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Bowstreet Portsmouth Serfass, Jack  USA

Jack Serfass

Co-Chairman and Co-Founder

Bowstreet

One Harbour Place Portsmouth (New Hampshire)  USA (03801) Web site:http://www.bowstreet.com

Biography

Jack Serfass, Co-Chairman and Co-Founder, co-founded Bowstreet in 1998. He is responsible for the company's long-term strategic direction, including exploring new markets, applications and business models for the company's products. Jack was previously CEO and President of Preferred Systems, Inc. (PSI). He founded PSI when he was 27 to develop leading-edge networking software for Windows NT and Novell NetWare. Prior to PSI, Jack led a group that managed the networking strategy, implementation and support for a $100 million health care company, Preferred Health Care, Ltd. He earned a bachelor's degree in Management Information Systems from the University of Rhode Island.

Introduction

For as long as computing has been around, change has been the enemy. "Eliminate change, reduce variability, and we can capture it in software," says the IT professional. But increasingly, this is not acceptable to a world where change is predominant.

Users expect content and operations to be customized to their changing needs. Business managers expect to easily streamline operations and tighten relationships with partners and customers across boundaries of technology, culture and corporations. And everyone expects systems to adapt intelligently and automatically to new people, products, pricing models and even business models.

To look at this from a more technical standpoint, a solution that meets today's needs must have five features, which are difficult with standard approaches. They need to be distributed or location-independent, dynamically assembled, sensitive to change, loosely coupled and massively customizable. Let's look at each of these in more detail.

Details of the Solution

To meet the need for cross-boundary operations, the new approach must work across different businesses. Users and operations must be able to easily locate and work with each other, regardless of where they are located. And, security issues such as rights and authorization must be easily managed at a granular level. By definition, this requires cooperation among businesses, but realistically the only way to achieve cross-company processing is to establish a standard way of communicating.

To meet the expectation that operations can be customized and can adapt in real-time, the system needs to be assembled dynamically at run-time. This breaks the mold of today's hard-coded applications, to create a totally responsive system that is assembled not by programmers in the development phase, but at run-time initiated by users and based on their profiles.

To further meet the goal of responsiveness, the system needs to be sensitive to change- and easily absorb it. So for example, business managers ought to be able to implement most of the day-to-day changes, such as adding new users or changing a pricing model. And ideally many changes ought to be responded to automatically. For instance, if a manager changes a price, the system should automatically reflect that change for all appropriate users.

To be able to integrate a variety of data and processes at run-time, the system needs to be loosely coupled. The system should be able to use the appropriate business process based on demand, without explicitly detailing those processes. Thus, code representing processes needs to be distinct and only loosely integrated into the whole, thereby enabling them to be connected at run-time.

mass customization

To handle the requirements of systems with large numbers of different classes of users, the system must support mass customization . End-users have different requirements for information and business processes. To support these differing needs, the system must have a solution for scaling customization - of both content and processes - to large numbers of distinct users.

Web Automation

Automation  Web Services

How do we meet all these goals and expectations? By combining XML and directory services into a new approach to deploying software we call Web Automation . This system uses XML-based components to represent everything - from data and documents to actual business processes and directory services. These components, called "Web Services ," are published in a directory as the basis for central control and security. They are then processed by the Bowstreet Web Automation system to enable unique and different Web sites or applications for different classes of users - dynamically assembled at run-time.

XML Provides Directories Provide Web Services Automation Provides Lingua Franca Platform Methodology Ubiquity Scalability Automatic creation of software Web nativeness Granular Access Dynamic Variability Repurposeability Relocation Independence Loosely coupled processes Meta data Distributed automation Easy change propogation

XML

For this conference, we will assume a high-level of understanding of the value that XML plays in such a system. As a syntax that standardizes how task-focused information is shared across the Internet, it is widely considered to be the core language for the future of e-business. XML provides for both context and interoperability of data, thereby enabling dynamic activities. Also, since XML is self-describing, specific XML-based applications can interact with each other without special programming to integrate them.

Directory Services

Directory Services

Directory services provide an optimal way of naming, describing and finding information and resources while managing the relationship between the resources. Typically, directory services software stores and manages access to detailed information about a company's IT assets, including people and business processes and resources - for internal use. But we believe that directory services software is also the best way to store this type of information for expanding e-business or e-commerce purposes. Since directory services software offers high levels of security, location independence, granular access and easy replication, and combined with the advantages of XML, it is a powerful enabler of the Bowstreet system.

Directory services software is a mature, time-tested technology that's been in use in client/server environments for several years. So, many customers already have directories that can be extended to manage applications over extranets. All the leading directory service vendors - including Novell, IBM and Microsoft - are working on solutions that extend directories to e-business.

Web Services Automation

Web Services

By themselves, XML and directory services do not contain enough functionality to create the entire system that we are discussing. To complete the picture, Bowstreet's Web Services Automation engine uses a technology called Builders. Builders act as teams of programmers, automatically building the code required at run-time to use a service and create the application behavior and appearance. Based on variable parameters, a Builder automates the construction of the code that represents a specific run-time application.

From the developer and business manager perspectives, Builders are broken into two separate functions. The Automator is used by technical staff to create the elements from which the Builder will operate. It leverages best practices, speeds deployment, reduces errors and QA and eliminates learning curves. The Customizor, meanwhile, enables business people to roll out extranets in real-time based on changing needs. Putting the customization function in the hands of business people makes change so easy to absorb that it's almost free.

The building blocks in the Bowstreet Web Automation system are called Web Services. XML-based descriptions of processes and data that are accessible through HTTP, Web Services enable completely new business models to flow easily from existing business processes. For example, new pricing, revenue and distribution models can be swapped in quickly and easily. With this approach, it becomes easy to embed one Web site across multiple other Web sites, aggregate multiple other sites into one site or syndicate business services to affiliates.

Conclusion

By intelligently combining two powerful technologies into a revolutionary system, Bowstreet has captured and automated the development process for generating Web applications on the fly. The system accommodates a high degree of variability and cross-company connectivity, enabling customers to quickly and easily customize and change those applications on a massive scale.

With the Bowstreet system, companies can publish and operate customized Web sites for everyone they do business with. They can embed pieces of their site into partners' sites or internal systems - or embed partner sites into their own systems. They can enable their customers to give themselves the level of service they desire by giving them control. Most importantly, the Bowstreet system gives companies an infrastructure that pays for itself quickly and continues to add value over time as change - whether in technology or in business - continue to dominate in the future.

Combining and Querying XML Data with XQL		Table of contents		Indexes		Creating the XML Content to Drive the Web