Earlier, software development teams typically used the waterfall approach where requirements were handed over to engineering and the final product was then handed over to quality assurance. Over the years, product development has changed to cater to market requirements, where teams collaborate and work together on each step of the process to build a better product more quickly. This is precisely what we call “Producteering” at Aspire Systems, where working software is released frequently. 

A great analogy to this would be the biological evolution, where it begins with experimentation (mutation and recombination), exploration (survival of the fittest) and refinement (producing more of the survivors). Increasingly, product development follows this analogy, where it has switched from a process based on anticipation (define, design and build) to one based on adaptation (envision, explore and adapt).

In today’s digest, we will take this opportunity to recount one of the success stories where Aspire adopted iterative development. This was a music vending product that we developed for one of our customers and the salient features of the process followed were:

• Beyond the next iteration, the team didn’t know the features that would be included in the next development iterations
• The team had a clear product vision and a general idea about the features needed in the product
• There was active involvement from our customer’s product marketing organization
• There was an absolute time deadline and resource constraints, which the team was very aware of
• The team had a overall product platform architecture
• Within the above, team delivered tested features every two weeks and then adapted their plans to the reality of actual product testing

The team’s process was one of evolution and adaptation, not planning and optimization. In the end, product was delivered on time, met high quality standards, and has been a success in the marketplace. The team didn’t start with anticipated architectures and plans but with a vision followed shortly by the first iteration of the product. The rest evolved as the team adapted to the reality of the market and the technology.

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In the previous digest, we talked about how Open source and SaaS leverage each other’s strengths and a possible merger of the two. Open source being a development and licensing model can be used to build a delivery model like SaaS, while on the other hand applications built using open source can be delivered as SaaS applications. Hence, the two can and do co-exist, while they need not necessarily merge.

While SaaS companies that use open source technologies, or a combination of proprietary and open source software, are quite common, there are very few SaaS companies who adopt an Open source business model.

Open source communities typically form around projects where there is a development problem/opportunity, so unless it’s something (the area of work of the SaaS provider) more than just a mundane business problem, SaaS providers may have a hard time gaining a volume to form a community of interested developers/users. It is also expensive for SaaS providers to adopt a pure open-source model, like say Wikipedia, as the costs of hosting the software on a continuous basis are not negligible.

A hybrid model with open source and commercial versions, which SugarCRM has adopted, makes better business sense as the commercial editions of the product allow revenue inflow to the company and in turn supports the open source user community. Contributions from the community, in turn, enhances the value of the software.

However, Sugar’s model also cannot really be called Open source SaaS, as only the commercial editions (developed by Sugar’s engineers) are offered as a hosted or on-premise solution and the open source edition (including extensions developed by the community) is available on Sourceforge.org or SugarExchange.com (the add-on marketplace where extensions are sold).

Other areas that need to be thought about and addressed from the provider’s end, when offering an open source SaaS, are the support, service delivery and management aspects of the software. But with SaaS gaining ever-increasing popularity, and being driven by user adoption, there’s a high possibility that there will be more companies who find Open source SaaS a new profitable business model.

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There are different schools of thought when it comes to SaaS and Open source (or SaaS vs. Open source as some would put it). Some believe that only one of them will survive and win over the other, others believe that both will co-exist, while the third group believes they will merge.

It’s certainly interesting how they feed off each other’s strengths and also create weaknesses in each other. Many SaaS providers, for example, use open source software (OSS) for its lower costs thereby driving open source growth. Open source vendors, on the other hand benefit from cloud computing and using web infrastructure services on a pay-per-use basis.

Open source licensing can create issues for SaaS vendors if it is not fully understood or complied with. A number of SaaS vendors may be incorporating open source code into traditionally licensed models unknowingly and without being aware of the violation until challenged. There is also repeated criticism regarding the security of open source software, which SaaS vendors need to take into account.

From the cloud computing end, although it is improving by leaps and bounds, reliability is something which SaaS providers and open source vendors have to worry about. Amazon’s S3 online storage services suffered two notable outages this year, which disrupted websites using the infrastructure service.

Those who believe open source or SaaS will win out over the other – due to the community contributions and support for open source software, or because open source software licenses will become irrelevant in the networked world – are wrong, because both of them can and will co-exist. What’s going to become more successful in the future is a SaaS revenue generating product that uses open source and is able to build a community as loyal as OSS communities which act as its sales force and becomes part of the development and PR team as well.

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From being a miniscule part of the software world just a couple of decades ago, open source has become ubiquitous today. It is so prevalent to the extent of not being visible because it is embedded in the mainstream. According to a Gartner report on open source software, “By 2012, more than 90% of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms”.

And this has resulted in a change in how software development takes place. From being a fully closed process, software development has been evolving towards a more community driven open source approach. Large and small enterprises and government institutions are rapidly adopting open source for three primary reasons: to reduce IT costs, deliver systems faster, and make systems more secure.

More often than not, ISVs are on the constant look out for an open source strategy that would address the demands of their customers. This could mean adopting an open source component or an entire open source license for their products. Whichever path they choose to go, open source does come with a certain amount of risk that needs to be managed.

Open source adoption is being considered everywhere, but one needs to remember that open source is far from free. And it requires an equal amount of support and services, just as proprietary software does. ISVs need to realize this and should continue offering quality professional services, which is a good revenue stream for them as well.

While open source may not work for every ISV, it’s for them to decide whether to move into the open source realm or not. That decision and the introspection that will follow will eventually help them sharpen their market focus.

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While not many in the enterprise IT community are in favor of having yet another new acronym surface, there appears to be a quite a bit of debate revolving Web Oriented Architecture (WOA). Following the sluggish adoption of SOA in enterprises, WOA has come into focus and is regarded as a lighter version of SOA with some technology differences.

While SOA is middleware-driven, investment heavy and typically involves integrating several back-end systems, WOA is about being light-weight and originating standards-based services internally and externally that can be immediately consumed. WOA is not really an architecture but a style of integrating several applications, using mashups and open APIs, REST and RIA clients from a variety of sources.

REST is a popular, powerful and simple method of leveraging HTTP as a Web service. Information is represented in the form of resources on the network and is accessed and manipulated via a specified protocol. It will make sure that enterprises fall back on simpler and more straightforward methods that simply work.

WOA is a promising bet for enterprises. It is about building new applications of code, not components, with the interactions all loosely coupled from start to finish. It’s about integration and leveraging existing assets and providing better control and access to enterprise application-specific data immediately, not after an internal SOA infrastructure is in place. Enterprises have started adopting WOA and in a variety of ways: these services can come together as portals, standalone Web apps, SaaS, or RIA front ends to support extended enterprise processes.

Having said all this, WOA is not the solution to every problem. There are some higher end applications where only SOA stacks can come to the rescue. However, it surely is a robust, scalable and reliable technology to build open and powerful web services.

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Ever since the ‘- as a Service’ trend started, there has been no looking back. One of the more recent acronyms is DaaS, which is up for grabs with varied meanings such as Data as a Service, Development as a Service, and Desktop as a Service. This week, we’ll discuss Development as a Service, which is being touted by Salesforce.com as their on-demand platform for developers.

DaaS consists of a new set of development tools and APIs that allow enterprise developers to harness cloud computing and develop applications without the need for software and hardware client/server architecture. It is an extension of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) as it allows developers to build, test and deploy applications using tools provided within the hosted platform.

The DaaS platform offered by Salesforce.com includes a set of features with the ability to create database applications on demand, a workflow engine for managing collaboration between users, and a Web services API for programmatic access along with mashups and integration with other applications and data. Full access to the database, logic, user interface and other capabilities of the Force.com platform allows easy development of enterprise software.

Earlier, ISVs used various development tools to build their products and most new development had to be started from scratch. But with the shift now towards web-based/on-demand applications and the easy availability of development frameworks in the cloud, it is probably a wise decision for start-up ISVs to tap existing infrastructure and services and build on top of it, and focus their efforts on business innovation

While it means less re-invention of the wheel and freedom from maintenance and upgrades for developers, ISVs also can gain from DaaS. It acts as a marketing channel for ISVs where they can place their products in front of several businesses seeking innovative business solutions. Of course, ISVs will have to ensure that their target market will overlap significantly with the platform users and that they do not get locked-in to the platform to their disadvantage.

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SaaS products have always been associated with an issue of limited customizability. In a move to tackle the same, another ‘as a Service’ model -Platform as a Service (PaaS) has evolved. Often being considered as an outcome of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), it can best be described as an application development and deployment functionality available as a service.

With SOA, we have defined certain web-based interfaces which are specific to an existing system or module. It also has rendered it reusable too. Now, PaaS promises to extend these functionalities to the next level, wherein the whole platform would become accessible through a web browser. This means that enterprises now have to just develop and deploy their applications through a browser without shelling out any extra revenue on infrastructures.

It is agreed that PaaS readily helps create and deploy applications. However, the question here is, “Why should Enterprises adopt PaaS?” as they already have tools and technologies to meet the same goal. It certainly has some clear cut advantages such as no infrastructural costs, instant IDE, instant deployment, to name a few. They just have to choose the right platform depending on their needs and resources and subsequently, can shift their focus onto creating innovative applications, rather than the complex IT infrastructures. This would also mean the removal of critical barrier to entry for smaller ISVs.

The time has come when anyone with an internet connection can build various applications and deploy them across the globe. PaaS is here to stay, but it should be ensured that they are kept open so that the developers and designers do not get alienated from the mainstream.

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The successes of Web 2.0 products and services have spurred hundreds of start-up companies and the leap now seems to be towards Web 3.0,which is often being considered a marketing term.

Web 3.0 can be defined as another era of the Web during which several technologies of the Semantic Web will be widely used. Though it is not synonymous with the Semantic Web, it will be largely characterized by the semantics in general. It is an era in which we will upgrade the back-end of the web, after a decade of the front-end of the web such as AJAX, tagging and other front end user-experience innovations in Web 2.0. It is a different application model that we will be seeing in computing which is likely to be very large and different. There are low barriers to entry and it is thought to consist of new generation of tools which will solve a lot of problems and will work everywhere, be it PC or mobile phone.

The main theme revolves around changing the web into a language that can be read and categorized by the system rather than the users, extracting meaning from the way they interact with the web. Openness will hold the key here. But more than just collaboration and social networking, it will break the old silos, links everyone everything everywhere, and makes the whole thing potentially smarter. It is about information control as against information overload in the previous version. It will also give emphasis on the renewal of key index in the search engine. This would mean users being able to find accurate results for any search of theirs on the web.

Coming to the Enterprise software companies, it would mean a new generation of business applications that may change their faces. It is just wait and watch for them at the moment.

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Integration of disparate systems is a key challenge in general and particularly so in SaaS, as we need to integrate an application/product ‘in the cloud’ and an on-premise system. Today we cover some key integration tools used for this purpose.

Jitterbit:This is an open source integration tool that helps to design, configure, test and deploy integration solutions. It supports most major document types and protocols. Like all integration products, Jitterbit is based on writing interfaces that translate simple user input into the queries or commands that insert and extract information into each system being integrated.

MuleSource:It offers an open source enterprise service bus (ESB) solution and has its origins in the open source Mule project. It provides Web Services support using Axis & XFire, integrates with Spring and provides out-of-the-box integration with many legacy, commercial products.

Talend Open Studio:This data integration software generates data integration processes in Java and offers Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) functions for data warehousing and analytics, working on scale out, commodity hardware grids. It includes over 100 native connectors for common enterprise applications. On the operational side, Talend handles data migration, data loading, synchronization or replication of databases and data exchange between systems.

Boomi: It is a provider of business integration solutions for small and mid-sized business (SMBs). Boomi’s ‘Visual Integration Technology’ enables integration of applications, trading partners and data using drag and drop features.

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Our focus this week is on some Oracle based features that can help in SaaS implementations.

Virtual Private Database: This works by transparently modifying requests for data to present a partial view of the tables to the users based on a set of defined criteria. During runtime, predicates are appended to all the queries to fetch only the rows that a user is supposed to see.

For example, if the user is supposed to see only accounts of tenant XYZ, the VPD setup automatically rewrites the query “select * from accounts” to “select * from accounts where tenant=’XYZ”. This is achieved by having a security policy on the ACCOUNTS table. Oracle Label Security (OLS) is another feature that supports row-based-security for restricting user access to specific data. It builds on the Virtual Private Database feature.

REF Partition strategy in Oracle 11g: This feature allows partitioning of multiple tables together using the parent-child relationship of the tables. Note that the partitioning keys are not stored as actual columns in the child table.

For example, if Parent ORDER table is partitioned by tenant ID, the child ORDER_DETAILS table inherits the partition even though tenant ID is not stored in the child table. This is optimal because data for each tenant is stored together automatically and transparently in the respective partitions.

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