I just attended a good event put on by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) entitled "Software as a Service: Collaborative Infrastructure and the Virtual Enterprise". Jeff Kaplan was the MC, and introduced Sean Poulley who was the main speaker. I really like the MassTLC, and the SaaS cluster within it. However, when I read the intro to this event, I had somehow gotten it in my mind that the "Virtual Enterprise" would have more to do with the automated data connections between different companies, using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and how applications in different companies would be talking to one another.
The presentations were about how to get groups of people to collaborate virtually, allowing those inside a company (and it's firewall) to connect and do shared work with those outside the company, creating virtual teams of people. Human collaboration using virtual working tools is absolutely necessary, and is how people will get work done now and in the future. What I was looking for was the next step. After you get the teams of people to work together, how do you get applications to connect with one another, across enterprise boundaries?
I'm looking for the connectors. I know they're out there, and companies are using them, but they have not yet filtered down to the "best practices" (using consulting lingo) level, where companies can just "hook them together".
At the last company, we were using the older technology of using File Transfer Protocol (FTP), to pass data files between companies, and then parsing them into databases. It had the same effect of automating the flow of critical business data between companies, and it worked, but it was pretty clunky, and took a lot more code than should really be required to have "my computer talk to your computer".
We have these cool web services that we can build to securely expose APIs to other applications, and I'm looking for the people who are using these in production applications. We've prototyped using web services, but I'm looking for the experience of other companies that have used web services heavily in production, connecting them into automated business processes that transcend corporate boundaries, and have war stories that can help the rest of us learn about their strengths and weaknesses, and whether we need additional infrastructure (like a Tibco, or other messaging infrastructure) to do it reliably in production and for more real-time interaction between applications. This is going to be key for really being effective in linking the computing business flow.
