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<< Thursday, September 19, 2002 >> |
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What is integration?
To no-one's surprise, integration is causing much of the pain that Web services can today help to alleviate. For InfoWorld's CTO of the year, Dawn Meyerriecks, the challenge is monumental. "We have 1600 financial apps alone," she said in a morning panel on preserving the value of legacy apps. "Collapsing those by just one order of magnitude in 5 years is a modest goal." Particularly when, in some cases, source code can't even be found.
We've heard it all before, of course. But Web services changes the game in a couple of ways, says Cape Clear's Annrai O'Toole. Microsoft's arrival on the scene is, in his view, a huge factor. "When Microsoft bolted TCP/IP onto Win95," he said, "they created the Internet." In the same way, he thinks, the now-standard deployment of a SOAP stack in Windows makes widespread integration based on Web services a foregone conclusion. The other key factor is XML data representation which drives the syntactic cost of integration -- the EAI bottleneck -- toward zero. 
O'Toole is much less sanguine, though, about business process integration. He wonders if it's even possible to declaratively describe a business process. "We've all seen the demos where the stick man does a yes/no analysis of the purchase order and hands it to the other stick man," O'Toole joked. "That lasts five minutes, then you throw it away and start coding." He thinks we'll still need to do a lot of scripting to glue things together.
It's a great point. We can, and should, embrace the declarative, data-driven approach to integration wherever possible. But scripting languages will continue to be the ubiquitous duct tape of the Internet.
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Google's Sergey Brin
Google's co-founder Sergey Brin gave last night's second opening talk. Clearly Google was one of the web's preeminent services long before SOAP APIs were slapped onto it. Google climbed a mountain that few others have attempted. At Stanford, from 1995 to 1998, Google was a hodgepodge of boxen using a disk cage made of Duplos. (Actually, an off-brand called MegaBlocks. Advice to entrepeneurs: "I encourage you to find innovative ways to save money, but buy good stuff, get Lego-brand Duplos.") By 1998 Google was fielding 10,000 queries/day on 25 boxes. Today it handles 150 million queries on a multi-datacenter cluster that runs to tens of thousands of computers.
Brin's recipe for scaling is: commodity systems, cleverness, and lots of brute force. The result is not just sub-second response on 150 million queries a day, but -- thanks to the new APIs -- a highly-available set of programmatic services. Brin showed, for example, how a Visual Basic application can incorporate Google's spell-checking by tapping into the SOAP API.
Even though Google has 100 Ph.D.s working the problem, Brin thinks that truly intelligent search remains an elusive goal. In the Q and A, when asked about RDF and the Semantic Web, he offered a "possibly unpopular" view. "Look, putting angle brackets around things is not a technology, by itself. I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand." When I asked about an experiment with topic-sensitive PageRank, Brin pointed out that the kinds of ambiguous queries this approach can resolve -- for example, the difference between "blues" the musical sense versus the mental health sense -- are in practice rare, and easily resolved by the user with follow-on querying.
What's next? Brin wants to tackle big problems in health, materials, transportation. The company is working on a system to simulate molecular dynamics. For a simple protein, this proceeds at the rate of one nanosecond of simulation per CPU per day -- three CPU years to crank a millisecond of simulation. As these new computational peaks come into view, it's a given that scaling them won't be a solo effort. Leaders like Google know they'll need to leave a trail of services for others to follow.
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Storytelling, rich media, and web services
MSNBC's Forrest Sawyer kicked off InfoWorld's NextGen conference with a sweeping survey of evolutionary, cultural, and technological history in the manner of James Burke. Speaking as a communicator, not a technologist, Sawyer recounted the many ways in which technologists have missed the point: communication is not a problem to be solved, it's what makes us human, and the most essential human act is telling a story.
Sawyer's story began with Charles Darwin, touched on T.H. Huxley and Raymond Dart, and paused to consider the situation circa 6 million years BC: a handful of different species of upright apes.  They moved out of Africa in three waves. First 1.75 million years ago, then again a million years ago, and finally 50,000 years ago -- a mere tick of the geological clock -- early humans migrated to Europe and Africa. The last and most recent event was the world-changer that established modern humanity. What was different? Speech, language, storytelling: the ability to transmit memes.
Fast forward to Samuel Morse (What hath God wrought!), then Marconi who "fought the last battle" pushing wireless versus wired telegraphy, point-to-point, never imagining the role that broadcast would play. At least Marconi made money, unlike poor Philo Farnsworth. "Here you are: electronic television," Sawyer imagined the hapless inventor saying to the world. "Well, he was only 21," Sawyer quipped, "and he never made a nickel from it."
As we continue to fight the last battle, using the web to pass around facsimiles of documents, Sawyer reminds us that "rich media is the next step in the evolutionary path of enterprise communications." (Jeremy Allaire violently agrees.) The B2B market, Sawyer says, is "effectively 100% broadband today." By 2006, he predicts that "80% of the global 2000 will deploy corporate apps that require streaming video to the desktop."
Once we surmount the technical obstacles, the real challenge arises. How do businesses make using rich media as easy and natural as email? How do we all learn to tell stories that people don't just read, but see and hear? "Not a soul in this room will figure out all the ways," Sawyer said, "because we're fighting the last battle." What's the next one? A planetary experiment in shared consciousness: Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere.
Heady stuff! It might seem an odd way to kick off a conference on applications of Web services. But, of course, he's right.
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