Getting Agile

All of you who are already on the Jini users mailing list probably have already heard about this great talk put on by Jim Waldo, a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems. I believe the ideas delivered during this talk are some of the most important for the true revolution in technology and business. The reason I believe this is because of our current stalemate in business technology with reliance on relational databases, XML, and physical software installations.

There must be a better way to enable business in the next technology wave. I think that this is the realization of “the network is the computer” idea. Managed services are appearing in many forms such as in JBI (Java Business Integration) with ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), Microsoft‘s BizTalk, and some other EAI enabling technologies such as Tibco‘s Rendezvous. Many of these technologies bring their own view on the technology future, but in my opinion they do not bring a large advantage to our current software methods.

There seems to be another family of technologies which have network awareness such as Jini, Globus OGSA, and SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology) for agent messaging models. Over the past few years, like others in the Jini community I have been trying to figure out how to enable business in embracing this network awareness for a financial advantage. I have met a few people in the Jini community who have had success in this area such as GigaSpaces and some people who are working on Wall Street.

Although there has been some success and particular markets have seen the advantages, there has not been a large movement in the enterprise. I think that the relational database is a technology which has started to show it‘s limitations. A few years ago there were OODB (Object-oriented Database) vendors trying to cross the data storage barrier set by relational databases. They did not succeed at a scale which was noticible in this huge market, but they did increase awareness of the limitations. Now that we have broadband in a substantial amount of homes and almost every business, the network has come of age. Those who create the data, enable the data, and position the data on the network will probably hold an advantage over the current persistence with reporting model.

The push for real-time data feeds, security data policies, and terrorism or natural disaster response should drive technology into this new era of network awareness. Which technologies and vendors will get in front of this push is still up in the air. I hope that Jini didn‘t already miss it‘s chance by being too forward thinking. I think it is a great technology which is enhanced by great services such as Rio, GigaSpaces, ServiceUI, and Neon. I hope that those of you who have been burnt by their use of Jini in the past will try it again with open minds. And those of you who have not seen this technology in action, please check it out. I believe it‘s time is coming.