From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0

As a result, we’ve seen companies like Google, Skype, Booking.com, Apple, eBay and others surge ahead with unprecedented levels of growth. These companies have greatly expanded their market size by using the Internet to enable customers to come to them from anywhere in the world. It makes sense. Why not have as big a market to draw upon as you can? Making your applications broadly available on the Internet is a good strategy for companies that want to capture a large portion of the consumer market.

So the question is: how can these techniques be applied to corporate Enterprise IT systems? Today, there are thousands of leading Enterprise IT organizations leveraging the same underlying technologies as consumer Internet companies in order to scale their own businesses for growth. In this article, we’ll highlight some of the drivers and the challenges behind the convergence between Web and Enterprise technologies.

What makes web applications successful?

First, let’s take a look at the reasons for the appeal of Web-based applications to consumers. The benefits come in three areas:

• Ease of access
• Simplicity
  
• Scale

By ease of access, I mean that the applications can be accessed literally from anywhere in the world. All it takes is a computer with a web browser and you can connect to applications as diverse as Wikipedia or shopping sites like neckermann.de. And in many cases, these sites can be accessed easily from the latest generation of Smart Phones from Nokia, Apple, RIM and Palm. Currently there are over 1 billion users accessing the Internet via computers but 3 billion people with mobile phones. In the next few years, I expect that many consumers will use Smart Phones to access web-based applications, further increasing the appeal of the Web as the dominant computing platform. For most new computer users, the Internet, rather than a particular operating system, will define computer applications.

Part of what makes Web-based applications popular with consumers is that they are so simple to use. There’s no desktop software to install, no drivers to configure, no updates to worry about. In effect, all of the complexity of configuring the software, managing the servers and updating is done on the server, rather than on the client PC or smart phone.

This makes the computing experience seamless and transparent for users. They are fully shielded from the complexity of the systems they use. When someone uses a site like eBay or Gumtree, they don’t have to worry about whether the server is working properly, whether the database is configured properly, or whether they have the right application server installed. Instead, it just works. Of course, the downside is that consumer expectations are very high. Everyone assumes that these Web sites are always on 24x7 every day of the year. And so if there is a problem with application availability, the repercussions are high. If a company like Yahoo or eBay experiences downtime, it is front page news and can negatively impact a company’s revenues and share price.

In the online world, many of the largest and fastest-growing organizations and sites are using a new computing architecture to cost-effectively ‘Scale-Out’ their successful businesses – achieving very significant savings over high-cost, proprietary technology. Scale-Out enables enterprises to improve application performance and scalability on an incremental, as-needed basis by adding multiple replicated database servers on low-cost commodity hardware. This is in contrast to a Scale-Up approach, which requires organizations to make a large up-front investment in more expensive and complex server hardware and database licenses in order to add capacity.

Because Web-based applications shield users from the complexity of the underlying systems, users benefit from Scale-out in ways that are subtle, yet powerful. Resellers can deal with vastly larger inventories, social networks can connect millions of individuals, and information can be aggregated and searched worldwide. Search sites such as Google are powerful to users because of their large scale. To the users, web applications “just work.” Of course, consumers who have experience with their corporate IT systems know that’s not always the case. But likely many users wonder why large scale systems seem to operate reliably 24x7 when their own internal systems suffer from occasional outages or poor performance.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

The gap between the consumer Web experience and the corporate IT experience has caused many IT organizations to consider using on-demand or “software as a service” platforms for their next generation of IT applications. There has been a significant increase in adoption of SaaS in the last few years. Many applications that were previously considered as requiring “on premise” installation are now being adopted as “on demand” Web-based solutions. This includes systems for order processing, credit-card validation, ecommerce, customer service, customer relationship management, human resources planning, materials planning and more.

These Web-based enterprise applications exploit the same underlying infrastructure that has made Internet applications scalable and highly available. These applications typically leverage the same open source software as the large Web sites and for the most part run the ubiquitous LAMP stack software (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) as well as Java, Ruby on Rails and other recent programming languages. Just as the public consumer Internet Web sites have paved the way for adoption of on-demand IT applications, the same is happening for internally-built applications. Instead of using an expensive proprietary client/server development model, organizations are moving to more modern, lighter-weight, highly scalable solutions built on the LAMP stack.

The advantage of the Web-based infrastructure is that it not only scales better than earlier client/server technologies, but it’s easier to manage (since there’s no client software beyond a Web browser) and by using open source software, the cost and complexity are greatly reduced. And for users, they get the benefit of a “portable” user interface that can run on any device with a browser.

For example, RightNow Technologies provides CRM Software solutions under a Software as a Service delivery model. The company has more than 1,800 customers worldwide including large, well-known companies such as Black & Decker, Electronic Arts, Nikon and British Airways. To ensure high levels of scalability, reliability, security and high-performance, RightNow chose to build its solution on the LAMP stack. Their scale-out architecture has enabled them to triple their Web traffic and manage:

• 30+TB of data – all stored in MySQL database systems
• 17 billion queries and 500 million page turns per month
• Thousands of database schemas, all from different customers running dynamically-generated SQL, based on customer design

In addition, the MySQL server's low administration benefits allow RightNow to manage more than 200 servers with only four DBAs – a much better ratio than could be achieved using proprietary database technology.

Enterprise infrastructure of tomorrow

In effect, the technologies powering the Web today will be the enterprise infrastructure of tomorrow. IT organizations need to develop experience and skills with this modern Web-based architecture or risk falling further behind.

Open source software, along with the standardization of Internet and related networking layers, is a key component in building modern Enterprise applications.

It is said that the motto of the new online world is "fail fast, scale fast". This means that it must be fast and easy to experiment and figure out whether something new will work or not. Go-to-market time may be even more important than cost savings. Many times the new solution will not work, but when the cost of experimenting is low, there is little downside. And when you hit a winning solution, you need to be able to scale very fast to meet the exponentially growing demand of your corporate customers or consumers. Databases designed for a Scale-out architecture (as opposed to Scale-up) are best for these new needs. The online database must provide instant access, low latency, and high performance. It must be easy to deploy in an experimental setting but it must also scale to the massive use that success will bring.

Leading CIOs are leveraging open source software, including MySQL Enterprise, to develop a scalable infrastructure that lowers their costs, accelerates innovation and makes their organizations more agile. Open source has helped many global IT organizations rapidly develop and deliver new products and services to market more quickly than before. And the results help both the top line revenues as well as bottom line profitability.

Telecom equipment manufacturers like Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks are building their next generation converged services infrastructure with MySQL technology, which they found to be the most appropriate fit in terms of performance, scalability and high-availability, flexibility and TCO.

Another example is the Swedish National Police, who are building all of their new applications on an open source infrastructure, including MySQL Enterprise, on commodity hardware. They project at least 50-percent cost savings over the next five years – and at the same time, are providing greater flexibility to their staff and reducing vendor lock-in.

MySQL Enterprise

The MySQL database is the industry’s most popular open source database – used by the largest of Internet Web sites as well as leading software ISVs and hardware companies, including Adobe, Alcatel-Lucent, Booking.com, eBay, F-Secure, Flickr, FaceBook, Google, Lafarge, New York Times, Nokia Siemens Networks, Reuters, Sage Software, Symantec, Travelocity, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia and millions of others.

While in the past it required advanced technical skills to use open source software, in recent years companies like MySQL, Red Hat, Novell, HP, Sun and IBM have stepped up to provide support for open source – making it a viable alternative for small and medium sized companies as well. Open source software has matured to the point where it does not require advanced programmers to manage it. And because open source software typically has less complexity than older closed source software, managing it in production is usually easier. For instance, a MySQL DBA can typically manage several times the number of database servers as their counterpart responsible for Oracle or DB2, as we’ve noted in the example of RightNow Technologies. Why? Because the MySQL product has a more modular architecture, with fewer complexities and without many of the rarely used features that can lead to configuration problems.

In addition, the MySQL Enterprise subscription offering includes the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, a rule-based system that acts as a “Virtual DBA Assistant” providing automated best practices for managing and monitoring scaled-out systems. For example, MySQL Enterprise Monitor can alert a DBA if there are issues related to performance, security or availability. The MySQL Enterprise Monitor examines several hundred variables in the MySQL server and operating system to alert DBAs of issues before they occur, helping to eliminate down time. MySQL Enterprise enables IT decision makers to benefit from open source while eliminating potential risks in production systems.

Goldman Sachs noted in a research report in 2006 that "the on-going shift to more Web-based applications is unstoppable". MySQL is the only mainstream database that was designed specifically for the online world, to be able to serve millions of online users, on-demand.

It will take no more than 15 minutes for your teams to download the MySQL server software from mysql.com, install it and be up-and-running, just try it out! And if you want to deploy it within your organization, our MySQL Enterprise Unlimited subscription offering enables you to deploy an unlimited numbers of servers for one year for the price of one single CPU of Oracle Enterprise Edition.

Welcome to the modern online world!

For more information about how to build cost-effective Enterprise 2.0 applications, download the free whitepaper “MySQL: The Best Choice for Modern Online Database Applications”.

http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/
white-papers/mysql_wp_online_apps.php

About the author
Zack Urlocker is Executive Vice President of products at MySQL AB, the developer of the world’s most popular open source database. He is a frequent speaker and writer on software technology and disruptive business strategies. His blog is at http://www.theopenforce.com.