Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...: So what gifts will I receive from the blogosphere this year?

So what gifts will I receive from the blogosphere this year?

I have been a good blogger this year and have not missed a single day sharing my thoughts. Hopefully I will be showered with gifts...

Here are some gift ideas in case you haven't figured out what I would like:

Open Source Analysis: Imagine if the blogosphere could collectively convince Gartner and Forrester of the merits of listing non-commercial open source projects in their respective Magic Quadrants and Waves right next to commercial proprietary closed-source vendor offerings. If the comparison focused more on products than vendors then open source has a fighting chance of actually being shown in a fair light. Enterprises need solutions to the business problems regardless of whether it is from a commercial vendor or not. Please help us be successful by not censoring and filtering out alternatives. I hope that Charlene Li and Tom Austin will not only assist the blogosphere in this goal, they will do so publicly from their own blogs

Cardspace: Microsoft will come to realize that folks in the Java community are second-class citizens in terms of their intellectual capability and realize that we are not capable of incorporating CardSpace into our applications and need their assistance. Kim Cameron and team will personally champion getting other Microsoft employees to contribute to Liferay Enterprise Portal as the official Microsoft-endorsed Java reference implementation

Ruby on Rails: While I have done a great job of torquing this community, hopefully one or two members will understand the notion of tough love and instead of being pissed will actually devote some brainpower into solving for many of the issues I raised. Within the marketplace, we all know that perception is reality. Change perceptions and you will then change realities...

Identity Management: Mark Dixon and Pat Patterson will further increase the integrity of their blog entries by not just talking about the problem space of identity management and how they can help but also talk about what identity management doesn't include. For example, if you are a new employee to an enterprise and need access to a myriad of enterprise applications can the current solutions provision a credential into each and every system you need access to? The answer is yes. Can these same tools effectively provision a credential so that you are up and running? The answer changes because to be effective at provisioning the conversation has to go way beyond identity and workflow and into entitlements and role engineering. Hopefully they can devote several blog entries in 2007 to these two critical topic areas

Infoworld: Hopefully, I can convince Jon Udell to tell the story of large enterprises whose primary business model isn't technology but yet how they also contribute to open source. I am sure that he is familiar with Aviva Canada and how they contributed their in-house ESB to the JBoss organization or how Duke Energy contributed a wonderful .NET framework or how folks over at Merrill Lynch are contributing to a new Message Queue and the list goes on. Jon is probably the only one with enough integrity to talk about this space as the industry analysts for the most part are owned by software vendors.

Smalltalk: I think it has the potential to make a comeback which is highly dependent upon members of this community pulling out all stops to win over the hearts and minds of large software vendors and even large enterprise customers. Will they feel it is worth the effort or simply not bother as more folks embrace Java?

SOA: Enterprises will stop doing SOA as they will finally realize that all the vendor hype is leading them to a worse place. They will finally acknowledge that they need to master enterprise architecture before attempting SOA. They will also stop buying ESB products that don't support industry standards such as BPEL, XACML and SAML regardless of how analysts declare them to be in the leaders spot.

Industry Analysts: Hopefully, I can see the likes of Redmonk, ZapThink, Nemertes, Elemental Links, The 451 Group and CBDI Forum all merge! Hopefully they understand that large enterprises already have hundreds of vendors with many of us having well into the thousands and that one problem space us enterprisey folk struggle with is in the reduction of the amount of vendors we do business with. Going to the table and asking for one analyst firm that provides a unique value proposition is possible, but asking for seven simply will not happen. Even if you don't merge due to conflicting models or even philosophies, you should at least figure out a way collectively for a large enterprise from a procurement standpoint to look like one. If you don't spend time on this, I will understand. After all, it is sometimes comfortable and familiar to be owned by software vendors than to do real work...