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Capriza’s clever mobility via HTML screen scraping

caprizaHTML browser virtualization, not APIs, may be the best way to mobilize existing enterprise applications like SAP ERP, Oracle E-Business Suite or Microsoft Dynamics.

At least, that’s the perspective of Capriza, a company offering a SaaS-based mobility platform that uses a cloud-based secure virtualized browser to screen-scrape data and context from the enterprise application’s Web interface. That data is then sent to a mobile device (like a phone or tablet), where it’s rendered and presented through Capriza’s app.

The process is bidirectional: New transactional data can be entered into the phone’s Capriza app, which transmits it to the cloud-based platform. The Capriza cloud, in turn, opens up a secure virtual browser session with the enterprise software and performs the transaction.

The Capriza platform, which I saw demonstrated last week, is designed for employees to access enterprise applications from their Android or Apple phones, or from tablets.

The platform isn’t cheap – it’s licensed on a per-seat, per-enterprise-application basis, and you can expect a five-digit or six-digit annual cost, at the least. However, Capriza is solving a pesky problem.

Think about the mainstream way to deploy a mobile application that accesses big enterprise back-end platforms. Of course, if the enterprise software vendor offers a mobile app, and if that app meets you needs, that’s the way to go. What if the enterprise software’s vendor doesn’t have a mobile app – or if the software is homegrown? The traditional approach would be to open up some APIs allowing custom mobile apps to access the back-end systems.

That approach is fraught with peril. It takes a long time. It’s expensive. It could destabilize the platform. It’s hard to ensure security, and often it’s a challenge to synchronize API access policies with client/server or browser-based access policies and ACLs. Even if you can license the APIs from an enterprise software vendor, how comfortable are you exposing them over the public Internet — or even through a VPN?

That’s why I like the Capriza approach of using a virtual browser to access the existing Web-based interface. In theory (and probably in practice), the enterprise software doesn’t have to be touched at all. Since the Capriza SaaS platform has each mobile user log into the enterprise software using the user’s existing Web interface credentials, there should be no security policies and ACLs to replicate or synchronize.

In fact, you can think of Capriza as an intentional man-in-the-middle for mobile users, translating mobile transactions to and from Web transactions on the fly, in real time.

As the company explains it, “Capriza helps companies leverage their multi-million dollar investments in existing enterprise software and leapfrog into the modern mobile era. Rather than recreate the wheel trying to make each enterprise application run on a mobile device, Capriza breaks complex, über business processes into mini ones. Its approach bypasses the myriad of tools, SDKs, coding, integration and APIs required in traditional mobile app development approaches, avoiding the perpetual cost and time requirements, risk and questionable ROI.”

It certainly looks like Capriza wins this week’s game of Buzzword Bingo. Despite the marketing jargon, however, the technology is sound, and Capriza has real customers—and has recently landed a US$27 million investment. That means we’re going to see a lot of more this solution.

Can Capriza do it all? Well, no. It works best on plain vanilla Web sites; no Flash, no Java, no embedded apps. While it’s somewhat resilient, changes to an internal Web site can break the screen-scraping technology. And while the design process for new mobile integrations doesn’t require a real programmer, the designer must be very proficient with the enterprise application, and model all the pathways through the software. This can be tricky to design and test.

Plus, of course, you have to be comfortable letting a third-party SaaS platform act as the man-in-the-middle to your business’s most sensitive applications.

Bottom line: If you are mobilizing enterprise software — either commercial or home-grown — that allow browser access, Capriza offers a solution worth considering.

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Despairing of the “brogrammer” world, thanks to GamerGate

gamergateIt’s hard being a female programmer or software engineer. Of course, it’s hard for anyone to be a techie, male or female. You have to master a lot of arcane knowledge, and keep up with new developments. You have to be innately curious and inventive. You have to be driven, you have to be patient, and you have to be able to work swiftly and accurately.

Far too often, you have to work in a toxic culture. Whether in person or online, newbies get hazed and harassed. Men are verbally abused, certainly, in many software engineering organizations — there’s no room in many techie hangouts for wimps. However, women are almost always abused worse, and while men can learn to fight back, women are harassed in ways that are truly sickening.

Men are insulted and called names. Women receive death threats.

I’ve written about the challenges facing women in technology many times over the past decades. One recent column was “Fight back against the ugly ‘brogrammer’ trend,” written in May 2012. Yet I am continually astonished (in a bad way) by how terribly women are treated.

A recent example is what’s being called GamerGate. That where a number of prominent women gamers – including some game developers—have been attacked online. Several women have reported receiving very explicit threats, which have included disclosures of their home addresses. At least two women, game developer Zoe Quinn and media critic Anita Sarkeesian, have apparently fled their homes.

For background on this appalling situation, see Nick Wingfield’s story in the New York Times, “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign.”

What can we do? Other than say, “This isn’t right,” it’s hard to be sure. I don’t know if anyone I know is involved in these sorts of threats. I am unsure if any readers here are involved in creating this culture of misogyny and fear. But I do know that in the broad world, anti-bullying, anti-hazing and anti-harassment programs apparently don’t work, or certainly don’t work for long.

Indeed, GamerGate has become a distraction. The discussion of GamerGate itself (which thrives on Twitter on with the hashtag #GamerGate) has seemingly overridden the bigger discussion about how women engineers, or women in the technology industry, are treated.

Christopher Grant, editor-in-chief of the gaming news/reviews site Polygon, has written a strong article about GamerGate, in which he writes,

Video games are capital “C” Culture now. There won’t be less attention, only more. There won’t be less scrutiny. There certainly won’t be less diversity, in the fiction of games themselves or in the demographics of their players. What we’re in control of is how we respond to that expansion, as journalists, as developers, as consumers. Step one has to be a complete rejection of the tools of harassment and fear — we can’t even begin to talk about the interesting stuff while people are literally scared for their lives. There can be no dialogue with a leaderless organization that both condemns and condones this behavior, depending on who’s using the hashtag.

GamerGate is evil. Perhaps harassment of women in the gaming industry is worse than in other technical fields. However, we should know, men and women alike, that despite the good work of groups like Women in Technology International and the Anita Borg Institute, the tech world is frequently hostile to women and tries to drive them out of the industry.

Alas, I wish I knew what to do.

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Next steps for Hewlett-Packard post-split

Neineil-sedakal Sedaka insists that breakin’ up is hard to do. Will that apply to the planned split of Hewlett-Packard into two companies? Let’s be clear: This split is a wonderful idea, and it’s long overdue.

Once upon a time, HP was in three businesses: Electronics test equipment (like gas spectrometers); expensive, high-margin data center products and services (like minicomputers and consulting); and cheap, low-margin commodity tech products (like laptops, small business routers and ink-jet printers).

HP spun off the legacy test-equipment business in 1999 (forming Agilent Technologies) and that was a win-win for both Agilent and for the somewhat-more-focused remainder of HP. Now it’s time to do it again.

There are precious few synergies between the enterprise side of HP and the commodity side. The enterprise side has everything that a big business would want, from high-end hyperscale servers to Big Data, Software Defined Networks, massive storage arrays, e-commerce security, and oh, lots of consulting services.

Over the past few years, HP has been on an acquisitions binge to support its enterprise portfolio, helping make it more competitive against arch-rival IBM. The company has snapped up ArcSight and Fortify Software (software security); Electronic Data Systems (IT services and consulting); 3PAR (storage); Vertica Systems (database analytics); Shunra (network virtualization); Eucalyptus (private and hybrid cloud); Stratavia/ExtraQuest (data center automation); and of course, the absurdly overpriced Autonomy (data management).

Those high-touch, high-cost, high-margin enterprise products and services have little synergy with, say, the HP Deskjet 1010 Color Printer, available for US$29.99 at Staples. Sure, there’s money in printers, toner and ink, monitors, laptops and so on. But that’s a very different market, with a race-to-the-bottom drive for market share, horrible margins, crazy supply chain and little to differentiate one Windows-based product from another.

Analysts and investors have been calling for the breakup of HP for years; the company refused, saying that the unified company benefitted from an economy of scale. It’s good that CEO Meg Whitman has acknowledged what everyone knew: HP is sick, and this breakup into Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. is absolutely necessary.

Is breaking up hard to do? For most companies it’s a challenge at the best of times, but this one should be relatively painless. First of all, HP has split up before, so at least there’s some practice. Second, these businesses are so different that it should be obvious where most of HP’s employees, products, customer relationships, partner relationships and intellectual properly will end up.

That’s not to say it’s going to be easy. However, it’s at least feasible.

Both organizations will be attractive takeover targets, that’s for sure. I give it a 50/50 chance that within five years, IBM or Oracle will make a play for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, or it will combine with a mid-tier player like VMware or EMC.

The high-volume, low-margin HP Inc. will have trouble surviving on its own, because that is an area where scale helps drive down costs and helps manage the supply chain and retail channels. I could see HP Inc. being acquired by Dell or Lenovo, or even by a deep-pocket Internet retailer like Amazon.com.

This breakup is necessary and may be the salvation of Hewlett-Packard’s enterprise business. It may also be the beginning of the end for the most storied company in Silicon Valley.