February 1, 2007
Through all of its evolution, Dovetail Software’s family of CRM products has embraced open standards in the process of bringing extensibility to Clarify’s proprietary code. Open-standard scripting languages such as JavaScript simplify and energize extension and integration throughout the enterprise computing environment. These languages are readily recognized by many applications, and freely employed by in-house IT departments. Standards sometimes arise first, often from a single developer or project, and afterwards get the seal of approval of a trusted authority that enables all developers to embrace the technology. This happened with JavaScript, created initially by Netscape. The same thing is happening now with Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) specification, which it is currently offering for ISO standardization. Other times, standards have to be created. This is occurring now in the CRM environment as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) continues its evolution: suggested standards begin to be discussed, and standards already accepted are…
September 17, 2007
Sam Gentile (uber-architect) gently reminds us: SOA: It's The Business Stupid! SOA has value only when applied from a business perspective. The primary goal of SOA is to align the business world with the world of IT in a way that makes them more effective. Period. Technology is only significant in the delivery phase and if we hit customers up with [insert any product here] without understanding the business drivers and processes, not only are we not doing SOA but we continuing to hype technology as the answer, and further disappointing customers with yet “another wave” of application integration technology with different products than the last time. Well said Sam. Way too often, we see technology solutions put in place without a good understanding of the business needs. We must understand the business needs first!