Aspire together with our customer, Biz-LX™ is organizing an informative webinar where we discuss the journey of building a software solution using Web 2.0 tools such as RIA and mashups, and demonstrate the benefits of such an exercise with a real-time case study.

In this webinar you’ll learn:

- Techniques used to design software solutions to allow better usability
- How to evaluate and select Web 2.0 techologies suitable for your software?
- The business benefits and implications of applying Web 2.0 designs to your software solution

Date: Thursday, Nov 19, 2009
Time: 11:00 AM ET/04:00 PM BST/ 09:30 PM IST

Regsitration is FREE!

Click here to register:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/587477833

Panelists:

Dave Strite
Chief Information Officer, Biz-LX™

Elango Kanakaraji
Head – Web 2.0 Specialization, Aspire Systems

Aspire Systems is organizing a webinar with noted speakers Euan Semple – Director of Euansemple.com and Alan Moore – Founder, SMLXL, who will discuss and share their views on Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

Some of the topics that will be discussed during this 1 hour session, to be conducted in a short while, include:

- Real value of Web 2.0 for Business
- Challenges and essential baby steps in Enterprise 2.0 adoption
- Social Media Marketing

Date : September 3, 2009
Time : 11.00 AM ET/ 08.00 AM PT/ 04:00 PM BST/08:30 PM IST

Click here to Register:
http://www.aspiresys.com/events/current-events/web2.0_for_the_enterprise.html

Here are some excerpts of the interview:

In the recent past, you’ve built engineering teams for 2 startup SaaS companies – what do you look for when building these teams and what were the major challenges you’ve faced?

John: I have been very fortunate in my career to have worked with a lot of talented people. Early in my career I worked at Lotus Development on products like 1-2-3 and Lotus Notes and was able to learn a lot about how great teams are put together and, equally important, how energy, excitement, and motivation is maintained while working on projects.

Putting together a great team in any company starts with having a clear understanding of your goals, looking out from 3 – 24 months. From this understanding you build an understanding of your needs, enough to recognize the skills required. From an individual perspective, the keys are character and skills. The key attributes that I look for include:

• An expert understanding of the skills required for the job. If I need a C# developer with 5 years of experience and knowledge of MVC I expect to hire people with those skills.
• I look for past examples of flexibility in their job roles. In startups you will be challenged to fill many roles, not just the one you were originally hired for. I love these challenges; you learn a lot and become a much more rounded individual. However, not everyone thrives under these conditions.
• I look for ethics and honesty. I want to work with people who can be honest about their failures, their shortcomings. When I ask people if they agree with a course of action I expect honesty. I will never know all the answers and I want people who are unafraid to speak up for the betterment of the team.

The most difficult thing in a startup environment is to bring enough attention to team and personnel development. I preach the importance of these things, I believe in these things, and I do better than many people I know. However, I find it very difficult to meet my own personal standards on this front. The challenges are varied, ranging from lack of money for training, lack of time for focusing on individual goals. At the end of the day this is an area where I know I want to focus more energy.

Is software usability a true differentiator when it comes to enterprise products?

John: Yes, and no. Many enterprise products are more difficult to use than they should be. Businesses will often have usability as a single item on a long checklist of features, and will sacrifice it over some other critical features. As some Enterprise products are commoditized, however, you see a stronger emphasis on usability arising, as it becomes more important when product pricing brace to the bottom.

From a software engineering perspective, what are the key things you would focus on to build highly scalable software?

John: As with everything else you need to understand the corporate goals and expected growth patterns for your software. While there are no one-size-fits-all rule that I would provide I would always urge focusing on database scalability first. It’s easier to scale web servers than database servers. From a performance perspective, however, I often see the biggest performance bottlenecks arising client-side with an over-use, or incorrect use, of AJAX capabilities. It is easy to bring the browser to a crawl if you are not diligent in your coding and testing efforts.

Read the full interview

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.

Read the entire digest contents

One reason is that the most popular mashups today are browser-based. This means that querying different data sources, filtering and combining of data and rendering it in a proper format is all done within the confines of the browser. However, this cannot be the case in an enterprise, where data is quite heterogeneous – it resides in different formats, in different places, with different access limits. This is where server-based mashups come into the picture.

Mashup servers can deal with disparate data sources and even allow users to mashup sources without understanding the differences between the various data formats. A mashup server can also provide a visual drag-and-drop interface for easy creation of mashups and allow users to share mashups through pre-built, server managed interfaces via everyday tools like spreadsheets, email and portals.

Most importantly, a mashup server can safely store authentication and authorization information and be connected to an enterprise’s own authentication and monitoring toolsets. However, setting up the mashup server, feeding it with formal services and connecting it to security, governance and connection tools calls for the involvement of IT personnel, without which the enterprise mashup space cannot make much progress.

Faster and better access to external and internal data sources, reuse of existing resources and newer ways to use information are some of the advantages of mashups without costly investments and middlemen. Another big advantage that mashups can bring about is to complement SOA, if it is being implemented across an enterprise and to very quickly and visually represent the ROI of SOA to end-users.

Read the entire digest contents

Consumer mashups became popular a while ago, with www.housingmaps.com being one of the earliest examples of easily and successfully merging real estate data with live map locations, to provide users a convenient way to locate apartments. More recently, the huge number of mashups created with Google Maps highlights how effectively data, code and content that is already available can be mashed-up, reused and integrated easily – even by newbie web users.

However, the enterprise mashup space hasn’t been keeping up with its consumer counterpart although many knowledge workers in the enterprise can benefit enormously from the ability to easily create and use mashups on the fly – and thereby reduce the long tail of IT demand.

Some of the reasons for the lack of adoption in enterprises are the security, compliance and integration requirements of enterprises, when combining and using data from various sources and systems. A lack of standards and formats has also been another issue that has prevented large-scale enterprise mashup use.

Vendors in the enterprise mashup tools/ platform space are however changing the dynamics of this market. In the last quarter alone, there have been several new and better 2.0 product versions of existing mashup offerings from Dreamface, JackBe, IBM, Kapow Technologies and others. Standards support for mashups have also emerged very recently.

If the current challenges involving the creation and use of mashups in the enterprise are resolved, mashups could very well turn out to be a brand new model of software development soon!

Read the entire digest contents

Many organizations had earlier been skeptical about the ROI on using Web 2.0 tools across the enterprise. However, with grass-roots adoption by on-the-ground staff to improve productivity, collaboration and knowledge-sharing, and results that are building over time, enterprises are willing to invest more on Web 2.0 technologies.

In fact, a recent report by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending (currently at around $1 billion) on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS is going to increase dramatically to $4.6 billion by the year 2013.

Some of the largest ISVs in the enterprise space have been integrating Web 2.0 technologies into their products for some time now. Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration features, IBM’s Lotus connections, mashup products and upcoming Quickr and SAP’s Business Suite which includes social networking and widgets are some examples. However, many of them are limited in their cross-boundary integration abilities.

On the other hand, stand-alone commercial Web 2.0 software companies that cater to Enterprise 2.0 users like Communispace, Newsgator Technologies, Six Apart and Jive software have their own USPs and are holding their own in this emerging enterprise marketplace.

At this point it is difficult to tell who will win out – the platform/suite players or the niche pure-play Web 2.0 vendors. One thing is for sure: those who address the problems of interoperability and integration of these new technologies with legacy systems, identity management and security, will be benefited the most.

Read the entire digest contents

Many of these consumer internet start-ups got started in garages with a fairly small team and had a beta version of the product out in a matter of 6 months – more or less.

While the success of some Web 2.0 start-ups can be attributed to early-mover advantage in identifying and filling an under-served niche, there are some underlying similarities behind the successful companies.

With the limited resources available at their disposal, the key focus areas were: simplicity and usability – the intuitiveness – of the product or site, collaboration and deep involvement with the user community who are more than merely ‘users’ – they are also contributors, participants and co-creators – and constantly incorporating their feedback to make the user experience better; developing viral product features that are valuable to users like blogs and integration with other Web 2.0 tools, and ultra fast development cycles.

What does all this mean for enterprise software companies? While the consumer internet market certainly has a different user base, some of the lessons that can certainly be learnt are the simplicity and usability of software and understanding the end-user’s real needs better. If these lessons are incorporated, enterprise software has enormous potential for growth!

Read the entire digest contents