This blog post is a lightly edited reproduction of a series of tweets I wrote recently
- This tweetstorm is a mini history of enterprise middleware. It argues that the problems we solved for firms 10-20 years ago are ones we can now solve for markets today. This blog post elaborates on a worked example with @Cordablockchain (1/29)
- I sometimes take perverse pleasure in annoying my colleagues by using analogies from ancient enterprise software segments to explain what’s going on with enterprise blockchains today… But why should they be the only ones that suffer? Now you can too! (2/29)
- Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, people began to notice that big companies in the world had a problem: they’d built or installed dozens or hundreds of applications on which they ran their businesses… and none of these systems talked to each other properly… (3/29)
- IT systems in firms back then were all out of sync… armies of people were re-keying information left, right and centre. A total mess and colossal expense (4/29)
- The solution to this problem began modestly, with products like Tibco Rendezvous and IBM MQSeries. This was software that sat in the _middle_ connecting applications to each other… if something interesting happened in one application it would be forwarded to the other one (5/29)
- Tibco Rendezvous and IBM MQSeries were like “email for machines”. No more rekeying. A new industry began to take shape: “enterprise middleware”. It may seem quaint now but in the early 2000s, this industry was HOT. (6/29)
- But sometimes the formats of data in systems were different. So you needed to transform it. Or you had to use some intelligence to figure out where to route any particular piece of data. Enterprise Application Integration was born: message routing and transformation. (7/29)
- Fast forward a few years and we had “Enterprise Service Buses” (ESBs – the new name for EAI) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Now, OK… SOA was a dead end and part of the reason middleware has a bad name today in some quarters. (8/29)
- But thanks to Tibco, IBM, CrossWorlds, Mercator, SeeBeyond and literally dozens of other firms, middleware was transforming the efficiency of pretty much every big firm on the planet. “Middleware” gets a bad name today but the impact of ESB/EAI/MQ technologies was profound (9/29)
- Some vendors then took it even further and realised that what all these parcels of data flying around represented were steps in _business processes_. And these business processes invariably included steps performed by systems _and_ people. (10/29)
- The worlds of management consulting (“business process re-engineering”) and enterprise software began to converge and a new segment took shape: Business Process Management. (11/29)
- The management consultants helped clients figure out where the inefficiencies in their processes were, and the technologists provided the software to automate them away. (12/29)
- In other words, BPM was just fancy-speak for “figure out all the routine things that happen in the firm, automate those that can be automated, make sure the information flows where it should, when it should, and put some monitoring and management around the humans” (13/29)
- Unfortunately, Business Process Management was often oversold – the tech was mostly just not up to it at that point – and its reputation is still somewhat tarnished (another reason “middleware” is a dirty word!) (14/29)
- But, even given these mis-steps, the arc of progress from “systems that can barely talk to each other” to “systems and people that are orchestrated to achieve an optimised business outcome” was truly astounding. (15/29)
- Anyway… the point is: this was mostly happening at the _level of the firm_. The effect of the enterprise middleware revolution was to help individual firms optimise the hell out of themselves. (16/29)
- But few back then even thought about the markets in which those firms operated. How could we have? None of the software was designed to do anything other than join together systems deployed in the same IT estate. (17/29)
- So now let’s fast forward to today. Firms are at the end of their middleware-focused optimisation journeys and are embarking on the next, as they migrate to the cloud. But the question of inefficiencies between firms remains open. (18/29)
- Take the most trivial example in payments: “I just wired you the funds; did you get them?”… “No… I can’t see them. Which account did you send them to? Which reference did you use? Can you ask your bank to chase?” (19/29)
- How can we be almost a fifth of the way through the 21st century and lost payments are still a daily occurrence? How can it be that if you and I agree that I owe you some money, we can still get into such a mess when I actually try to pay you? (20/29)
- As I argue in this post, the problems we solved for firms over the last two decades within their four walls are precisely the ones that are still making inter-firm business so inefficient (21/29)
- What stopped us solving this 20 years ago with the emerging “B2B” tech? Easy inter-firm routing b/w legal entities (the internet was scary…), broad availability of crypto techniques to protect data, orchestration of workflows between firms without central controller etc (22/29)
- But we also hadn’t yet realised: it’s not enough merely to move data. You need to agree how it will be processed and what it means. This was a Bitcoin insight applied to the enterprise and my colleague @jwgcarlyle drew this seminal diagram that captures it so well. (23/29)
- And my point is that the journey individual firms went on: messaging… integration… orchestration… process optimisation – is now a journey that entire markets can go on. The problems we couldn’t solve back then are ones we now can solve. (24/29)
- What has changed? Lazy answer: “enterprise blockchain”… lazy because not all ent blockchains are designed for same thing, plus the enabling tech and environment (maturation of crypto techniques, consensus algorithms, emergence of industry consortia, etc) is not all new (25/29)
- But the explosion of interest in blockchain technology was a catalyst and made us realise that maybe we could move to common data processing and not just data sharing at the level of markets and, in so doing, utterly transform them for the better. (26/29)
- In my blog post I make this idea concrete by talking about something called the Corda Settler. In truth, it is an early – and modest – example of this… a small business process optimisation (27/29)
- The Corda Settler optimisation is simple: move from asking a payee to confirm receipt once sent and instead pre-commit before the payment is even made what proof will convince them it was done, all enabled through secure inter-legal-entity-level communication and workflow (28/29)
- But the Settler is also profound… because it’s a sign the touchpaper has truly been lit on the next middleware revolution… but this time focused on entire markets, not just individual firms (29/29)
Richard Gendal Brown 
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