Meet the Apatar team at OSCON and LinuxWorld: Email for a Free Expo Pass

Apatar team is getting ready to head out for two trade shows - OSCON and LinuxWorld.   Although the two conferences may sound similar to you, they are very different. As ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn puts it: 

1. OSCON is a theater. LinuxWorld is a show floor. 

2. OSCON is intimate conversation. LinuxWorld is hard negotiation. 

3. OSCON is beer. LinuxWorld is wine. 

4. OSCON is polo shirts. LinuxWorld is business suits. 

5. OSCON is a code wizard. LinuxWorld is a star salesmen.”  

I would like to invite you as a Naked Open Source blog reader to attend (passes will be provided by Apatar): 1. O’Reilly Open Source Convention, taking place in Portland, OR on July 23-27, 2007.  

O’Reilly’s OSCON is perhaps best conference for open source developers. Speakers include Chris DiBona from Google, Larry Wall creator of Perl, Guido Von Rossum creator of Python, Rasmus Lerdorf creator of PHP, Robert “roml” Lefkowitz, Matt Asay from Alfresco, Brian Aker from MySQL, Mitchell Baker from Mozilla, and many others.Parallel to OSCON, there will be an OSCAMP, an “open” space for meeting, for learning, for connecting, for writing code … The agenda is created and modified “on the fly” by the participants. You can add to the agenda any issue that importance to you. Most of the key points and next steps will be captured in Wiki online so that the entire Freedom/Libre/Open community can benefit from our work. To register for OSCAMP, follow the instructions on the Registration page.  2. LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, taking place in San Francisco, CA on August 6-9, 2007. 

LinuxWorld is a more business-oriented event, and a good place for to catch up with latest developments in the world of infrastructure, Linux and Open Source software. Speakers include Brian Aker of MySQL, Matt Asay of Alfresco, John Roberts of SugarCRM, Raven Zachary of The 451 Group, Andrew Morton of The Linux Foundation, Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon Web Services, Kevin Kettler, Chief Technology Officer of Dell, Diane Greene, President and CEO of VMware, Ron Hovsepian, President and CEO of Novell and many others.

Attendees will be able to participate in the developer’s contest for the most innovative Apatar DataMap (and win a 80GB Video iPod), find out more about Apatar Data Integration, view live presentations and learn about the upcoming features.  If you are interested in attending any of these conferences, email me your name, and I will register you for the shows. 

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Will Mashups Push Web 2.0 into the Enterprise Arena?

The short answer is, “yes,” but I believe it is conditional to certain changes that have to happen first. Let me focus on what prevents mashups from evolving into the enterprise space right now. According to Gartner, corporate developers spend approximately 65 percent of their effort building bridges between applications. Think about information that’s stored in a typical enterprise and how it interacts with information on the Web. The problem each enterprise faces is how to let customers, partners, vendors, and everyone else with interest in a company use the company’s data and services within their own enterprise applications. A sweet spot is a reliable way for the information to be used inside and outside of the enterprise easily. If you look closely, there is a disconnect between a huge amount of infrastructure being built for the future of “cloud computing,” and the capabilities of today’s companies to effectively link data between on-premise and on-demand applications.

But there are three problems with existing middleware products in the enterprise market:
a) The tools are expensive.
b) The tools are complex to install.
c) The tools are difficult to implement and maintain, and most require a serious work effort (architecture, configuration, programming, and custom coding and testing) before delivering any value to the end user.

What kind of middleware does Enterprise 2.0 need in the area of information integration?

I wrote about mashup building software tools in this post. Today these tools lack enterprise data integration capabilities, especially in the area of batch-type data integration, where large chunks of data (in the tens of megabytes, or even gigabytes range) have to be moved in and out. What we see now is mostly a web scrapping/RSS/light-weight XML approach to creating situational applications, or mashups. Enterprise 2.0 needs middleware that can access data both on a local network (like MS SQL/MySQL/Oracle databases and files), and on-demand applications and systems in “the cloud.” The tools should be much easier to implement and cost 5x to 10x less compared with traditional information integration tools available to the enterprise market from companies like Informatica, TIBCO, etc.

I separate all information integration into two distinct categories: batch and real-time. These categories have been powered by what we know as Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) respectively, where ESB inherited EII/EAI with the emergence of SOA. Designed for cloud computing, Middleware 2.0 across both of the above categories should come in as many as three packages:
a) Pure-play

b) Built into mashup building tools, such as Dappit, Teqlo

c) Built into emerging enterprise software available on-demand, such as DabbleDB, Blist, and Swivel.

During the next two to five years, Middleware 2.0 will evolve to quickly and inexpensively link “the cloud” and the existing on-demand and on-premise applications and databases across the enterprise.
My next post will be about the long tail of information integration. I will take on how the technology adoption of data integration tools looks today, and how it will look in the near future.

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Three Trends Influencing Enterprise 2.0

In this post, I will describe the top three drivers influencing the adoption of Web 2.0 in Enterprise 2.0. In my next post, I will express my opinion on whether mashups are capable of pushing Web 2.0 into the enterprise arena.

Trend #1: Shift to Cloud Computing
In “cloud computing,” documents and business information are managed online. Google is rapidly building an amazing platform for rolling out on-demand applications on a worldwide scale. Very soon, Google Apps will be a good-enough solution for millions of small business to solve most document management and collaboration problems. Have an idea where all these multi-tenant applications and zetabytes of data will be hosted? Google will spend $500M $3B this year to build the largest data center in the world. Services like Amazon EC2 (covered here and here) offer pay-as-you-go fully managed server time. On-demand computing is going to completely change enterprise IT architecture. When it only costs $70 a month for a dedicated virtual server with fantastic connectivity 24/7, and you can turn them on and off as needed, why would you want to mess with hardware on-premises?

Trend #2: Growth of Web 2.0 Content and Infrastructure
Since 2005, many successful venture capitalists have been trying to find yet another promising Web 2.0 startup to add to their portfolios. Pundits speculate that during the last two years close to a billion dollars were invested into Web 2.0. During the next five to seven years all this money will pull off a lot of infrastructure with an enormous amount of content and data on it. But in order for a Web 2.0 company to secure longevity, aggregating terabytes of user-generated content and having lots of servers to serve traffic to gazillions of registered users is not enough. You’ve got to create an ecosystem. How will these newly-minted Web 2.0 companies create ecosystems? Ecosystems will come through APIs and data mashups with other websites. ProgrammableWeb maintains the best up-to-date API directory. Look at how fast APIs are being added to their database. In a very short period of time, the key advances of Web 2.0 (namely collaboration and new ways of sharing information) will become an attractive target to benefit enterprises.

Trend #3: Mashups
2007 has been named by BusinessWeek as “the year of the widget.” Widgets are small embeddable components that can seamlessly integrate on third party sites and can deliver content from beyond the realm of the site. To help users create widgets, a growing number of companies out there are developing mashup building tools:
I learned about Dapper at the Mashup Camp unconference at MIT on January 17, 2007 where I met Eran Shir and Jon Aizen, the company founders. Dapper is an impressive new online mashup tool that takes the concept to the extreme, making it possible to convert and reuse just about any source of information on the Web, including that in plain old HTML. This promising startup has recently closed a round of financing with Accel Partners.
DataMashups.com is a new highly Web-centric mashup tool complete with a WYSIWYG “edit” mode.
Grazr is an application development system for feeds and their GrazrScript is a programming language for feeds. John Musser of ProgrammableWeb posted a recent news update on Grazr closing $1.5 million Series A round of financing.
JackBe’s JackBuilder product is a browser-based mashup tool to create mashups called “Rich Enterprise Applications” or REAs. JackBuilder is an entirely Ajax based IDE that allows widgets, components, and services to be integrated together into enterprise mashups
All of these tools allow for building a quick and dirty SOA, and are aimed at technology enthusiasts. Focused on web screen scraping and RSS, today’s mashup design tools could hardly be applied across the enterprise sector. But that will change. Mashup technologies can and will disrupt enterprise applications. During the next three years, mashups will open up a new enterprise application market, providing business users and IT departments with a quick and inexpensive approach to develop and implement applications. And during the decade following 2010, maturing mashup building technologies will shrink the enterprise application market. In my next post, I will write about whether mashups are capable of pushing Web 2.0 into the enterprise space.

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Fedora’s Community Leader Needs Medical Help

UPDATE FROM MARCH 18, 2007: Folks, the latest news… Jack is OK now, and has received a lot of attention from the community willing to help.

……….

I just received this post by RSS from Matt Asay’s blog. Jack Aboutboul, who is in charge of Fedora’s marketing, is very sick. He’s looking for help:

We are part of a very smart and very well connected community of people, especially when it comes to scientific matters. I know that a few years back Patrick Volkerding, creator of Slackware, had some crazy rare health issues and by posting online was able to find someone who led him to a proper remedy. I hope we have enough smart people around that will be able to do the same for me. Please pass this on to anyone you know, its a desperate plea for help. Obviously pass it on to scientists, doctors, pharmacists, etc. but please also pass this amongst non-geeks because I’m sure someone out there knows someone who can help.

If you have any ideas, please pass them along to Jack using contact information on his blog.

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Seven Qualities of Highly Successful Open Source Software Company

Six days ago, I wrote about the key factor influencing disruptive market strategy – New Market. This post summarizes six additional characteristics of a truly disruptive open source business. Most of them derive from one of the best books I can think of in the area of disruptive business models, The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clayton M. Christensen. Here are all “Seven Qualities” as of March 18, 2007:

1. New Market

I believe that a new business model alone doesn’t make it, be it open source, or SaaS, or whatever. The key idea is that in order to be truly disruptive, an offering has to address a large underserved market segment, and create a NEW market in the first place. In commercial open source, the initial target is never the existing users of expensive, proprietary software. What the heck can they do with your scrappy product? The best target market is a highly growing underserved market with a lot of demand and little to no supply. Similar to what MySQL offered to all Internet small businesses who can’t afford MS SQL or Oracle database to power an e-commerce shop or a content management system of a micro business with little to no revenues. Then move up the stack and target the ones who have the budget, but are still not willing to pay 5K-20K for a piece of software if there is a cheaper or better yet FREE alternative.

2. Low Price

It takes 5x to 10x the price advantage between what your proprietary competitors charge for a solution and what a commercial/supported package of your software costs in order to create enough disruptive “leverage” to cross the chasm and enter the mainstream market.

3. Good-enough Product

A product/solution should be good enough to solve 50% to 80% of the most common customer needs. At the beginning, your competition will not consider such an  offering as a threat at all, as it doesn’t have all of the “things” and “features” their BMW-driving sales force is communicating to prospects all day long. Their customer and your customer are two different animals.

4. Easy to Implement

The product should be simple enough that it can to remain easy to implement and extract value from. Take Mule, a highly successful open source ESB as an example. Mule can be installed in several minutes compared to hours to install and configure proprietary products from EII/ ESB vendors such as TIBCO. At Apatar, we strive to do the same and make sure Apatar ETL can be installed in two minutes or less.

5. Community of Loyal Users

There should be enough supporters willing to contribute their time to requesting new features (compliment Product Marketing), testing your software and reporting bugs (compliment QA), and developing new product functionality (compliment R&D).

6. Standard Technology

A disruptive open source product/solution should utilize widely used technologies, which have already become or could become a “commodity”-type component in a technology stack, LAMP or Java.

7. New Distribution Channels

The traditional distribution models are not good for a truly disruptive product. No BMW-driving sales folks to “push” your product into the market (unless you are really short on time and have VC backing to support some direct sales). The Internet is replacing most roles in the marketing, PR, and sales functions of an emerging open source start-up.

If you have ideas about any additional components that make an “essential” package of a disruptive open source software start-up, I’d love to hear about them.

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ETL vs. ESB

A few months ago, prior to the release of the Apatar Community Preview, Matt Asay asked me via email whether Apatar competes with ESB products, specifically with MuleSource and ServiceMix. After I responded to Matt by email, I thought about posting my response to a blog, and Matt said, “Go ahead.” In fact, two people asked me a similar question during the MySQL User Conference, which reminded me about the email that I’m posting below.