Lampitt or Leave It

An Exhilarating New Chapter

The past five years have been successful and exciting:

• I was fortunate to have the opportunity to lead Jaspersoft's technology / ISV alliances while also forging strategic initiatives and partnerships in Analytic Database, Predictive Analytics, Big Data, and Cloud. Big news for the company this past year included: 
  • Big revenue growth and size in 2010 leveraging the Open Core Licensing business model 
  • Great buzz and recognition for the Big Data and Cloud initiatives which I drove
  • Debut on the Gartner Magic Quadrant
  • Launched first and highly successful JasperWorld user conference
• During my tenure at Jaspersoft, I was allowed to go part-time for a couple years to co-found zAgile with visionary, software engineering expert, and semantic technologies pioneer Sanjiva Nath. The company provides a semantic content integration platform for software engineering and enterprise applications. It is off to a great start with major customers like Bechtel as well as customers in healthcare and technology segments.

Alas, I determined it was time for yet a new adventure, introduced below. It's bittersweet to move on, but I am grateful to continue as a happy Jaspersoft stockholder as well as keep a front row seat as an advisor at zAgile.

In May, I joined BonitaSoft, the leader in open source business process management (BPM), as VP of Marketing. I am even more excited today than when I first joined. We have all the key ingredients for success:

• Company's leading open source BPM products, recognized by Gartner as "Cool Vendor" in its 2010 report and this year “the only open-source product that meets Gartner's definition of a BPMS”
• Solid co-founding team with BPM thought-leading visionaries (Miguel Valdes, CEO; Charles Souillard, VP of Engineering and CTO; Rodrigue Le Gall, Chief Services Officer)
• Fantastic growth, not only in terms of employees but also highly successful first year of sales operations (150 customers already!)
• A ripe and growing BPM market and even more opportunities edging outside of BPM and into tangentially related categories.

I look forward to reporting our progress. Stay tuned...

 

 

 

Metadata is the New Application

“The more I think about it, the more I like the concept: #Metadata is the new
software.”
- @GartnerTedF, Ted Friedman, Gartner Analyst for Data Management and Integration

I was excited and inspired upon reading this tweet. I think Ted is pointing out that the real key to any enterprise information solution, rather than any innovative client presentation or visualization layer, is about getting and managing data as usable information. Rather than a fancy GUI of the application/software, the right data is the the ultimate goal, and the path to that is a metadata-driven approach. Of course I may going off in another tangent than what Ted was intending. I do not believe he has yet provided more detail, but I look forward to his elaboration.

At any rate, I will continue with my interpretation and ideas. My view is that metadata is key to this, but it’s only part of the story. That’s because mapping concept X in System 1 to concept Y in System 2, using metadata is only a “dumb connection.” And the mission is more than about data; the true goal is information. So really, we need more than even just metadata. The mission is about CONNECTING systems and CONTEXTUALLY retrieving ONLY appropriate content. That's quite a challenge today since you need to map, in a point-to-point fashion nearly every permutation of metadata connections in order to answer any ad hoc question that might arise, or to deliver any contextual content. That’s a lot of spaghetti integration to manually code and certainly it's impossible to maintain with any realistic budgets today.

Unless an ontology is used for the specific business domain(s) at hand.

For those unaware, ontology in the information sciences domain, according to Wikipedia “is a formal representation of the knowledge by a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to describe the domain.” Therefore, an ontology goes far beyond the concepts simple metadata, or even a dictionary or taxonomy.

With an ontology, metadata, business rules, processes, behaviors, relationships are embedded together. And the ontology acts as an overlay for existing systems without being invasive to those systems. Therefore, the ontology now becomes the heart of powerful new applications, in the spirit of Ted's quote above. Of course a client layer GUI is required to interact with the ontology which then interacts with the source systems (tools and applications). But most of the logic, business rules, and metadata are indeed within the ontology.

All sounds great theoretically, but can a solution really exist? Actually it already does. zAgile Teamwork illustrates just such a solution. With an ontology, using semantic web standard technologies, based on an industry standard metamodel for software engineering, zAgile Teamwork integrates not just the metadata but the concepts of Projects, Requirements, Tasks, Isses, Test Cases, Check-ins, Customer Support Cases, and more. Therefore, ad hoc queries, faceted searches, and contextual content can all be served in a consistent fashion.

With zAgile Teamwork, powerful new metadata driven applications are possible thanks to the software engineering ontology and framework under the covers. The real magic is indeed this middleware of the solution and the GUI can be any new or existing application or tool. For example using a template within a wiki, now Requirements can be captured in a structured way inside the wiki and tied to Projects, Issues, and Tasks in an issue managment system. Likewise Test Cases can be created in the wiki and similarly and automatically tied to appropriate concepts. And for example, do you want to know what Customer Cases in Salesforce.com are connected to a Task, or Issue in JIRA or a Requirement in the Confluence wiki? Yes, there’s a Connector for that too. In fact, all you have to do is add a Connector for whatever tool or application you have, and you can INSTANTLY integrate all knowledge of all connected systems. Too good to be true? Learn more here and give zAgile Teamwork a spin today and see for yourself.

zAgile Teamwork v1.2 is Generally Available

zAgile Teamwork v1.2 is now generally available for download here*.

*Note: Please make sure to email your Confluence and JIRA server IDs to 'sales at zAgile point com' so that we may provide the evaluation or customer license for your specific environment.

zAgile Teamwork includes three main components, and the new features are listed under each of the following sections. (for an overview of other features, check out the zAgile product feature table):

1) zCALM (zAgile Cohesion for Application Life-cycle Management): integration infrastructure, including semantic framework and software engineering knowledge model (other knowledge models, or "ontologies" can be plugged in for different domains)

•    Background reasoning and indexing
•    Inferred model is separate from base and is persisted in the database
•    Significant performance and scalability enhancements 

2) Wikidsmart Connector (wiki connector): semantically enables Confluence wiki from Atlassian.

•    Additional macros for improved template/form layout
•    Support for Table-Plus macro for improved rendering of query results
•    Improved user interface for "Smart Search", to instantly find precise content. Check out the video (requires log-in).
•    Confluence 3.0 Support
•    Support for ARQ extensions

3) JIRA Connector: JIRA issue tracker from Atlassian.

For a review of zAgile Teamwork and a 10 minute video, check out my last blog.

Maximum Efficiency and Predictability in Agile Software Engineering with JIRA and Confluence

Tired of late night phone conferences, countless e-mail threads, and way too many meetings to keep everyone in synch? Want to maximize the  efficiency of your agile software engineering processes?

Then check out the new 10 minute introduction video of zAgile Teamwork. We show you how to have a tightly integrated agile software engineering environment using Atlassian's Confluence and JIRA. zAgile provides the  "glue" to integrate any software engineering tool: issue tracker, wiki, version control, continuous build, etc.

Out of the box you have all the key pieces to handle:

- Requirements and Test Cases in Confluence: zAgile provides "smart templates" that allow you to capture these key concepts in a structured way PLUS tie them to Projects, Issues, and Tasks in JIRA.  And you can pull in information from JIRA as desired.

- Issues, Tasks, Projects in JIRA: this is the standard JIRA capability, and zAgile adds the ability to tie content directly to wiki and other tool content, and expose that external content inside JIRA

So why spend a fortune on IBM (Jazz / TeamConcert), Microsoft (Team Foundation Server), and Oracle (BeeHive) to make their own tools work together and also with external tools? zAgile delivers a highly affordable and open way to integrate information across your environment. That means you achieve:

- optimal efficiency with integrated phases of software engineering (agile, or otherwise)

- high predictability

- extreme traceability of Requirements

Take zAgile for a spin today at our hosted sandbox, and download to use in your own environment.

For a more detailed look at zAgile Teamwork, check out the 1 hour recorded Atlassian webinar.

New Class for Software Engingeering Executives: How to Build Offshore Teams

We have just published the schedule for a new class, a must for software engineering executives:

How to Establish and Run Successful Offshore Development Teams

This 2 day course describes how to establish and run successful offshore development operations. At the end of this course, participants will have all the materials needed to get started with their offshore engineering initiatives or to review existing offshore operations for efficiency and tangible savings.

Day 1

    * How to assess potential partner
    * Negotiating terms, beyond services rates
    * Building teams

Day 2

    *  Aligning processes and roles across local and offshore teams
    * Creating and managing effective division of labor between local and remote teams

Establishing cohesive infrastructure for managing deliveries

Click here to learn schedule and pricing

Partnering with Atlassian for Events in July: Webinar and Bay Area User Group

We have a couple of events lined up with our friends at Atlassian:

1) zAgile Teamwork Webinar hosted by Atlassian on Thursday, July 23, 9 AM Pacific
Sanjiva Nath, zAgile's Founder and CEO, will be delivering an overview and demo of zAgile Teamwork.
zAgile Teamwork enables your software engineering teams to maximize productivity and minimize time to delivery. zAgile Teamwork delivers easy, affordable agile requirements and test case management right inside Confluence, and it integrates those with project, task, and defect management inside JIRA. Therefore, teams collaborate using Confluence, and they manage the execution via JIRA in a seamless way.

2) Atlassian Bay Area user Group in Palo Alto, CA, Tuesday, July 28 at 6.30pm
Cubberley Community Center
4000 Middlefield Rd
Palo Alto, CA 94303

Pizza and soft drinks served at 6.30pm.
Registration required for entrance. No charge.

We will discuss enterprise usage of Atlassian products. How to enhance Atlassian products with partner solutions, roll out scalable solutions, integrate Atlassian products tightly with one another and other products.

Featured presenters so far include:
1. Atlassian, Douglas Butler, Sales Engineer: What's New in Confluence v3.0 and v4.0 and What's Coming
2. zAgile, Sanjiva Nath, CEO: zAgile Teamwork, tightly integrating JIRA and Confluence and more

A Head in the Clouds: How to Make Money in the Cloud, Serving Enterprises

zAgile exhibited at the SDForum called "Shaping the New Age of Application Development," in Santa Clara, CA this past Friday and Saturday.

A couple of cloud thought leaders provided keynotes each day:
- James Staten, Forrester
- David Chappell, David Chappell & Associates

Unfortunately I missed James Staten's presentation, but I heard rave reviews,and I enjoyed looking over his slides. I did attend David Chappell's presentation and found his presentation to be quite an  interesting way to view the various options for cloud computing today.

I tweeted some of my thoughts, and they crystalized more over the next couple days.

With all the talk of cloud, I felt a bit frustrated. On the one hand, it seems that everyone agrees that for ISVs, using the cloud is a slam dunk because their hardware requirements can scale up and down at will.  But apparently it's not obvious yet on how the cloud is going to make money while serving the enterprise. It seems that everyone weighed the benefits of PaaS vs IaaS, what kind of computing do you require, how big do you need to scale, etc.

I am not saying I have it figured out, but here are my thoughts... and I wonder if it's a lot simpler than all that.

My basic feeling is that to understand where the enterprise (ie, “the money”) will use the cloud, it is first important to recognize the strengths of the cloud and how it can save money for enterprises. Simply put, the cloud is great for “instantaneous” and “elastic demands” of customers. “Scaling” is the wrong word here in my view as I pointed out in one of the break-out sessions because if infers “scale-up” while diminishing the importance of “scale down” instantaneously.  (Someone tweeted nicely that Sun brought us scaling, and Amazon brought us elasticity). These elastic and instantaneous services are valuable in this context and could be charged at a premium in terms of a per minute or hour basis but might be more expensive over the course of a year. No matter, I will pay a premium if I am only paying for a few weeks for something critical and urgent.

Therefore, I propose to break the enterprise application types into 3 types:
a)    Permanent: traditional, mission-critical applications
b)    Temporary: sandbox applications, prototypes, temporary projects, a holiday campaign, etc.
c)    Unpredictable: we are launching this new app and have no idea where we will attract 100 or 10,000 users and over what course of time.

I propose that the Cloud vendors have the immediate opportunity in b) and c), and this is where  a proving ground is offered to the enterprise. Then, over time, they will feel comfortable with the benefits of the cloud, as well as the cost analysis saving for taking on “a)” eventually. I feel like people are trying to figure out a), because that’s how enterprises traditionally think – because the flexibility that the cloud offers has never been an option until now.

Finally, while I can agree that all cloud vendors may jump on the “reservation” pricing bandwagon because “the other guys are doing it,”  I do not believe that customers will buy-into it in a big way until b) and c) are proven out with the early majority of enterprises.

Presenting to Hundreds, Beers with Tim Berners-Lee, You Know, the Usual

Last night was a good night for zAgile on both coasts of the States.

I presented, along with other vendors, to the PAWS (Palo Alto Semantic Web) group as part of its first semantic web demo session, held at Microsoft's Mountain View offices. Standing room 100-200 folks, nice turn-out and great reactions. Mark Johnson of Powerset semantic search acquired by Microsoft) blogged good notes.  Many thanks to PAWS organizer Peter Berger,

Kayla and Devon at SHIFT, Katie from Powerset, assistant organizer Shamod, and Microsoft!  This was a speed demo of 10 minutes per vendor, and you can see my overview slides here.  I handled the demo straight from the regular zAgilie hosted sandbox that anyone may use to take Wikidsmart for a test spin.

(Slides from the longer version of the zAgilie presentation from the San Francisco Meet-Up last week
are here, and the video is to be posted on YouTube / zAgile.com within some days. )

Also last night, zAgilie CEO Sanjiva Nath presented to about 30 people at the Boston / Cambridge Semantic Web Meet-Up. Many thanks to Kingsley Idehen and Marco Neumann for the invite and management of the meet-up. In attendance was none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself! And many folks went out for beers afterwards at a nearby watering hole.

Indeed, a night to remember...

zAgile Kicks off Roadshow by Hosting Semantic Web Meet-Up at Atlassian in San Francisco

Last night, we had a great turnout for the Semantic Web Meet-Up in San Francisco at the Atlassian offices in San Francisco. (The San Francisco meet-up is now the fastest growing semantic web meet-up group in the State; thanks to Marco Neumann, founder of the original 700+ strong group in NYC for driving the success of the groups across the country!) zAgile brought in Sorrano's pizza (highly recommended), and it was a crowd pleaser. Many thanks to Atlassian for agreeing to host at their location and particularly Trisha Hong for her great organization and work on logistics.

Sanjiva Nath , zAgile founder and CEO, delivered a presentation on the promises and tangible benefits of the semantic web. Importantly, he described that a "semantic approach" does not necessarily mean that semantic web technologies are being used. He described how you can practically apply semantic-web driven solutions today in your organization. Sanjiva presented some examples with Wikidsmart for Confluence, which turns the Confluence enterprise wiki into a semantic wiki allowing the ability to capture information in a consistent way, automate content and links generation, and find precise information quite quickly.

In addition you can "plug in" any other tools and applications with Connectors to the underlying zAgile infrastructure, called zCALM, and have a coherent semantic search across all applications and tools as well as deep interoperability amongst all applications.

We look forward to the upcoming Semantic Web meet-ups during the April zAgile USA Roadshow including an astounding 160+ signed up for the PAWS meet-up in Palo Alto on Tuesday. We look forward to seeing you there, and after the USA roadtrip is complete, we want to organize the same for Europe. Drop us a line at info at zagile point com to learn more.

zAgile Wikidsmart - Coming to a City Near You

zAgile is hitting the road and will be at the following 8 cities in the USA during April. Folks elsewhere, please email info at zagile point com if you would like a zAgile event to be held in your city.

Many thanks to Marco Neumann and the Semantic Web organizers in each city below for their help and organization with the events. Attendees will learn about the benefits of the semantic web and how to practically apply the semantic web benefits to their organization today.

April 9,   San Francisco 
April 13, Los Angeles   
April 14, Palo Alto, CA 
April 14, Boston       
April 16, Washington, DC 
April 20, Austin          
April 22, Chicago        
April 23, New York