Application Development

What's Your Big Data Score?

Mike Gualtieri — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:32:34 +0000

If you think the term "Big Data" is wishy washy waste, then you are not alone. Many struggle to find a definition of Big Data that is anything more than awe inspiring hugeness. But, Big Data is real if you have an actionable definition that you can use to answer the question: "Does my organization have Big Data?" Proposed is a definition that takes into account both the measure of data and the activities performed with the data. Be sure to scroll down to calculate your Big Data Score.

Big Data Can Be Measured

Big Data exhibits extremity across one or many of these three alliterate measures:

Open Source: An Emerging Driver For "Mobile First" Strategy

Jeffrey Hammond — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:15:23 +0000

Yesterday the folks from Black Duck published some interesting information on the use and growth of open source projects in the mobile space. Their data confirms that open source mobile projects are alive and well, even in the age of the Splinternet/App Internet. In fact, there are now over 10,000 open source projects focused on popular mobile platforms (see Figure 1). What's more interesting is the rate of growth - the number of new mobile projects with open source licenses has doubled in each of the past three years. It's hard to believe that this rate of growth will continue into 2012, but betting against hyper-growth in the mobile space seems to be a good way for analysts to end up eating crow.

Figure 1: There Are More Than 10,000 Mobile OSS Projects

Here's why you need to care about open source as part of your "Mobile First" strategy:

Agile Adoption Is A Trip Down The Cone Of Uncertainty

Tom Grant — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:20:39 +0000

One of the core priniciples of Agile is a realistic attitude about the unknown. We might have a rough idea of how much work it will take to complete a project, but we cannot state with the certainty of a papal bull how we're going to get to that destination. Therefore, Agile teams have to embrace Agile principles like loving plans, but abandoning any fetishistic relationship with specific, immutable plans.

Agilists learn to live with uncertainty, but they're far from fatalistic about it. In fact, the opposite is true: the truly good Agile teams assume a very aggressive posture about the management of uncertainty. In this respect, Agile software teams behave a lot like military professionals. First, they accept the inherent unpredictability that they'll face, either on the battlefield or in the backlog. They adopt maxims like, "No plan survives contact with the enemy," or concepts like friction, to describe the nature, sources, and effects of uncertainty. Next, they develop strategies, like the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, and act), to navigate through the minefields of unexpected outcomes. And finally, they adopt a great deal of rigor and discipline, plus no small amount of self-criticism, to the application of these uncertainty-management practices.

The New Design-Driven Development Landscape

Michael Facemire — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:32:06 +0000

How did we get from single-channel desktop apps…

In the not-too-distant past web-centric software development had a standard workflow between designers and developers. This was possible because there was a single delivery channel (the web browser) and well-established development constructs. Design patterns like Model-View-Controller had well known coding counterparts such as Java Server Pages, the JSP Standard Template Library or Struts. But now, the introduction of mobile computing has significantly altered this design-development workflow. The key disruptor is the need to target multiple mobile devices with a common set(s) of source code. Regardless of whether devs use a single HTML5/CSS3/JS implementation or native implementations on iOS and Android, there's a greater burden on designer than in the web-centric past. What's worse, the success or failure of mobile apps is more dependent on the complete user experience than ever before. This new reality requires a major shift within development organizations.

Playbook: Achieve Cloud Economics For Operations And Services

John R. Rymer — Thu, 03 May 2012 23:15:21 +0000

Cloud computing has reached an inflection point for enterprises -- a comprehensive strategy for its use is now required. Until now, most companies had adopted cloud services in an ad hoc fashion, driven mostly by business leaders and developers looking to deliver new systems of engagement they felt could not be delivered by corporate IT -- or in the time frame required. These ad hoc experiences prove that cloud solutions are now ready to be strategic resources in enterprise business technology portfolios. Only CIOs can help the business strike the right balance between the agility, efficiency, security, compliance, and integration that's required for a successful cloud strategy.

This research introduces our Playbook approach to our cloud research, describing how to execute an enterprise cloud strategy from vision to planning to implementation through to ongoing optimization. It is the Executive Overview to our Playbook on achieving cloud economics, setting the context for 12 reports by Forrester analysts that address each major phase of the transformation.

Cloud computing in its various forms is helping many CIOs drive greater business responsiveness. Enough so that most enterprises have adopted cloud computing in some form -- usually a collection of software-as-a-service offerings. But cloud solutions now offer cost optimization, security, and quality of service for the full range of enterprise requirements, not just tactical needs. Thus, it is time to make cloud strategic, rather than a disconnected set of initiatives. How? CIOs need a playbook to create, implement, and optimize an end-to-end cloud strategy. This cloud strategy must achieve three goals:

Everything You Wanted To Know But Were Afraid To Ask About BI

Boris Evelson — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:55:05 +0000

How does an enterprise -- especially a large, global one with multiple product lines and multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications -- make sense of operations, logistics, and finances? There's just too much information for any one person to process. It's business intelligence (BI) to the rescue! But what is BI, and how does BI differ from reporting and management information systems (MIS)? What is the business impact, and what are the costs versus the benefits? What is the appropriate strategy for implementing BI and achieving continued BI success? Our new report will give business and IT executives an understanding of the four critical phases of strategizing around BI to achieve business goals -- or "everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask" about BI. Here's a sneak preview of the kinds of topics the report covers and the kinds of BI questions one needs to ask in order to build an effective and efficient enterprise BI environment:

Progress Software Lowers Its Sights

John R. Rymer — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:58:25 +0000

Clay Richardson, Mike Gilpin, and I collaborated on this blog post.

I don't normally blog in response to news events, but I feel obligated to blog about Progress Software's strategy shift, announced last week (April 25, 2012). The reason: Before the shift, Progress was an independent alternative to the top-tier vendors of enterprise application platforms (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP); after the shift, it is not (see the figure below). Progress will now be a much more narrowly focused, specialist vendor.

Henceforth, Progress will provide its established OpenEdge application development platform (including OpenEdge BPM and a cloud-based version), its DataDirect Connect database drivers and integration tools, and its Apama (complex event processing) and Corticon (business rules management) platforms primarily for financial trading. Progress will no longer provide the following products, seeking to either sell them to other vendors or spin them out as independent companies:

Mobile Backend-As-A-Service: The New Lightweight Middleware?

Michael Facemire — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 03:48:00 +0000

It's no secret that demand for mobile applications is skyrocketing in both the consumer and enterprise space. To meet that demand, application development shops are continually looking for new ways to accelerate development of apps that meet their consumers' needs. In response, many new ISVs are beginning to offer a set of cloud-based, server-side mobile services to make app development quicker and easier to deploy. ISVs are referring to those services as "mobile backend-as-a-service" (not a particularly good name, but we'll use it for now). MBaaS offerings sit squarely between the existing platform-as-a-service vendors and the full end-to-end solution space occupied by mobile enterprise/consumer application platforms (see Figure). I'll go into more detail on the other layers of this mobile service triangle in the future, but for now let's take a look at the MBaaS space.

Data Discovery And Exploration - IBM Acquires Vivisimo

Boris Evelson — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:59:54 +0000

Today IBM announced its plans to acquire Vivisimo - an enterprise search vendor with big data capabilities. Our research shows that only 1% to 5% of all enterprise data is in a structured, modeled format that fits neatly into enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) and data marts. The rest of enterprise data (and we are not even talking about external data such as social media data, for example) may not be organized into structures that easily fit into relational or multidimensional databases. There's also a chicken-and-the-egg syndrome going on here. Before you can put your data into a structure, such as a database, you need to understand what's out there and what structures do or may exist. But in order for you to explore the data in the first place, traditional data integration technologies require some structures to even start the exploration (tables, columns, etc). So how do you explore something without a structure, without a model, and without preconceived notions? That's where big data exploration and discovery technologies such as Hadoop and Vivisimo come into play. (There are many others vendors in this space as well, including Oracle Endeca, Attivio, and Saffron Technology. While these vendors may not directly compete with Vivisimo and all use different approaches and architectures, the final objective - data discovery - is often the same.) Data exploration and discovery was one of our top 2012 business intelligence predictions. However, it's only a first step in the full cycle of business intelligence and analytics.Read more

What Are The Benefits Of Running Your Software Organization As A Business That Delivers Products?

Mike Gilpin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:54:11 +0000

In my blog post yesterday, I asked whether you should be running your software organization as a business that delivers products. Today I will explore what it means for you to take this approach.

As Forrester has pointed out in past research, to move forward in a product-centric way, you must establish a number of capabilities in your organization in a product-centric operating model:

I used to make a living doing product management and running product management organizations, as did a number of people at Forrester. My perspective on product management is somewhat distinct because I started out on the product engineering side, leading product development organizations. But between my first ISV and my second, I saw the contrast between weak, ineffective product management and strong, effective product management. When strong product management is in balance with an effective engineering group, well aligned, it's a beautiful thing to see. The weak option? You don't want to know - it was too painful to remember.

Should You Be Running Your Software Organization Like A Business That Delivers Products?

Mike Gilpin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:05:27 +0000

Is it hard to focus your software delivery organization on the right things? Do you sometimes deliver the wrong features or give too little priority to the most important features? Are you drowning in the cost of too much redundant software, because stakeholders can't get on one page about what the business really needs? Do you struggle to make the case for investments you know are essential to your long-term survival but that deliver few short-term benefits? If so, consider the benefits of running your shop more like a business by reorganizing to deliver products (or value streams, in Lean lingo).

It's been more than two years since we last surveyed software delivery leaders about their increasing tendency to organize to deliver software as products (rather than projects or application functional areas), but even then this trend was well under way:

I have only anecdotal evidence that this trend is continuing to grow, but I'm convinced by hundreds of interactions with top software delivery leaders since we did this survey that it is, especially for people who deliver customer-facing websites and mobile apps. Customer-facing dynamics are also driving this trend for the "Internet of things" among firms focused on Smart Grid and other similar domains that depend on customer adoption to drive success. What are the factors driving this growth?

The North Plains/Xinet Acquisition: Not A DAM Game-Changer

Stephen Powers — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 17:34:23 +0000

Guest post from Researcher Anjali Yakkundi

North Plains, a legacy pure-play digital asset management (DAM) vendor based out of Toronto, Ontario, announced today that it has agreed to buy fellow pure-play DAM vendor Xinet. The DAM market is fragmented and, with a few exceptions (Adobe, Autonomy, EMC, and OpenText), is littered with smaller, proprietary players. We've long expected moves in this market, but most of the focus has been on the larger DAM players in the market or the larger content management or customer experience vendors that have no DAM solution (such as IBM).

With this acquisition of Xinet, North Plains moves to become one of the few, if not only, midmarket pure-play DAM player in between the big guns and the pure-play small vendors. What else does North Plains get out of the acquisition?

Dell Bolsters Its Apps Mod Street Cred By Acquiring MAKE Technologies And Clerity

Phil Murphy — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:34:27 +0000

Dell made two bold moves last week that bolster its apps modernization street cred. Since MAKE Technologies and Clerity Solutions may not be household names to you, here are our observations about the moves and some rumination on what it means to you.

Who Dell Bought

MAKE Technologies (MAKE) - Vancouver, BC-based MAKE brings powerful application analysis, apps portfolio management, and advanced re-engineering capabilities to Dell.
Clerity Solutions (Clerity) - not to be confused with CA-Clerity - the PPM tool, it was one of the last remaining COBOL compiler vendors in the business of rehosting COBOL applications to Unix and Microsoft operating systems. It and Micro Focus arguably owned the lion's share of the market.

What Dell Gains / Why It Matters

Understanding Cloud's Multitenancy

John R. Rymer — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:52:54 +0000

Forrester's James Staten and I collaborated on this research.

True cloud services all use some mode of multitenancy -- the ability for multiple customers (tenants) to share the same applications and/or compute resources. It is through multitenant architectures that cloud services achieve high cost efficiencies and can deliver low costs. Multitenant architectures must balance these cost benefits with the need for individual tenants to secure their data and applications. Forrester finds that few application development and delivery (AD&D) pros understand how multitenant architectures balance sharing with security, and many have other concerns as well. This research clarifies the picture and guides good decisions about cloud services.

Our definition: Multitenancy defines IT architectures that let multiple customers (tenants) share the same applications and/or compute resources with security, reliability, and consistent performance.

Our research yielded three major findings about multitenant architectures. These are:

Agile Development Makes Business Technology Come True; It Embodies Business Value In Software

Diego Lo Giudice — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:39:45 +0000

There is no doubt that Agile growth in the market is significant, and the growing daily number of inquiries I've been getting on Agile from end user organizations in 2012 gives me the impression that many are moving from tactical to strategic adoption. Why's that? Many reasons, and you can read about them in our focused research on Agile transformation on the Forrester website. But I'd like to summarize the top five reasons from my recent research "Determine The Business And IT Impact Of Agile Development" :

Application Development

What's Your Big Data Score?

Categories:

Open Source: An Emerging Driver For "Mobile First" Strategy

Agile Adoption Is A Trip Down The Cone Of Uncertainty

Categories:

The New Design-Driven Development Landscape

How did we get from single-channel desktop apps…

Categories:

Playbook: Achieve Cloud Economics For Operations And Services

Everything You Wanted To Know But Were Afraid To Ask About BI

Categories:

Progress Software Lowers Its Sights

Mobile Backend-As-A-Service: The New Lightweight Middleware?

Categories:

Data Discovery And Exploration - IBM Acquires Vivisimo

Categories:

What Are The Benefits Of Running Your Software Organization As A Business That Delivers Products?

Categories:

Should You Be Running Your Software Organization Like A Business That Delivers Products?

Categories:

The North Plains/Xinet Acquisition: Not A DAM Game-Changer

Dell Bolsters Its Apps Mod Street Cred By Acquiring MAKE Technologies And Clerity

Categories:

Understanding Cloud's Multitenancy

Agile Development Makes Business Technology Come True; It Embodies Business Value In Software

Categories: