Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Archive for January, 2008

I was very surprised that in ZapThink’s 2008 predictions, they predicted that they will be acquired:

Our prediction for 2008 is that one of these firms will acquire ZapThink, as well as other SOA thought leadership firms, because we can establish the winning acquirer as a global SOA leader

I wasn’t so much surprised that ZapThink would eventually be acquired, but I was surprised at the public announcement. Now, I’ve never been an entrepreneur, have never been involved with a startup, and have never gone through an acquisition, but a statement like this in an open forum sent out to ZapThink’s mailing list (beyond paying ZapThink clients) would seem to indicate one of two things:

1. An acquisition is already in the works.
2. The company is struggling and has just raised a huge banner saying, “We’re for sale. Please come save us.”

I’d be very surprised if it was the latter case, as a public statement like this would seem to kill any negotiation position. So, I’m going to assume that the former is the case and that it won’t be long before this “prediction” is reality.

It certainly brings up an interesting topic for companies in the SOA consulting space, one area where I do have past experience. Obviously, consulting companies make money by having billable resources. If you’re a consultant and you’re not billable, the revenue is not coming in to pay your salary. The owners of the company ultimately want your salary to be paid by clients, not by them. At the same time, this makes the development of intellectual property very difficult when the consultants are 100% billable. While intellectual property is certainly an indirect source of revenue, as it can help close deals, it’s not a direct source of revenue. So what’s a consulting firm to do? It would seem that bringing in a set of experts in intellectual property development that also have experience in creating non-consulting revenue streams (training, vendor marketing) could be a very potent combination that gets around the revenue challenge. The risk here, however, is that the “vendor neutrality” that an independent ZapThink has provided becomes challenging, given that many consulting firms get deals through their vendor partnerships, and it’s difficult to be a partner to competing vendors. Even ZapThink themselves have recognized the challenges of consulting and vendor relationships in Dave Linthicum’s recent post on his InfoWorld blog. We’ll just wait and see what the future holds for ZapThink. I wish my friends Ron, Jason, and Dave all the best in 2008.

Normally I’m not the guy to stir up a lot of controversy, but there’s one topic that I’ve mentioned on mailing lists, here, etc. that usually attracts a few opposing comments. That topic is the use of the term application in the enterprise. I’d like to see that term go away, or at least be limited to just the presentation layer of a solution. Why is that? It’s because it’s the boat anchor of IT, in my opinion. Think about it. How do we get out of the habit of thinking about monolithic point solutions for one small user group and into the habit of thinking about business capabilities that have potential for broader applicability when we have one hundred-plus organizations with the title “application development?” How do we deal with the organizational concerns when applications that were built for one group with one intent are now suddenly critical components for many other solutions with different user bases, each with their own set of priorities?

If nothing else, a switch from using the term “application” to the term “solution” would be a symbolic gesture that represents the change that must occur within IT. IT shouldn’t be producing applications, we should be producing solutions. Those solutions may still be self-contained like yesterday, or they may be a composite of pieces from many previous solutions, some new development, some off the shelf solutions, and some Internet-hosted offerings. The boundary of what constitutes “one application” are all but impossible to draw because of the many necessary interdependencies. Even if we limit the use of the term to just the presentation layer, it’s still debatable whether we should be using it. For example, are widgets on the OS X Dashboard applications? We don’t call them applications, we call them widgets. There’s some pretty sophisticated widgets, though. But wait a minute, won’t Word and Excel be around forever as applications? Well, the latest version of OS X introduced Quick Look, where with a press of the space bar, I can see the contents of an Excel spreadsheet without launching “an application.” The ability to present information in a tabular format is merely a capability. So, even in the sacred ground of the desktop, there are arguments that this notion of application launching may become less important to where the right thing simply happens.

I’m not a fool, and I certainly don’t think the use of the term application is going to go away in 2008, or anytime soon, but I do think that to continue the innovative use of technology, we need to make sure that the terms of the past aren’t locking us in to a single way of thinking about how computers are used. The continued need for better integration and more context-awareness in our technology solutions will only increase, and that pressure will continue to challenge any organization that is stuck with the application-centric view of technology as their boat anchor.