IBM Alphaworks says ADIEU to SaaS
One announcement that slipped under my radar last week while I was traveling was the launch of alphaWorks Services, a new on-demand addition to IBM's research and development website, launched to coincide with alphaWork's tenth birthday (picture courtesy of the alphaWorks website). Two of the three services available at launch are targeted at enabling end users to build their own applications: Ad Hoc Development and Integration tool for End Users (ADIEU) and Web Relational Blocks (WebRB).
I think the wave that alphaWorks is catching here is a different one, albeit enabled by SaaS. It's the trend towards self-service assembly of composite applications. Interestingly, the alphaWorks launch came on the same day as the announcement of WebEx Connect, which targets the same nascent market. In the next few weeks, I think we'll see other announcements in the same field, and the market will start to take shape.
It's still quite immature, though. The most intelligent coverage of the alphaWorks launch is on searchWebServices, which points out that:
"Chris Spencer, emerging technologies strategist at IBM ... was careful to say that 'theoretically' end users could create Web services with ADIEU and you didn't have to be a 'hardcore programmer'. The reason for his caveat is apparent when viewing the online 'Stock Quote Demo' on the alphaWorks site. It is true that it appears to be pretty much a matter of filling in the dialog boxes that are the 'cards' that create the Web service. But if you don't know what Xpath is, or what strings are, it would take some coaching from a programmer to build even a simple three-card Web service ...
"Besides developers, the more likely users for ADIEU will be business analysts who, while they are not hardcore programmers, know the basics of Web services standards and coding."
So it's a case, then, of not so much alphaWorks saying 'hello to SaaS' as, tentatively, 'ADIEU to coding'. Marc Benioff would approve (another example of 'the end of software'), although he would probably argue that Salesforce.com is already forging ahead with saying goodbye to software.