Adrian Bridgwater writes a nice article on Rapid Application Development for the Cloud in this week's Computer Weekly (Where will cloud computing take us in 5 years time?).
In particular, he picks 3 vendors he believes are at the forefront of delivering RAD in the Cloud - SAP, Tibco and Magic Software with their uniPaaS application platform.
Unlike the other 2 vendors though, Magic Software is, I believe, the first technology vendor to combine the following 3 capabilities within a single platform solution:
- A ready-made business application engine or metadata engine that allows developers to focus quickly on building and perfecting business functionality. This enables organizations to build complex business applications using fewer resources and with a greater level of ease. (Thereby reducing instances of IT project failure and improving ability to meet budget and timeline requirements.)
- A single development paradigm that eliminates the need to use different coding languages and teams for the different Client, Server and communications layers of modern business applications based upon Cloud or rich internet technology. This significantly reduces overall development costs, shortens testing time and eliminates coding mistakes that cost more to correct after deployment.
- Multiple deployment modes from a single development effort. This allows an organization to develop an application once, and then deploy it in a variety of modes without incurring an expensive re-development effort. This is particularly valuable for Independent Software Vendors and enterprises looking to quickly and efficiently create a Cloud or Mobile based version of their original Client-Server application.
On 28 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the southern coast of the US with devastating effect. More than 1,800 people lost their lives, and the total destruction of homes and property was estimated to top out at more than $81 billion.
In the resulting cleanup operation, the Health Level 7 (HL7) capabilities of the Houston-Harris County Immunization Registry enabled a total of 38,360 vaccination records to be searched in rapid time. The net result was 13,377 matches that saved more than $1.5m in needless vaccinations..
The above excerpt is from David Akka's latest article in E-Health Europe and looks at how efficient HL7 integration is helping healthcare around the globe - here.
Further down the article he discusses one of the latest challenges for IT healthcare providers - how to efficiently and quickly manage the move from HL7 V2.x to V3 and he provides a range of useful integration tips for best achieving this.
For further reading on HL7 integration click through some of the links below:
iBOLT for HL7 (HL7 rapid integration tool)
Improving HL7 Integration for Healthcare Providers (White Paper)
HL7 Integration - Good News for Hospitals & Health Care IT Suppliers (Blog post)
Jason Slater writes a fantastic technology blog that I'm just a little envious of - his posts cover a wide range of issues from software to security, and include 'how to' downloads along with the latest industry news.
He has kindly given us the opportunity to talk to his readers about our rapid Cloud and on-premise application development tool - uniPaaS. You can view the full blog posting here.
In other news this week, Mike Knuckey from CloudVision, recently had a chance to speak to our UK and Nordics Managing Director, Dave Akka, at the Cloud Computing World Forum Conference.
He highlights that one of this year's biggest challenges for the enterprise is how to handle the whole phenomena of public, private and hybrid Cloud computing, or in other words, how to efficiently mix existing on-premise applications with new Cloud-based application services.
Despite the wishful thinking and propaganda from some of the Cloud vendor-giants, not all companies will be shifting their mission-critical business application and databases off their own servers and into a vendor-hosted Cloud offering tomorrow.
It’s simply perceived to be too risky or too radical a move for most CEO’s. Gartner recently predicted that only 20% of business applications will be off-premise by 2013. That means that by far, the larger proportion of enterprise applications will remain on-premise for a good few years to come.
If this is the case, then the main challenge for businesses now will be to learn how to effectively balance on- and off-premise deployments, and how to better integrate their newly acquired Cloud applications with their existing on-premise applications to get the most value from their overall data mix.
We've written extensively about this in our recent white paper that you can still download here - 'Cloud vs. On-Premise: Is there a Middle Ground'.
By chance it seems - a number of people, ranging from family members to work collegues and friends have recently asked my opinion on the concept of B2B blogging. So instead of duplicating my efforts over email and Facebook I've decided to spill all my trade secrets right here. Hope this helps!
Why Blog?
To generate thought leadership – good blogging has a similar effect to white papers – it helps a company talk about their offering or unique value in a non-sales oriented environment that websites find hard to do. Also, consumers today have learnt to ‘filter’ out the sales pitch speak of websites so blogging has that potential to generate greater credibility and maintain a reader’s attention span for longer.
To drive traffic to your website – every single blog post acts as a standalone web page that is indexed by Google and other search engines – helping potential customers find your company or offering in a general web search. It is also much easier to build up and expand a blog than a website. For web optimization, quantity of pages is almost as relevant as quality. Over time then, a blog can become a far greater source of exposure for a company than a website.
To boost sales leads – blogging is a vital tool in the ‘lead nurturing’ toolbox. Potential customers may follow a blog for a few months to ‘test’ the credibility of a company or offering. A good blog that mixes in product demos and technical insights will help customers and potential users decide in their own time and in their own way that your product is right for them.
To build brand loyalty – regular blog postings encourage existing customers to remain in-touch with a company – helping to keep them abreast of upcoming events and new offerings as they happen. Sometimes this can be far less intrusive than a customer relations call..
How to get the most from your blog..
- Ensure the blog becomes an insightful resource that readers can learn from and refer back to again and again.
- Research around your subject and make your blog a collection or archive that readers can refer their friends and collegues to.
- Provide interviews and opinions from other industry experts and thought leaders. As great as you are - a blog cannot be all about you, all of the time.
- Write posts of a professional editorial quality – bad English will kill a blog before anything else does.
- Provide videos and other visual aids to help make your point. Adding YouTube clips is a great way to illustrate a case or highlight an existing problem - even if you're selling billing software and the video clip is from an old beer commercial - sometimes an analogy works best.
- Avoid masses of unbroken text – people read screen-based text at only half the speed of printed text – so make it an easy read with bullets, bolding, graphics and paragraph headers to break it up.
- Provide web links in the text – both to other blog posts, your own website, external opinions, up-to-date newspaper articles and professional research analysts – anything that will help corroborate your opinions and establish your credibility.
- Ensure that every blog post is supported by social media – a blog should have associated company/product pages in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. Every new blog post should be automatically posted to your social media walls AND posted to a range of relevant target user groups from those social media sites. Encourage readers to ‘digg’, comment and write reviews of your posts – it all helps to make your blog stand out from the rest.
- Try to avoid direct sell – remember, nobody likes to be 'sold to'. That's why the sales guy is paid the big bucks.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Eyal Pfeifel, Magic Software's CTO and ask him his opinion on a number of technology trends that the company is currently working on including Rich Internet Applications (RIA), mobile enterprise application development and the whole Cloud computing phenomena.
Below is the full transcript of our interview:
SG: Our platforms are known for their use of ‘business-ready’ logic rather than hard coding. Can you elaborate?
EP: When we designed uniPaaS, our main goal was to streamline and simplify the process of developing business applications. Whenever we consider adopting or developing new capabilities, we always put a very strong emphasis on ease of use and not necessarily on an exhaustive set of capabilities. At the end of the day, the developer enjoys a more productive work process as a result of this focus.
SG: Define the main advantages of Rich Internet Applications (RIA)?
EP: For years, IT departments and ISV’s have been looking for technologies that don’t require on-going maintenance, yet are still powerful and interactive. The main success behind the browser was its ability to deploy applications to any desktop without requiring any installation and maintenance. However, browser applications are very complicated to develop if you want to achieve a high level of interactivity. This is where RIA fills the gap by providing a highly interactive rich user interface while not requiring any installation or administration.
SG: What are some of the challenges in effectively building a mobile enterprise application?
EP: The main challenge facing developers today is the lack of business-oriented, portable mobile development platforms. Each mobile platform today requires completely different development tools and skill-sets and the developer is required to either choose between them or learn them all. These existing development environments are also comparable to the first generation of desktop development platforms from a decade ago in terms of functionality and simplicity.
SG: So how do we get around these difficulties today?
EP: Using our uniPaaS platform it’s possible to develop both desktop and mobile applications using a single development environment and a single paradigm. The same skill-set the developer uses to build desktop applications can now also be used to build mobile applications. uniPaaS’ support for additional mobile platforms is only going to expand in the near future.
SG: Where do you see the mobile market moving to next?
EP: In the coming years we will see more and more functionality moving from the office to the mobile phone just as we moved from office phone extensions to private phone numbers, and from desktop based e-mail to mobile e-mail. We will now also see additional enterprise abilities migrating from the desktop to mobile handsets, where applicable.
Some capabilities may of course stay on the desktop – but functions which require individual interaction and response will move – such as task management, workflow, simple reporting and so on.
SG: So, do you see all IT apps moving to the Cloud in the next few years?
EP: I think that the cloud is a very important platform and I believe that many enterprise solutions will migrate to cloud-based environments in the coming years. However, in order for this trend to succeed it remains vital to provide viable on-premise options for both IT departments and ISV’s in order to avoid technology lock-in concerns. Any vendor seeking success in the Cloud space would be wise to provide on-premise capabilities as well.
SG: Eyal, thank you very much for your time.
EP: A pleasure.
Modern IT application projects have become massive budget items, beyond the means of many enterprises and software vendors.
That's why Cloud computing is such a sought after technology today. Because it offers a way out. It represents the lean consumption of computing resources; the antithesis of bulky, expensive hardware acquisition and lengthy code writing projects. It follows the ‘just in time' production model - where you use only what you need without carrying unnecessary IT baggage. Multi-tenancy and elasticity are synonymous with the Cloud - enabling businesses to grow without incurring a direct IT cost penalty that previously made businesses think twice before attempting anything innovative.
And it's already here. Cloud computing represents a global market that's forecast to reach $43.2 billion by 2012; growing at a CAGR of 25.7 percent. (TechNavio Insights, Global Cloud Computing Services Market, 2008-2012), with Infrastructure services set to reach nearly $10 billion in 2013.
However, I don't believe that enterprises will be forced to choose between traditional on premise hosting and Cloud computing. The latest estimates from Gartner Inc tend to confirm this. They expect that Cloud applications will only account for, wait for it, a whopping 20% of business applications in the enterprise by 2013 (as shown in the not-so-clear reproduction of the graph below). That means that by far, the larger proportion of enterprise applications will remain on-premise.
If this is the case, then the main challenge for businesses now will be to learn how to effectively balance on- and off-premise deployments, and how to better integrate their newly acquired Cloud applications with their existing on-premise applications to get the most value from their overall data mix.
To do this, Cloud platform vendors need to understand that businesses are run by people, not machines. And they should build their Cloud platforms accordingly.
The uniPaaS platform is one that has it right. It doesn't force businesses to choose a Cloud-only deployment mode that puts customers at the mercy of the big bad vendor. Instead, it lets you play the field, so you can deploy your application on-premise, or in the Cloud, or both - and even switch from one to the other simply and cost-efficiently as and when business needs change.
For any size enterprise or software vendor looking to benefit from the Cloud revolution, this is undoubtedly a game-changer worth a look at.
To increase productivity, businesses have come to rely upon software applications. From the very beginning, these applications have been created using sophisticated programming languages, many of which were developed in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
These languages require a very high degree of precision and completeness, with programmers writing detailed ‘code' to present real concepts and functions. It's a process that's labor intensive and open to errors, with knock-on consequences for a company's financial and competitive viability.
With some minor adaptations, these programming languages (some of which are here on the left) have remained virtually the same over the years. But in that time, the business and IT environment has undergone a revolution.
A Web revolution. Today, programmers are no longer writing code for just one machine. They need to consider the interaction of multiple systems, platforms and devices. Enterprise applications are exponentially more complex compared to the mainframes and terminals of yester-year. It's now about the server and the client working together, sharing the computing load, whereas once they worked in isolation.
Modern enterprise applications today require millions of lines of code. And programming languages were simply never built for this pace of change.
Software projects have become massive budget items. Projects stretch on for years, consuming ever larger resources. Companies are forced to employ an army of programmers and consultants just to stay afloat. By the time debugging and stabilization has been achieved, a new technology arrives promising even greater performance. And the same cycle of ever growing costs begins anew.
Businesses today need a platform that eliminates the chore of writing vast quantities of low level coding. Application designers need to be free to concentrate on building the business logic and functionality of their application. They also need a platform that puts greater focus on the day after development, a platform that which gives you the choice in how you deploy, whether it's on-premise or in the Cloud, or even both.
uniPaaS is not a programming language. It's an application platform. What's the difference? Unlike code, a 'platform' provides pre-compiled business functionality, or pre-written code, that speeds up development and avoids the need for low-level hard coding.
With uniPaaS, developers bypass the technical coding chores and concentrate instead on the truly creative side of their job - building business applications with optimized business logic and spot-on functionality. The result is a better application that's delivered on-time and on-budget.
For enterprises and software vendors looking to escape from the IT cost trap, uniPaaS represents a solid growth opportunity.
Michael McMillin is the president of a 5-person software company with over 1,200 customers. They've been using uniPaaS for over 20 years to build specialist construction software.
Thanks to uniPaaS RIA they can now quickly and cost-efficiently transform their client/server application into a Rich Internet Application that serves up the power of a desktop application over the internet.
The advantage? Their customers - construction site engineers, no longer have to worry about carrying an expensive application-loaded notebook onto building sites - all they need is a simple web-enabled device from which they access their application online using Internet Explorer, Firefox or whatever browser they use. So even if their desktop/mobile device is damaged or stolen, they only loose the hardware - and not the more valuable application IP.
A perfect case study example of the uses of RIA and private Cloud applications.
The IT Spending Spiral
The UK's new Lib/Con government has unveiled plans to cut £3.2 billion over the next five years from its current levels of IT spending which total around £16 billion. Meanwhile that figure is dwarfed by the U.S. federal government which currently spends around $76 billion a year on information technology, with $20 billion of that devoted to hardware, software, and file servers (Alford and Morton, 2009).
With IT public sector spending spiraling out of control, governments on both sides of the Atlantic are finally beginning to reconcile that you cannot dig your way deeper into dept in order to climb out of the fiscal hole we find ourselves in. Governments are left with little choice - either put a brake on spending today (and then perhaps at least have a say in what you decide to cut), or face a certain downgrade in credit rating that will be a much harder blow to the economy tomorrow.
The Dept Abyss
Of course, either choice is a bitter pill to swallow - but it is necessary. I believe that those in the know, in the civil services, federal governments and finance sector, have for a long time watched the figures mounting up in near disbelief, and they fully understand that no county can ignore for long the sort of deficit growth that we are currently experiencing (In the UK it's currently at 3 billion per week while the US debt increased by a total of 1.9 trillion in a single year for 2009).
Western governments have already had a glimpse of what lurks over the Greek abyss and are now in a cold sweat. And while the UK and US are not dependent like Greece, on the Euro printing presses controlled by Brussels, in some ways that actually makes things worse.
It means that an irresponsible government can borrow and spend well beyond its means, and then fallaciously rely on their ability to print money to pay off their debt if and when the marker is eventually called in. The problem is that printing money in the numbers required (around £890 billion for the total UK dept and $13 trillion for the US) inevitably results in inflation. As in the words of Milton Friedman, "inflation is taxation without legislation". The old, the very young, the middle class and small businesses that represent the backbone of western free-market economies will suffer the most as their purchasing power and savings rapidly evaporate.
Not a Sight to Reassure Nervous Credit Agencies - UK National debt: ONS
So the UK government is right to start now, while they still can. And there's no more appropriate place than the public sector - where there is a history of over-spending and bad decision-making that has seen costs spiral.
The landscape of government IT projects is littered with high-profile failures. The recent plans to create a single UK database of prisoner records is just the latest and is now weighing in at over a whopping £500 million in costs and probably won't end there.
If the US federal government figures we mentioned at the start are anything to go by, then we can say that roughly one quarter of total government IT costs are taken up by hardware/software/file servers. If true, then we can begin to appreciate the role that cloud computing can play in alleviating at least part of our budget crisis.
Cloud Computing - The Cost Saving Potential
By its very definition, cloud computing frees organizations from the costs of acquiring and maintaining IT systems, enabling them to more efficiently ‘consume' IT resources on a ‘just in time' basis instead. The cloud frees staff from the limitations of the desktop and even has the potential to increase enterprise productivity with the use of mobile-hosted applications that let staff work effectively outside of the office.
Cloud computing then, represents the ultimate playing field leveller - small and medium sized businesses can subscribe to scalable and powerful CRM, ERP or other computing resources and begin to compete with their larger rivals. And what's good for the free market is often an indication of what's good for the public sector - whether it's defense, healthcare or education. Cloud computing has the potential to put an end to the project cost overruns and provide a proactive response to the impending IT budget cuts.
The ISV Challenge - How to Compete with the Big Boys
For independent software vendors, the cloud story is panning out a little differently. The cloud industry is being quickly dominated by the big-boy vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Google and Amazon who are using their clout to rapidly corner the cloud provision market.
The catch for the little guys is that's it's not that easy to efficiently implement a cloud offering. To build a cloud application for business use - especially if it's designed to run on mobile devices, isn't a simple undertaking. A cloud development effort begins with a Rich Internet Application (RIA) - a technology that to some extent remains below the media radar - but nevertheless represents the power at the very heart of the cloud revolution.
RIA is the ability to host powerful desktop computing over the internet. It works by finely balancing and distributing computing capabilities between the server and the client - and it relies on a clever communication structure which allows the client to call on the server when more complex tasks are demanded.
Software vendors looking to build a cloud application ignore the complexities of RIA at their peril.
To help, here are four tips that may come in handy for ISV's looking to build and deploy a cloud offering in the near future:
- Research what it really takes to build a Cloud application - don't be fooled into thinking that it's all about a cool-looking client interface. Like an iceberg, most of the RIA development effort is below the surface - with the server and communication layers. So fancy client-side tools such as Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Air/Flex in reality are only part of the RIA effort.
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Mobile enterprise applications require more thinking out. For a cloud application to run on a mobile device, software vendors need to consider not just the smaller screen factor but also the fact that users will typically avoid complex tasks that can be more easily handled from the office desktop. Mobile applications therefore need to be imaginatively thought out and adequately prototyped to ensure simplicity of use and the ‘completion of tasks' rather than the straightforward one-to-one replication of back-office systems.
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Use an application platform rather than coding to standardize on skill-sets. As already mentioned, cloud applications based on RIA require the use of different teams and different programming languages to build the different server and client sides of the application. Using a dedicated RIA application platform that provides a single toolset for these tasks can save software designers valuable time and money and help ISV's get their product to market before the big vendors succeed in saturating the field.
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Don't forget about integration! Even once you've built a great cloud application - your customers are going to need to integrate their cloud data with their existing on-premise applications and back-office systems. Integration inherently improves the ROI of cloud data, so it's worthwhile offering some sort of integration capability. Using a proven integration platform with ready-made connectors to common enterprise systems such as Salesforce.com and SAP is a step in the right direction and will facilitate a fast and cost-effective integration that will appeal to many customers - especially those put off by the thought of another long, manually-coded project.
Tom Day is the CIO of the US-based Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA). In this short and enlightening video, he outlines, without mincing his words, why his organization has been using Magic Software's application and integration platforms for the past 15 years (yes, that's fifteen!).
He also describes some of the tasks he is currently performing using the uniPaaS application platform and iBOLT business integration suite and how these platforms have enabled his IT team to concentrate on delivering business value without getting bogged down in technology.