Its always nice to see others building on your ideas, so it was cool to see some folks from the SAP Mentor community take up the gauntlet. At RedMonk we like to say developers are the new kingmakers, because of the increasing influence they wield on business innovation, from the bottom up. Of course some are quite skeptical of the idea that developers are influential, often because they see the IT world through the lens of the product purchaser.

In a post today for his SAP Community Network blog Owen Pettiford said (Good SAP Savvy) Developers are the new Kingmakers asks why more people haven’t got the memo about developer innovation yet.

“To answer this we need to look back to see how developers were viewed about 10 years ago. Many organisations took a look at their IT developers (geeks) and decided that IT development was a commodity that could be given to a 3rd party provider and so IT was outsourced across the globe. Most of these outsourced deals focused on driving down the cost of IT (it was viewed as a commodity after all).

What this often also drove out of the deal was any wiggle room for Developer Innovation. 10 years on this means that many organisations and IT outsource providers have all but forgotten how to innovate – SLAs and Margins are king. In effect organisations have thrown out the baby with the bath water.”

As he explains:

“This doesn’t mean that the traditional skills required to configure the SAP business systems are not important it is more that to make your SAP system stand out from the crowd (and do stuff your competion can’t) you need developers to build (hopefully cool) stuff on top of it.”

SAP and JQuery, SAP and in-memory database, SAP and RESTful development, that kind of thing.

The Mentors are a great group of people, which has been explicitly fostered by SAP management to allow for innovation across what Hugh MacLeod calls the porous membrane. The pied piper of the Mentors is a guy called Mark Finnern. Not coincidentally the SAP Mentors are big MacLeod fans.

The Mentor community is run alongside the SAP Blogger community, another strategic initiative led by the redoubtable Mike Prosceno. What does strategic mean? SAP’s Blogger program has a real travel budget and gives you CEO-level access at events. Same for the Mentors, I believe.

It is increasingly obvious the Mentors are the new kingmakers at SAP, they are gatekeepers. If you’re a product manager and you can’t get the Mentors on-board chances are good your product won’t get the management or market attention you’re hoping for. SAP briefs the Mentors, many of whom are software developers, though not exclusively so, under NDA and gets early feedback on what works. This feedback is as often as not in the best form- an application based on the platform in question. The Mentors include customers and SAP employees – and have their own independent culture. They drink the cool-aid, but only to get rid of the taste of jagermeister. Dissent is encouraged: noted curmudgeon Dennis Howlett is a Mentor, and he gets all misty-eyed when he talks about the community. Its also important to stress this is a group steeped in business domain expertise: Its not just nerds, its savvy nerds that have also cut their teeth on business process work. Oh yeah- and they’re all social media savvy. And GREAT fun. the Mentors are a Trusted Adviser Community. Awesome product feedback for the price of a hotel and a flight – that’s a pretty good return.

Other vendors have equivalent programs – IBM has recently started building its own, similar, program called Champions. Microsoft has its Most Valued Professionals.

But the bottom line is SAP has built something world class here. Its not open source, but it is open development. It’s co-innovation. Of course a Mentor program is only one element of a good Developer Relations program, but its a great base to build on.

Developers are the new kingmakers, and the many years and dollars SAP has spent building communities ready for the coronation are likely to pay dividends.

disclosure: SAP, Microsoft and IBM are all clients

The last time I wrote about a World Made of Messages was back in 2010, when SpringSource announced it was to acquire RabbitMQ. A lot has happened in the the meantime- but things are really heating up.

Logmein recently acquired Pachube, and then made the end point to end point real time web message broker free to use this week. Making something free is a great way to lower barriers to participation.

As devices continue to find their way onto the Internet, we want them to be able to take advantage of everything the Web has to offer. We want Pachube users to control their own data, build applications that we would never envision, and share with others as they see fit.

Another way to lower barriers to participation is to open source code, which is what IBM just announced: it has released Java and c versions of its MQTT clients as an Eclipse proposal under the name Paho.

The MQTT specification for machine to machine, message-based comms was already publicly available, but making the code open source is a whole different ballgame; that’s the big news.

IBM contributes plenty of code to projects like the Apache Web Server and Linux. But in many respects I see this latest drop as IBM’s most significant since it open sourced Eclipse ten years ago. Why? Because the Eclipse Public License is designed to support derivative works and embedding, while the Eclipse Foundation can provide the stewardship of same. One of the main reasons Eclipse has been so successful is that rather than separate software from specification it brings them together – in freely available open source code – while still allowing for proprietary extensions which vendors can sell.

Rather than talking about machine to machine, we could just describe MQTT as a protocol for lightweight messaging. As I described it in the RabbitMQ post mentioned above:

“Web developers tend to scoff at transaction management, but messaging has a really broad applicability – particularly in the cloud world. How are we going to deliver cloud interoperability? If you think the answer is Web Standards think again- remember WS-*? Messaging however offers the opportunity to tie disparate systems together with point to point interactions or indeed other integration patterns.”

At this point I should probably explain that I didn’t think IBM was going to make this move. I have pushed them hard internally to do so, but it still caught me by surprise. As I commented in April 2010:

definitely need message oriented middleware [MOM] interop, and the simplicity of more RESTful methods. WMQ may have a role to play in the “other spaces” – but IBM isn’t set up to pursue these opportunities. The barriers to entry to WMQ are significant, and IBM’s engagement models isn’t set up to address them. The WebSphere business has little or no interest in pervasive adoption, whatever IBM rhetoric may have been over the years. Rabbit is just filling the vacuum that nature abhors. Same as virtualisation – if IBM won’t address the mass market with its invention, then someone else bloody will. Is Rabbit the VMware of messaging? Could be, right?

At this point, Andy Piper is surely entitled to say “In Your Face, Governor!”

At this point I should talk to IBM and how it got here, and the huge credit deserved by its Hursley Development Labs team, and the execs that let them pull the trigger. You see – the MQTT open source move is a bottom up phenomenon. Andy Stanford Clark has been on the lightweight messaging tip most of his career but its only in the last couple of years he has really nailed it, co-innovating with local software developers, rather than IBM’s usual multi-billion dollar partnerships. Andy got his house to tweet, building a better mousetrap. He was a huge supporter of HomeCamp, a home automation community event – about ten IBMers came to the first one. Suddenly local UK web hackers like my good friend Chris Dalby were targeting IBM platforms, sending data to an IBM message broker. This was weird and awesome.

Meanwhile IBM was beginning to invest in more local grassroots evangelism – with great people like Zoe Slattery (sadly now retired from IBM), Simon Maple and the aforementioned social bridgebuilder Andy Piper. Hursley managers that allowed all this innovation to flourish under their watch are John McLean and Gerry Reilly.

Given the open sourcing decision happened under the watch of WebSphere/AIM SVP Marie Wieck she deserves credit too. Are we going to see IBM WebSphereMQ open sourced any time soon? Probably not- but there again it just became more likely.

So that’s just a few of the people involved – the key point being that the decision making here seemed as much as Social process as a technical, marketing or sales decision. IBM open sourcing MQTT software is Social Business, with developers being the constituency in question. More messages, and more active endpoints, will also mean a lot more data – Big Data – which IBM can turn into money in plenty of ways.

Internet of Things innovation is not just going to happen at huge traditional IBM customers. Indeed Software is Eating the World.

Talking of eating the world, if you’re wondering if any web companies you’ve ever heard of are interested in lightweight messaging – how about Facebook, which is using the MQTT protocol for Facebook Messenger? As architect Luzy Zhang explains:

One of the problems we experienced was long latency when sending a message. The method we were using to send was reliable but slow, and there were limitations on how much we could improve it. With just a few weeks until launch, we ended up building a new mechanism that maintains a persistent connection to our servers. To do this without killing battery life, we used a protocol called MQTT that we had experimented with in Beluga. MQTT is specifically designed for applications like sending telemetry data to and from space probes, so it is designed to use bandwidth and batteries sparingly. By maintaining an MQTT connection and routing messages through our chat pipeline, we were able to often achieve phone-to-phone delivery in the hundreds of milliseconds, rather than multiple seconds.

So IBM is open sourcing technology which directly addresses current megatrends such as Big Data, Internet of Things, and even Social Media. This is a different kind of innovation by IBM, targeting the grassroots developer. Good job. Will MQTT and its Paho implementation prove to be as influential as Eclipse? Perhaps not- but Eclipse commoditised, while in this case IBM’s incentive is to innovate for growth.

File under Smarter Planet, Instrumentation.

disclosure: IBM and VMware are both clients. Some of the individuals I mention above are personal friends.

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I spent a couple of days this week at VMware’s VMworld conference in Copenhagen. Fantastic craft beers with friends at the Mikkeller aside, there were plenty of high points.

I enjoyed the keynote by Raghu Raguran, svp and gm, cloud infrastructiure and management, because it was punchy and to the point – any keynote under an hour is more likely to be a good keynote. Two and half hours means on the other hand generally means the keynote isn’t good. But Ragavan got plenty of information across in his 55 or so minutes – and the key narrative was striking because it was so explicit about what the enterprise can learn from the Web, in terms of automation and management in the cloud era.

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