watch Pages, Ensemble and Pathways implementations spring up throughout the Fortune-whatever just as quickly as you saw enterprise portals replace intranets in the late 90s.

Better yet, in the spirit of Enterprise and Web 2.0, rather than watching this happen, let’s participate in it.

Comments

Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment

  • Are these products built with partners or reskinned? Is that the reason why this isn’t this on dev2dev? How long has this been on?

    Posted by: logicuser on April 1, 2007 at 1:53 PM

  • I’m not sure I fully understand your questions, but I think I can comment on them a bit. First off, the products are being built by BID’s core engineering team — many of the same folks who brought you ALUI, ALI Publisher, ALI Collaboration, ALI Studio, etc. I don’t know what you mean by “reskinned” but these products are all new initiatives, although they undoubtedly leverage the experience the BID folks have garnered over the past 10 years they’ve spent building enterprise portals and other enterprise software.To answer your last question, the marketing documents and web site were only released last week to the public. I think you should expect to see GA for these products some time this summer, but don’t quote me on that — remember, I don’t work for BEA.As for this stuff not being on dev2dev, well, with my blog post, now it is! There’s also a lot of the same info located at www.bea.com/enterprise with more traditional BEA branding. I’m sure you’ll be seeing more on dev2dev soon.

    Posted by: bucchere on April 1, 2007 at 3:48 PM

  • These products have all been organically developed at BEA. In some cases we have leveraged our existing capabilities and technologies (i.e. our experiences with our search product informed our decisions with the new Pathways product), and in the end these are new products built by BEA.The http://en.terpri.se micro-site was launched last week, and it is meant to provide a Web 2.0 and Social Computing resource that will grow over time. We will have the blogs on dev2dev and en.terpri.se refer to each other as appropriate.And, of course the same base product information was also made available concurrently last week at http://www.bea.com/enterprise.

    Cheers,

    Shane Pearson

    BEA Systems, Inc.

    VP, Marketing and Product Management

    Posted by: spearson on April 3, 2007 at 1:40 PM

Categories
bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Public Sector Breakfast Seminar: Ajax, Java & Mission Critical Applications

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve been selected by Nexaweb to sit on a panel of Enterprise Web 2.0 experts. My co-panelists include:

  • Brant West, VP Federal Sales, Autonomy
  • Brenda Dixon, Commerce Industry Account Lead, IBM Federal Systems
  • David Bock, Technical Director, FGM
  • David McFarlane, Chief Operating Officer, Nexaweb Technologies, Inc.

The event takes place on Wednesday, 11/8 at 8 AM at The L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in DC.

If you’d like to attend the free seminar, please register here. Hope to see you there!