IT industry vendors have a unique way of converting every business concept into mundane technology problem to sell their technology products

IT industry has it own way of converting every beautiful business concept into mundane technology problem to sell their technology stack. They reduce every business problem entering market and killing it by labeling as technology problem. 

WEB 2.0

Web 2.0 is not so much of technology but new way of doing business using crowd-sourcing, social networking, collaboration across value chain. 

Strength of  - JavaScript , Making rich UI, Open source LAMP,  Open source products gave way for blogging sites, Rapid Development frameworks, AJAX ... --- thus technology was starting to overshadow Web 2.0 concept. People started claiming Web 2.0 === AJAX.    

Vendors started a war of coming up with framework of AJAX. Each came up with his own version of AJAX library selling them to customers with make-believe of Web 2.0. In this war actual meaning of Web 2.0 was lost somewhere.

Web 2.0 is very highly innovative concept. It needs a radical shift in culture and Way of Working. It may disrupt the entire traditional revenue model.  

Ex- In news industries, where there were defined reporters who could publish the news. Now in Web 2.0, every man can be a reporter and contribute to news making.

In publishing industry, there were renowned authors who could author a book or article. Now in Web 2.0, every man can be a author, publisher. Any person can become a reviewer and do proof-editing.

In music industry, only contracted bands came out with music. Now any man can try his hand at singing and upload it on Youtube.

In Retail, companies will contract person to develop the software and sell. Now any man can develop software and host it on AppStore and sell it to mass.

Telecom companies are new music sellers.  

Coffee houses are new retailers.

Retail companies are new IT Hardware Sellers. 

These concepts are business ideas requiring a deep thinking and change in which make the difference between a successful and failures.

But innovative business concepts cannot be commoditized hence cannot be sold and hence ignore by Vendors.

SOA

SOA is not so much of technology but aligning technology to business. It is paradigm of thinking in terms of Enterprise functions in terms of business process. And technology then is aligned to meets those processes. 

IT Vendors knew what will sell is not this concept but their technology products. So they came out with tons of materials equating SOA with ESB, BPM .... and SOA === ESB+BPM.

Vendors started a war of coming up with their ESBand  BPM. Each came up with his own version of ESB  product selling them to customers with make-believe of SOA. SOA was killed every project started with the customer asking which ESB, which BPM.  

Aligning technology to Business went missing. result thousands of dollars down the drain because of failure of SOA projects.

  

SOA is foremost a business concept. Demanding companies start thinking in terms of their business services they offer to the world. These services are then broken down in business processes which are broken down into granular services. Real challenge is in service identification and aligned with attributes which make them reusable in different client scenarios.

The services identifications, making service reusable, service design principles are complex concepts require deep analysis not commoditizable. Hence are ignored by vendors. These are ideas which make a SOA project successful or failure.

BIGDATA

Bigdata is a business problem of utilizing millions of unstructured information assets (text, audio, video, chats etc.) to the benefit of business.

IT Vendors knows and have converted this into a mundane technology problem. Enter problem “Of Storing of large data and processing large data”. Enters Hadoop.

Vendor has now started the race of coming up with their own version of Hadoop infrastructure.

But real problem lies in how we actually extract meaning out of unstructured free text. Is Hadoop’s Regular expression enough to extract the meaning out of this free structure text? Log may be fine; because they have structure and can be extracted meaningfully by regular extraction patterns.

BIGDATA is more a concept of semantic text meaningful web than infrastructure. It is more about converting the text of non-meaningful words, phrases into more meaningful text by extracting the concepts and entity from them and linking into existing Web of information. LinkedData, DBPedia , WikiPedia, Semantic technology, Ontology , Corpus, are more important than infrastructure. 

The extracting meaning, pattern recognition, Natural language parsing, ontology, corpus creation are complex concept not comoditizable hence ignored by most. These are ideas which will make BigData problem successful or failure.

Is SOA about Technology?

A week back I was discussing SOA with somebody who is expert in SOA and had been implementing SOA for more 5 years. He explained SOA mostly in terms of tools and technology. He had worked in best of stacks in the industry. Service Identification an the important concept of SOA paradigm was nowhere in mention in his entire talk.

This seems to be a common notion of SOA around the industry. Most people and interviewer start focusing on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Life Cycle which are the tools for SOA deployment.

It is similar to start discussing about Object Oriented Design from Language syntaxes, Application Servers, Compilers and Transactions etc. instead of discussion about the Design Principles for finding reusable components, classes, relationship between classes to achieve reusability, extension, flexibility etc.

No one discusses about Principles for identification for services which makes sense and achieves reusability, designing services and interfaces which are immutable, configurations which will allow services in multiple scenarios.

SOA is about Business aligned IT. So any discussion about SOA should start from Business so that we can then accordingly define IT strategy in alignment with the Business. But, when SOA word is mentioned people start talking about web services, BPM, ESB leading to its early death.

Microsoft in their “Business-Oriented foundation for Service Orientation” talks about new architecture principles which needs addressing:-

• How do we prevent service-orientation from following similar promising initiatives into the same architectural mistakes of the past?
• How do we ensure that the chosen implementation architecture relates to the business requirements?
• How do we maximize the life expectancy of the implementation in an ever-changing environment?

It further talks of SOA tenants Principles for identification for services which makes sense and achieves reusability, designing services and interfaces which are immutable, configurations which will allow services in multiple scenarios.