Application Development

From The Field: The First Annual Canonical Model Management Forum

Mike Gilpin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:58:48 +0000

Early last week, I attended the first annual “Canonical Model Management Forum” here in the DC area. A number of government agencies as well as several of the major banks, insurance companies, credit-card operators, and other private-sector firms attended the meeting. There was one vendor sponsor (DigitalML, the vendor of IgniteXML), and the meeting was hosted at a CSC facility. There were a number of presentations by the attendees about their environments, what had motivated them to establish a canonical model, how that work had turned out, and the important lessons learned.

But What Is A Canonical Information Model?

In the first day of sessions, I heard a number of definitions of canonical modeling, but most were similar to Forrester’s:

A canonical information model is a model of the semantics and structure of information that adheres to a set of rules agreed upon within a defined context for communicating among a set of applications or parties.

Forrester’s recent survey data shows that canonical modeling is actually quite common among those pursuing SOA:

OK – But Why Do I Need One?

Welcome To Forrester's New Blog Platform!

Mike Gilpin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:29:56 +0000

We don't normally draw attention to things like this (changing our underlying platform technology), but in this case, there are some key differences in capabilities, that you need to know about so you can benefit from them. As you already know if you've been following the Application Development & Program Management blog, we have a team of analysts who are already active bloggers. But in the past, it may have been challenging, if you were particularly interested in following the posts of one analyst, to do that in amongst the posts from the rest of the team.

So I'm thrilled that we now have individual blogs for all the analysts on the team, too. Everything blogged by the team also rolls up into the team-level blog, which is a good place to hang out if you're following several analysts on the team, have more eclectic interests around application development and delivery, or just want to be tuned in to what's going on across the team.

Another great innovation (for you) of our new platform is that blog pots are now presented with only summary information showing in the initial view. Only after you choose to drill down on a post do you see the whole thing. This makes it easier to look through several posts, whether on an analyst or team blog, and find just the stuff you care about.

And now for a few words from Cliff Condon, the Forrester exec who leads our social computing initiative of which this new platform is a part, on Forrester blogs and what it means for you:

Everyone’s welcome here. Forrester analysts use blogs as an input into the research they produce, so having an open, ongoing dialogue with the marketplace is critical. Clients and non-clients can participate – so I encourage you to be part of the conversations on Forrester blogs.

Progress Software’s Coming Out Party

John R. Rymer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

We all need to revisit our understanding of Progress Software. On March 4, I was introduced to the “new and improved” Progress at the company’s annual briefing for industry and financial analysts. The company is a new enterprise software vendor with 25 years of experience. If you know about Progress, it is likely through an ISV solution based on the OpenEdge database/4GL. Or perhaps through the Sonic enterprise service bus ... or the Actional SOA management product.

How you should think about Progress Software now (see Figure):

First, Progress Software has a new mission, which it calls“operational responsiveness.” To achieve this mission, Progress will primarily seek to help enterprises develop real-time, event-based architectures that extend existing systems. Real-time, event-based systems let companies see what’s going on in their business processes at any given moment, and to act while transactions and interactions are in flight to fix problems, ensure compliance, add revenue opportunities, and/or cut costs. Example scenarios:

What’s In Your Test Estimation Framework?

Margo Visitacion — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I've been working quite closely with fellow analysts Dave West and Mary Gerush surrounding project estimation. Regardless if you're in the Agile world, testing is factored in (well, unit testing anyway), and if you're in the traditional camp, we've heard the same pain from a number of Forrester customers. No matter what methodology we use, there's not enough time to test. To combat that, testing organizations are attempting to build a livable, usable framework to provide them with information to battle for sufficient testing time.

Getting the best return on your SAP investment

George Lawrie — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Are you a wondering how to get the most out of your SAP investment? Are you trying to figure out SAP’s long-term strategy? Do you want to make better use of SAP’s BI platforms and services ecosystem? If so you have a lot in common with other Forrester clients.

Forrester has answered hundreds of inquiries about SAP in the last year or so. And the volume of inquiries is increasing as our clients roll out SAP solutions to the furthest reaches of their global domains and use white space partners to cover an ever broader footprint.

At the same time, you ask us questions about deployment best practices, SAP’s pricing and licensing, its middleware approach, the strategic significance of its acquisitions, and the implications of changes in the top management team.

We decided to pull together all our experts to discuss their SAP research in a series of jam sessions (teleconferences) to help you make the best informed decisions with the minimum investment of time. Each teleconference looks at a specific dilemma for which we’ve fielded client inquiries.

If you are an Application Development & Program Management professional, or a CIOs, or a Business Process & Applications professional looking for guidance then there is a session in this week long series of one hour Webex sessions just for you. Or if your dilemmas cover all the topics you can attend all the sessions or download them later and follow at your leisure.

We’ll start by looking at SAP’s Product Strategy. We will explain just how SAP's product portfolios and technology strategy for enterprises and SMB clients is evolving. You will hear Forrester analysts debate the merits of SAP's product offerings, technology architecture innovations, and its likely success in providing software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.

Staffing, Skills And Workforce Planning Survey - How Are You Coping?

Phil Murphy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

How successful is your firm at attracting and retaining people with the skills you need to develop, deploy, and maintain your applications? Do you believe we're headed for much tougher times trying to hire and retain skills or do you think some of the hype is overblown? We have fielded a survey on staffing and skills issues and I'd like to encourage you to participate as we dig into many of the issues.

General issues:

How Will Cloud Impact Your Existing Application Portfolio?

Phil Murphy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

In a conversation with a vendor in the application portfolio management space the other day, we got on the subject of what "Cloud" means to them and by extension to their current and future customer base. My colleagues have written extensively on what it may mean to Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, HP and others, and our conversation began discussing the potential of cloud-computing from a vendor perspective - for instance:

Oracle Likes Cloud Computing After All

John R. Rymer — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Larry Ellison angrily dismisses suggestions that Oracle’s business will be harmed by the rise of cloud computing. Many misinterpret Ellison’s remarks to mean he (and by extension Oracle) thinks cloud computing is a dumb idea that Oracle won’t pursue. We are now learning that Oracle does, in fact, intend to pursue cloud computing. But we're also learning that Oracle's strategy is more limited than those of IBM and Microsoft, its large-vendor competitors.

Enterprise packaged apps integration

George Lawrie — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, man is born free and is everywhere in chains. So too Enterprise app deployments are conceived as self contained yet everywhere are integrated with legacy and complementary apps.

My colleague Ken Vollmer and I are looking at packaged apps integration best practices and how these might change as some apps move to the cloud. We are asking:

What kind of middleware do you use?

How do you help process owners to assemble (composite) processes that have transactional integrity?

What do you do about the conflicting data models of apps from different stables – for example yours and those of a third party or perhaps in –house?

How far can so called “canonical” data models and meta data help to overcome such problems?

If you have experience and an opinion about what constitute the top three best practices in such packaged apps integration, or if you can warn about the three most egregious pitfalls to avoid we would love to talk with you.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you at glawrie@forrester.com

Blogs and My Research Lifecycle

John R. Rymer — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I’m soon getting a new tool for my work as an industry analyst: A Forrester blog. Before diving into my new blog, I think I should define its role in my work, and get your comments and suggestions.

My Forrester blog is a new part of my research lifecycle (depicted below). I’ve been pursuing some form of this research lifecycle for over 15 years.

SAP Customer? Come Jam with us!

Mike Gilpin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Hi, I'm happy to report that analyst George Lawrie of our team that serves Application Development and Delivery Professionals has been working with a host of analysts from across the company to put together our first-ever SAP Jam on March 22-25!

Collabnet expands its ALM toolset with Agile project management

Dave West — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Today Collabnet announced the acquisition of Agile PPM vendor Danube. As an Agile PPM vendor Danube are farmous for their support for Scrum, with their offerings ScrumWorks and ScrumWorks Pro. With this acquisition, Collabnet has taken a significant step in merging the disciplines of Agile project and portfolio management with ALM. Collabnet has traditionally stayed away from supporting any one-process model, describing themselves as process agnostics.

NoSQL And Elastic Caching Platforms Are Kissing Cousins

Mike Gualtieri — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

The NoSQL Movement Is Gaining Momentum, But What The Heck Is It?

The NoSQL movement is a combination of an architectural approach for storing data and software products (such as Tokyo Cabinet, CouchDb, Redis) that can store data without using SQL. Thus the term NoSQL.

There Won’t Be A Mobile Channel In Banking Anymore

Jost Hoppermann — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

The mobile channel is increasingly relevant in business strategies, application architectures and applications of financial services firms. Consequently, we are all aware that the headline represents a strong exaggeration. So, why this statement? Is there any substance in it that application architects, application developers, and enterprise architects need to consider? Interactions with a number of banks indicate that the answer is yes.

Metrics, Metrics, Metrics – What Do Benchmarks Tell Us Anyway?

Margo Visitacion — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:00:00 +0000

A common inquiry request to Forrester is asking for benchmarks for quality. Testing groups are struggling to figure out how well they’re doing and if the processes they’re fighting for are making a difference.