Showing posts with label Embarcadero Technologies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Embarcadero Technologies. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Embarcadero Technologies' AppWave Modernizes PC Desktops with App Store Convenience

A sponsored podcast discussion of how enterprise app stores can bridge the gap between software development and improved PC software distribution and maintenance. Learn more about AppWave.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Get free AppWave download. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the productivity gap between modern software and the aging manner in which most enterprises still distribute and manage applications on personal computers.

At a time when business models and whole industries are being upended by improved use of software, we're also seeing mobility, cloud services, and data analytics. IT providers inside of enterprises are still painstakingly provisioning and maintaining PC applications in much the same way they did in the 1990s.

Furthermore, with using these older models, most enterprises don’t even know what PC apps they have in use on their networks and even across thousands, in many cases, of notebook computers. That means they're also lacking that visibility into how, or even if, these apps are being used, and they may even be paying for licenses that they don’t need to pay for.

So while the software inventory and business service management initiatives are helping along these lines, there's a general lack of control over PC applications. I don’t think you can solve that without including new ways to engage the PC users directly. This is really a function about the use and the users, not just the applications and the PC.

To learn more about how things can be done better, I recently interviewed the President and CEO of Embarcadero Technologies, Wayne Williams, to examine the ongoing problems around archaic PC apps management and how new models -- taking a page from the popular app store model -- can rapidly boost the management of PC applications. [Disclosure: Embarcadero Technologies is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Wayne has more than 15 years of experience in founding and leading companies. He was appointed CEO of Embarcadero Technologies in 2007 and he is a former COO, Senior Vice President of Products and CTO at Embarcadero.

I want to welcome you to BriefingsDirect, Wayne. It’s good to have you with us.

Wayne Williams: Good morning. Thanks for having me, Dana.

Gardner: As I said, it’s kind of ironic that, on one hand, we have software taking over in a larger sense how businesses are run and how industries are being innovative in reaching customers in new ways. This has been highlighted recently by Marc Andreessen in some of his writings. At the same time, the corporate PC, also driven by software, is still sort of stodgy and moribund, at least in the perception of how it’s being used productively.

So let’s unpack this a little bit, Wayne. How is it that software is advancing generally, but PCs remain, in a sense, unchanged?

Williams: I've been asking myself that question for many years. I've spent most of my life in software, and I'm embarrassed to say that the industry has really done a poor job at making software available to the users, which is the fundamental issue.

Windows is clearly the dominant PC platform but it has fundamental design flaws, which sowed the seeds for the problem.

Part of the story

But that’s only a small part of the story. Software vendors are so focused on building the next great application and on features and functions in that application that they've lost sight of what really matters, which is making sure that the application that you build gets used, gets in the hands of the users, and that they get their work done.

When I look at the PC industry and where it has come, the applications themselves have improved dramatically. I can’t imagine being as productive as I am without Microsoft Outlook, for example, for email and calendaring. And Adobe Photoshop. I don’t think you can find a photo anywhere that has not been edited with Photoshop. It’s incredibly powerful.

But unfortunately, a lot of the gains that really could be made have been wasted, because it’s very, very tough to get an application from a vendor into a user's hands.

Gardner: It seems to me that while the technology is somewhat unchanged since the '90s, the users are a different breed nowadays. We have different behaviors and different levels of anticipation and expectation around what productivity is all about. We used to call these productivity apps, but now productivity comes from being able to innovate, self-start, even learn from your peers -- that social fabric type of an interplay.

Are these some of the core problems? We're at a dissonance between expectations and behaviors on one hand and the same old local area network (LAN) level of management on the other.

At the end of the day, all technology is about productivity. Software certainly is about productivity.



Williams: Absolutely. That’s a great point. At the end of the day, all technology is about productivity. Software certainly is about productivity. And if you're going to radically increase the productivity of a team, the knowledge that team can share about what tools are used for what job is critical knowledge. That’s why we’ve built in the ability to rate and review apps into AppWave. Team members can find the best tool for the job based on peer feedback.

Gardner: What about this as it applies to application development and deployment? I know that Embarcadero has been involved with that for an awfully long time. Is there something of a disconnect between development, gathering requirements, creating an application, and then the operations, thinking about operations through that adoption pattern, and user expectation and behaviors?

It seems as if we're still stuck in this era, where there's a wall between the two, but some of the activities that you have been up to strike me as trying to close that, or at least create a feedback loop, or a life cycle benefit, between apps, how they're developed, how they're used, and then how they are iterated on.

Williams: There are a few ways to look at it from a development perspective. One way is that software developers are probably the most aggressive in terms of the need for productivity, the most aggressive users of applications and tools and all the issues that surround that.

At the end of the day, software developers, whether at a garage start-up or one of the large software vendors, are passionate about solving a problem, creating software that solves a problem, and getting it into the hands of their users. That’s what really drives developers.

Important disconnect

T
he problem is that there's a disconnect between creating your software and getting it into the hands of the users. You very rarely are talking about this happening in seconds, which it should. It’s something that happens more on the order of months or quarters in a large company.

Gardner: I have to imagine that this contributes also to the security problems. So many organizations now are really doubling down on what they need to do for security, recognizing that it’s not something you buy out of a box, that it’s really part and parcel of process, methodology, standards, and governance.

There must be some benefits by closing this loop, as you pointed out, when it comes to bringing better security and then making automated changes that bring even better security on an ongoing basis.

Williams: There's a whole host of problems that emanate from the root problem, the root problem that we're talking about, and security is one of them.

You have an environment which is high-friction. It reminds me really of a state of manufacturing before the Industrial Revolution, where you had processes that were slow, expensive, unpredictable, and error-prone. That’s how PC software has operated over the last 20-plus years.

When you have an environment that is so high friction, users will go around it.



When you have an environment that is so high-friction, users will go around it. So you have this process with the PC, where IT tries to get more control and locks down the environment more, and the business users that need to get the work done find ways to get it done.

We have large customers that have a policy: When somebody is hired, all controls are turned off so that they can get their desktop together and get the apps that they need for the first three days. Then they'll lock it down. That’s not a good environment for security.

Gardner: That’s begging for trouble. You mentioned the core problem or the root problem. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind fleshing that out a bit for us. What do you think the real root problem is here?

Williams: The root problem is that software should move at the speed of light, yet it moves at the speed of a glacier.

Let me give you an example. In a mid- to large-sized company, if an employee is looking for a special pen for a new project, they can go to a catalog, take out a pen, and they can usually have it the next day, and that’s a physical good.

Software is virtual. So it could and should move at the speed of light, but for many of our large customers it takes quarters to get software into the user’s hand.

Looking for productivity

Gardner: So we've identified the problem internally. As I said, it's ironic, because when we look to the larger landscape of business, we're still in a tough economic situation around the globe. People are looking for productivity.

Marc Andreessen wrote recently that software is really revolutionizing how we procure things like entertainment and books and how we discover new products and services online. We can do this as a consumer. Doesn’t it seem almost absurd that, at a time when individuals using some of the tools that are available on a retail basis, are leaps and bounds ahead of someone who is just trying to get some basic work done in a large corporation?

Williams: Yes, you can take a fairly simple device like a smartphone from Apple or an Android device and find and run applications literally in seconds. Yet you have this sophisticated environment with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of software sold every year, powerful hardware and processing power, but it's like pulling teeth for a user to get the applications she or he needs.

Gardner: Wayne, you and I have been around long enough to know that the way to instigate change in an enterprise environment is not necessarily to attempt wholesale radical shifts. You need to work with what's in place and recognize that investments have been made and that those investments are going to continue to be leveraged.

So let's start defining the solution at a high level here. We want the applications that have been developed. We want the interfaces and data that folks are used to to continue to benefit them. But we also want to start energizing this new sense of empowerment that people have through their personal lives and their consumer roles and bring some of these things together.

What I see from our big customers is that for every commercial app that they license they will have 10 that are built internally.



Craft for me, if you could, the vision about retaining what's good about the enterprise and what's been invested in and brought to the daily grind, but at the same time start to bring innovation and allow people to exercise their behaviors and their empowerment.

Williams: As far as what's good and what can be retained, there's a great footprint of hardware out there, PC hardware. A massive investment has been made.

It's the same with software. There are tons of software, both licensed and built internally. And the internal part is really important. What I see from our big customers is that for every commercial app that they license they will have 10 that are built internally. And while there is very little visibility into how commercial licenses are used, there is some, but it's little. And there's zero visibility into who’s using internally built software, for the most part.

There have been massive investments made in software, and unfortunately, a lot of the productivity that could have been realized hasn’t been. But the good news is that it can be.

When I look at the opportunities, it's really two constituents, which you described. You talked about the user for a second and then you talked about the investment and what can be reused, and that’s really management, typically IT management, which is centralized. AppWave is about bringing these two stakeholders together.

Gardner: How can we do that? I'm familiar with what you've been doing with developers. Developers have unique requirements, but it seems like you've gained some insight and some technology in serving their needs in a fast-paced, agile environment, and can now bring that to the larger group of consumers within the enterprise.

Removing friction

Williams: If you look at mobile software, the friction between the user and the app is removed, and the results are fantastic. For us, that was a great proof point, because we started on AppWave before anybody had heard of the Apple App Store.

For PCs, the problem is much more difficult and it's much larger. Mobile software is about a $10 billion industry, and PC is somewhere around $300 billion. So the opportunity for productivity gains and overall results is much, much bigger, and the problem is much more difficult. Now, with AppWave the mobile experience -- find, run, rate, review -- comes to the PC. So the agile enterprise has tools to support it.

Gardner: So bringing that mentality of search, discover, share your experience, ease of access when you want to then act on that kind of information, almost instant gratification when the app comes down, being able to run it, and then upgrade it along the way with very little oversight, very little maintenance, certainly very little disruption, you have to ask yourself -- why would I want to do it any other way?

How do we bring these together? How do we bring the app store experience to IT? How do we enable them to bring that to their own constituents, their own users?

Williams: The key is the system. With the enterprise app store we bring two constituents together: users and management.

For users, there are really three principles that drive everything that we do. One of them is self-service, the next is socialization, and the third is instant gratification.



You mentioned a few things that are core principles. For users, there are really three principles that drive everything that we do. One of them is self-service, the next is socialization, and the third is instant gratification.

As a user, when I have a problem to solve and I'm looking for an app to help me solve it, I want to be able to find it myself, quickly. I want to understand what my peers are saying about that app. When I decide I want to try it, I click a button and run it. Everything we do goes through one of those filters. It’s about the user experience.

From a management perspective, for IT they need centralized control and visibility into real usage. So those are two principles that really drive everything we do with AppWave from a management perspective.

People talk about the consumerization of IT now, and initiatives like "bring your own device." The key for IT is to put an environment in place that draws users in and gives them what they're looking for, but you can still maintain overall control and have real visibility into who is using software and when.

Gardner: I'm curious. With AppWave, is there the opportunity to bring down apps fresh, or more frequently than the typical install, lockdown, patch process that we're familiar with now? Is there a hybrid model that incorporates some of the goodness from other trends like software as a service (SaaS) or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but allows the same PC apps, the rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the investments that have been made in the code and logic to remain?

Results is conflict


Williams: This is one of the difficult engineering challenges we had, and it goes back to my first point about Windows sowing the seeds of some of the problems. If you look at Windows, it's designed around the concept of sharing and sort of a utopian view, where applications could all share parts, and typically those are called DLLs in Windows. Unfortunately, the end result of that is conflict.

When a user wants to try a new application, that application is installed and will typically conflict with other applications that were previously installed. The problem gets worse when you get into new versions.

In the PC market, most vendors update their software multiple times a year. For example, we put out new release of every major product once a year and then we will have point releases typically quarterly. You have an awful lot of change, and every time there is a change, you stand to break other things that are already installed on your computer.

That was one of the things we had to tackle, and we did with AppWave. That folds into instant gratification. If I'm a user who has an existing version of a particular application, and I need either the older version or the newer version, I should be able to click a button and be productive. I should be using it in seconds.

Gardner: Well, we've defined our problem. We recognize that it's severe. We recognize that the environment is propelling people for change. We know that people have alternatives in the market for at least some apps, and we have been describing some of what is required of a solution, at least at a high level. So I guess it's time now to really dig in a little bit. Describe for us what AppWave is, what it does, and how it came to be?

At the heart of it, we removed the dependencies that applications would have with other applications and with the environment in general.



Williams: AppWave is an enterprise app store for PCs that provides self-service. Users can very easily type in a search term and get a result. The result is a set of applications. Then they can click and run those applications, read ratings and reviews from their peers, and they can be assured that when they do run those applications, they're not going to disrupt anything else that they have on their PC.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about that problem you mentioned a moment ago, that ability to bring down new or quickly upgrade or change apps, but without losing the config, the importance of the legacy, the use and trail of what that application has done for the user. How did you solve that?

Williams: Years and years of engineering, but at the heart of it, we removed the dependencies that applications would have with other applications and with the environment in general. Each of these applications is able to stand on its own, which means you can have multiple versions of a particular app and move between them painlessly with no concerns.

I think that’s important for just about any knowledge worker. I've seen company after company -- and ours is no different -- afraid to move, for example, to the newest version of Office, because they're not sure if documents from the old version are going to work properly. Problems like that are gone, because you can easily move from version to version with the click of a button.

This is particularly important in R&D,where a tremendous amount of time is spent retooling to go from one configuration of applications for a particular system.

Prior to having AppWave, developers had multiple PCs, one for working on the new release that’s going to come out this year and then one for going back and fixing bugs on last year’s release.

What are the metrics?

Gardner: As you pointed out, Wayne, you've been doing this for some time. A lot of R&D, starting with tools, is probably the hardest category to crack. And you've seen how organizations have adopted and used your AppWave approach, creating this storefront, making those apps available to solve some of these issues that plague PC software distribution.

What have people gained from this? Do we have some metrics? Can we look at some examples? What do you get if you do this properly? How impactful is the shift when you go from say a traditional distribution to an AppWave and an app store distribution model?

Williams: I can give you a few examples. It's been amazing for us certainly. We drink our own champagne. We've made incredible gains, with the biggest gains being in two areas.

One is in R&D, where teams generally produce a daily build of most of the products. Those apps, when they come off the build machine, are now immediately available to all of R&D. It's particularly important for QA, because the downtime that you would have retooling and getting a new app is gone. It’s literally seconds. So we've seen some great gains internally with R&D.

We've also seen it with sales. We've got roughly 20 products. We put out a minor release once a quarter and majors once a year. So if you just looked at the explosion of that set of apps that a salesperson would have to have on their PC, just in two years, it’s 160. That historically has been a problem. It’s just a productivity drain and it’s error prone. Now that problem is gone.

What’s most exciting is when a customer really sees that this can help them get to market quicker.



There are certainly metrics out there as far as productivity and under-utilization of software and over-utilization of software, but I think what’s most exciting is when a customer really sees that this can help them get to market quicker.

A large financial services company had a nine-month rollout cycle for of a new version of a PC app. They had a really pressing business need to get this done before the holidays, their biggest season. It was impossible using their current methods for PC software distribution. With AppWave, users were upgraded to the right version of software in minutes.

The thing that they loved about that whole experience wasn't really the metrics. Certainly they put together their ROIs and they were impressive, but what that really did for them was that it allowed them to move quickly, to solve the business need in a time that would really make a difference.

Gardner: And at a time when software is more important than ever, they're going to gain an advantage by being able to deliver that software, put it in the hands of their employees, and also put it in the hands in the market, learn from that market and adjust, it just seems like you get generally better business agility, particularly when you are in a software intensive field which, as I said, most companies are nowadays.

Williams: One of the things that's frustrating for me, seeing how the software industry has matured and grown over the years, is that everybody talks about ROI. There's nothing wrong with the concept of ROI, but what I see often is a forest-and-trees problem, where people will lose sight of what the real goal is.

Losing sight of the goal

T
hey will get so buried in a metric here and a metric there to build up an ROI, that they will lose sight of the goal. What’s the goal? The goal is to get my product or service to market sooner, better, and with better quality than the competition. That ROI is almost immeasurable.

Apple is a great example. This is a company that was in serious trouble for a number of years. It's the most incredible turnaround success story than any of us have ever seen. And all of that may not have happened if the iPod was a year late. Sony wasn't totally sleeping. They owned consumer electronics, and given a little more time, they probably could have stopped that move.

It’s so important for people to remember that software is going to help you get your product or service to market sooner and better, which is going to help you beat your competition.

Gardner: I'm afraid we are about out of time, Wayne, but I wanted to look just at a couple of the building trends now that point to the future. We're seeing tremendous uptake in mobile devices and tablets. We're seeing people who want to be able to combine their roles as consumers and individuals at home with what they do at work.

This is blurring the lines between on-premises, doing work within a corporate environment, or over a VPN even. But they need this. This is how they're going to be productive. It's putting an onus now, a different level of requirements, on IT, on developers.

It's all about getting the right app in the hands of the user as quickly as possible and that should happen on all relevant platforms.



Is there something about AppWave and what we've been talking about that can be brought into the mobile and even cloud spheres, these trends being sort of locomotives in the market right now, that brings together them and what we have been talking about?

Williams: Absolutely. Our view is that, at the end of the day, it's all about getting the right app in the hands of the users as quickly as possible and that should happen on all relevant platforms. So certainly mobile tablets, Android tablets, and iOS, iPads, are very cool and powerful devices that we are certainly going to support.

The important thing to remember is about getting the app to the user, regardless of what device they're using. So whether it's a tablet, a PC, or it's their own PC, as opposed to the company PC, they should still have access to all the apps that matter, with all the same kind of principles we've talked about, instant gratification, very easy to find. Those are all things that we're covering in AppWave.

Our initial focus was all about solving the PC problem, because in my view that’s the big problem. That’s where so much productivity has been locked away. We've solved that for the PC now and we certainly will support other popular platforms as they emerge.

Gardner: Well, very good. I hate to say we will have to leave it there.

You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity improvements and speed the value benefits for those PC users and across the applications that they are accustomed to. This is something that’s been of interest to IT departments and those users as well.

I'd like to thank our guest. It's been a very intriguing discussion. We've been with Wayne Williams, President and CEO of Embarcadero Technologies. Thanks so much, Wayne.

Williams: Thank you, Dana. Have a good day.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, as always, thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Get free AppWave download. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.

A sponsored podcast discussion of how enterprise app stores can bridge the gap between software development and improved PC software distribution and maintenance. Learn more about AppWave. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Take a Deep Dive on How Enterprise App Stores Help Drive Productivity

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the growing importance of enterprise app stores in moving organizations to a self-service model that reduces both complexity and delays in getting applications to end users.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity and speed-to-value benefits for PC users and IT departments alike.

We’ll specifically examine what steps businesses can take to build and develop their own enterprise app stores for mainstream use. We'll further see what rapid and easy access to self-service apps on PCs and notebook computers through such app stores is doing for businesses.

The popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, on one hand, has energized users, but on the other hand it’s caused IT and business leaders to scramble to adjust to new models of applications delivery.

We’ll explore here how app stores are part of the equation for improved work and process success on and off the job. We’ll see how Embarcadero’s AppWave solution brings the mobile apps experience to millions of PC users in their workplace in the enterprise.

We’ll also hear from the author of a recent Ovum white paper on why app stores are so important for enterprises, as they consider ways to better track, manage, and distribute all of their applications.

The popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, on one hand, has energized users, but on the other hand, it’s caused IT and business leaders to scramble to adjust to new models of applications delivery.



Please join me now in welcoming our panel. We're joined today by Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at Ovum. Welcome back to the show, Tony.

Tony Baer: Hey, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: We’re also here with Michael Swindell, Senior Vice President of Products and Marketing at Embarcadero Technologies. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Swindell: Hi. Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And we’re also here with Richard Copland, Principal Innovation Consultant at Logica. Welcome, Richard. [Disclosure: Embarcadero is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Richard Copland: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: Tony, let me start with you. You've written a white paper in the recent past on app stores and why they’re important in enterprises. Were you surprised in any way at how broad this app store model can be used and is starting to be used for all sorts of applications?

Concept leap

Baer: I was a little bit surprised because there is certainly a concept leap from a $1.99 little applet that you pull down from the iPhone app store or from the Android marketplace to a full-blown enterprise desktop application.

That being said, it’s not surprising, given that there’s been a huge demand from the bottom-up, from the people in the workplace. So it’s a phenomenon that’s probably better known as the consumerization of IT -- "I have these sophisticated mobile devices and tablets. Why can’t I get that easy to use experience on my regular machine for my day job?"

Therefore, the demand for the comfort and convenience of that was inevitably bound to spread into the enterprise environment. You've seen that manifested in a number of ways. For example, companies have basically embraced more social collaboration. And you’re also starting to see some use of many of these new form factors.

So again, what Embarcadero has been starting to introduce is symbolic in a way that’s really not surprising.

Gardner: Richard Copland, any thoughts on this as well? Tell us a bit about your organization, Logica, and your role as a Principal Innovation Consultant.

Copland: My role as a Principal Innovation Consultant is effectively twofold. It's to find new things and introduce new things to our clients. Something innovative to me is something that's new to you and provides a benefit. This can be cash, people, or green ideas. I spend my day looking at cool new stuff, which means ways of working, technologies, partners, and even wacky research coming out of the various universities here in Europe.

I get involved in schedules of client discussions, and people look to me and my team to bring ideas to life, to help answer that question, which is a challenge where there must be a better way. An example of that is the enterprise app store being a better way for things. Then, it’s unpacking that and exploring how you might help create that vision of the answer and empower them to believe that these things are possible now.

A bit about Logica: We're a business and technology service company. We provide business consulting, system integration, and outsourcing to our clients around the world including many of Europe’s largest businesses.

Last year, we did just under £4 billion globally with 800 million of that being here in the UK. We create value by successfully integrating people, business, technology, and a key part of this is the innovation piece. Clients look to us to bring innovation and innovative things, and Embarcadero's AppWave and the concept of the business application certainly falls into that category.

In terms of those larger trends, which are driving or almost overseeing the consumerization of IT, I step it back, and say that it’s almost as we are as a service concept which is the fragmentation and segmentation of people looking to get more and more value being directed to them, specifically to their needs, and as a result of that, it’s the on-demand concept.

Generation Next

For me, it’s also the whole Generation Next piece which is about a whole new generation that is educated and tech-savvy. They're multitasking all the time. They work as consumers. They're purchasing products and customize them to their needs in terms of their lifestyles. So they’re regularly sharing insight and comment on things which are good for them.

That’s playing out in terms of lifestyle and that's being brought into the business scenario, whereby the formal and informal hierarchies of organizations are blurring.

Another trend that I see, and a lot of our clients in the conversations that we have see, is this whole global talent contest, by which clients are struggling to maintain, obtain, and keep satisfied Generation Next with the latest technology. Why should they legitimately step back in time in the tools that they will use in their role, if it doesn’t provide and support their last stop. It’s a real challenge for them.

Gardner: Michael Swindell, when we see longer term trends, and then new innovations, one of those trends has been the need to rationalize applications. Almost every enterprise I talk to rarely knows how many applications they have, rarely knows to what degree they’re being used, and has no clue as to how to sunset them or bring this sprawl under control. It seems that that’s a long-term trend trying to rationalize apps, but at the app store model, innovation brings some sanity to that and buy-ins from the users.

Is there a win-win possibility here with app stores helping organizations manage their apps better, and yet, getting the buy-in from the users to accelerate how that goes about by them voting and either installing and uninstalling these apps rather rapidly?

Swindell: There are really two sides to the benefit of using the app store methodology for those problems. There's an organizational side of understanding application usage, as you said maybe sunsetting applications, understanding how applications are used within their organization, so that they can make good decisions.

Then we have the user side, where users have a lot more information that they can provide that’s very useful for both the organization and other users.

The app store metaphor works very well in sharing that type of information. It gives the organization usage information and statistics, and the demand information that's valuable for the organization to plan and understand their application usage. It also provides information to other users on the applicability of applications for certain scenarios, whether applications are good or bad for a particular scenario.

This has worked well in the mobile space with public app stores, and we see that there's a lot of applicability inside the firewall, inside organizations, to be able to use this information and create more value out of their applications and to help users get more value and understanding about their applications.

Gardner: Tony, back to you. In your white paper, it seems that there's an economic value here, that we're just sort of scratching the surface of. It seems that we know that the consumers like app stores, based on how they vote with their dollars, whether it's $0.99 or more. It’s just a huge success for Apple and others are jumping on the bandwagon.

But it seems to me that getting the transparency, seeing the trends, and being able to sunset and better manage their apps has got a fairly significant economic value to it. Furthermore, users perhaps will only be using resources based on their needs. So there is sort of an efficiency aspect to this. Is that what you've found?

Traditional model

Baer: We've not done any scientific studies, but compare this model to the traditional application deployment model.

Number one, it's a much more of a long-fused process. There is elaborate planning of the rollout. You're trying to figure out all the different client targets that you're trying to address. Even if you do have locked-down machines, you're still going to have issues. Then, package the release,. Then, regression test it to death. Then distribution, and you actually get the thing installed. Hopefully, it's up during some off hour, let's say, at 3 a.m. Then, you prepare for all the support calls.

That's a pretty involved process. That consumes a lot of time both for the end user, who is waiting for the functionality that he or she may want -- or not. And it's also, of course, a considerable overhead in the IT organization.

If you take that all away into a more modular model, more like a radio broadcast model, essentially it becomes a lot more efficient. You lose all this lead time, and as Michael was talking about, you then get all the visibility for all these apps being consumed. End users have more sway. As long as they are authorized to use these apps, they have this choice.

So it's not that all of a sudden they have a whole number of apps that are loaded on their machine, whether they like it or not. We haven't done anything to quantify this, because trying to quantify productivity is like asking “what's the cost of downtime?” And in a lot of sectors that can be a very subjective number. But intuitively, this model, if it scales out, should basically provide a much lower cost of ownership and much greater satisfaction.

This model, if it scales out, should basically provide a much lower cost of ownership and much greater satisfaction.



Gardner: Richard, in your looking over the landscape for additional innovations, I can see how services orientation and cloud computing certainly dovetail with this, but it also seems to me that the need is for organizations to encourage users to change their habits. Maybe it's around the process level, instead of an application level or maybe simply adopting new applications quickly, rather than having to go through a long period of adjustment.

Is there something about the app store model that you think will encourage faster buy-in and perhaps a lot of organizations would incentivize or use social mechanisms to encourage users to adopt new technologies and new applications faster?

Copland: Undoubtedly. The whole socialization and the social trend which I see as probably the biggest driver behind this is for the way in which people use software and the way in which people comment on a software.

The organization will cluster around the toolkits for which the feedback from the users is positive. I can think of one large global financial organization here that has 5,000 apps within their world. They would look to simplify their landscape by over 60 percent, because they recognize that they've got so many kinds of individual pockets of activity going on in the organization.

And you need to support those individual pockets of activity that, in terms of your users in the tail effect, they’ll be the mainstream enterprise apps, such as Windows-based or Office-based, which the majority will use. But if you could tap into an environment, in which you are giving the people what they want, then the return on investment (ROI) from that is going to be a lot faster.

Cultural incentive

Gardner: We’ve certainly seen how the incentive is there from a cultural and popularity perspective, given what we’ve seen in the mobile space. There's a strong economic and productivity rationale for this in terms of both long-term IT trends, like rationalizing applications, and shorter-term trends, like incentivizing people to use the social mechanisms and adopt newer applications or processes or methods faster.

Now the question is: how do you do this? How do you take a legacy of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of applications written for the PC, written across different platforms and different iterations over time and maturity levels of those platforms, and make them available through an app store?

Michael Swindell, tell me a little bit about AppWave and what it takes for an IT organization to make the transition from that long process that Tony outlined to a more streamlined app-store approach.

Swindell: The best way to describe AppWave is that it’s just a pretty simple three-step process. The first step is taking traditional software, which is traditionally complex for end users and for organizations to manage. This includes things like installations, un-installations, considerations about applications, of how they affect the users’ environment.

Then, converting those traditional software applications into the concept of apps where they are self-contained, don’t require installation, can be streamed and run to a user anywhere they are, and really delivering the mobile-like experience of mobile software to the more complex traditional desktop PC software.

AppWave has tooling that allows users to take their applications and convert them into apps. And that’s any type of application- commercial application or internally developed.



AppWave has tooling that allows users to take their applications and convert them into apps. And that’s any type of application -- commercial application or internally developed.

That's the first step. The second is to centralize those apps in an app store, where users can get to them, and where organizations can have visibility into their usage, manage access to them, etc. So the second step is simply centralizing those apps.

The third is the user experience. One of the key drivers behind the success of apps in the mobile space has been the visibility that users have into application availability. It’s very easy for users to search and find an app as they need it.

Think about how a user uses a mobile phone to come up with an app. Maybe they’re walking down the street, they see a business, and they have an idea, or they want directions to something. They can simply search in an app store on their mobile device and immediately get an app to solve that problem.

If you look in the business space and inside the workplace, when a user has a problem, they don’t really have a mechanism to sit down and search to solve a problem and then get an application to solve it immediately.

As we talked about earlier, and Tony really well-described that the process, once they identify an application to solve a problem, that can take weeks or months to roll out. so you don’t have that instant feedback.

Instantaneous experience

The user experience has to be instantaneous. An area that we focused on very heavily with AppWave is to provide the users an ability to search, find apps based on the problems that they’re trying to solve, and instantly run those apps, rather than having to go through a long process.

Gardner: Michael, I’d like to hear more about how you go about that. But before we do, let me check in with our other panelists.

Tony, this sounds like it’s something quite new. As you pointed out, in the past and for the most part, in the present, in an enterprise, a user might have a need, wish they had a tool, a utility, a macro, any kind of a helping hand. Rather than go to IT and wait in line, sign some sort of a requisition, or go through a PO process, they probably just said, "Oh, the heck with it. I'll make do with what I have."

But now, we're giving people the opportunity to self-serve, search in the moment of need, and then satisfy that need with the click of a button. It sounds to me that it’s going to really enhance user productivity, the user's ability to innovate themselves, rather than just sit back and go with the flow. Am I overstating it?

Baer: From the end-user standpoint, there certainly is quite a win to this. But we also have to look at the fact that this is going to change the way IT serves the organization. At least this aspect of it is really going to become more of a service provider. And there are a lot of implications for that.

From the end-user standpoint, there certainly is quite a win to this. But we also have to look at the fact that this is going to change the way IT serves the organization.



For one thing, IT has to be more responsive but they also have to work on more of a shorter fuse, almost like a just-in-time type of model.

That being said, there's no free lunch in all this, and it still requires management. For example, we still need to worry about dealing with security governance, managing consumption, and also making sure that you lock down, or secure the licensing issues. As I said, there’s no free lunch, but compare that to the overhead of the traditional application distribution and deployment process.

So again, from the end user standpoint, it should be a win-win, but from the IT standpoint, it's going to mean a number of changes. Also, this is breaking new ground with a number of the vendors. What they need to do is check on things such as licensing issues, because what you're really talking about is a more flexible deployment policy.

Long-term, it's definitely a win-win. Short-term, there are adjustments to be made by IT and also by the software industry.

Gardner: Just as a quick observation, managing licenses is so difficult. Many organizations will just pay a blanket fee, not even bother to audit, or do anything they can to avoid the vendor audit. With the app-store approach, they would have real data, know exactly who is using what, and pay only what they had to. So I think that there's a hurdle to adjust to on the licensing, but there might actually be a strong benefit.

Changing the dynamic

Back to Richard Copland. On this notion that users, when empowered to download and find apps based on search, based on the library, based on what other users are passing along as what’s worked for them as users in the organization, it strikes me as really changing the dynamic itself.

Do you follow my thread on this? Do you think I'm going too far, and can we perhaps make the association that app stores can fundamentally change the way workers behave in an innovation sense?

Copland: Absolutely. You’re on the money with regard the direction of travel. We talked a little bit about looking at the mobile aspects of it and moving to this on-demand usage and the challenges for the organization to do that.

Certainly, the components within the AppWave solution give you the opportunity to move to more of what I would describe as smart working or remote working, by which the user doesn't necessarily have to come into the office to access the tools, which are traditionally being provided to them at their desk in their environment.

If you start remote working or are given a broader range of remote access, then you can be operating a much stronger work-life balance. So if you're in a situation where you’ve got a young family and you need to take the kids to school, you can come on and go off the company network and use the tools which are provided to you in a much more user-friendly flexible environment. That would be certainly from the user's perspective.

If you start remote working or are given a broader range of remote access, then you can be operating a much stronger work-life balance.



From the business’s perspective, I start moving to a scenario where I don't necessarily need to maintain a real estate where if I’ve got 5,000 users, I need to have 5,000 desks. That certainly becomes quite empowering across the rest of the organization, and other stakeholders -- the facility’s officers, business managers -- start taking real notice of those types of savings and the nature of how work is achieved.

Gardner: Back to how this can work for organizations. Michael Swindell at Embarcadero, tell me about AppWave, and let's learn a bit about its heritage. It seems to me that this has been something that's not just a flash in the pan new for you. It's really an evolution of something you've been doing in the application development arena with tools. So perhaps it's time to learn a little bit about the legacy and history of how AppWave has evolved?

Swindell: This is the AppWave 2.0 platform, which is really the second generation of the platform. The original 1.0 platform was designed to help deliver Embarcadero's own products to its users. And the reason it was developed was that Embarcadero, as many ISVs have, has a portfolio of different products, over 20 tools in our portfolio. We wanted to provide those to customers so that they were much easier for the users to find and use the applications as they had a need.

As a problem arises, you didn't have to worry about whether or not software is already installed or whether or not you have it. You simply need to be able to search on the problem and then be able to pull up the Embarcadero application to solve that problem.

The first generation of this technology was designed specifically for those 20 products. We created app versions of our software. Then came the idea of the centralized app store and the user experience to search, find, and run those apps.

Gardner: This is fairly proven. How long this has been in use in terms of a technology and a platform itself?

Licensing core

Swindell: Two years for the platform. Then, the licensing core, which is really an important part. We talked a little bit about earlier about how license management is important in access control. The license core that provides both licensing and access control has actually been around for quite some time and managed the licenses. We've been developing the licensing technology for almost 10 years.

Gardner: So you're taking this and focusing it beyond that core 2.0 that you started with. Now we're looking at what custom apps, legacy apps, cross platform, what is it that an enterprise was interested in moving in an app store direction, and they are going to examine something like AppWave. How far and why can this be applicable in terms of their legacy, their installed base of apps?

Swindell: Our vision is any type of application in the organization will eventually be supported by AppWave. The initial support is for PC apps in organizations, which is the vast majority of productivity applications that end users need. It also is where the largest problem set is, both from an end-user perspective and from an organization's perspective.

So we're tackling the hardest problem first and then our plan is to roll in other type of apps, web apps, and applications that you might be using in an organization, using other types of delivery technologies.

But the idea is to take any type of these applications and present them as an app inside the AppWave ecosystem. So a user can have a centralized way to search for any type of app whether it’s a corporate HR, a web application, a hosted software as a service (SaaS ) application, or a PC application. Certainly, mobile would be an obvious direction as well.

The idea is to take any type of these applications and present them as an app inside the AppWave ecosystem.



Gardner: It seems that we’re also moving now to being able to manage our applications, not just in their entirety and in their traditional state, but perhaps even decomposing them and getting into more of a modular applications transformation benefit.

Tell me how the companies that you’re working with that are using AppWave are using this, not only to just repurpose existing apps, but to even transform those apps and present them in new and interesting ways.

Swindell: There's a variety of ways that organizations are delivering applications to users today. The wider variety of applications and different ways and repositories that they have for apps really makes it confusing for end users to be able to know where to find what applications are available.

When I talk to end users and to customers, if you ask them where they find their applications, you’ll get a different answer, depending on who you talk to in the organization or what type of application they’re thinking of.

One of the things that AppWave and the app store concept can do is to help create a centralized app view of the different types of applications and even the different types of services in your organization, and to be able to understand what’s available.

Common presentation

There are also opportunities for the same types of socialization and sharing of information and knowledge about services using the app store concept, as there is with apps.

The important thing is to take these different types of applications and present them in a common way in the same place, so that it really doesn’t matter whether the app is a web app or it’s a PC app. Users can find them, run them, and share information about them at the same place.

Gardner: Just to be clear, your technology allows for not only ISV-packaged apps, but also custom apps designed for your organization, by your organization. These can now also be brought into this corral more of a common denominator of all sorts of apps. Is that correct?

Swindell: Correct. And those apps can be comprised of a variety of different services, different types of technologies, but they’re presented to the end user in the same way as a Windows app or a Web app.

Gardner: Is there an additional technical benefit here in terms of sometimes what we see with SaaS and multitenancy in that the patching and the security and management of that application can be conducted centrally. Then, each time the user brings it down from the store, for example, he gets a fresh updated version. Is there a lifecycle benefit to how apps are managed as part and parcel with this?

Some applications or some data may be dependent on a particular version of an app or an application. By using apps and AppWave, you can roll back three versions and open that up without having to install it, find it, or anything.



Swindell: It makes it a lot easier for end users, because they don’t have to think about it. When they log into their app store environment, updates are automatic, and it’s also very visible. They can see what’s happening very similar to into a mobile device. You always know when there are updates available because you get an icon that tells you how many updates are available.

There's an additional benefit, especially with software modularization and compatibility between different versions, that AppWave can provide. By compartmentalizing applications, it allows apps to run side-by-side across multiple versions.

So some applications or some data may be dependent on a particular version of an app or an application. By using apps and AppWave, you can roll back three versions and open that up without having to install it, find it, or anything. So the isolation and the idea of apps can really help in that regard.

Gardner: Richard Copland, as someone who is out there hunting down innovations that they can bring to their user organization and their clients, was there anything about AppWave or app stores in general for enterprise use that was interesting and attractive to you that we perhaps haven’t hit on yet?

Copland: In AppWave and the Embarcadero team, we have a global innovation venture partner program. They were our recent winner. They went up against competition from around the world. We believe that the app store concept has got so much within it in terms of the user experience, the socialization aspects, and the collaboration aspects of it.

Bridging point

The area which we haven't touched on so much is that it's a bridging point between your legacy systems and your more visionary cloud-type solutions where you really are SaaS, on-demand and pay-per-click.

Gardner: I guess on-demand isn't so much concerned with where the app resides and how it's delivered across the wire, but really with the notion of organizations being able to allow their users to go into a process, find a solution, apply it, and even create new types of innovative work and workflows. It's really about choice, freedom and applicability rapidly, rather than over a long time that is the actual benefit around on-demand.

Copland: The thing that will kill innovation is just operating slowly. One of the biggest blockers that organizations face with regard to innovation is the nature of how that sets out and the speed at which they react to what are their internal ideas.

Swindell: You can look at this as being in a way -- and Dana and Richard you're hinting on that -- a cultural preparation for transition to the cloud, if indeed the cloud is suitable for specific parts of your application portfolio.

Gardner: Michael Swindell, for those organizations that are looking at cloud but are bit nervous and see some risk and lack of governance security control, is there something about app store that makes that bridging effect that Richard was alluding to, but in a way that is more enterprise ready. That is, something that gives command and control in terms of access, privilege, governance and management but also fosters that innovation and freedom.

You can look at this as being a cultural preparation for transition to the cloud, if indeed the cloud is suitable for specific parts of your application portfolio.



Swindell: It certainly is a way of operating that's very attractive, that there's a lot of interest in, and has a lot of obvious benefits. But there's also concern around the areas that you bring up. Having an on-premise private app store that runs within your organization that is on site really addresses a lot of those concerns and uses the cloud simply to deliver new applications and apps from ISVs and from other vendors.

Once they are inside your organization, they're operating within your security and governance environment. So you don't really have to worry about those concerns, but it still delivers a lot of the benefits of the user experience of cloud and the on-demand nature.

Gardner: I know this is going a little bit out further into the future and perhaps into the hypothetical. It sounds as if you can effectively use this app store model and technology and approach like AppWave to be a gateway for your internal PC apps, but that same gateway might then be applicable for all these other services.

But if the gateway app store model works for a class of apps, it might work for all apps. It really could be a governance and management capability well beyond just the ability to package and deliver apps in this fashion. What are your thoughts on that, Michael?

Driven by demand

Swindell: The foundation is there, and I think it will be demand driven by users. Every time we talk to a customer with AppWave, the list of possibilities and where customers want to use and take the environment is exciting, and the list continues to grow on how they can use it in the long-term.

So we're building facilities today to connect the private AppWaves into our cloud infrastructure, so that we can deliver certainly apps but there could be other types of services that connect into that as well.

Gardner: Okay, and just to be clear. AppWave is available now. I believe we have a 30-day free trial, is that correct?

Swindell: Yes, there is a free trial, and we also offer free version of AppWave that organizations can download and use today with free apps. There's an entire catalog of free apps that are included and are streamed down from our cloud.

So you can get set up and started with AppWave, using free apps in your organization. What can be added then is your own internal custom apps or commercial licenses that organizations have. So if you've hundreds of commercial licenses, you can add those in or add your own internally developed apps.

Once they are inside your organization, they're operating within your security and governance environment. So you don't really have to worry about those concerns.



Gardner: Very good, and where would one go to find out more about this?

Swindell: You can go to www.embarcadero.com/appwave and try it for free.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we're out of time. You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity and speed-to-value benefits for PC users and IT departments of like. I’d like to thank our guests: Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at Ovum. Thank you so much, Tony.

Baer: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We've also been here with Michael Swindell, Senior Vice President of Products and Marketing for Embarcadero Technologies. Thank you, Michael.

Swindell: Thanks, Dana. It was a pleasure.

Gardner: And Richard Copland, Principal Innovation Consultant at Logica. Thanks so much, Richard.

Copland: Cheers, Dana. Cheers, guys.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. As always, thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Embarcadero.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the growing importance of enterprise app stores in moving organizations to a self-service model that reduces both complexity and delays in getting applications to end users. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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