Came across an interesting article from Paul Gillin, who does a great job of explaining a very powerful platform – the Serena Mashup Exchange – in a few simple words.

As I look at the amount of automation we have in place around the Mashup Exchange, the systems powering it, and how we’ve been able to “glue” these systems together for real business value and results, technological progress becomes apparent. SaaS is real, and has real benefits, and the move to SaaS represents another evolutionary step in enbracing the power of the web.

I’m currently attending the Metamorphosis 8.0 show in San Jose today, where we’re hearing about Integration generally. This is another crucial ingredient in the evolution of SaaS – and Pervasive seems to have a great story  – 150 integration adapters that can connect to a SaaS system. More on that later.

We’ve been hard at work on the Serena Mashup Exchange, which will go into a live beta April 2nd at MashupExchange.com. If you’re really, really curious, you can see the unpublished alpha here. There are a few major UI tweaks that we’ll roll out in a few days, as well as upload some additional mashups and web services during the beta period.

We’ve also started to get some cred from blogs like Dennis Howlett’s Enterprise Alley at ZDNet, talking about our platform, HiveLive. We chose HiveLive because their SaaS platform is uniquely tailored to our goals – i.e. we want to enable people to interact with each other, and have the data be a scondary considerations – an artifact of their interaction rather than the focus!

It may seem like a nit, but it’s a true difference between their platform and others. Nothing shows this more than when you attempt to set up data types on HiveLive. Several other vendors we examined in this area wanted 30+k in consulting to simply create a new posting type – let’s say a mashup listing data type which has a zip file containing the actual mashup, a few text fields with descriptions, some images, a video etc. – all of which is a “Mashup Listing”. In other systems, the data types are at the center of the application, and are not easily modified, whereas in HiveLive the people are the center, and data types are easily modified around people’s needs.

Simply put, this means a much more relevant system that saves us thousands of dollars and enables much deeper self-serve configuration rather than customization, which is the bane of all implementation efforts.

I am sitting in salesforce.com’s partner conference right now. They just went through some great coverage about where they are working, where the opportunity is for partners, and where salesforce.com intends to build. They were open about what they were doing, and that is a great thing for partners, who want to make safe investments.

They also highlighted some interesting cases where salesforce has sold nearly 40,000 seats to a Japanese firm, but not for the CRM – but rather for the platform!

Which brings up another point: they are redubbing the platform as “the force.”

Good branding. Now if they could only change their ticker

All that ribbing aside,  SaaS is going through an inflection. Business Objects’ Steven Lucas last night at the “after dark” party said that they have reached 50k subscribers, which is a big amount of recent growth. Salesforce’ platform sale is a huge unprecedented event.

So all that makes me more excited than ever about Mashups and the Mashup Exchange.

And if you’re looking for funding, look to Emergence Capital, a 5-year old VC that is tightly focused on SaaS, and is looking to invest in “technology-enabled-service” which includes BPO’s, information services companies, and SaaS.  They are looking for people to build standalone companies, and are asking themselves the question: when will the force platform be ready for people to build on it?

Things are heating up.

Tonight is party night at dreamforce. That means 6, and counting, parties are out there tonight – and I am looking forward to all of them!

This has been an amazing show for mashups – our booth has been very busy, and you get the feeling that people are very interested in what we’re doing and how they can become a part of that.

I’ve had over 200 partner inquiries so far, so the hard part is turning those into real relationships! It will take time, but this level of response is very exciting.

Dreamforce is rumored to have over 7,000 partiicpants, and the buzz is extreme. Now only if they served good coffee!!!

This morning René kicked off a terrific presentation around SaaS and how Serena is going SaaS. He walked through a video around a choice: going SaaS or staying with the traditional model, then walked through several principles behind SaaS:

1. Multitenancy
2. Security
3. Democracy
4. Community

This was one of the best presentations I’ve seen in terms of taking people from being unaware of what SaaS really means to the state where they can understand not only the promise of SaaS, but also how they could get themselves into the business.

This is where things got really interesting: René then talked about the Mashup Exchange: a marketplace for mashups and associated services, which drives value for partners and customers.

Since I am driving the Mashup Exchange, this means a lot to me – so many SaaS companies have stumbled around partners, and I am intent on us getting it right.

That means we learn from the past, and emulate the best attributes we have seen in systems in the past.

Simply put: protect partners’ business for the long run, give them a fair and free marketplace to sell their goods, and provide real value in creating a new opportunity for them.

Jeremy Burton, CEO of Serena software took the stage early today to talk about a revolution in application development.

His presentation started with a discussion around the Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter” by Nick Carr. The basic premise is that IT was so expensive and difficult that much of the last 10 years have been spent implementing systems that bring organizations up to parity with others, and reduce their costs, but really is not a competitive differentiator.

But that is about to change, according to Burton. While it may seem revolutionary, he contends that there’s a new era, driven by the network, that will bring us into a “new golden era of application development.”

He then showed a monty-python-esque video (he is British, after all) focusing initially on the “Ministry of IT.” This was a video of a horrible future with byzantine IT in a wacky black and white world, needing control over everything.

The long-tail came next: the long-tail of application development – that is. Burton talked about facilitating the development of simple applications in the long tail of applications – the apps that are little used and therefore too expensive to build to warrant the effort. He argues that global development, heterogeneous architectures, collaborative development, and lack of information (the slide said “flying blind”) for IT, are the things that will drive the next revolution.

Jeremy then talked about the products that will drive the Revolution: Dimensions & ZMF, TeamTrack, and Mariner. TeamTrack as the glue to provide processes between IT and the business, and Mariner as the management tool to give a professional, slick interface.

Then he introduced ALM 2.0: integrating the whole stack so that we could e.g. route a ticket into a mangement system, report on it at the aggregate level in realtime, in effct integrating Project Portfolio Management (PPM) with all the rest of the stack.
He then turned to the long tail of applications: there are 5 times the number of applications desired than IT’s capacity to build those apps. He argued that even doubling the capacity of IT wouldn’t put a dent in that demand, which led to another video: another Flying Circus: Ministry of the CIO.

Picture a black and white world (not unlike Brazil – the movie). Some ppor guy wants a simple app, but has to go through some horrible beating in order to get a siple app. Luckly the good guys save him from a torturous fate right at the very end.

Then the quotes came: Walt Mossberg: “IT is the most regressive and poisonous force in the technology today,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and reported here. CIO offers additional observation, that IT can get in front of it, or get left behind.

He then turned to Facebook, it’s success, and how people are building apps on facebook. The crazy thing is that after opening the facebook APIs, facebook has 3,878 applications within 3 months. Now these applications are simple ones: so he added the “interactive friend graph” which highlighted his friends.

He then clicked on my interactive friends graph, which highlighted my friends – hah – thanks for the plug Jeremy!

Then came the BFF – my “best female friend” app – and showed how the best female friends app and Google Maps could be “mashed up” to produce a simple application.

That’s when things got really interesting: Burton argued that with Web2.0, this facebook thinking will drive the enterprise to develop similar mashups: the mashup between SalesForce.com and SAP. This leads to (drumroll please. . .)

Serena Mashup Composer: a new tool – “Power to the Mashers”

The premise: Business People can Build apps! SOA has enabled easy access to applications on the back end, and Mashup Composer is the application that can allow the Power User to Build, and Deploy a new application.

So Serena will also enter the SaaS game in a huge way: allowing folks to build and deploy applications.

So he brought up a VP of Engineering, Ali Kheirolomoom, to give the demo – then Jeremy decided to change things up: instead of having the developer do the demo, he stepped in and did it himself!

So Jeremy started building an application: an Office-2007-like GUI and highlighted how a salesforce.com opportunity could be routed for approval to the CFO. More interesting, he demonstrated how you would change that process to add a Dunn & Bradstreet Web Service to add it to the process. This was actually funny – the developer asked the CEO to add the D&B process to the Mashup.

Jeremy added the D&B process within 5 minutes, live! Serena Mashup Composer made it easy so all he really had to do is drag and drop the web service, add a branching the workflow by dragging and dropping, and designate that he only wanted.

Then came the announcements, with a bombshell:

• Mashup Exchange: a marketplace for buying and selling mashups
• Mashup Composer and Server, which will be free for use until you deploy a Mashup and get business value.

That’s right: free until you derive value.

More later – time for some tea now.

I am at Serena’s xChange conference in Chicago right now, and will be doing a liveblog for the next day as I attend sessions. The big news, of course, I can’t share yet, but it won’t be long now

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve seen posts about Serena’s Mashup strategy in the New York times, eWeek, and tons of other places.

But that’s not really funny.

Giving me free reign over a website is pretty funny (funny dangerous, not funny haha). I just finished writing some copy, and me laughing woke up my wife. Now – she didn’t think that was too funny, but I have a feeling my geek humor will resonate with some. You be the judge – keep your eyes peeled for some new things to crop up on the Serena website next week, and tell me if my humor resonates, or rings hollow?