10 Trends – with Muse in the Middle

Today's eWeek online version, 2012-02-20, contains a story, Cloud Computing and Data Integration: 10 Trends to Watch, within its "Cloud" section seemingly written around the capabilities of Muse. Or, perhaps MuseGlobal has been developing capabilities within its flagship software platform which fit the "waves of the future" now starting to break on the shore of today's business needs.

The story is one of the familiar 10 slide shows in which they distill the wisdom of their in-house experts and those of external tech watchers – in this case some Gartner – and an interested developer, to gaze into a particular tech crystal ball. This one is focused on business needs and the cloud. In their own words:

Increasingly, large organizations are discovering and using enterprise information with the objective of growing or transforming their business as they seek more holistic approaches to their data integration and data management practices. This is all in an effort to address the challenges associated with the growing volume, variety, velocity and complexity of information. ... intensifying expectations for cloud data integration and data management as a part of a company's information infrastructure. ... to enable a more agile, quicker and more cost-effective response to business needs. ...eWEEK spoke to Robert Fox, of Liaison Technologies.

So what are the trends (details in the eWeek article)? And how does Muse fit in those trends?

EAI in the Cloud

Muse provides a cloud based service enabling standards based systems and those with proprietary messaging protocols to communicate with each other. This is a hub-and-spoke architecture, so once an application has its Connector written, it can communicate with ALL the other applications working with that Muse hub.

B2C Will Drive B2B Agility

Not so obvious here, but Muse has Connectors for access to the major, and quite a few minor, social platforms, so including their information and practices in the B2B world should be that much easier.

Data as a Service in the Cloud

Where service providers gather information and data from disparate sources, merge it, de-dupe it, cleanse it, and hand it on the service user, Muse is an obvious platform with all of these capabilities baked in from the first batch. Increasing numbers of data providers and the rise of the data brokers, means Muse has a niche as the functional platform for these new providers.

Integration Platform as a Service

"Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) allows companies to create data transformation and translation in the cloud ..." I couldn't have put it closer to the core of what Muse does, if I had said it myself!

Master Data Management in the Cloud

Aggregation, de-duplication, transformation, normalization, conformance to standards (local and International), consistency, identification of differences, enrichment, delivery – this could again be a description of a Muse harvesting service. Right here when needed.

Data Governance in the Cloud

Not directly a Muse function, but its transaction and processing logs make provenance and quality of data easier to report on and find the areas of weakness.

Data Security in the Cloud

Secure communications, a sophisticated range of authentication options, encryption when needed, and NO intermediate storage of the data means that Muse as a transaction service is not the weak security link in the chain.

Business Process Modeling in the Cloud

Not a core strength of Muse – can't win them all. But complex data manipulation processes can be handled through scripting within Muse. Connection to and from external service platforms means that they can be allowed to control the modeling and allow Muse to deal with the data.

Business Activity Monitoring in the Cloud

Tie Muse's aggregation and data cleansing to a link with your favorite BI service and monitoring became rather easier. Because Muse links to systems, it will work with virtually any BI system and place the raw data and analyses wherever they are needed for review.

Cloud Services Brokerage

If this sounds like your business (or one you want to get into), then a look at the Muse platform could save a lot of time and effort to get a superior service up and running. As the technology behind a CSB it takes some beating!

So how did Muse do? Seven right on the money and three near misses seems like a pretty high score to us.

WTD about TMI?

TMI - Too Much Information, Too Much Content, Too Much Data - are all here to stay with us. There will be more of everything that we will pull and more of everything that will be pushed to us.

On my BART ride last week (yes - very green of me), I read an interesting article (http://bit.ly/cHG21g) in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine on RIM CEOs failing to communicate their vision/strategy to the market. 99.9% of all the CEOs in the world will come out 2nd best when compared with Steve Jobs, but there was a particular comment made by Jim Balsille (RIM Co-CEO) that made me realize that RIM's market share and mind share in smartphones could erode faster than Motorola's or Nokia's:

Balsille thinks the world is wrong about apps. Many are just
glorified bookmarks, he argues, that aren't necessary if you can connect
customers to the Web.

Apple has 250,000 apps because most of them are serving a critical need of presenting content in a form that can be consumed very easily - especially on a mobile device. Yes - you can browse the web and search for whatever you need - but that does not help the TMI syndrome. If anything it exacerbates it. The apps are making it easy for iPhone, iPad or Android users to filter and consume the content available all over the Web. Even Google has embraced the app paradigm - even though "googling" for content is good for Google's ad revenues.

Gus Hunt, CTO for CIA, who is building a "peta" scale infrastructure to handle the data and computing requirements said at Cloud Expo last week that he wants any data to be used by any application. He does not want to invest in building applications that are dependent on a particular data set or a particular data set being created for a specific application. The days of consolidating all the data into a single repository are long gone and never coming back.

Question is What To Do about TMI?

First - Leverage technology that can reference data from any source in any format. It isn't feasible to try and standardize the legacy content repositories. Data will stay federated, so your content integration strategy should account for it as well. Speed and agility in accessing new content sources is a competitive advantage for today's businesses.

Second - Ensure that data cleansing can be automated. This will allow you to work with incomplete or partial data - especially when working with a large number of data sources.

Third - Focus on normalizing the aggregated data, so that the consuming applications can work independent of data sources. This will allow you to serve content to a variety of consuming applications and end devices - especially the constrained mobile devices that need additional filtering or formatting. This will also allow the content creators to focus on creating content and not to worry about the device/platform battles that are being waged on the other side of the value chain.

More to come on the innovation in these areas.....