As an alarming legal predicament builds momentum in the software world, the dangers of a not-quite-dystopian Taco Bell centric future saturated with legal barriers continues to threaten the enterprise landscape, and undermine innovation and interoperability. Litigious quagmires involving software patents and copyrights has become the technology equivalent of the cold war, a mostly silent battle where software titans calculate strategies in mutually assured destruction. Two of those titans, Oracle and Google have been entrenched in a protracted legal squabble involving Application Programming Interfaces (API). One of the primary points of contention is whether API’s are copyrightable, and as a consequence, whether they can be reverse engineered without permission. All of this is happening just as we’re seeing pockets of innovation emerge in largely conventional software markets such as PLM, ERP, ECM, and CRM for which API’s play a central role. Will every innovative enterprise software startup be litigated and fined into oblivion as a result? You’ve been fined $10 million dollars for violating the API Morality Statute. Continue reading
How we work is fundamentally changing, not just in engineering, but across all disciplines involving information management and collaboration. There’s an escalating revolution in enterprise software, where the grand unification dreams of the past are now being set aside. Spoiler alert: there really can’t be one system to rule them all. It’s not that we haven’t tried to forge the one system in the fires of Mount Doom. But in many cases we tried and failed. Instead of a single-vendor monolithic solution, there’s renewed emphasis on specialization within a larger heterogeneous mix of options. Tools in collaboration, communication, and analysis that aren’t bound to their masters like their monolithic precursors, but instead flourish in an alliance of interconnecting and distributed technology. And here we all stand, at the turn of the tide.
Tensions in the larger enterprise war between Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) appear to be on the rise, and the latest battleground is apparently waving the Master Data Management (MDM) banner. The genesis of this conflict stems from the intersection of two different visions, PLM and ERP born from opposite ends of the enterprise. To understand how we got here, check out 
Enterprise software, and the assumptions and paradigms that go with it, are under assault. Consumerized products that find their way into the enterprise are redefining what it means to be an enterprise software application. I was reminded of this very fact just this week, during what has become a rather predictable biennial experience for me: the phone upgrade. The changing of the guard, as it were, sounds rather innocuous, right? Buy shiny new phone, throw old phone into ocean*. Despite my obvious evangelism and appreciation of new technology, the excitement of the moment is always tempered by a little bit of dread. It’s not a fear of change per se, but just trepidation about the consequences of change. With each new phone comes some sort of data migration, analysis of data plans, incompatibilities, interface differences, reconfiguration, re-personalization, various hassling by the carrier, and questions about accessories. Do I need a new case? It’s time to revaluate note and to-do list apps (again). What unspeakable horrors will the new device do to my contacts sync’d in the car? Inevitably, some legacies have to be let go as a consequence of the transition, and new paradigms are adopted. The whole adventure doesn’t cause any acute kidney pain, but it is time consuming. The phone is a mission critical piece of my technological puzzle and the parallels are very apparent. If I were an enterprise, the phone along with my primary PC is my digital backbone. Recalling when I first went from a brick phone to a flip, or a flip to Blackberry, or Blackberry to Android, the reaction was always the same. This is just simply better. With every moment, it’s unequivocally obvious that technology has progressed, significantly. I immediate forget about any concerns – because I sure as hell am not going back. Can we say the same about enterprise software?