Intelligent Enterprise

Blogger Julian Wraith recently asked CMS Watch pundits to comment on The Future of Content Management. This is a topic I get asked about a lot, not only by CMS Watch customers but by consultants, friends in the industry, and (yes) vendors. I thought I'd offer some high-level observations here.

First I'd note that content, today, is not what we used to think of as content ten or fifteen years ago. Content used to mean document. Then for a while it also meant a web page, or the text and artifacts destined to make up a web page. Now it means whatever it means. Content can be just about anything. And not surprisingly, it means different things to different people.

There's a saying in Hollywood, made famous by screenwriter William Goldman, that "nobody knows anything." It's a lament that sometimes seems to apply to the IT world as well. There are counterexamples for every rule, and every time you think you know something, circumstances find a way to humble you. Pretty soon you realize it's impossible to make any generalizations, except that you can make no generalizations.

Consider the RFP process. Mind you, I'm no expert on Requests for Proposals (or tenders, as they're also known), but after you read enough of them, it's clear that nobody else is, either. Every RFP is different, and almost all are seriously flawed in one way or another. No one seems to know how to write a "good" RFP, perhaps because "nobody knows anything."

A while back, I wrote about the CMS Watch decision to expand its coverage of Apache Lucene for the Search and Information Access Report, based on what seemed like an accelerating rate of adoption of Lucene and related technologies. That trend appears to be continuing unabated. As the graphic below from Indeed.com shows, job listings that contain the terms Lucene, Solr, and Hadoop (three interrelated Apache projects that tend to be mentioned together) have skyrocketed of late. Solr is the Web app framework built on Lucene, and Hadoop is the Apache open-source implementation of Google's famed MapReduce distributed-computing programming model.

The business world is full of tumult these days, and times like these are known to give rise to strange bedpartners. But few would have expected the kind of union announced by Open Text yesterday. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company says it will acquire Vignette Corporation outright, later this year, in a deal worth approximately $310 million.

According to the announcement by Open Text, Vignette shareholders will receive US $8.00 in cash, plus 0.1447 of an Open Text common share for every share of Vignette common stock, which equates to something like US $12.70 per share -- a premium of 74% above the 30 trading day average closing price of Vignette shares and barely a dollar more than book value.

Why would Open Text, a $725 million vendor (with a diverse product catalog, but best known for its wide collection of ECM products) want to risk its respectable 9-percent operating margin by acquiring a competitor with negative profitability and a rapidly dwindling stream of license revenues?

Economic downturns tend to accelerate change in the IT world: People with budgetary authority find themselves taking a fresh look at what they're spending money on, how and whether IT investments are paying off, why bad investments are not paying off, and what to do differently going forward.

Given the situation we're in, now might be as good a time as any for potential buyers of software systems -- and licensees whose contract renewals are coming up -- to declare war on per-seat pricing.

For the most recent edition of the Search and Information Access Report, I had the opportunity to help expand our coverage of Apache Lucene. The decision to increase our coverage of Lucene was a no-brainer, because (as anyone covering the search and information access space knows) Lucene's traction in the enterprise world is accelerating by the day.

Over the past year, in particular, interest in Lucene (and related projects – Solr in particular), has picked up noticeably, in part because of recent significant performance enhancements and stability improvements, but also because IT specialists are increasingly desperate to get their search problems solved on a limited budget.

As I wandered around the Gilbane Boston 2008 show last week, the question I heard people asking each other most often was some variation of: "How's business?" Almost everyone is trying to figure out what the economic train wreck is doing (or might do) to IT spending.

The Good News is that showgoers were, by and large, surprisingly optimistic. It seems in particular that government spending on Web and Search technologies hasn't abated (yet). "We've seen deals take longer to close," one vendor told me, "but they do eventually close. They don't just evaporate. At least, not yet."

A recent press release concerning ArnoldIT's Google monitoring service piqued my interest. It turns out to be a nicely formatted aggregation page for Google blogs. The most recent five blog entries (or titles therefrom) are grouped together by category. Google has over 70 different blogs (for everything from Gears and Gadgets to OpenSocial and Chrome). Keeping up with them all is nearly impossible. Hence the ArnoldIT aggregation service, dubbed "Overflight."

While handy in its own right, Overflight is not available as an RSS feed. It also doesn't seem to be searchable. So I decided to see if I could mash together my own version of Overflight (tailored to my own research needs), using Yahoo Pipes, the visual Web-app builder.

Cloud computing is one of those buzz phrases that, like "redistribution of income," seems to make otherwise dispassionate people hyperventilate. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, speaking at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference, raised quite a few eyebrows when he derided "cloud computing" as "complete gibberish" in an extended on-stage rant before an audience of financial analysts. A few days later, Free Software Foundation patriarch Richard Stallman (never one to mince words) called cloud computing "worse than stupidity" in a highly critical interview with The Guardian.

Don't be fooled, though. Cloud computing is not just a catchphrase. Like REST, it's a style of doing things that doesn't seem particularly profound at first glance, but has important implications for certain problem-spaces. What the skeptics need, perhaps, are a few real-world case studies in cloud computing, to understand what the hubbub is about.

Microsoft's announcement last week of its intention to expose SaaS versions of its Office products (under the moniker "Office Live") can be interpreted in numerous ways. Some see it as not much more than a kneejerk response to Google Docs. Others have characterized it as a kind of belated attempt by Microsoft to tap the promise of cloud computing. (Microsoft is no stranger to cloud computing, however, as any Xbox owner knows.)

Remember Google the way it was in 2001? Slightly funky logo, exclamation point on the end. Lots of white space. Proud declaration above the query-box: "Search 1,326,920,000 Web pages"?

The last company on earth I'd expect to support open-source JavaScript libraries is Microsoft. By "support," I mean providing 24/7 product support through Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS).
But guess what? Hades has apparently frozen over, because according to Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, "later this year" Microsoft will begin providing 24/7 PSS support for jQuery, the popular open-source JavaScript library.

It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more.

Today, three of the biggest behemoths of content management (namely IBM, Microsoft, and EMC) announced a new standard... one that, if it does indeed become an accepted standard, is supposed do for the content-management world what ODBC and SQL did for the database world. (We've heard that one before, but keep reading anyway.)

It's too soon to know what to make of Google's new Chrome browser (I've only been hammering on it a short time), but I have to admit I was disappointed (if unsurprised) by the two-dimensional, low-tech-feeling, all too familiar baby-blue "skin" of the UI. (Can you imagine Adobe perpetrating such an eyesore?) Likewise, it's perhaps telling that the early documentation came in the form of a comic book. Welcome, once again, to Google Beta-ware.

Some random impressions:

Big Blue recently released its IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics report, and it contains more than a few eyebrow-raisers. For example: Web-application-based security vulnerabilities have begun to outnumber reports involving conventional viruses and trojans (of the kind that target the operating system). We're now at the point where 51 percent of newly discovered software vulnerabilities depend in some way on Web-page interactions.

Also, there's been a sharp surge in the number of vulnerabilities that involve SQL injection (as opposed to cross-site scripting). Meanwhile, the use of infected image files (.gif or .jpg) as a way to inflict mayhem is on the decline.

What really got my attention, though, is the new Top Ten list of vendors with the most vulnerability disclosures. Normally you would expect Microsoft to be at the top of that list (I would, at least). Instead, it's at Number 3, behind Apple and... Joomla!. Fortunately, Joomla! can be secured, but it's quite possible that many novice Joomla! installers do not.

Over at the Adobe Developer Connection Web site, Belgian developer Sébastien Arbogast has posted an interesting article (a tutorial of sorts) on how to write next-generation Web apps in Flex. What's interesting isn't the Flex part (or the demo app itself, which is rather uninspired) but the underlying stack, which gives some hint, I think, of what Adobe's Flex evangelistas may be envisioning as LAMP-Next. It's a combination of Flex (for the presentation layer), BlazeDS (for messaging and presence), Spring (the runtime framework), Hibernate (for persistence), and MySQL (data layer). The application server used in Arbogast's example happens to be JBoss, but it could just as easily be something else.

There's something vaguely Orwellian, at times, about the language that turns up in quarterly and annual reports (the kind U.S. public corporations are required to file with the Security and Exchange Commission). Remember the classic slogans from Orwell's 1984? War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Perhaps we should now add, "Higher prices mean lower cost of ownership."

I'm reading a well-known software company's quarterly report dated April 1, 2008, wherein the following rather noble-sounding statements are made:

Lawyers were well represented (you might say) at last week's Enterprise Search Summit in New York. At times, ESS felt more like an e-discovery conference with analytics and social-computing side-tracks rather than a search conference featuring a few e-discovery sessions.

Based on what I saw at the Search Summit, there seems to be a new awareness, at ever-higher levels in the corporate responsibility chain, that in a litigious business environment, "enterprise search" is not just a knowledge-management tactic or a productivity aid, but a survival imperative. You will be sued some day. (It's not a matter of "if," but when.) During the discovery phase of the suit, you're going to provide (and also receive from the other side) bewilderingly immense amounts of data. Without good search technology, sifting through the data isn't just tedious but nightmarishly expensive.

In an earlier post, I commented on the (undeclared) "VM war" that seems to be shaping up between Adobe and Sun Microsystems. If Adobe has its way, PC users will soon be running Web-friendly desktop apps in a secure Virtual Machine environment built on Adobe technology. If Sun has its way, we'll all be running JavaFX apps. (And if Microsoft has its way, we'll all be using some combination of .NET and Silverlight.)

Sun appears to have overslept the alarm this time, however. The company announced its JavaFX-based RIA strategy a year ago to relatively little fanfare. And although the technology was touted at the recent JavaOne show, the fact still remains that few people outside the Java developer community have ever heard of JavaFX.

Just when you thought the Java application server market was pretty well saturated (if not in actual decline), along comes a brand new entrant with familiar-sounding promises of "lighter, faster, easier." What's doubly ironic is that this new contender comes from the very folks who've done so much (intentionally or not) to make "Java appserver" a bad name in recent years. I'm talking about the people at SpringSource (purveyors of the celebrated Spring Framework).

The recently announced SpringSource Application Platform is (according to its creators) "a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability." Spring geeks will recognize it as the long-awaited integration of Spring with OSGi.