Monday, November 17, 2003

Supply Chain Software Development

I’ve mentioned the notion of creating a software development supply chain to assemble software from components before at this site and on my Yahoo! group. Now Clemens Szyperski and David Messerschmidt develop the idea and examine what makes it different in The Flexible Factory [registration required] in the December issue of Software Development magazine. They speculate that software assembly would be a new “industrial revolution”.

They also observe that a market must exist for components. This is not a new observation. The component world dream really started with products like the OS/2 Workplace Shell (OS/2 2.0). That dream was so far ahead of its time that technologies such as CORBA had to be invented for it. In an interview I conducted with Dave Roberts, one of the designers of the Workplace, he recognized the deficiencies of the model - no market place. However, the markets such as ComponentSource and Flashline do not really solve the problem. Any VC will tell you - “there is no money in (software) components”. Why not? There is huge money in PC components e.g. processors (Intel) and disk drive controllers (IBM). The reason is that value cannot be measured and hence value falls to the lowest common denominator. Value is primarily determined by cost. Not by the risk carried in the value chain. All that these companies are providing is an online version of wholesaling for component libraries. Something we used to do from firms such as Greymatter.

Dave Roberts believed that web services were the answer to the problem. Runtime metering of method calls. I believed this too and was responsible for an infrastructure called “Wireless Application Manager” which planned to offer runtime metering and billing for wireless web services on the Sprint PCS Vision network. That system was never implemented but ideas like it are beginning to emerge. For example, it is now possible, using technology similar to aspect-oriented programming to weave code into applications which meters the use of method calls and reports it to a central billing system - such as that owned by an ISP or a telco.

This solves the final problem identified by Szyperski and Messerschmidt - that of trust and risk. In the design for Wireless Application Manager, for example, all web services were non-repudiated end-to-end through X-509 certificates on the supplier end and through the handset identification on the other. The access carrier is best placed to play the role of trust mediator. They can also provide quality of service - something which wasn’t identified in the SD magazine article. By allowing price differentiation across quality of service lines, supply of services or components will naturally align with value chains and risk is spread across the suppliers in the chain.

The bottom line is that there is a whole lot of infrastructure to be built out before supply chain assembly of software applications will be possible. It involves the development of network access operators to facilitate the marketplace and provide the trust, quality of service, metering, billing, mediation and settlement. It requires a wider use of a meta-data language such as RDF but one which is capable of semantically describing an application in a way which can be identified in an agreed ontology along with its quality of service ranking and its terms and conditions of service, including price. For example, does a downstream partner get a discount for volume - and if so, how much, and how is this administered? Does the end user get to specify QoS and Trust levels for an application such that all the components or services it taps into fit that designated level and will the price the end user pays vary accordingly? Is there a concept of first class, business class and economy for use of a word processor?

Maybe! Just maybe… Check back in 15 years.