In this podcast, Andy Mulholland, Capgemini’s CTO, provides guidelines for how IT organizations can transition from monolithic applications to more flexible, granular technology architectures. He also talks about the Web services technologies in his books, Mashup Corporations, and Mesh Collaboration. Now let’s join Andy Mulholland, CTO of Capgemini, one of the world’s largest IT consulting firms.
Andy Mulholland, the CTO of the Capgemini, one of the world’s largest IT consulting firms, will be the first to tell you that large, monolithic software applications are inflexible and demand conformity. For years, he says that IT organizations wrote business applications to follow this departmental, monolithic model. “Because of technical constraints, if a company did not think through everything it needed from the application and build it into this at the beginning, it became hard to do anything about it later. As a result, companies ended up with these monolithic applications that covered all possibilities.”
Today, Mulholland says that we are starting to see enterprises return to their core businesses, and to spin off what doesn’t fit. Along with that, the evolution toward Web services is really about how every department in an organization can create its own flexible shared services. He says that companies have to move from monolithic applications to more granular services. “The only way to do that quickly and efficiently is with nimble applications which operate flexibly off a data set and that provide a single version of a particular company’s truth.”
Mulholland is not suggesting that companies abandon their monolithic applications. He says, “Monolithic applications are great for capturing and protecting data about what companies do. But there is focus on how marketing can be better done, how to better understand customers, and how to build Web services that drive revenue. He points to the ability of companies, such as DHL, FedEx, and UPS, to be service oriented in the front office, but to have a consolidated architecture in the back office. .
In this podcast, Mulholland, provides guidelines for how IT organizations can make the transition from building monolithic applications to more flexible, granular technology architectures. He also talks about the Web services technologies in his books, Mashup Corporations, and Mesh Collaboration.
Bio
Andy Mulholland is CTO of Capgemii, an IT consulting firm with more than 90,000 employees in more than 30 countries. He joined the company in 1995. He co-authored MashUp Corporations – The End of Business as Usual, and Mesh Collaboration -- Creating New Business Value in the Network of Everything. He received an InfoWorld CTO 25 award for social networking. While at Capgemini, he has published five white papers, and proposed technology architectural models. Three of his models have become the norm throughout the technology industry, including the concept of adaptive IT. He sits on the technology advisory boards of several organizations and enterprises, including the Californian State Technology Board, the Open Mobile Alliance, and the MIT Supply Chain Group. He is also a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
Resources
Capgemini adopts social networking tools for knowledge management
InfoWorld
Capgemini to Contribute SOA Notation, Methodology to OASIS
On-demand Enterprise
http://www.on-demandenterprise.com/offthewire/26039304.html
His blog excerpts
http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/
Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis
