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From the Editors: Clouds and mashups


By SD Times News Team
June 15, 2009 — 
If there’s an underlying theme behind this year’s SD Times, it involves the Internet. This reflects a sea change.

In the not-too-distant past, enterprise software development projects were contained within the enterprise. Server and mainframe applications ran within their data-center silos. End-user applications ran on desktops and notebooks. Client/server applications leveraged the corporate LAN; the closest they might come to touching the Internet would be remote access via a virtual private network.

As time went on, more and more enterprise developers learned about the Web. The initial brochureware websites became full-fledged client applications, using sophisticated front ends to provide secure access to some business data, such as a customer’s account information or a real-time inventory lookup. For the most part, however, enterprise applications lived in their silos, with the only Internet touchpoint being browser-based access to public-facing customer applications.

Now, look at the categories in the 2009 SD Times 100. One new category is Cloud Computing. Another is Mashups. While those concepts aren’t every organization’s cup of tea, their importance in today’s business environment can’t be overstated.

With cloud computing, companies are pushing their own custom applications out to remote data centers running at companies like Amazon.com, Google or Salesforce.com. Unlike traditional hosted applications, these truly are custom applications, written by the enterprise or its consultants for the exclusive use of the enterprise.

As cloud development matures (it’s odd to write “matures” for a trend that’s truly in its infancy), organizations are able to utilize many different cloud platforms, underlying data and storage services, programming languages, and APIs, all with varying service levels of guaranteed uptime, bandwidth and performance. It’s enterprise computing, served up with a large helping of Internet infrastructure.

Mashups present an entirely different opportunity, granting developers and power users the ability to leverage code reuse on a massive scale. Consider how Vi Labs is using Google Maps to help organizations track down software pirates. (Read the story here.)  Is it mission-critical? Not necessarily. Could the company have implemented mapping without mashups? Certainly. Was this an easy, inexpensive way to add functionality to an application? Definitely.

Best and brightest
The SD Times 100 recognizes the best and brightest companies and organizations in the software development industry. This is not a product award, and we don’t charge companies to participate. While the SD Times 100 does welcome nominations from readers (and most of them do come from software makers and their publicists), the awards themselves are judged by the editors of SD Times.

Our favorite category is “Influencers.” That’s the one that engenders the longest and most heated discussion between the judges. That’s where we try to identify the companies that have had the broadest and deepest impact over the entire field of enterprise software development.

In some cases, those Influencers are creating standards and industry specifications that we must conform to—or ignore at our peril. In some cases, the Influencer is building platforms that we’re going to use—or compete against. In some cases, they are building tools that everyone wants to adopt, and which also set the bar higher for partners and competitors.

Almost by definition, every Influencer has to be someone you’ve heard of, either directly or because of its actions. In fact, most are household names. (Otherwise, they wouldn’t be much of a broad influence across our large, diverse industry.) While there are many companies or organizations that exert influence—and they can be seen in the other SD Times 100 categories—they don’t have the same overarching, category-defying influence as our 11 Influencers.

We hope you enjoy reading the 2009 SD Times 100. Tell us what you think of our picks: Where did we hit the bull’s-eye? Who did we miss? Write us at feedback@bzmedia.com.


Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, mashups


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