Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/04/bea_ibm_social/
BEA, IBM get social too early
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Posted in Developer, 4th May 2007 10:41 GMT
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Earlier this year, both BEA and IBM announced upcoming additions to their middleware offerings that would extend the ability to incorporate Web 2.0 functionality, such as creating mashups.
Now both companies have made more extensive announcements, with each including a subtle but significant shift towards branding the additions as well as providing the social computing model in a form compatible with business applications.
This is an interesting twist in that the rise in not just popularity, but the perception of significance of services such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Wikis, blogging, and del.icio.us, not to mention Second Life, has suddenly given social computing a prominence in the mindset of business systems strategists that was not there even six months ago.
There are certainly some tricks to be learned from the way these applications provide an environment for users to play within. These tricks can, and probably should, be applied to the future development of business-related services. Mashups and Wikis are two obvious candidates that have immediate potential as tools in building new business services.
But there are signs that the software industry, in its keenness to jump on the social-computing-as-business-tool bandwagon (indeed, to be seen as driving it), seems to have lost sight of one of those tricks – namely that none of the social software tools started life as a planned product with a defined sales cycle but rather emerged from small groups of people sharing a common view that "if we could do this it would be 'cool'". To paraphrase the Irish saying, they were doing it for the craic, not the meeting of business goals.
It may seem a trivial point, but this is in practice a subtle difference to the position being taken by BEA and IBM. In essence, they are adopting the view that social computing trends are going to be significant, so business users need to buy a set of tools that can be integrated with the existing product sets the companies produce. This does seem to be putting the cart before the horse in the traditional way of software vendors, where the obvious vested interest is to convince (primarily existing) customers that they are going to need "Technology X" soon, so they had better buy it from their favourite supplier right now.
The product carts now being offered will no doubt prove to be excellent, but without yet knowing what the horse of user/business needs might be, there is no way of knowing whether they may match up.
The trouble is many of the social computing technology providers have already been bought up by bigger companies that play in the social space, so the business software vendors don't have open to them the traditional option of cutting deals with the start ups, and then acquiring them. To get Flickr and or del.icio.us now, they would have to buy out Yahoo! lock, stock and barrel. The only alternative is to come up with their own alternatives.
So BEA is, for example, pitching its three recently revealed (http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/03/30/bea_social_networking/) offerings, AquaLogic Pages, AquaLogic Ensemble and AquaLogic Pathways as the integrated tools that will be needed by any AquaLogic user toying with moving towards exploiting social computing techniques.
IBM, for its part, is launching developerWorks community spaces, a place where users with common interests can meet online, and IBM Lotus Connection for Partners, which has a self-explanatory function for providing profiling, blogs, communities, and social bookmarking for partners selling Lotus-based products and services.
And thereby lies the rub. The businesses requiring such capabilities – and they will need them – are more likely to turn to social networks that are driven by their common business needs than by the technology they currently use.
From the vendors' point of view, the drivers towards social computing tools are likely to be found "out there" in the common problems of individual business segments rather than "in here" under the vendors' direct influence. Users, both at a strategic and tactical level, are more likely to turn to turn to, say, "myspace/invoice/management/alternative solutions" than a vendor-driven service.
And to stretch the analogy to breaking point, such efforts seem doomed to be putting both the design of the horse and cart before the appearance of roads. BEA's product marketing director for emerging products, Ajay Gandhi, suggested that its new offerings provided tools where "everyone can create collaborative web applications and situational workspaces". It sounds great: the ultimate freedom for any individual within a company to do what they think they need to do to make the business grow - the ultimate in business agility.
In practice, however, this has the potential of achieving an unbridled level of anarchy that would make the early days of the PC's appearance in business pale into insignificance. No social applications building can really take place until the right generic set of policies are defined that can manage the potential anarchy. Gandhi admitted that while BEA has a consultancy division looking at this issue, it has not reached the point of having a policy set available with which to advise and support customers as they move to social computing models.
Such generic policy models will then have to be robust enough to support adaptation to suit specific business requirements. As an example of just one issue, the potential for inadvertent misuse of a third party's intellectual property rights in a mashup could cause mayhem in the business world once corporate lawyers got on the case. There are attempts at creating new licence structures in this area – such as the Common Creative Licence in Flickr, which allows limited, personal use – but businesses are likely to need something a little more robust. It will, perhaps, also need to be an adjunct or superset of ITIL.
In reality, these policies will need to be not only defined but also fully implemented before any individual user gets anywhere near being allowed to put their own thoughts or aspirations into a tangible runtime form. ®