Dion Hinchcliffe, executive vice president of strategy at Dachis Group, says companies often want what integration brings them, but in the end, they stumble over "being in the business of integration." He explains what he means to IT Business Edge's Loraine Lawson in this Q&A. Last week, Hinchcliffe outlined the business uses for lightweight integration.
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?This is the snake oil part of integration. This is also why SOA in the enterprise didn?t take off, because if you're not serious about being in the business ? if you're saying I?m not going to support you ? people won?t stick around.?
- Dion Hinchcliffe
- VP of Strategy
Dachis Group
Lawson: Frank Johnson wrote a piece titled, ?The IT Reformation and the Splinternet.? Have you read it?
Hinchcliffe: No, but that title makes me want to read it.
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Lawson: He talks about how the Web is moving toward sealed off platforms ? like Facebook and LinkedIn ? these sort of sites that tend to be platforms unto themselves and not so interoperable with other sites. Do you think that will become a challenge to this concept of lightweight integration?
Hinchcliffe: That?s really been the debate the last five years in the Web 2.0 community: Open is good, but too open means you can lose control. There's this arc and maybe eventually a science that will emerge: I want to open up just enough to make it worthwhile for everyone else to connect with me, yet I don?t want to make it so easy they can leave with their data. So this is the challenge. Facebook wants to open up and Twitter wants to open up, but if they overdo it, they lose what makes them special because anyone can go anywhere, there?s no lock-in.
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We do see a platform as a way of opening it up such that you strategically control it and the balance is you have to give enough away to make it worth it, just keep enough control to make it worth it to you. So that?s the challenge.
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Lawson: You write more about the social media more than I even read about it. Does Facebook open itself enough, for instance, that companies could go in and create a business model where they're scraping their site and creating products from that?
Hinchcliffe: Oh, of course. Now are they a good steward? Are they a good business partner? No.
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My company, Dachis Group, is the world?s largest Facebook developer, just so you know. I do a lot of enterprise work, but when I talk to CIOs and CTOs right now, all I hear about is the big blur between the outside and the inside of their organization, and Facebook is no exception.
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Yes, Facebook has an entire application development division. They have hundreds of thousands of apps. I think they passed the 500,000 app mark like last year. Are they treating their developers well? No. Are they being good integration partners and citizens? No. They're being unfair. They're opening up enough to draw everybody in because it?s the place to be drawn in, but then they change the rules and it?s pretty unfair.
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Lawson: So Facebook doesn't treat them well in the long run? They develop these things and then what?
Hinchcliffe: This is the snake oil part of integration. This is also why SOA in the enterprise didn?t take off, because if you're not serious about being in the business ? if you're saying I?m not going to support you ? people won?t stick around.
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I?ve done a lot of enterprise integration. Usually it?s the HR system that wants to be opened up first. Everyone wants to have the current list of employees; their applications want to have a pull-down list top pick who's working on this project or whatever, so they always want to have an active list of employees. When you open that HR system up, all of a sudden someone goes to HR and says, ?You need to buy a lot more Oracle licenses and $60,000 in CPUs because everyone in the organization is now using this data a lot.? And they go, ?But why should we pay for that? Why does our budget have to pay for supporting the usage for across the organization??
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I?ve been on two large SOA efforts where they would shut down HR participation because they didn?t want to be in the 24-hour service business. One wanted to be able to back up the system on weekends and the business said, ?No, no we need the data alive all the time, it?s your job.? And the other one, because they had to buy so many additional licenses and resources to support that, and it turned out that they weren?t serious about being in the business of supporting integration. That?s what you have to do to make this happen.
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The pattern seems to be people open up early on and, if they're successful, then they don?t use their power responsibly in the long run.
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There?s exceptions to that: Amazon has proven to be a great steward. They open up and they go, ?No, we?re really serious about the business of it, we?ll give you refunds if they're not up, we?ll be there, we?ll give you support, we?ll do whatever it takes so that you know that you can trust us and rely on us forever.? And that makes a real difference, but they're, unfortunately, the exception.
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Now we see a lot of cloud companies like SalesForce.com and Google who are also saying similar things and so far they?ve backed that up as well. So there?s hope.
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