Interesting contrarians railing against CRM

Now I think the case is overstated for polemical reasons, as you'll still need your regular customers' data to hand regardless of your customer service attitude (or lack thereof)...

http://soa.sys-con.com/node/1202650

I am going to get a lot of heat for this statement but, truth be told, CRM is a hoax. There is no such thing as CRM. It’s all smoke and mirrors, and you cannot nurture customer relationships (or any other form of relationship) using a bunch of bits. It’s a cop-out. I know of CRM market segments and sizes. I am well aware of CRM dissemination and popularity in corporate America. I don’t question its omnipresence in virtually all businesses in one form or another. My claim, however, is that it does not and cannot work as billed. In numerous cases, it is simply a waste of “feel-good”money. Here’s why.

The companies and industries making the most use of CRM packages are those with the worst customer service. This in itself should be eye-opening. Airlines are perfect examples. Can anyone think of an industry with worse customer service? ...

Tibco joins the Cloud Club

Another leading vendor, who I know as the premier complex event processing company, Tibco, has also announced a cloud offering called Silver - or to narrow that down, a Platform as a Service offering on top of Amazon EC2. They'll have a large list of development languages and libraries ("Java, C++, and Ruby with support for .NET and Spring" - although some blogs list a larger set of future languages it will support).

Interestingly, they claim they'll make it easy for users to move between Cloud Computing environments, which is one of the current gotachs of Cloud Computing - cloud vendor lockin due to proprietary APIs.

Of course, it'll have auto-scaling, ("self-aware elasticity" in their marketing speak), which seems to be the next big feature that everyone new to the market needs to support.

(see http://www.tibco.com/company/news/releases/2009/press967.jsp)

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New Cloud Computing Offerings

The projects that I'm working on at Smart Services CRC have Cloud Computing (and Cloud Everything-Else) as a recurring theme, and so I've been trying to keep tabs on what's emerging both in the market, and in the academic and blogger discourse on the subject.

Here's an announcement of 2 more Cloud Computing offerings, from Verizon and Carpathia. Interestingly, the Carpathia offering includes auto-scaling, which is hot on the heels of the Amazon EC2 announcement of the same feature.

http://cloudpundit.com/2009/06/03/verizon-and-carpathia-launch-hybrid-offerings/

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Niel Ward-Dutton on some SOA/Cloud/Saas commonalities

This post gives some insight into what the Software as a Service success stories and Cloud computing in general has to offer the SOA world. He emphasises again that SOA is not just about how to build things, or expose applications wrapped in XML. It's about the experience of using the service. That's from the user point of view... from the provider point of view, I'd say it's about exposing some part of the business to a set of consumers. "Services align with business functionality" is the primary insight that SOA has to offer -- otherwise we're just doing distributed components again - and very poorly at that when you consider the mish-mash of WS-* stuff that we seem to be required to use to build it with.

Big Blue in bed with "Big Orange"

Looks like IBM and Amazon.com are teaming up in cloudland:


IBM to Deliver Software via Cloud Computing With Amazon Web Services

[via eBizQ]

SOA and Web 2.0 - chalk and cheese?

This post on SOA World starts out with the kind of glib assertions that normally make me very suspicious:

SOA brings together people, not just software. That's why integrating Web 2.0 concepts into a SOA-such as comments, feeds, ratings, tags, and automatic search alerts-holds so much promise for breaking down business silos and enabling many people to work together for the first time.

SOA - bringing people together? I don't think so... at least not until the applications that front-end the services in a SOA platform choose to apply themselves to social networking. But then it occurred to me that the most successful SOA-based platforms provide that success by integrating user profiles and event notifications with the Web Services backbone that integrates the functions needed by the users. I'm thinking of Rearden Commerce, salesforce.com and others which - although they see themselves as Saas and SOA rather than Web 2.0 - provide the kinds of Web 2.0 features that the article quoted above is espousing: even if these come in the form of corporate policy people doing the tagging and rating which is used by the people whose spending they're trying to trace and control.

The death (or at least redifintion) of middleware

This post by Neil Ward-Dutton on his company's blog makes the point that:

In the mid 1990s, "middle" meant "the gaps between applications and software components". Middleware was technology you turned to in order to try to build distributed systems: we were faced with transaction processing middleware, database middleware, object middleware, and so on...

Now, when you see most of the talk about "middleware", "middle" means "the gap in a technology stack between an operating system and packaged applications". Middleware is now defined largely by vendors from a software product marketing perspective, rather than by customers from a technology perspective.

I have a small quibble with the initial definition (from my admittedly CORBA focus). In the mid-90s I saw middleware as a way of building applications from distributed - sometimes reused - software components.

However I agree that middleware is becoming an increasingly vague and marketing driven term. I'm often distressed that leaders in the IT industry are claiming that Web Services is the "obvious" (or even the "only") choice to make when building or integrating distributed applications, while at the same time claiming that Web Services is not middleware! The disclaimer seems to be indicating that you can't expect the same level of platform support from WS* that used to come with CORBA, or Transactional middleware, because "Web Services isn't designed to do the same thing".

My question then is "Why are you using it to do the same job, if it doesn't - and isn't expected to - provide the same facilities as 90s middleware to the distributed application developer?"