Bill Coleman (pictured) is founder and CEO of Cassatt Corp. Prior to that, he co-founded BEA Systems, and also served as Vice President of System Software at Sun Microsystems. He will be keynoting SYS-CON’s Web Services Edge Conference and Exhibition at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York in June.

Bill was interviewed recently by SYS-CON West Coast Bureau Chief Roger Strukhoff.

Strukhoff: You’re going to present the first keynote speech, Monday morning, June 5, at the SOA Web Services Events Conference and Exhibition. As I understand it, you’re going to talk about software isn’t “IT,” meaning IT. Software isn’t IT anymore. Is that correct and what does it mean?

View Bill Coleman's SYS-CON.TV Interview with Roger Strukhoff

Coleman: Well, that’s right. It was meant to be a little facetious with the title, obviously, but we have just lived through, in my lifetime, an era when software was it, software was IT, everything was hard-coded, procedural. You built custom applications, you spent a long time putting them into place. They were unchangeable and, obviously, by the time you got them in place they were out of date.

I believe that we have three disrupters to the model of software that will totally transform that in the next decade, for sure. The base is service-oriented architecture, of course, which is part of the theme of this conference, but service-oriented architecture, its value is it’s service-oriented. It is not a procedural application; it’s a different architecture. It means that software is no longer developed as large applications, but it’s tied together by establishing the events and workflow that the customers need to run their business. The key is these are all loosely coupled and there’s where the opportunity for changing the software model is.

Strukhoff: SOA has been disrupting things for a couple of years, at least.

Coleman: SOA has been around conceptually since the bust. It’s now just beginning to get legs. I’m happy to see that my old company, BEA, is capitalizing on that and starting to get some good momentum again. But it’s been mostly, to date, not quite developed as full-process workflow. Several different applications would be built on Web application servers and tied together in semi-custom and non-heterogeneous ways.

And now we’re getting far enough along so that with some of the workflow issues—using open technology based on Web services—the choreography is starting to get a little better. This allows anybody to play, and allows the applications to begin to (evolve) into services.

The next issue is the “good enough” issue. Basically, applications we use today, whether they are desktop applications for desktop productivity, or doing spreadsheets, word processors on the one hand—or all the way on the other hand to the three major categories of enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, and the supply chain)—are reaching the good-enough stage in which they can be decomposed into their services.
The duplication of having multiple applications instead of a dynamic workflow of loosely coupled services is not only bad from an expense point of view, but it prevents customers from being able to react to their competition, and therefore in the marketplace will become less competitive.

Strukhoff: Right.

Coleman: If those two things happen, I think we’re going to see the generic application industry, as we see, begin to devolve. And, of course, it will be accelerated by open source.