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The Future of Software

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Enterprise Software’s Future Lies With ISVsSeptember 19 2007

By Jeff Nolan

It’s almost comical to suggest that a single blog post or article could cover the breadth of possibilities that the “future of enterprise software” might embody. Having said that, the future of enterprise software will not be determined by any one technology or architecture. Nor will it by be shaped by buzzwords — on-demand and Facebook and collaboration initiatives are not the future, but means to an end.

The future of enterprise software will depend on how independent software vendors define their solution set and how and where they go to market; it will also be shaped by the tighter integration of customer communities with vendors, and lastly, by a restructuring of IT itself.

To market with SOA

The biggest change in enterprise software technology over the last decade has been the shift from client/server to service-oriented architecture, with the most significant progress being delivered in the last four years. There isn’t a serious application provider on the planet that has not embraced SOA principles; they are logical and cost-effective, with benefits flowing to both vendors and customers. Also driving change is the calcification of existing enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and human resource application silos.

Simply put, customers have spent tens of billions deploying working solutions and they depend on them to run their businesses. Much a

Sit Up Straight and ListenSeptember 18 2007

We speak faster than we can type. Much faster. The average conversation speed of an American speaking English is 120-160 words per minute, whereas the average typing speed requirement is about 40 words per minute and the top 10 percent of keyboarders type at speeds of 64 words per minute or faster. Do the math. You could communicate nearly three times faster with a computer if it could understand you.

So why on earth are we still using two-dimensional representations of the real world like desktops, menus and pointers? I believe we could do a lot better by exploring how applications can work better with voice-driven user interfaces. Not just pure voice interfaces but also what are known as multimodal interfaces, which combine the best of vocal/audio interface elements with the best of what the screen can do.

By Surj Patel

Voice-driven user interfaces have long been the holy grail of human computer interface design. Science fiction is a great representation of this – in our fantasy worlds, characters interact with machines by speaking to them, not by accessing some desktop start menu. (Remember Scotty in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home? “A keyboard? How quaint!”)

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft (MSFT) has been slowly but surely forging ahead in this area for a lon

Making Facebook Platform Apps Scale on the CheapSeptember 11 2007

You know a web 2.0 application is hitting an upward inflection point when your inbox starts filling up with the likes of “Joe Doe wants to add you as a friend on VagueSter.”

Over the last few months, it’s been Facebook’s turn. The site’s rise in traffic is in no small part due to developers being enabled to deliver their apps using the Facebook API. Some of these apps are getting serious traffic; see the Alexa results for the ex-PayPal guys over at Slide.com, for example. But some words of warning about social applications.

As Friendster found out the hard way, exponential network growth is compelling but the hangover can be deadly. In simple terms, your audience can grow linearly but your computational requirements often grow exponentially (social network computation has a lot of what’s known as NP-complete problems). If your app on the Facebook platform succeeds, you don’t then want it to die on the vine for lack of server resources. You need to make it scale and you need to make that happen quickly. And of course, cheaply.

While the guys in Palo Alto are happy that you use Facebook as your platform, they are not going to be happy if, as you succeed, you take them down with you. The techies at Facebook have been careful to ensure that they offload as much processing to you as they can — which means that

Is Enterprise Software Failing The Innovation Test?September 5 2007

The software industry these days is all about consumer software applications, with a new generation of Web 2.0 apps hogging the limelight. We caught up Vivek Ranadive, CEO and founder of Tibco Software (TIBX), to find out his thoughts about the state of innovation in enterprise software. Below are excerpts from a very candid interview with FoundRead editor Carleen Hawn.

Carleen Hawn: It seems like most innovation in the tech industry is coming from consumer software companies right now. Why?

Vivek Ranadive: There has been really very little innovation because in the last 20 years we’ve been locked into extortionist database architecture. The mother of all databases, the relational database, is at the center of everything, which is why prices of databases have stayed the same. Then we’ve got these silos on top of the database — the enterprise resource planning (ERP) silos — which is just more extortion because you need a $100 million SAP implementation to make it work. Then you’ve got this tool called “business intelligence,” sitting on top of the ERP, which is oxymoronic because it’s only a reporting system – meaning it delivers information about what’s happened to your business after the fact, when it’s too late for you to do anything about it, so it’s not really “intelligence” at all. And then you’ve got these incredibly expensive service and consulting companies who try to make this l

Why Cisco & Microsoft Are Uneasy Frenemies?September 3 2007

If the 1990s were all about client server wars - Oracle versus Microsoft versus everyone - the coming years will be all about communication centric software. And that means Microsoft will tussle with Cisco, current peace accord not withstanding. Continue reading to find out why. By Allan Leinwand

Recently, Om wrote that Cisco (CSCO) and Microsoft (MSFT) have made their peace over VoIP. But while this peace accord makes a good press release, don’t be fooled: These two companies are mortal enemies locked in a fierce competition for the crown jewel of medium and large corporate IT infrastructure – enterprise messaging.

Although I am a fan of open-source software and other enterprise messaging solutions, there’s no denying that Microsoft, with its Exchange product, owns medium- to large-enterprise messaging. This despite the fact that many others have tried to break into this market over the years, including on-going attempts from the likes of IBM (IBM), Zimbra and Google (GOOG).

Looking at Exchange, you’ll