Each year, we ask some Intelligent Enterprise product reviewers to reflect on product releases from the last 12 months. This year, Nelson King focuses on the advance of Web services, Ganesh Variar sees Oracle 9i setting a BI trend, Rajan Chandras predicts more back-office business processes will go out the back door, and Colin White spots maturation milestones in the portal platform market.

IT'S ABOUT GOING FORWARD

Of course, this has been a very difficult year and IT has had its own problems — both commercial and technical — that go back well before Sept. 11th. That's why it's important to find something to anticipate and feel optimistic about. I wish we could point to something really big and exciting like the PC (20 years old this year) and the Internet (apparently past its gung-ho days), but nothing of that magnitude seems imminent. What we do have is something that should be near and dear to the concerns of Intelligent Enterprise readers: application and data integration through Web services.

Depending on how you categorize technologies such as CORBA, DCOM, and various electronic data interchange (EDI) schemes, Web services represent about the third or fourth attempt at making application and data sharing generally viable. We have for some time wanted to do these things without the usual headache, complexity, and cost. Web services make that promise.

Oh, we're cynics about this all right. Been there, messed that up. The technical difficulties of operating complex applications over the wire, the problems of incongruent formats, and the ticklish relationships (internal and external to our companies) have often made application integration, EDI, and distributed applications more of a nightmare than a practical vision. However, the approach of Web services has two things going for it that we haven't quite had before: It's Internet all the way and its core technologies (extensible markup language; Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration; Simple Object Access Protocol, and Web Services Description Language) stand a great chance of universal acceptance.

In last year's summary ("Product Unfocus," Jan. 1, 2001), I wrote about Microsoft's .Net initiative as the harbinger of Web services. It's more than an initiative now, as products are finally appearing. In a nutshell, most of them look better than workable. Microsoft Visual Studio .Net in particular, though officially unreleased, has been in enough programmers' pilot projects to come under heavy scrutiny. The preliminary verdict is: This will do quite nicely.

Likewise from the Java camp. Such early products as Borland Software Corp.'s Delphi 6 and SilverStream Software Inc.'s eXtend Application Server 3.0 indicate that frameworks and integrated development environments for Web services may turn the alphabet soup of standards into something the average shop can use productively.

Yessir, we are going to have Web services. Maybe they aren't the greatest things since the Internet, but they'll provide the enterprise with solutions we've been looking for. The vendors love them because they represent a different (continuous) revenue model. We'll see how that pans out. In the meantime, Web services are an approach and a set of technologies that beg for that old "can-do" and "make it work" spirit. That spirit is due for a comeback.

Nelson King [nelsonking@earthlink.net] has written nine books on database application programming and spends much of his time in the trenches of enterprise software development.

BUSINESS-INTELLIGENT DATABASE

Oracle9i Database, launched in June 2001, might well turn out to be a trendsetter for future BI products. Oracle9i Database is designed to perform as a fully integrated business intelligence platform rather than just as a database used for data warehousing.

The standard practice in the BI industry is to employ best-of-breed tools. Today, a typical business intelligence system consists of an extract, transform, load (ETL) tool, a relational database, an online analytic processing (OLAP) engine, and a data mining tool. Each tool has its own metadata, security mechanisms, recovery strategies, and means of manipulating the data. This approach requires maintaining at least four separate engines, and is inherently inefficient because the other tools involved can't fully leverage the power and scalability of the database.

Oracle9i Database is the first product in the industry that combines ETL, database management, OLAP, and data mining in a single engine. In Oracle's vision, a single engine lays the foundation for a fully integrated BI platform.

In practice, other ETL, OLAP, and data mining tools will not go away; these products contain many unique features of their own. Instead, the tool vendors will be able to harness the power of the database to make their tools perform more efficiently. For example, most analytic queries process large sets of data and return a small set of highly summarized results. However, due to the inherent limitations of SQL, the analytic applications replicate the detailed data and rely on the limited query optimization features of the tool. Oracle9i Database has enhanced the capabilities of SQL and introduced two new Java-based APIs to support OLAP and data mining.

This enhancement will help developers of customized applications as well as tool vendors to perform the analytic calculations within the database and return only the summarized result to the front-end tool for display. ETL applications will also benefit from new features such as SQL access to external files, the "upsert" functionality (updating existing rows and inserting new rows using a single SQL statement), multi-table inserts and table functions (user-defined functions, coded in PL/SQL, Java, C, or C++, that can process and return multiple rows).

Oracle9i contains other performance-enhancing features such as list partitioning and bitmap join indexes. The enhancements in this release promise to improve performance and reduce the complexities involved in integrating business intelligence products. Oracle9i Database has opened the door for performing data intensive operations such as ETL, OLAP, and data mining closer to the data, within the database. I hope that Oracle's actions will set a trend for the business intelligence community.

Ganesh Variar [ganesh_variar@yahoo.com] is a project manager at Saama Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based consulting firm. He has nearly eight years' experience in managing and designing business intelligence solutions.

BPO WITH A DIFFERENCE

Budgets are being slashed, costs are being cut to the bone, and companywide layoffs are depriving you of your talent. If you're not an Arizona Diamondbacks fan, is there anything left to cheer for? Well, maybe cheer is a strong word, but there are strategies to survive even these tough times. A great way to control costs is by using niche, Web-enabled solutions to outsource and subcontract (both locally and offshore) many of your back-office business processes. And fortunately, there are an increasing number of products in the market that will help you do this more effectively.

As an example, BMC Software has a suite of products that let database administrators manage an Oracle database over the Web. I haven't used these products yet, but I'm excited by this capability. Imagine having a talented Oracle DBA "on tap," who can access your database server at a moment's notice, from anywhere across the world — and charge you for only that time.

Customer-facing processes — for example, order acceptance or help-desk services — can also be served well in this manner. Blue Ocean Software has one such help-desk software that both help-desk staff and users can access over the Web. This kind of software offers interesting possibilities; experienced but remotely located help-desk staffers could now perhaps be recruited to work from home — a win-win proposition indeed.

There are plenty of such solutions out there. Software from OpenAir.com Inc. lets you manage projects and time and expense over the Web. Software and services from ITAccounts provide finance and accounting support using the Internet. A service from well-known antivirus software vendor McAfee.com Corp. supports automatic, scheduled software upgrades over the Internet, which frees up your own technical support staff.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the trend du jour, but this is BPO of a different flavor. We're not talking large, multi-year, multimillion-dollar deals here — these are niche solutions that are ideal for small to medium enterprises, or at the departmental level of a large organization. This is where back-office business need meets outsourced solution using the Internet as the cost-reducing medium. Of course, this is not a silver bullet: Outsourcing, subcontracting, and offshore relationships can be a high risk game. But in the never-ending corporate search to reduce costs without compromising the needs of business, the demand for such niche, Web-enabled products and services can only grow stronger.

Rajan Chandras [rchandras@hotmail.com] is a consultant for a large international consulting and systems integration firm. He has 14 years of software industry and consulting experience. He is based in New Jersey.