Four key technologies are simultaneously disrupting the way we work. Each one by itself would do the job, but the fact that all four are happening at once is a major threat - and an opportunity - for global enterprises. That's the word from Software AG, which recently held its global Process World conference, in Orlando, Florida. Addressing the 1 000 international delegates, CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich referred to Gartner's 'four forces' of change: social, mobile, the cloud, and information based on big data management.
"These trends are changing how we engage with customers and how we manage our companies. It's a new age of software; there has to be ease-of-use for the business user, it has to bring processes and IT together to execute better, and it has to connect people, no matter where they are, so that they can beat the competition more often."
Streibich says the company is set to invest in three areas to take advantage of the shifts: business process excellence, integration, and big data management. He also affirms Software AG's commitment to the North American market (it is currently Germany's second-largest software vendor), where it has enjoyed considerable success after 2011's purchase of in-memory specialist Terracotta. Terracotta has grown 300% since the takeover and now boasts a potential two million Java developers who can use its in-memory caching technology.
"We also have a new platform focusing on the mobile application life cycle where desktop applications can be redeployed as iOS and Android apps without recoding them. I believe the current transition is equivalent to the introduction of the Internet in the 1990s, and early adopters will immediately benefit."
CTO Dr Wolfram Jost says he has never seen such a convergence of technologies.
"What is so important about these four forces is that I've never seen such technologies coming to market at the same time, where each single one is disruptive and transformational. Companies will completely change how they do business because of these technologies. And there is no software company in the world that can ignore these forces. As a result, platforms are getting more important than out-of-the-box products."
Software AG announced new versions of its WebMethods process integration suite and ARIS modelling tools at the conference. It also launched ARIS-Connect, a new product based on HTML5, which combines social, cloud and mobile.
"Today, process modelling is for experts," says Jost. "But all stakeholders should be involved in process modelling and design."
Big data questions
John Rymer, an analyst with Forrester, says big data is an enormous trend.
"There is an overriding trend where the world is moving from a disk-based, highly transactional approach where data is at rest, to a world where there are different values: data in motion, and analysis counting more than integrity. We're looking at more dynamic models from different sources and this puts a lot of pressure on data management infrastructures. But I want to emphasise that the past doesn't go away; it's just that it will have to evolve. Amazon doesn't process transactions using SQL; it uses completely new models to reach massive scale. Solving these problems will require a number of different approaches. Unfortunately, we call them all big data, but I think we're reaching a point where we will have to tease them out and look at more specific scenarios and the products that solve those scenarios."
Robin Gilthorpe, CEO of Terracotta, agrees that big data is a huge and somewhat amorphous topic.
"It does cover a range of technology topics. But from the Terracotta chair, I think there are two huge factors in market development: the move from spinning disk to memory, and the drive from a world dominated by SQL to other choices. A lot of that is driven by the mobile world and the fact that the desktop is no longer the default assumption for designing and deploying applications. Time itself is an enormous factor if you want to extract value. And it's very hard to develop insight about data without holding things in memory and we know this from human experience. Putting two books together on a bookshelf in a library doesn't give you insight. You need to access both of them, consume them and hold them in memory."
It's a new age of software.
Software AG's embrace of the new in-memory world doesn't mean its commitment to ADABAS/Natural is going away. Darren Roos, COO of EMEA and recently appointed to the Asia-Pacific region, says ADABAS/Natural is still strong everywhere.
"We have over 1 000 customers, from Hong Kong to Brazil to the Middle East, and they're all big customers running mission-critical applications. The technology is robust, scalable, performs very well and we have customers who run very broad systems, and in a year they'll have a handful of support calls. The systems just don't go down - ever. There are so many of these systems that it will be another 50 years before they reach the point where we can stop worrying about them. Our customers consider the length of time to change not in years but in decades, and many of them have absolutely no plans to get off them in at least the next 15 years. It's very difficult to generate a business case for something that will definitely be more expensive and a massive risk in making the change away from something that works perfectly. In South Africa, we have customers that run ADABAS/Natural end-to-end, from point-of-sale through to the back, and they're still running their businesses effectively on it. The user interfaces are modern WebMethods front ends: it works, it's fast and reliable, and they didn't have to rip and replace."
The event also saw feedback from a local company: African Bank. Vishal Maharaj, who is head of enterprise architecture and strategic platform delivery at the organisation, presented how it re-architected its entire business around Software AG products.
"What we had before was an intricate web of complex logic, hard-coded into millions of lines of Java. Code was in silos, there was no documentation and lots of duplication of hand-coded rules. To re-architect the bank, we decided to change the entire system so that it focused on the customer."
After testing the new system in parallel with the old for three months, African Bank deployed WebMethods to over 100 branches, where it came up against performance limitations. Software AG stepped in and made software experts available to fine-tune the performance.
"Software AG adopted a risk-sharing model with us, and thanks to our work together, African Bank is now a worldwide reference implementation," concludes Maharaj.
First published in the December/January 2013 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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