Ringside seats for Enterprise 2.0

March 24th, 2008 javier

What do Hi5, Facebook, or MySpace have to do with enterprise computing? I’ve been asking myself this question for over a year, as I have continued to hear about social networking’s imminent impact on business applications. Frankly, my answer up until recently was “not a whole lot”. It seemed all too convenient for the technology industry to try to rationalize a consumer trend (social networking) into an established space (enterprise apps) and even add it’s own “Next-Big-Thing”(tm) moniker (Enterprise 2.0).

Over the course of the last 9 months or so, my perspective has changed a bit due to two reasons. First, Hyperic is fortunate to count some of the largest players in the social networking space (Hi5, CNET, plus a few we haven’t announced yet) as well as some of the most significant enterprise and software-as-a-service players (Comcast, Dice, Intuit, and many others) as customers. This puts us in the unique position of being able to see how both of these seemingly different types of companies are tackling some of the same problems. The second reason is because I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking to my good friend, advisor, and Hyperic board member Bob Bickel. Bob’s new company Ringside Networks, launching this week, is focused on building technology that bridges the gap between social and business applications and does so through an open source product offering.

Rather than provide another recap of what Ringside does, I encourage folks to check out Matt Asay’s great writeup on his blog. Instead, I’ll offer up some commentary on why the “Social Application Server” concept makes sense, and how it might relate to Hyperic at some point in the future.

There’s a lot of talk these days about social networking and SaaS ‘platforms’. Companies expose API’s to their services and encourage people to build integrated apps which leverage the power of a CRM (like Salesforce) or social (like OpenSocial or Facebook) platforms into their apps. The nature of this integration typically involves two applications running on separate infrastructure, talking through the Internet through some variant of REST or web services. Aside from Salesforce’s Force platform, the majority of the integration between these sorts of apps is done on the outer layers of an application. An app can devote an IFrame or some other piece of screen real estate so it can display content from a platform, or perhaps use Javascript calls to embed functionality. Even in cases like Force (where there’s a richer API which can be embedded at any layer of the application), the interests of the platform provider (especially those of ad-driven social networking sites) restrict the ability of a customer of the platform to more deeply integrate the content from a social app into theirs. Ringside’s open source Social Application Server is meant to remove that restriction.

What does this have to do with Hyperic? Well, for a long time we’ve been looking at the emerging problems of managing large scale web applications whose content and functionality is not entirely under control of a single provider. If you’re a downstream customer of one of these platforms, how do you react to it’s availability or proper performance? If you’re a provider of a platform, how do you measure the usage of your API such that you can scale effectively without compromising your own site’s performance? There’s a lot of infrastructure in between the two applications that can fail. If the integration is done at the wrong level of the application, the entire experience of on both sides of the application might be compromised. These are the types of scenarios which will become more and more common, and will benefit from having an open piece of middleware which can help build richer, more robust applications which tie into social platforms. Developers can build richer integration, customers get a richer experience using the application, and providers of the application can build integration into these services that lets them maintain control of their customers experience.

We wish Bob and the Ringside team the best of luck, and are eager to see how our customers can benefit from their technology!

Entry Filed under: IT Industry, Javiers Blog