Manufacturingtalk has now published our article which examines how to upgrade IT application functionality for the manufacturing industry.
In particular, the article examines subsribing to a SaaS vs. custom-building the software application in-house using rich internet application platforms such as uniPaaS.
For a more in-depth look at the application technology needs of the manufacturing sector and how they can be solved have a look at the following web page and white paper.
A number of people have been asking what sort of applications uniPaaS can develop. Well, the answer is a lot!
uniPaaS is a highly versatile application platform (note - it's not a programming language - more on that below) that can deliver virtually any type of application, front-end or back-end.
You can develop desktop client applications, web browser applications, service oriented services like SOAP web services, J2EE services, or even local COM servers.
You can also develop RIA applications for both desktop and mobile. RIA applications are fully functional desktop applications that are deployed over the internet and work over an HTTP connection with an enterprise server. RIA applications are installed automatically and are updated automatically whenever those updates are available.
Here are some screen-shots to illustrate..
uniPaaS RIA application running on a Windows Mobile phone:
uniPaaS RIA application based on the .NET framework and deployed over the internet:
A uniPaaS browser based HTML application, that you serve with a browser only:
A uniPaaS Windows based Client/Server application, that is deployed in a local area network:
The fact that uniPaaS is a 'platform' rather than simply a 'programming language' means that it provides versatile and powerful development facilities that are more closely related to the logic of real business. And it doesn't require the developer to directly access the low level APIs of the underlying infrastructure.
This platform versatility comes from an 'information-centric' design that features a specially made metadata engine. (white paper about this here)This engine provides capabilities and functionalities specifically for business information, whether operational, financial or management, as opposed to many other tools out there that are more generic in scope, and therefore less 'information' focused.
Following on from my previous manufacturing posts, I've now compiled the main 5 benefits of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for manufacturing industries into a new white paper that you can download for free here.
Rich Internet Applications are particularly beneficial to manufacturing companies. That's because the nature of manufacturing requires a combination of powerful business functionality (to handle their diverse work scope - including production, delivery, inventory, sales force etc), that they need to display in a myriad of ways (graphically and in complex table format), and they need it available anywhere (at the production line site as well as on the move in the warehouse etc).
They can get this sort of rich internet functionality today by sourcing it from a SaaS vendor of course. It's quick to assimilate, and cost-effective to run. The only problem is if the vendor doesn't have exactly the type of functionality that the manufacturer needs. There's not much room for customization with an off-the-shelf SaaS product.
There is then an advantage to building your own RIA in house - as long as it can be done without incurring high costs and an over-long development effort!
The white paper first highlights the benefits of RIA to manufacturers and then describes the most efficient and effective path to implementing RIA in-house.
All comments and feeback are welcome!
60% of companies in a recent AIG Consulting poll were found to suffer from marginally successful technology projects or outright project failures.
A full half of this number experienced project ‘runaways' which take too long to deliver, consume too much budget, or under-deliver on functionality.
The Get IT together seminar is designed specifically to address the problems that lead to IT project failure.
How? By helping organizations to optimize their software systems and IT departments to better deliver business results.
Attendees can expect to learn:
- How to align IT department objectives with your overall business goals
- How to better streamline the application development process
- How to more effectively deliver IT projects
- How to get your business applications working together
- How to ensure your current goals answer future business needs
If you are a CEO, CIO or IT manager these issues should already be sounding alarm bells in your head.
To find out more about seminar sessions topics and times, speakers and locations, visit the Get IT together website.
To secure an invitation online register or contact Glenn Johnson direct on +1 949 250 1718 or email glenn_johnson@magicsoftware.com.
Here's a useful graph that I found created by Gartner that nicely shows the how the browser has evolved over time.
Beginning with the origin of web applications at left hand side of the chart, we see that Ajax and HTML were designed to give application developers more power and capabilities when creating internet based applications.
It started off well enough, but Ajax never really took hold as well as initially expected. Ajax uses a combination of technologies that makes building the Client interface substantially more difficult than static web pages. It's performance is therefore relatively low when considering the effort that needs to be invested, since it's based on script that needs to be interpreted, rather than on compiled code.
The next step along the chart was the movement in the direction of plug-in's and Java. However, this also presented challenges, particularly with its compatibility with different browser types, with certain applets not being able to run properly.
The solution then, was for the industry to move to applications that run ‘outside the browser'. These apps run on the middleware stack but still use a runtime language such as Java or .NET.
This seems to be the most practical solution then, both in terms of cost and performance. Typical business application, we must remember, are characterized by complex and heavily loaded data. This data needs to be displayable and retrievable in an efficient manner.
The browser is simply not designed for that. To compound the problem, there are now so many different browser types out there (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and now Google Chrome) that preparing the application to run on each is a coder's nightmare.
The solution then is obvious - scrap the browser altogether as a business application sandbox - and use a tool that has a dedicated business-optimized front-end layer.
That's uniPaaS.
You'll find it far more secure as well.
The current strain on IT budgets is nicely represented in this clip that shows how far the nature of the Client-Vendor relationship has distanced from our everyday business transactions.
Vendors get more frustrated as customers make increasingly unrealistic demands. Now's the time for Independent Software Vendors to consider moving to SaaS - while using a strategy that mitigates the risks involved to ensure the most profitable outcome..
So what's metadata and how does a platform that uses a metadata approach help us build and deploy business applications?
Ned Batchelder gives us a good overall explanation that's worth reading. In short, metadata is data about other data: Or information about a thing, apart from the thing itself.
In ancient days when libraries consisted of scrolls, each scroll had a tag so you could tell what was in the scroll without having to unravel it. That tag was metadata.
In today's world, metadata is used to organize, manipulate, shelve, locate, categorize, and otherwise work with data when you don't want to actually deal with the data itself. In software metadata provides information about data so that the data can be worked with in bulk, without having to understand and write all the source code.
Now we can begin to see how this can be useful in cutting the time and costs of building business applications:
Since the main cost in developing RIA, SaaS and other applications is the complex code-writing for the different Client and Server ends of the application, uniPaaS come with a ready-made business application engine that pre-compiles code and pre-configures business logic. This ‘metadata' engine allows developers to bypass the strenuous code-writing stage and focus instead on optimizing the business performance of their application.
With no more intensive code to write there's less chance of project failure and more chance of creating an application that meets business requirements on-time and on-budget.
Who better than our very own Ofer Spiegel (Marketing Product Manager at Magic Software) to illustrate the benefits of a metadata approach when building business applications. Here's the video from his same post comparing uniPaaS with Adobe Flash.
A nice article from CloudAve, the evangelists of Cloud Computing.
According to these guys, Enterprises are much more conservative when it comes to choosing SaaS.
The fact that uniPaaS provides a very direct path for developing applications and also allows them to be deployed in a variety of modes - Full Client, RIA or full multi-tenant SaaS - may therefore have the effect of encouraging more Enterprise companies to now make the move.
At any rate, it seems to have made the SaaS marketplace a more diverse place to choose from - and one that's now more accessible to more businesses - which can only be a good thing.
In our previous post we established that too many IT projects are failing. By 'failure' we mean one or more of the following three things:
1. Not completed on-time
2. Not delivered on-budget
3. Doesn't answer the requirement brief
These three factors are particularly sore points today because of the recession. When budgets are tight the benefits of building business applications can be easily outweighed by the costs and effort involved.
That's why many are now opting for Cloud-based solutions that mitigate the risks and costs involved in building and deploying applications in-house.
Well, why not just opt for a SaaS solution like Salesforce.com then? The answer is that while Salesforce.com may be perfect for many enterprises and businesses, it ties you to the Force.com platform.
There is therefore, some insecurity knowing that your mission-critical data is held on another company's servers. There's also a limited scope in how much customization you can demand from your provider. One size generally fits all. And in some instances, this may not be good enough for businesses attempting to differentiate themselves from their competitors in today's tough economic climate.
What's needed then is a platform that can develop powerful, modern applications, such as Rich Internet Applications and SaaS, at low cost, while minimizing the chance of project 'runaways' and which combines the input of both IT specialists and business managers.
Not an easy order to fill.
So, what exactly does uniPaaS offer that's so different?
Well, it can be summarized in 3 short points:
1. uniPaaS is an end-to-end environment for software developers.
2. uniPaaS is based upon a metadata engine.
3. uniPaaS applications can run in multiple deployment modes.
Each of these three points deserves its own entirely dedicated post. So coming up we will deal exclusively with point 1 - uniPaaS' end-to-end environment - and what that means for businesses trying to deliver on-time, on-budget and according to project specs.