I had a talk with George Dearing from InformationWeek last week. Him being well-versed in Enterprise IT made the conversation lively because he totally understood what MindTouch is delivering to the Enterprise IT infrastructure. George writes:

MindTouch Puts The Enterprise In 2.0 - Content Management Blog - InformationWeek

It’s not often you hear terms like application integration and IT governance from companies building their businesses on Web 2.0 underpinnings such as blogs, wikis, and RSS. So I was somewhat surprised to be smacked in the face with just that from Aaron Fulkerson, the tech-talking co-founder and CEO of MindTouch, a company that wants to be the “tissue” that helps enterprises connect all those disparate systems.

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My first thought was why isn’t everybody doing this stuff? For starters, it’s because creating scalable Web architectures isn’t for the faint of heart. Fulkerson says the founders’ backgrounds in distributed systems helps it deliver on the promise of easy-to-use interfaces and IT-friendly integration.

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So how is MindTouch making friends with both business and IT? For IT, the pitch is simple; make their lives easier by empowering them to add governance not just over the wiki, but over all of their applications. In that sense, Deki Wiki, says Fulkerson, becomes not only an integration layer but a common user interface across different applications. The heavy emphasis on integration is a calculated move by MindTouch, one it knows will not only pique the interest of CTOs across the land, but put it head-to-head with middleware heavyweights such as BEA Systems and IBM.

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The other side of the social enterprise equation involves the user experience. I asked Fulkerson how MindTouch manages to appease business users.

“We’re allowing customers to add this 2.0 social layer to existing enterprise applications. That adds a tremendous amount of value to the organization because users can interact with applications much easier through common interfaces and processes,” he said.

In case you still think MindTouch Deki Wiki is just a wiki allow me to clarify. Yes, it is a wiki, but it’s also an application integration platform and an application development platform. A very large percentage of MindTouch Deki Wiki users are using it to connect teams, enterprise systems, and Web 2.0 applications. Their doing this with dynamic report templates, situational applications and by providing alternative interfaces to a variety of legacy systems that are inherently difficult to use. In these cases the wiki is more of a canvas to a distributed application platform or a kind of enterprise connective tissue. MindTouch users are realizing much more value from their existing systems and human resources. The IT department is facilitating this while maintaining unprecedented governance. A smaller percentage of users are developing entirely new applications on MindTouch Deki Wiki. These folks are using the software as an alternative to BEA Weblogic. I’ll write about this at another time.

In reference to how our customers are using MindTouch Deki Wiki as enterprise glue, George mused:

“This is exactly what we were trying to do in the Enterprise IT infrastructure back in 1997–centralize and integrate. This is great!”

He’s absolutely correct. Except we’ve taken a decidedly different approach that delivers far more benefits to the IT department at a much lower price point. Specifically, previous enterprise integration products were very much focused on centralizing systems. These were almost entirely closed systems and they’ve all taken a systems view. MindTouch is an open platform, not to be confused with insecure–this means adhering to open standards, takes a distributed approach and allows users to create a very people-centric view of systems and data. MindTouch, rather than centralizing and thereby creating vendor lock-in as well as additional burden on the IT dept, allows an IT professional to connect systems and allow users to be able to organize systems and data to suit their needs and their processes. And because it’s so easy to create situational apps and reports these can be iterated on and adapted as needs change. MindTouch is allowing IT professionals to provide governance over their existing enterprise systems, databases, and Web 2.0 applications while allowing users to get at the data they need in the way that suits them best.

Why aren’t other vendors taking the same approach as MindTouch? What we’ve engineered is really hard. Also, we saw the need and trends coalescing early on and our backgrounds in distributed systems research made use well positioned to engineer a solution. For more information read the MindTouch Technology page.

categories: Awards and Coverage, MindTouch