Michael Stamback's Blog

Product: AquaLogic Commerce Services Archives

The Choice: Innovation or Extinction

What is innovation? How do you achieve it? Does it come in a box? Today's market is one of increasing competition, with the spoils going to those who stay ahead of the innovation curve.

What does it take to really be an innovative leader in your market space?  All one needs to do is take a look at history to see that organizations that bring business and IT together to address the core business model tend to thrive, while those that do not open the door to competitors and fade into extinction. 

What do FedEx, Amazon.com, Nucor, and Southwest Airlines have in common? Each of these companies is widely recognized within the industry as having taken steps to combine business with IT, and to leverage that combination to disrupt their respective market spaces with innovative ideas.

FedEx developed technology that not only gets your package to its destination faster, but also tells you exactly where that package is along the way, reducing the potential for loss. The company is so successful that “FedEx” is often used as a verb to describe package delivery in general, regardless of the carrier.

Amazon.com did something similar, developing a new storefront that not only robbed traditional brick-and-mortar book stores of market share, but sparked a revolution in how companies connect with consumers.

Southwest Airlines, one of the few airline companies to avoid bankruptcy, broke ahead in a crowded industry by combining business and IT to create an easy-to-use online reservation system and innovative active email campaigns to promote cheaper flights. 

Steel producer Nucor utilizes an innovative combination of business and IT to keep the company profitable and growing – in a declining industry with multiple casualties.   

Innovation, however, is more than riding a wave. Today, innovation requires the agility to constantly redefine and refine the business, finding new ways to do business that keep the competition in catch-up mode. To accomplish this, you need a technological foundation that supports sustained innovation. BEA AquaLogic platform can provide that foundation.

BEA recently completed the next evolutionary phase of the AquaLogic platform.  When originally launched in 2005, BEA AquaLogic was positioned as service infrastructure for SOA.  Over time, and through the acquisition of Plumtree, Fuego, and Flashline, the AquaLogic platform evolved to address SOA and beyond.

Today, BEA AquaLogic delivers the SOA, BPM, and Enterprise Social Computing capabilities that allow organizations to achieve and sustain true innovation through the creation of next-generation dynamic business applications.

Applications have continuously evolved since the mainframe days to provide more and more value to the business, at increasingly rapid pace. Gone are the days of monolithic applications that are simply packaged and deployed on top of an application server.  SOA brought about a revolution in applications, breaking them into discreet, consumable parts that could be assembled and reassembled to meet new business demands.  On a parallel course with SOA, BPM, social computing, and other trends provide the business with more direct influence over its business systems.  Dynamic business applications are the next generation of applications, the convergence of all these trends.

Dynamic business applications allow business and IT to align in a more efficient, collaborative manner to bring about true agility.  They consist of bite-sized pieces and parts that are assembled in a process that allows easy modification of application behavior through changes to individual parts of the assembly, without having to go through a rigorous IT change control process. 

The prospect of this kind of agility might be a little unnerving to IT, since lack of control over this type of capability can breed chaos, which hinders business agility.  Here too the BEA AquaLogic platform provides a solution. With built-in, comprehensive governance over the entire life cycle of dynamic business applications, BEA AquaLogic can provide IT with the confidence that innovation doesn’t come at the cost of control. By allowing the business to make changes based on business decisions, IT can free itself to focus on more strategic issues. 

Dynamic business applications represent the next wave in business agility.  That agility breeds business innovation, and that innovation allows a business to be a force of change in the marketplace, rather than merely reacting to competitors.  BEA AquaLogic provides the foundation that allows the enterprise to take advantage of dynamic business applications, and to complete and sustain the transformation from spectator to innovator to market disruptor.