Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
QCon London 2010!
March 10-12, 100
Speakers, 80 sessions,
"THE" team leads and,
architects conference.
Free Book Offer
SOA Demystified
$40 Value
Scaling Scrum
in the enterprise?
ScrumWorks Pro
can help.
Start a trial today
Posted by Jean-Jacques Dubray on Sep 09, 2008
CohesiveFT just released a white paper detailing a new trend in the industry, software manufacturing which is fueled by mature Open Source Software and Cloud Computing.
The ever more fine-grained distributed computing architecture is customer-led, not vendor-driven. Customers are aggressively moving from single-sourced, tightly coupled, vertically-integrated middleware solutions to multi-sourced, loosely-coupled, horizontally-aware middleware solutions.
By contrast, CohesiveFT sees:
Middleware today is single-sourced, high touch, one-size-fits-all, and obscured through opaque pricing.
and believes that this market is ready for disruption with an online distribution model. This was echoed recently by Frederick Chong (Microsoft), who sees the democratization of software distribution as a major driving force behind this possible disruption (based on Chris Anderson’s landmark book “The Long Tail”).
CohesiveFT notes that:
IT analyst studies have consistently shown that enterprise IT has less than 20% of its manpower and dollar budgets available to new business initiatives. Ultimately, in one form or another, the reasons for this are traced back to too much complexity.
Its rationale is that this complexity can be tamed:
With the “blooming” of thousands of open source components, combined with a proliferation of virtualized computer devices potentially deployed in grid topologies, there is a risk of increased complexity for customers to manage. A “software manufacturer” can absorb most of this complexity through an automation platform that makes configuring and provisioning middleware solution no more difficult than choosing memory, disk, and peripheral configurations.
CohesiveFT argues the sheer number and types of OSS components make it is easy to build modern middleware stacks with completely different components even though these components have no noticeable functional differences. In particular, these components are so loosely coupled that:
The manufacturing model is no longer just for hardware or physically assembled products; the transformation of the existing middleware products to multi-sourced, loosely-coupled, horizontally-aware components with supply chain management orchestrated by software “manufacturers” enables the birth of a new approach: software manufacturing...the software market will move to sourcing individual components of the application stack from specialized vendors which are then assembled into mass customized application stacks through a built-to-order model.
But this is not all, CohesiveFT also sees a new trend emerging that augments Software Manufacturing:
CFT is encouraging community contribution from enterprise and independent developers alike. The role of community contribution or “crowdsourcing” is a key part of the opportunity created by the Elastic Server platform.
Is Software Manufacturing going to create a second wave of success for Open Source Software? Is it indeed disruptive? or is it targeted to non consumers in the long tail? What's your opinion?
Regaining control of the data centre
Consolidation and Virtualization Are NOT Enough: The Case for Non-x86
Brian Marick takes us through a quick tour of the most important values and challenges to adopting Agile successfully (they aren't the typical challenges and values we hear in the community).
The line between development and architecture is tricky. Does it exist at all? Is an ivory tower actually needed? There's a balance in the middle, but how do you move from developer to architect?
The word 'authority' sometimes produces an allergic response in hard-line agilists. Freedom and authority – both are bad if misused and both are good if used in right spirit for a noble cause.
"Getting Started with Grails" brings you up to speed on this modern web framework. Companies as varied as LinkedIn, Wired, and Taco Bell are all using Grails. Are you ready to get started as well?
Those familiar with only ITIL V2 often scoff at the thought that ITIL could serve as a governance framework for SOA. With ITIL V3, the focus of the framework shifted towards service-orientation.
SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer discusses AspectJ, SpringSource's dm Server and tc Server products, OSGi and Scrum.
Heroku's Adam Wiggins talks about Rails, Background Jobs, Add-Ons, Ruby, and how Heroku manages to work around Ruby's inefficiencies using Erlang and other languages.
For Grady Booch the foundation of a good architecture is patterns, SOA being just one of many patterns. In this Second Life presentation, Booch attempts to bring more clarity on what architecture is.
No comments
Watch Thread Reply