Today Cape Clear has become part of the Workday family. This is a move that is very exciting, not only for myself and the rest of the Cape Clear team, but because we think it is an important statement to the industry. This could be the day that the middleware industry finally broke the mould on how to deliver integration technology — this could also be the day that SOA finally stood up and announced its intention to be a real driver of business value, and not just a driver of technology innovation.

A Shared Vision

There are many aspects to this announcement that get me excited: however, it is our shared vision of how applications should work that is most important to me. From the get go, Workday realized that integration was an important and essential part of their solution. With that in mind, they surveyed the market and licensed our technology two years ago in 2006. Since then, every single Workday customer rollout has taken advantage of the built-in Workday integration. But as we worked closed together we saw that not only was our unique On Demand solution to integration working really well, but there were many more things that we could do together – we both had very similar views on how best to make integration a core component of a hosted application. It is this vision, that integration is at the heart of hosted applications – and not an on premise, bolt-on like other enterprise vendors believe – that separates us from the rest of the pack.

It was in the Tea Leaves

For those of you who may be a little surprised at a hosted applications company buying an SOA and Enterprise Service Bus company, you shouldn’t be. This is really the logical outcome of many of the things I’ve written about on these pages over the last several years. It’s also the pervasive trend in the industry: only last week Oracle bought BEA — it’s second or third attempt to weld an external middleware strategy into its application business!

As you look back on postings such as “The End of Big SOA”, or “SOA and Enterprise Applications” and of course “On Demand Integration”, I think there has been a consistent vision that:

1. SOA needs to be kept simple and focus on the business side of the house
2. SOA is about enabling applications, not technology
3. The future of SOA is tied up with the whole phenomena of “On Demand”

However, the announcement we are making today is just the next step in the expression of a vision that goes back a lot further than the postings I’ve put on my blog in the last few years.

The Bell Curve

The founding vision of Cape Clear was all around a simple bell curve diagram — we wanted to make the power of middleware and integration as simple as possible, a technology for the masses and not just the few in the upper decile of the skills bell curve.

Our argument has always been that the set of capabilities in middleware are an important and essential aspect to every enterprise application: No application is an island, it has to live in a networked and integrated world. However, the problem with middleware is that it has always been too complicated — less then 10% of the developer population can really use middleware products. We set up Cape Clear believing that Web Services could help drive key innovations to made middleware a lot simpler. To a certain extent, Web Services did deliver as promised — however along the way the Web Services simplicity ballooned into an ever more complex, big SOA stack.

Integration On Demand

In looking back over the last 8 years, one is ineluctably drawn to the conclusion that no matter how good the intentions, all On Premise software, particularly On Premise enterprise software, is always going to be made a lot more complicated that it needs to be. Part of this is due to the fact that building up a large enterprise IT capability is hard and complex to begin with, part of it is because it suits many vendors to keep it complicated and part of it is because the technology to make On Demand solutions viable has only come into existence in the last few years.

However, we here at our new home, Workday, are still fully committed to our founding vision — making integration as simple as possible. Over the next weeks and months we will be discussing in more detail where we go from here. We have lots of exciting ideas on the things we can do – so please stay tuned.

But for now, we are fully on board to deliver our shared vision in the only realistic way it can be delivered: On Demand.

In a recent posting, Joe McKendrick makes reference to our claim that the whole notion of “Big SOA” may be over, even before it really begins. Of course, that is a somewhat contrary claim to make — after all, the strategies of every player in the SOA space are focused on building out as big a SOA stack as possible. So, why do we here at Cape Clear think that Big SOA is all wrong, when everyone else thinks it’s all right? Or to put in the colloquial context of one of those old Irish sayings about a proud mother attending a local school performance: “It’s a great dance! Only, it’s a pity they’re all out of step except my Johnny!”
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With the release of Cape Clear 7.0 we started talking about our vision of “On Demand Integration”. This week, in a webinar with Workday we started to explore in some more detail exactly what we mean by ‘On-Demand Integration’ and walk through some real world examples of it in action. Our basic proposition is that there is a secular trend away from “on premise” applications, to “on demand” applications, however, the elephant in the SaaS room is the whole topic of integration. We here at Cape Clear believe that there is a good way to solve the SaaS integration problem and we’d like to share our thought with you …
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