ESME<\/a>. <\/p>\nTo ignore software built elsewhere is to be economically hamstrung.<\/p>\n
The rise of the Eclipse ecosystem is perhaps the best example of the new economics of the software industry. There are those in the commentariat that argue open source no longer matters in the face of cloud computing. But that is to ignore the fact most cloud providers make extensive use of open source. Is open source a business model? Do bears shit in the woods? I must confess to surprise my colleagues didn’t push back harder recently when asked the business model question recently. Open source changes the economics of our industry – that’s what new business models do. Perhaps it is the success and utter dominance of open source that has closed our eyes to the obvious – the new software industry business model is deeply and profoundly based on co-innovation.<\/p>\n
Which brings us back to SAP, which has recently taken to flagging co-innovation as a core element of its strategy. Hang on though- not so fast\u2026 Co-innovation and joint engineering only make most sense in the context of open intellectual property, and SAP still has some way to go in this regard. Not invented here is alive and well at SAP, although it is under increasing, pressure.<\/p>\n
The recent acquisition of Business Objects didn’t just bring customers, and an end to end information management story – it also introduced a desire for agility and immediate gratification. Business users don’t wait around for vendors to provide the perfect business intelligence support tool- they’ll just buy from someone else. The era of the situational application and the mashup is upon us.<\/p>\n
That means pace layering. One of the under-remarked aspects of the mashups is that many them are not bidirectional. Adobe Flex data grids based on information sucked in from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, for example, are one way. Analysing data is not the same as carrying out a transaction. You may need to roll back a transaction, but not the data the decision was based on.<\/p>\n
Adobe plays an intriguing role in the emerging SAP pace layering story. SAP now resells both Flex and LiveCycle (called Forms Lifecycle Manager when sold by SAP). Both Flex and LiveCycle provide the means to create rich forms based applications which are far more responsive for users than the usual SAP UI techniques.<\/p>\n
Adobe is particularly notable from an enterprise pace layering perspective because unlike many other technologies that fall under the heading Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Adobe has focused on delivering service oriented front ends that can be integrated with back end services with a minimum of fuss and code. This is loose coupling – of distributed components.<\/p>\n
In a roundtable at TechEd Herve Couterier, a Business Objects alumni, and now the most powerful man in SAP’s product group (he even has responsibility for SAP’s NetWeaver platform) made an interesting observation.<\/p>\n
“The industry is becoming more component based. Client adaptation happens faster than with other components. Coming from business objects into SAP,” he said, “we had a different software development culture”.<\/p>\n
Indeed – SAP would be well advised to cherish the injection of pace into its portfolio. Layers evolve at different speeds. Some components rarely change, while others may evolve on a daily basis. A one speed SOA is doomed to failure. <\/p>\n
I would argue that timeless software is an idea whose time has come: keep the base stable but innovate at the edges. The most successful businesses are those that best manage the balance between unstructured and structured process innovation. What is evolution, after all, if not an exercise in pace layering? <\/p>\n
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