Barrys and my invention, and the specific implementation of that invention, is so new and abstract, that it is a real challenge to bring the software to market.  As John Walker, inventor of AutoCAD has said, we need to find lunatic early adopters to try the software out and evolve quickly from there.

 

As discussed earlier, our software world is incredibly complex and highly abstract, so much so, it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to describe our invention to business people and even to technical people in our own specific area of our industry.  Why is that?  There have been many reasons given over the last several posts, but it comes down to our invention is ahead of its time.  I believe this is an inherent characteristic of any invention, because an invention is just that, it is brand new and requires people to think in ways that they never have thought of before.  What makes our invention even harder to understand is that it works in the virtual world of software which is already a complete mystery to most people.

 

Think of it this way, we invented a standard way to design (i.e. draw and define) application integrations of any size and complexity.  The resulting output definition can be read by other drawing tools and therefore can be reused to replicate or use as a template for other companies application integrations that have similar business scenarios.  In other words, the drawings form a library of business process integrations that can be reused by anyone, much like the way AutoCAD has a library of pre-built designs that can also be leveraged by anyone. This, in my mind, is advancing the industrialization of software.

 

We also invented an intelligent messaging definition that can be used by any middleware engine, in our case we are using BizTalks middleware engine.  However, our intelligent message is a complete abstraction away from any middleware engine implementation.  This means that other middleware engines can use the same standard file definition for business process execution.

 

And thats the key to our invention, much like AutoCADs invention of the DXF universal file format which "is probably one of the most widely supported vector formats in the world today".  We have invented design-time and run-time XML schema definitions that any drawing tool (design time) and middleware engine (run-time) can use as both definitions contain everything required to define and execute any business process integration scenario totally independent of programming languages, operating systems, middleware engines or any implementation details whatsoever.  In my opinion, this is raising the level of abstraction to a new level our software development world has not yet seen.  You heard it here first

 

How would other middleware engine manufacturers use our invention?  For example, Sun acquired SeeBeyond, which is a middleware engine, therefore Sun could use our invention to not only automate the design and code generation of application integrations for SeeBeyond, but also, and more importantly, build a library of reusable business process integrations for their entire application suite of software products.

 

Microsoft Indigo is another middleware engine that could benefit from our invention.  Microsoft could use BRIDGEWERX as part of their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy.  SOA is the latest TLA in our industry. 

 

You would think with the amount of words written in these posts that this was turning into a book.  It is!  I decided in January of this year to write a book titled, The Industrialization of Software (shameless plug) to help educate people (and inventors alike) about our strange software world and even more bizarre business world of software.  It chronicles my 4 years as President of 5by5Software and details most of the topics you have read over the last several posts that Shane Schick has been kind enough to post on ITBusiness.ca

 

As I see it, we are in a software revolution where the last 4 years of IT has been the worst in the history of our industry.  Businesses have revolted against the software world largely because of our abysmal track record of delivering quality software.  Now the general public (with AntiSpyware, SPAM, etc.) have entered the fray.  For those of you that use software in your daily life, you have the power to make (demand!) the necessary changes in our software industry to bring us out of the dark ages and force us into the industrialization of software.