Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

September 26, 2006 Get Ready For SaaS 2.0 By Andy Patrizio SAN FRANCISCO -- Like products, it seems concepts are getting version numbers. First there was Web 2.0. Now there is SaaS 2.0. High-tech officials floated the new term here at SaaScon, an event geared to foster discussion on the growing popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS). Whereas Web 2.0 is built around user-driven content and interactivity, SaaS 2.0 is an enhancement to the initial efforts of software services. Bill McNee, CEO of research consulting firm Saugatuck Technology, introduced the SaaS 2.0 concept, noting that it is an expansion of the SaaS concept to further integrate software services into "premises-based" software, the term used at the show to describe installed, packaged software. "SaaS 2.0 is about transforming business processes," McNee said. "It's closer to business service provisioning and a platform with programmable services on top of it....

We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that this was coming…moments ago Facebook removed the restrictions on registration and anyone can now become a member by joining a geographic network. They’ve also anticipated backlash from existing users who liked Facebook just fine as an exclusive club, thank you very much. New privacy controls were put in place in the last week to give users additional say over who can find and interact with them. Specific new privacy features include: * Block other users in specific networks from searching for his or her name. * Prevent people in those networks from messaging, poking and adding him or her as a friend. * Control whether his or her profile picture shows up in search results. Expect lots of heated debate over this move. And also expect exponential growth in Facebook’s usage by tens of millions of new users. I joined Facebook recently (through a TechCrunch network) and am a member of the Silicon Valley network as well. Please feel free to add...

Yahoo will open its Sunnyvale, Calif., campus to outside developers in a 24-hour Hack Day next week to see what kinds of applications people can come up with using Yahoo technologies. About 500 developers are expected to test their mettle in taking a Yahoo software mashup from concept to prototype. Participants will work round-the-clock beginning next Friday afternoon, camping out on the campus lawn while being feted with food, drink and musical entertainment from a mystery act. Following demonstrations of the applications, awards will be given for the ones deemed the coolest. Yahoo has held numerous Hack Days for its own employees since December 2005, but this is the first one open to developers from outside the company. The goal is to encourage innovation and bring that start-up feel to the company, says Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo. In a nod to the irreverent attitude of early hackers famed for applying their own fixes to programs and taking co...

September 22, 2006 (Computerworld) SAN FRANCISCO -- Shaygan Kheradpir, CIO at Verizon Communications Inc., gets several mostly cordial instant messages a day from line-of-business workers -- like customer service representatives -- asking for help with their IT systems. Kheradpir, whose IM address is available to all of the company's 250,000 employees, largely credits the company's four-year-old service-oriented architecture (SOA) for a comfortable relationship between IT and Verizon business groups. He said the SOA has eased low-level technical work, giving IT developers more time to work with end users when building applications. Verizon's CIO spoke at the BEAWorld 2006 conference, held here this week, where he and other users said they are expanding their focus on SOA and eyeing an emerging set of tools that promise to even better nurture what has long been an often-thorny relationship between business and IT. At the conference, San Jose-based BEA brought ...

Early Web 2.0 adopters and visionaries addressed more than 400 Greater Washington business leaders during a highly-successful Web 2.0 applications conference yesterday. The New New Internet: Web 2.0 for Business, presented by ExecutiveBiz (the Greater Washington, DC area's leading executive events organization and weekly digital magazine) showcased strategies from high-level experts. Topics covered by guest speakers included the growth of user content and control, adaptive web technologies that enable new and enhanced user experiences, predictions for winners and losers in the 2.0 space, and how the enterprise must adapt to survive and benefit. The Sept. 20 day-long conference, the first of its kind on the east coast, featured a series of keynotes, panel discussions and presentations for senior executives and IT professionals on the growing relevance of Web 2.0 for business and government. "Companies like Jobster, Digg and YouTube have demonstrated explosive growth, an in...

BEAWORLD 2006 - SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- BEA Systems, Inc. today unveiled its plans for the BEA SOA 360 platform. The BEA SOA 360 platform is intended to deliver the industry's most unified Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform for business transformation and optimization, in order to help to improve cost structures and to grow new revenue streams. The BEA SOA 360 platform is uniquely architected with the newly unveiled BEA microService Architecture (mSA). The SOA 360 platform spans the three BEA product families -- Tuxedo, WebLogic(R) and AquaLogic -- and is supported by the newly previewed SOA collaborative tooling environment, BEA WorkSpace 360. BEA WorkSpace 360 is intended as the industry's first unified SOA tools to bring business analysts, architects, developers and IT operations professionals into a shared workspace for collaboration and interaction. Critical to the adoption of shared or syndicated services is executive lea...

Back up on wikipedia. Please everyone add freely to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Enterprise_Applications web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, Ajax , SOA, Mashup, Composite Application, RIA,

Oracle is currently seeking to buy another 20% of Indian software developer I-Flex Solutions, boosting its stake to about 75%. I-Flex writes banking software while Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ) develops database software. Oracle is looking to buy about 16.62 million shares for about $531 million. The offer will be on the table between Nov. 6 and 25. In August, Oracle upped its stake in I-Flex to about 55.1% from 52.5% and offered to purchase an additional 20% of outstanding shares from I-Flex shareholders. Indian law requires Oracle to make an offer on another 20% of shares in the hands of private shareholders following prior purchases of I-Flex's stock. "In acquiring a majority stake in I-Flex Solutions, Oracle announced its arrival on the world stage of vertical banking technology," wrote Virginia Garcia, research director at Financial Services Strategies and IT Investments, in a research report. The analyst noted that Oracle is already...

I returned last week from a 15-day tour of some of Australia and New Zealand’s hottest IT start-ups. I specifically describe these as “IT” companies because unlike in the States, where the Web 2.0 movement has spawned hundreds of new companies, the Australasia marketplace hasn’t been captivated by the same frenzy. Indeed, of the nearly 50 companies I met in a seven-stop itinerary through the major tech venues of the region, only two companies specifically addressed the consumer market. Instead of mash-ups and consumer-generated content and social networking businesses, the Aussie and Kiwi entrepreneurs have their sights squarely set on the enterprise or on technologies and services that enable businesses to better serve their customers. Maybe one can expect an upside down (from the U.S.) approach to the market from lands south of the equator. Simple math is the more likely explanation, however. Stand on the Golden Gate Bridge and take in a 360-view of the Bay Area. Within your view a...

AOL has expanded its support for the Dojo Foundation , an open source project that lets developers build Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) applications. The ISP has donated a JavaScript Compiler tool to the project which analyzes applications, deletes unused code and provides metrics on call patterns. AOL has also started to provide hosting services for the Dojo Foundation, and recommitted to contributing to the tool's development and submitting bug fixes. "We are pleased to be furthering AOL's support of open source initiatives through our contributions to the Dojo JavaScript toolkit, especially as we have benefited so much from our own increasing adoption of key open source platforms and standards," said Sree Kotay, senior vice president for AOL Technology . AOL is one of the early supporters of the Dojo Foundation and is using the technology for its AIMPages project that is currently in beta. Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, AJAX , RIA, SOA, Mashup

Forget "fat" clients. Just use AJAX. CTO Scott Dietzen is (quite rightly) proud of the effort. "We did two betas and a release candidate before the community gave the thumbs up," he said. The new version also has mobile support. "We have support for Symbian, Palm Treo, Windows Mobile and we have a partner that fills in on the Blackberry," he said. "On any smartphone I have, all my email and address book data will now sync, over the air. You can get new customers from the CRM system, and it will show on your mobile phone while traveling." Very cool. So why am I not seeing more cool AJAX stuff on the Web? A shortage of programmers, Dietzen said. "AJAX programming skills are in short supply. AJAX development has gotten an order of magnitude easier, but it's still harder than HTML," and the programming workforce continues to age. Dietzen recently went to the 50th birthday party for Carnegie-Mellon's computer science depar...

Sweet post by Dion. Right on the money. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=63#comments There is a frequently recurring piece of software development lore that plays on the fact that good programmers are supposed to be lazy . In these stories, a good programmer will take a frequently recurring, monotonous task (like testing) and instead of doing it by hand, will instead write a piece of code once that will do the task for them, thereby automating it for future use. Put another way, instead of carrying out the work by hand, a lazy programmer will spend 95% of the time allotted to the work by developing code that will carry it out for them, and the last 5% of the time will be spent running it to get the actual work done. Then, every time the task must be carried out in the future, software can be directed to complete it swiftly and automatically. While this is a simplified model (one must ask who checks the work every time to make sure it's right, how is the code maintained ov...

I really can't believe that anyone who understood the technology or the Web 2.0 movement would consider it a 'fad' but there are always sceptics I guess. ajaxdevelopersjournal.com AJAX is not a fad," according to Andy Lyttle . "People aren't using AJAX just because it's AJAX. It's not for buzzword-compliance, although it has become a buzzword. It's not for adding useless frills, although it can be used for useless frills. AJAX is a tool to enable web developers to build sites that are actually better for the user, in a very real way. Better functionality, better usability, overall a better user experience. Things that simply weren't possible to do before." Lyttle is just one of the many software development professionals who AJAXWorld Magazine has been talking to about AJAX. What follows is a round-up of comments and observations about the fastest-growing technology trends since the advent of Java 12 years ago. "As I see it there are ...

SoftGram We were interested to find that 76% of those thinking about or planning to bring a SaaS product to market (Considerers) are firms with less than $25m in annual revenue; only 13% of the firms were $100m or greater. Technical and Financial The Considerers are clearer on their technical plans than on their financial plans. 74% said they would use proprietary rather than Open Source software as the basis for their products, and 68% will base their offerings on third-party SaaS components or services. 80% said they would depend on outsourcing for the hosting of their SaaS products, with only 20% undertaking to service their SaaS customers with in-house resources. Professional services operations are an important part of many software companies; only 11% of our Considerers did not have them. When asked, If you re-deploy your current software as SaaS, will you re-deploy or downsize your professional services operation?, those who did have professional services said they would downsiz...

SearchSAP SAP's partnerships and investments with independent software vendors that build composite applications is part of a campaign to make NetWeaver the primary driver to a services oriented architecture (SOA). NetWeaver infrastructure makes it much easier to create snap-in or plug-in applications or services that may be applicable to large numbers of SAP customers Peter Kastner, vice president and research director, Aberdeen Group Companies moving forward with SOA projects may do so with IBM WebSphere or Oracle's Fusion middleware technology, but many are looking toward their primary ERP vendor to manage an SOA environment, according to Peter Kastner, vice president and research director at Boston-based Aberdeen Group. The ERP approach in some cases could be...

August 31, 2006 (Computerworld) -- This article is excerpted from the book Ruby on Rails: Up and Running , published by O'Reilly Media Inc., copyright 2006. Reprinted with permission, all rights reserved. Rails may just be the most important open-source project to be introduced in the past 10 years. It's promoted as one of the most productive Web development frameworks of all time and is based on the increasingly important Ruby programming language. What has happened so far? • By December 2006, you're likely to see more published books on Rails than any of Java's single flagship frameworks, including JSF, Spring, or Hibernate. • The Rails framework has been downloaded at least 500,000 times in only its second year, as of May 2006. These statistics compare favorably with the most popular open source frameworks in any language. • The Rails community mailing lists get hundreds of notes a day, compared to dozens on the most popular Web development frameworks i...