Can Social Software Make IT More Dynamic?


Software AG deputy CTO Miko Matsumura believes the power of people


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February 20, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Aligning IT and business practices has become the Holy Grail of the software industry, and enterprises are demanding more dynamic solutions from software makers. Today’s enterprise is constituted of people, processes and technologies, and business infrastructure is increasingly bound by human behavior.

SD Times interviewed Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO of Software AG, to learn more about how social networking, the concept behind Facebook and LinkedIn, makes IT more dynamic by empowering people and coordinating their activities.

SD Times: Why is social software emerging in the enterprise?

Miko Matsumura: From our perspective, we view social software as part of a broader story. The emergence of social software is something that is fairly deep. It seems to be the segmentation of enterprise software into three regions. I want to be concise with this, because it’s not the traditional segmentation of hardware, middleware and applications.

The three layers are the machine layer, the corporate layer and the human layer. The bottom layer of enterprise software has to do with machines. This includes mainframes, transactional systems and the data center.

The middle layer has to do with the needs of companies. This layer includes both enterprise applications like supply chain, CRM, ERP, but also traditional middleware like integration, SOA, ESB, etc.

The emerging layer in this new way to look at software is the human layer. This includes what people traditionally call “front office” applications like productivity and collaboration apps. But what is transforming this layer is the emergence of the social graph and new interfaces.

The things that my kids do on the Internet are also ways to propagate events, collaboration and to coordinate IT infrastructure and the deployment of new processes and services.

SD Times: How are these layers interrelated?

MM: These three layers correspond with the three major architectural patterns in software today: the service-oriented pattern where everything is a reusable component, the process-oriented pattern where everything is a process, and the event-oriented pattern where everything is an event.

In the world of the data center, looking at everything as a service makes a lot of sense. As you move up to the corporate layer, process is the dominant metaphor. At the human layer, events are the primary model.




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