Lampitt or Leave It

zAgile Pioneers Unified Collaboration for Software Engineering

Looks like there are a lot of unified collaboration (UC) suites popping up, described in 2007 by Robin Bloor as an integrated suite of “voice communications, with definite traces of VoIP, conferencing, single contact number, voice mail, mobile telephony … suggests email, chat and collaboration.” Robin points out that if you ask what UC is to Avaya, Siemens, and Nortel , they focus on the voice aspect while if you ask Microsoft and IBM, you get more of a software oriented answer of course.

The newer generation of companies and their products for UC seem to all have their particular focus too, leaning all the more on the software side:
-    Project oriented
-    Web meeting oriented
-    Enterprise wiki oriented
-    Instant message and/or VoIP oriented

I would not and had not originally described zAgile as UC, but from the descriptions of UC I am seeing, apart from any emphasis on voice specifically, looks like zAgile fits well into that space too. Otherwise, we typically identify zAgile as ALM 2.0 (Application Life Cycle Management) or a new category called SIM (Software Information Management).

zAgile pioneers UC specifically for software engineering segment and is doing so thanks to collaboration (wiki, forums), communication (instant messaging) and social networking tools as well as an underlying rich network of software engineering ontologies that enable deep, contextual integration of teams, tools, processes, and knowledge across the engineering environment. In this way, teams can collaborate more effectively with respect to their specific engineering tasks at hand. You can also think of zAgile as a sophisticated mash-up platform for software engineering information. (But the term “mash-up” seems to me to hint at a hacked point-to-point ad hoc solution rather than a thoughtful platform and architecture. ) 

I am not aware of any particular companies focusing on a specific business segment for UC. I would be pleased to learn of other specialized UC environments. Any takers?

zAgile: Live on ReadWriteWeb with Web 3.0 and Start-Up Luminary Sramana Mitra

zAgile was selected to present at the ReadWriteWeb Roundtable of Web 3.0 start-ups today.  Each vendor was allotted 3 minutes, and zAgile was selected to present first.

I presented the zAgile pitch live via inernet to Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley-based technology entrepreneur who has founded three companies and provided strategy consultation to over 75 organizations. She writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy and is a columnist for Forbes.  Sramana also writes for ReadWriteWeb, where she described her take on Web 3.0 back in February 2007.

I was hoping to post the recording, but apparently there were technical glitches and some of the presenters' pitches were lost. None-the-less, we appreciated the opportunity to show-off the zAgile vision and recieve Sramana's confirmation that she saw a solid business opportunity.

Gartner and Project10X Agree on Hottest Web 3.0 Trends

Looks like industry pundits would agree zAgile is on the right track.

Mills Davis and the semantic web / Web 3.0 gurus over at Project10X have issued their Web 3.0 Manifesto. zAgile solutions utilize semantic web technologies and collaboration tools to "unify any software engineering environments with cohesion, collaboration, and confidence." The underlined Enterprise categories below from the report apply to zAgile technologies.

Top-10 List -- Enterprise
1 Information sharing
2 Semantic search, discovery, & navigation
3 Semantic mashups and composite applications
4 Semantic infrastructure / middleware SSOA, SBPM, SWS, virtualization, policy-based computing
5 Semantic business intelligence
6 Semantic ERP applications CRM, PLM, SCM, HRM
7 Semantic governance, compliance, & risk
8 Semantic web sites, wikis, collaboration, interest networking, & collective knowledge systems
9 Semantic advertising, marketing, personalization, & customization
10 Intelligent systems knowledge-based research, design, engineering, simulation, planning, scheduling, optimization, & decision support.

ReadWriteWeb reports: Mills Davis says the report, "reveals how semantic technologies will drive product and service opportunities in the next stage of the internet."

Gartner published their own list earlier this year about disruptive technologies for 2008-2012 (zAgile captures the categories underlined below)...

    * Multicore and hybrid processors
    * Virtualisation and fabric computing
    * Social networks and social software
    * Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
    * Web mashups
    * User Interface
    * Ubiquitous computing
    * Contextual computing
    * Augmented reality
    * Semantics

... as well as well as a report this week for strategic technologies of 2009. Again, zAgile fits into the list, this time for EnterpriseMashups which it describes as follows:

Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications. Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.

Now, if we can get that multi-core, cloud computing, augmented reality project out of the labs...

VCs Seek Opportunities in Downturn

I attended a couple SVASE venture events this week. The SVASE CEO is Chris Gill, and he was on hand for helpful advice. The first one was called "First Impressions" in Palo Alto chaired by Chad Salinas of Najdorf, where start-ups pitch their company to a panel of venture fund investors.  The second event’s theme was "Closing the Deal: Terms and Valuations" in Danville, CA.

Panelists from both events included:

• David Epstein, Venture Partner, Crosslink Capital.
• Anurag Nigam, Board Director, Sand Hill Angels
• Roy Thiele-Sardina, Managing Partner, HighBAR Ventures
• Cynthia B. Padnos, Outlook Ventures and has just founded Illuminate Ventures (sp?)
• Andrew Williamson, PhD, Physic Ventures
• Dana H. Shultz, Attorney at Law
• Brian O’Malley, Senior Associate, Battery Ventures

I gleaned nuggets from each event, some of which I will share here:

• How is the valuation determined in a first round? The first step is for investors to understand your next milestone to hit, whether it is to build an alpha product, release a v1.0 GA product, win one or more customers, perfect a sales model, etc. How much cash is required to get there?

• For investors, their stake is more about risk than the money. There is that old investor’s rule “the first step to make money is not to lose money.” They want to understand how solid your team is primarily, how great of an idea you have, how well you can execute on the idea, whether you have done it before, what your segment is doing, what the barriers to entry are, who the potential competitors are, etc.

• Terms are typically standard and published by the big law firms such as Wilson Sonsini

• Venture funds who did not invest during the dot.com aftermath in 2002-2004 were hammered. Funds like Mayfield that invested big won big.

I get 3-4 emails per day from various start-up and venture networking organizations. All the meetings are well stocked with venture fund members. And all the venture investors continue to remind entrepreneurs that cash is there for companies with great teams and great products, and they are ready to invest. All great to know.

PS: and then there is always what Guy says...

Mash-Ups Surge in Importance

I found this analysis from Forrester analyst Oliver Young to be interesting, outlined at i-Penny:

Mash-ups will increase in price over the next 5 years, nearly doubling from $76,500 per deployment to $143,400 per deployment, while collaboration and productivity web apps in the enterprise (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) prices fall in some cases by over half. Price drops will be especially sharp in blog, wikis, social networking and widgets.

It appears that Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis, while essential, are already becoming considered as nearly commodity.  My view is that mash-ups, which typically are hacked point-to-point hard-coded connections will show their gaps soon too, despite their growing importance.

This is why zAgile is focusing on the value of contextual integration. zAgile takes mash-ups and composite applications to another level, via its semantic infrastructure and network of domain-specific ontologies. zAgile can plug in both software engineering tools and collaboration tools, in a contextually integrated way.  Therefore, there are no more silo's of information, and everything can be accessed, as in one information repository, across systems.

What is zAgile - versus SCM, ALM, and All That Jazz?

When I joined zAgile in May 2008 to drive its marketing, I knew I had my work cut out for me.  Although zAgile clearly has a unique, differentiated vision to unify software engineering environments, equally compelling messaging was required to describe that vision. Today's software delivery teams use all sorts of different tools that are often not integrated making it difficult to synchronize the data across them, different methodologies are unique to each organization, and typically those teams are geographically distributed which makes communication and delivery consistency major challenges. The problems that zAgile addresses seem clear enough. But because no category or product today addresses all of these problems, the value propositions of zAgile overlap with some existing narrowly defined categories while bringing some totally new innovation to the table. Therefore, as we all want to immediately categorize something in order to grasp it, I knew the challenge would be to express the value proposition of zAgile in simple terms.

zAgile can be described in a variety of ways:
1) What is zAgile, in a short blurb?
zAgile unifies software engineering environments by contextually integrating all aspects of software delivery including teams, tools, processes, and knowledge

2) How would software industry analysts categorize zAgile?
zAgile delivers on the ALM 2.0 (Application Life-cycle Management) vision defined by ex-Forrester analyst Carey Schwaber. Carey described ALM 2.0 as the "glue" that ties the software delivery tools together. But she admitted she did not like the ALM 2.0 term, presumably because it brings along the baggage of ALM which infers inclusion of tools in such a solution. zAgile does not include tools. zAgile is the contextual glue to integrate teams, tools, processes, and people, precisely as she describes ALM 2.0.

Gartner would probably exclude zAgile from both SCCM (Software Change and Configuration Management) and PPM (Project Portfolio Management).  Although zAgile does neither source code control nor project management, it can immensely help stakeholders with each, for example, by giving composite views of all source code related artifacts for a given product or a portfolio overview of all projects or integrate multiple heterogeneous source control repositories to provide a composite and coherent view.

3) Is there a market for what zAgile is delivering? What other offerings are similar?
zAgile delivers what IBM Jazz has been promising since it was first described in 2004, but in a much deeper, broader, and open way.  IBM Jazz is the technology platform on which Rational Team Composer products are built. The first Team Composer products became available in June 2008. While one might find it surprising that IBM is charging customers for integrating its own tools, it seems to be getting a lot of buzz. And at $2,000 plus per seat, apparently IBM sees a market there. zAgile does too.  The part that seems to be missing from Jazz is the part you would likely most expect: deep, contextual integration across all tools without having to upgrade your tools to get it. This is what zAgile delivers - and more.

4) Can you offer any analogies as to what zAgile is like?
zAgile does for the software engineering stakeholder what CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) products such as Salesforce and Oracle/Siebel do for the sales and marketing folks. For example, when your company runs a campaign, those leads go into the CRM, and the leads are matured over time through various sales and marketing actions. Eventually, leads become contacts, opportunities are identified, a pipeline is developed, and a predictable revenue stream is generated. Today, nothing exists for engineering teams except to a limited extent for those who have all tools from one vendor. There is no way for example, for a CEO, VP of Engineering, or VP of Products to get a dashboard view of how customer enhancement requests map to a product release or see a composite view of the software delivery status.

5) So what are some tangible examples of what zAgile delivers that we don't see anywhere else?
a) "Water cooler" for distributed engineering teams
Synch-up meetings are great -- once in a while. But too often, they are over-used and take people away from actually getting work done.  For smaller, centralized teams, people synch-up at the water cooler, in the hallway, or passing by each other's desks. With a zAgile portal and collaboration features, stakeholders can contextually see, with appropriate access rights, what each other is doing, whether following an instant message chat, viewing status of task assignments, seeing what someone is working on, displaying what was most recently achieved, etc. For distributed teams (and over 70% of teams are distributed), this is perhaps the only way other than lots of late night phone calls across geographies.

b) Extreme traceabilty for all software delivery information
With zAgile, you can contextually browse the software delivery environment with ease. But sometimes you may want to do an ad hoc search --- and you don't want to look through multiple systems or ask multiple people which can take hours or days. With zAgile's integrated information repository, a single query can provide the needed information, for example: make one query to view bugs for Single-Sign On (SSO) for a project called Jaguar. zAgile will explore each tool semantically, and it returns:
-          a list of SSO bugs for Jaguar
-          the SSO product specification
-          the list of patches related to SSO
-          the SSO developer and his/her profile
-          developers that have skills to fix SSO bugs … and their availability to work on SSO in the future

c) Tap unstructured content and integrate it into a comprehensive knowledge base
Collaboration tools are really catching on such as wikis, instant messaging, and 'enterprise-Twitter' widgets like Yammer and SocialText. While those are certainly useful for "the moment" when capturing information or communication, they simply create new silo's of information that are nearly impossible to mine for information in the future. zAgile lets you contextually integrate information from those tools so that they are no longer information black holes in your organization. Check-out the zAgile CEO's blog on the semantic wiki and semantically enabled Atlassian Confluence.

d) Provide a dashboard / composite view of your software engineering environment
As described earlier about the analogy with a CRM, zAgile provides a dashboard so that you can see the status of your whole software delivery environment in one view.

e) Methodology capture, management, instantiation, and tracking
zAgile lets you easily capture your organizations' methodologies (or processes, depending upon your terminology), in a way similar to IBM's Rational Method Composer. But whereas, IBM's products have proprietary format and limited integration points, zAgile allows you to capture any methodology by building resuable method components and publish them to a variety of media (eg, wikis) in open formats. In addition, and here's the even more interesting part, you can instantiate a specific methodology into a project and configure it in all of your software delivery tools, ensuring consistency across all projects. Finally, everything can be tracked because it is captured in the zAgile repository.

So what is zAgile?  All that Jazz ... and a heck of a lot more!