Current Trends in eBusiness

White Paper March 2005

eBusiness means more than a neat Web site or a cool collaboration environment. With emerging trends in eBusiness many new tools and technologies have evolved that help eBusinesses develop. This white paper talks about how enterprises should gear up to adopt eBusiness technologies and solutions and what some of the current trends in this arena are.
C - 2005. All rights reserved by MindTree Ltd.

eBusiness has gone through a number of changes in the past few years. Many enterprise companies were caught off-guard by the hype during the dotcom bubble and stumbled into it without fully understanding how best to harness the power of the related tools and technologies for their needs. Most organizations just plunged into eBusiness emulating their competitors or thinking that by introducing some form of portal or e-commerce solution they will gain a competitive edge. What they have discovered is that eBusiness still has to make sense as a business. A neat Web site or a cool collaboration environment is not going to be the main source of competitive advantage. Any eBusiness initiative has to be tied to the overall business strategy of the organization and has to be driven by distinct set of objectives and measurement criteria. This article discusses how enterprises should gear up to adopt eBusiness technologies and solutions and what some of the current trends in this arena are

Step 1: Define Y our E-strategy

Your eBusiness strategy should only be a subset of your overall business strategy. This strategy should lead to a set of well-defined initiatives each with its own objectives and desired outputs. The initiatives should be such that you will be able to define metrics of success for each and monitor their health on an ongoing basis.

Step 2: Prioritize
Chances are that you might end up with multiple competing initiatives each with its set of proponents. Given the limited resources at any organization they would need to be prioritized. Some metrics for prioritization include: business impact, business urgency, technical complexity, effort involved, change involved, organizational readiness etc. Picking the ones to be embarked upon should be a collaborative discussion between business and IT leaders of the organization.

Step 3: Defining Success

Any eBusiness initiative should have a set of measurement criteria that will define success. Is the aim to drive down cost? Is it to improve productivity? Is it to allow your customers access upto-date information? The metrics that you define to monitor the health of your initiatives should be tied to your overall objectives. For example, a global car rental company decided to re-architect their Web site from an early-generation CGI-based solution to a state-of-the-art technology platform. Their Web site allowed their customers to reserve rental cars online. At

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the inception of the project the Web site only accounted for 5% of their overall revenue with other channels (call center, travel agents, affiliates etc.) accounting for the remaining 95%. With each call that was diverted from the call center to their website, i $7 was added to their bottom line. The re-architected site gave them a scalable platform and allowed them to drive business to their Web site using multiple mechanisms marketing, personalization, improved usability, enhanced functionality etc. Today it accounts for roughly 17% of their revenue. By using some base metrics they were able to continuously monitor their ROI and define the health of the overall eBusiness initiative.

Step 4: Define the Or ganization Behind the Initiative

Any eBusiness initiative should involve representation from both the business and the IT team; they should work as a team to reach the overall goals. There should be a clear governance structure that is able to look across the different initiatives, monitor their health, resolve conflicts, and provide the requisite funding and resources. A sample organization structure is shown below:
Coordination across projects STEERING STEERING COMMITTEE COMMITTEE
Business, Business, IT IT

Publish Metrics Issue Resolution Management of Program Plan Publish Weekly Program Status Report Provide Project Leadership Metrics reporting Project Planning

Business Business Representation, Representation, Architecture Architecture Representation Representation

PROGRAM PROGRAM OFFICE OFFICE

Overall Executive Sponsorship Funding Resources Prioritization Metrics monitoring

Project Management and Requirements Project Team (s)

App. Infrastructure and QA Team

Requirements definition Implementation activities

Database management Configuration Management Infrastructure set up, monitoring and support Testing and QA

Tools, Technologies and Standards Unit Testing

Step 5: Implementing a Solution

eBusiness initiatives tend to be very conducive towards an iterative implementation model. Once a broad set of business requirements have been understood, an architecture definition phase should be undertaken to define the base technologies and platform. This is also a good time to decide between an out-of-the-box product based solution or a custom-developmentbased on core technologies. The other aspect to keep in mind is the user experience. Many of the

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end users may not have had prior training on using Web-based applications and hence usability of the application becomes one of the key success criteria. With an architecture and user experience model in place, the application should be further evolved through an iterative process of detailed business requirements, technical design and implementation.

Step 6: Monitor , Support and Enhance

A continuous process of monitoring the key metrics, making changes as per the business needs and day-to-day maintenance is needed to keep the initiative fresh and in lock step with changing business demands.

Current Trends
As eBusiness has taken off over the past few years the different associated domains and technologies have also evolved. We will take a look at some of the major trends associated with eBusiness:

Commoditization of Application Servers

Application servers provide a base platform for a number of eBusiness applications. They provide the plumbing and core set of infrastructure services like session management, transaction management, user management, security, logging, auditing, scalability solutions and ways of encapsulating business services. The J2EE specification is embodied in a number of application servers from vendors like IBM, BEA, Sun, ATG as well as open source solutions like JBoss. Similarly Microsoft has encapsulated a number of services in its .NET framework that provide similar capabilities. The past few years has seen fierce competition in the J2EE application server space with the clear frontrunners being IBM and BEA. However, with the maturity of the underlying specifications, there is very little differentiation that the application server vendors can provide. They are looking to add custom extensions to demonstrate additional value but that could tie you down to a particular vendor. With the recent advances made by the open source frameworks many enterprises are choosing to use JBoss or Tomcat in place of the more costly WebSphere or WebLogic. Understanding the scalability and performance metrics of your eBusiness application portfolio is a key factor in deciding which application server to choose.

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Content is the King

There is a plethora of information residing in any organization. A good content management and access strategy is one of the key eBusiness initiatives that an organization should undertake. Such a strategy should involve process, technology and above all re-use of content. The consumers of the content may be internal, like, employees seeking information on the organization's policies or external, like, customers and partners seeking information about an organization's products. It is all about giving the right information at the right time to the right consumer irrespective of where that information resides in an organization. Many vendors offer a comprehensive content management suite that allows an enterprise to organize the content, define processes and roles in managing the content and provide means for publishing and presenting the content via different channels. Some of the vendors offering such suites include Interwoven, Vignette, Microsoft and IBM. Open source solutions like OpenCMS and Mambo have also found favor amongst organizations that are looking for entrylevel content management solutions. With majority of the application server vendors realizing the key role of content in any eBusiness initiatives, the application servers and content management suites have started to merge over the years. As such vendors like IBM, BEA and Microsoft are offering a comprehensive stack that covers the full gamut of infrastructure, content and personalization aspects of an eBusiness initiative. Taking the content management mantra to an extreme, many organizations end up having multiple repositories for different kinds of content or assets. In such cases, repository consolidation and access to multiple content repositories via an integrated solution becomes a key necessity for new eBusiness initiatives.

Open Sour ce Frameworks

Far from being a collaboration of some geeks around the world, the open source movement has entered the mainstream in the past few years. Many projects have been launched by OSI (Open Source Initiative) and a comprehensive suite of products and solutions are part of the open source environment including (but not limited to):

! Linux

a Unix-like operating system which has been deployed on almost all

commercially available platforms. Linux has strong backing by the likes of IBM and HP, which see it as a good counter-balance to the dominance of the Wintel platform.

! Apache which is one of the most popular Web engines ! Application server and infrastructure solutions like JBoss and Zope
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! Programming environments like Ruby and Python ! Integrated development environments like Eclipse ! Content and collaboration tools like OpenCMS, Red Hat CMS, Wiki and Mambo ! Database solutions like MySQL
The lure of free and widely available software may be quite high for an enterprise to refuse. However, before adopting open source solutions as a part of the eBusiness initiative, an organization should consider the following aspects:

! Skills and Training: Are the requisite skills there within the organization? How easy is it
to acquire them if they are not? Many open source software products provide only the basic set of documentation and training by 3rd parties is only available for the most popular products.

! Support: Unlike commercially available software, open source software may not have
the requisite support available that is needed for key eBusiness initiatives. Things have started to change with vendors like Red Hat and Covalent providing support for some of the most popular products like Linux and Apache.

! Licensing and Modifications: Different open source products come with different
licensing mechanisms. Even though most would allow modifications, organizations should be careful in how they modify the software keeping the future upgrades and redistribution of the modifications in mind.

Integration Acr oss the Enterprise

Most eBusiness initiatives necessitate a comprehensive view of data and functionality across the enterprise. With multiple applications, databases and information silos deployed in an enterprise, integration across the multitude of such applications remains a chief concern for a CIO. Solutions from vendors like webMethods, Tibco, SeeBeyond, Vitria, IBM and Microsoft allow for such integration. A comprehensive enterprise application integration suite would encompass data transformations, reliable messaging, business process mapping, monitoring, workflow and adapters for connecting to various legacy technologies. As this market has matured, various standards have been established like those dictated by JCA, JMS and Web services. Most vendors are starting to support such standards in addition to the proprietary solutions that they had originally evolved. With the distinct overlap between an integration server and an application server many of the original pure play vendors have started offering solutions that encompass the entire infrastructure and integration needs of an eBusiness application (Example BEA, IBM and webMethods). Enterprises embarking on an eBusiness initiative should evaluate best-of-breed versus full-suite strategy to see which one serves their needs better.

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Service Oriented Ar chitectur es and Web Services

Services oriented architectures have been around for a while. Remember DCE and CORBA? Both of them are good examples of service oriented architectures. So what is all this hype about? The answer lies in the definition and adoption of standards for Web services. Web services are one form of implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Due to the widespread agreement around the base Web services standards, SOA has been brought into the mainstream via Web services. Many organizations have already deployed Web services within the enterprise and are now moving to build collaborative applications with business partners using Web services. The applications include a wide range like providing access to legacy systems to front ending business functionality and collaborating with business partners to fulfill orders. Major software vendors like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are introducing or architecting their products around a SOA-based architecture with Web service implementations. As per Gartner, SOA will be a prevailing software engineering practice, ending the 40-year domination of monolithic software. Any new eBusiness initiative must encompass SOA as the base architecture for its implementation.

Collaboration - A Key For Successful eBusiness Initiatives

As per Gartner, new license revenue for the collaboration market should reach $1.1 billion revenue by 2008. With teams being distributed around the globe, the different aspects of collaborative software in the form of instant messaging, Web conferencing, application sharing, white boards, virtual workspaces for teams etc. play an important role in successful delivery of eBusiness initiatives. Equipping a team with the right set of collaborative tools ensures that they are able to better share ideas and come out with a more comprehensive and quality solution. Gartner predicts that as the infrastructure for net messaging and Web conferencing improves, team-based real-time collaboration will enter mainstream usage.

Grid Computing
Just as the electric power grid led to availability of a cheap and reliable source of power, the computational grid has the potential of changing how we utilize and rely on computational assets as a set of shared resources across a distributed network (like the Internet). Grid

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computing can be defined as a set of standards and protocols that allow a set of collaborating computing resources in a network to work on a single problem at the same time. An organization may have a set of underutilized resources like Unix servers or File servers; grid computing would allow them to work as a single, highly available unit to solve complex computational problems. Related to the ideas of grid computing is the concept of utility computing which promises to deliver on-demand computing capability. Many applications only need high-end computational capability at distinct points in time. The idea would be for an application to be given the amount of resources it requires at a particular point in time via the help of selfmanaging and configurable computational assets. Although grid computing is still in its early adoption phase, it has the potential of fundamentally changing how we utilize computing resources for different applications. Instead of deploying high-end servers to meet a specific application's peak demands, organizations would choose to work with clusters of shared servers and storage devices that are configured at run-time-to serve the needs of multiple applications.

Will Mainframes Survive the eBusiness Onslaught?

Mainframes have played a crucial role in servicing many mission critical applications across a number of organizations. The computational paradigm was generally batch-oriented or tightly controlled by applications that were mostly used by internal users. Many eBusiness applications that have been developed still rely on the functionality of the mainframe applications for the business rules. They access the mainframe applications via some gateway or veneers like Web services and provide a friendly user interface to the end user. On the one hand it has given a new lease on life to the Mainframe but it has also exposed a hitherto tightly guarded computational resource to the whims of an Internet user (or a 3rd party application). Consider a hotel reservation system that runs on a mainframe and was mainly used by reservation agents. An eBusiness application is developed that exposes the same functionality to users on the Web. This also allows for the number of requests to the mainframe to multiply many-fold and could start impinging on crucial applications sharing the same set of resources. Organizations are dealing with such scenarios by introducing middleware the throttles the number of requests being sent by eBusiness applications to such mainframes. It also means that functionalities that were originally implemented on the mainframes are slowly being migrated out to open systems that can be more easily scaled to meet the unpredictable demands of eBusiness applications.

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eBusiness has to Make Sense

At the end of the day, each organization will embark on eBusiness initiatives that make sense for its particular situation. eBusiness still has to make business sense and should be judged by the same set of metrics and ROI calculations that any other initiative in an organization will be measured by. Technology will keep on evolving and each organization will decide its own route depending on the perceived benefit and the maturity of the technology. (The author is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, IT Services, MindTree Ltd.)

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