BPM-EAI

JackBe (www.jackbe.com) , the an enterprise mashup software vendor recently unveiled the first "Enterprise App Store" based on the business model made famous by Steve Job's Apple App Store. The App Store, similar to its more popular namesake, provide well-tested, well-governed applications and readily available to the enterprise users on a published catalog. The vendor has claimed that the latest version of its enterprise mashup platform, Presto, provides a way to create internal Enterprise App Stores. Industry experts opine that every enterprise will ultimately adopt the App Store as the primary model for delivering information in the future.

The idea of a service catalog has been around forever and in fact forms a basic tenet for the success of SOA formula. Reuse before build is only possible when users are aware of what services exist in the enterprise and how to use them. This forms the most compelling argument for the Service Catalog. However, the evolution from a service catalog to an App Store has always had a few challenges which have resulted in most organizations in making this change. Lets have a quick look at some of them.

1. Multiple Platforms: Most organizations have multiple platforms running within the enterprise and the interaction between them is facilitated by middle ware adaption. Unless, we have a common platform across the board, its very difficult to have standardized services available to the entire organization. It's a bit like trying to build round pegs for irregular shaped holes, some of them might still fit, but most will need fillers.
2. Expense Sharing: Building any service or content for the entire enterprise is expensive and often it's the team which brings its wallet to the table that gets to decide what gets delivered in the end.  The constraints vary from the inner political situation in the enterprise to the vagaries of the global financial crisis when it comes to managing the budget for such services.
3. One Enterprise Governance: Governance is again related to the previous point about expense sharing. Again, the team which paid for the service gets to decide its path and the argument is difficult to maintain otherwise. Changes to any enterprise service need to be strictly governed with the interest of all user bases and in a very large enterprise this reduces the agility of any change. Most units within the organization would find it easier to build their own service from the scratch than to try and get executive approval for changes to enterprise services.

Such app stores open up a few different dimensions for the vendors as well and it would be interesting to see how they react to the change. For starters, applications that require the whole enterprise platform to be revamped will need to rethink their strategies. Organisations will get less tolerant of the "buy-me-once-buy-me-forever" mantra which is offered by vendors of licensed enterprise platforms. Instead, there will be a shift in preference towards Open Source apps, which can fit well within the established platform and allow clients to leverage the existing capabilities for future needs.

Additionally, although the "service marketplace" has been experimented with over the years, with had mixed results, there must be a cognizance of the fact that there is merit in developing lightweight service components which can be accessed, procured and implemented with relatively low transaction costs.

Finally, there is a huge opportunity for the service vendors to finally emerge from the shadows of the product vendors. The product shall now be available as a useful application, not a plain vanilla commodity, and hence the partner who can help the enterprise leverage the capabilities of this product will be preferred over one which is going to just implement a base capability.

Its going to be interesting times as we see how the service vendors step up to the challenge.