So, here are the quotes I liked most:

• “We firmly believe the user experience needs to be a first level priority at the same level as SDLC, platform languages, SOA and security.”
• “If the business depends on people and people depend on information technology, then the interface between people and information technology — the user interface — naturally has to be very good. If you have an ineffective user interface, you’re going to have a less effective organization.”
• “…people are the platform. IT is ephemeral. It continues to change over time, but what does not change in business is that the quality of any organization depends on the quality of its workers.”
• If developers think the goal of SOA is to provide agility in assembling loosely coupled Web services into an application that provides real-time sales data to managers and marketers, they are missing a key component in the Burton view:  “The idea is to make user experience the end goal of any IT initiative and not an afterthought.”

I, personally, subscribe to all the above statements. They remember me a very nice article I read a couple of years ago, from Dion Hinchcliffe, titled The Web2.0 Trinity: People, Data and Great Software. The pictures in this post are both taken from Dion’s article, and I use them consistently in my talks around Web2.0 and the evolution of Desktop technologies.

Going forward, there is another quote that my few readers may appreciate:

“We see the next step as RIAD, the rich Internet application desktop. Here you need to look at Adobe AIR, Google Gadgets, the Microsoft Widget Library, to see resident applications that provide you with a visual experience associated with RIA.”

This is even more close to what I have often written in my blog: moving beyond the browser (as we see it today) towards a mechanism where applications, delivered via the web, will be executed locally. GREAT !

What seems missing to me is the very last part of the article

In Burton’s view, the future of the UXP is in using Web widgets, portable chunks of code and gadgets, miniature objects that can be placed on a Web page to provide dynamic content.

With widgets and gadgets, real-time sales data is on the sales manager’s desktop without requiring him to do multiple click-throughs to find a table or chart, the Burton analyst said.

What I think is missing is the name to this approach, a name which already exists. It is called Mashups, isn’t it? What is needed is the possibility to define those widgets in a standard way and be able to mix and match them in different contexts: a Portal, a Mashup environment, a Rich Client, the desktop even….

• Open Source applications, the most popular of which is probably the Azureus BitTorrent client
• Commercial applications also, of course !

And, not least, IBM is building the new generation of its products based on Eclipse RCP!

The Universal Managed Client for SOA, called Lotus Expeditor. A platform for building enterprise applications and enterprise mashups that bring the power of SOA towards the desktop and devices

The new Lotus Notes 8 client, which brings the possibility of building Composite Applications centered around the collaboration tools

Lotus Sametime, which provides a new frontier for Unified Collaboration and Communication

Sun may not be ready. But the world is not waiting in order to make Java evolving! And Java is bigger than a trade symbol.

• The consumption patterns of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are made possible by SOA in this view.
  “The architecture has no value until it’s expressed in consumptions patterns. …The underlying service is just a generic-kind of service, but it comes to life when you put an Ajax interface in front or some kind of cool mashup in front of it. Once you’ve got a platform of business services, you can make mashups or Web 2.0 or a ton of really cool things.

• “Turning to another goodies metaphor, …SOA is invisible in the same way the recipe for a cake is invisible. Even the most proud baker wouldn’t stop people from eating his cake while he read them the recipe. The consumers of cake or Web 2.0 applications want to enjoy them not hear a dissertation on how they were made, he said.
• The status of SOA today is similar to where e-commerce was in the late 1990s. At that time everybody was building e-commerce applications using e-commerce tools. “Now, we’re doing the same thing with SOA. We’re saying this is an SOA project or this is an SOA tool. Today, you still use content management and application servers and Java as a language and Web interfaces, but you no longer call it e-commerce because now it’s just apps. It’s just how we do it. We don’t really think of it as e-commerce any more, it’s just the typical pattern for applications these days. I think exactly the same thing will happen with SOA.”
• “When you say SOA no longer matters, it’s everything that SOA enables that matters, I totally think that’s right because SOA is a way to achieve certain things from an architecture and an alignment and agility point of view,”

I like all these quotes, because they really make the point!

Going back to what Gartner asserts, I obviously like the presence of the following 3 items in the top-ten list:

1. Business Process Modelling
2. Mashups and Composite Applications
3. Web Platform and WOA

My readers know how much I consider “Business Process Modelling”, at the point that I did not hesitate to say that it is the glorification of any SOA, the way in which Services could become useful from a Business Point of view. I am not sure, though, that BPM will emerge (finally!!!). Not because it should not deserver a shining place, but because of the power implications it brings into a company’s organization (who owns the process owns the power….).

In this context, though, the emergence of the Mashups and Composite Applications, may slightly change the picture. “They allow you to rapidly tailor the functionality you want in one place, without having to re-create the original“  is the quote from Gartner. I still think what I wrote last year in “Composite Applications, Mashups and Portals: relay race or team spirit?” . Through Mashups and Composite Applications, the user will become an actor in the SOA. SOA will not stop anymore at the beginning of the HTTP pipe on the server…. it will continue, it will encompass the desktop.

The user will be allowed to integrate what the “portal” gives him with tools and content coming from elsewhere. The “portal” will provide the official company process and the mashup will provide the creativity, the differentiator by which a user would tailor the standard process and add his own touch !

I extrapolated the sentence

Who is to say the mashup has to remain a Web-based offering ?

because I think that it is very interesting… Not because of its “Web 2.0″ bias (as the article implies) but because of the implications that the mashup technology could have well outside pure browser-based technologies.

Web-based technologies go well beyond their utilisation in browsers. I think that they have their place in Rich Client applications also.

I am thinking here to technologies I know, such as Lotus Expeditor or Lotus SameTime. Where the Composite application model actually allows the integration of content and application delivered over the internet with content and application aggregated from the enterprise SOA.

• Ismael Ghalimi’s “BPM is SOA’s Killer Application“.
  Ismael is the CEO of Intalio, a very bright mind in our industry and one of the people who clearly saw the importance of Business Process Management
• Dion Hinchcliffe’s “Enterprise mashups: More about processes and less about services?“
  We all know Dion’s contributions to the Web 2.0 promotion and understanding via his famous blog

I could summarize the ideas behind them in the following way.

Enterprise Mashups represent, on the desktop, what SOA represents on the server. And that what matters, on the client as well as on the server, is how these technologies allow the execution of Business Processes.

This is great!
In my presentation “Thoughts for a Rich Client”, I sort of developed the concept of 360 degrees integration.
Let’s represent the integration space with our Globe: we have a Southern and a Northern hemisphere.

The Southern hemisphere represents the kind of integration that happens on th server. This integration is made possible by an architectural pattern (SOA) and conveyed to us by a Portal. Ismael’s article describes so well how this is all about Business Process, because the reason to adopt an SOA is indeed the one to automate an existing Business Process (or to implement a new one).
By the way, I have written a little comment to Ismael’s article in which I try to explain my position.

The Northern hemisphere is a new territory. Until recently, the desktop has been considered simply as a projection of something that was happening on the server. Infact, a Portal is aggregating content that is simply displayed inside a browser. In the Web world, the Presentation Layer of an application has normally been executed on the server, leaving to the desktops the simple task to display something happening elsewhere.
The advent of AJAX (and of other rich client technologies, including Lotus Expeditor) and the evolution of the technologies in the browser space made it possible to actually consider the client as a first-class citizen in the SOA world; for the first time in the web era, the Presentation Layer (or a part of it) could be implemented outside of the server, “after the web server”, on the other side of the pipe….
This makes it possible to perform aggregation also on the client. call this aggregation “enterprise mashup” or “rich portal”…. at the end, what these technologies allow, is the implementation of the client side of Business Processes.

The Business Process can now be described and properly automated in its more natural way: a rich set of cooperating tools, information and applications allow users, from their desktop, to properly use orchestrated services. The formal, top-down processes described and executed on the servers are made available to users who can recompose them in ways that exploit the innovation and foster the flexibility required by new enterprises.

So, BPM on one side and Enterprise Mashups on the other, can actually represent two faces of the same coin. The coin of the “enteprise business processes”.

P.S. Other articles that contributed to this where:

• “Try this little SOA-to-BPM experiment“
• “BPM and SOA need each other”
• “Is there bad blood between BPM and SOA?“
• “Web 2.0 and SOA: Contrived or Converging?“
• “Web 2.0 and the Global SOA“