A sponsored podcast discussion of how enterprise app stores can bridge the gap between software development and distribution and maintenance.

1. Embarcadero Technologies' AppWave Modernizes PC
Desktops with App Store Convenience
A sponsored podcast discussion of how enterprise app stores can bridge the gap between
software development and distribution and maintenance.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies
Dana Gardner: Hi. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the productivity gap
between modern software and the aging manner in which most enterprises
still distribute and manage applications on personal computers.
At a time when business models and whole industries are being upended by
improved use of software, we're also seeing mobility, cloud services, and
data analytics. IT providers inside of enterprises are still painstakingly
provisioning and maintaining PC applications in much the same way they did
in the 1990s. [Disclosure: Embarcadero Technologies is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Furthermore, with using these older models, most enterprises don’t even know what PC apps
they have in use on their networks and even across thousands, in many cases, of notebook
computers. That means they're also lacking that visibility into how, or even if, these apps are
being used, and they may even be paying for licenses that they don’t need to pay for.
So while the software inventory and business service management initiatives are helping along
these lines, there's a general lack of control over PC applications. I don’t think you can solve that
without including new ways to engage the PC users directly. This is really a function about the
use and the users, not just the applications and the PC.
To learn more about how things can be done better, I'm here now with the President and CEO of
Embarcadero Technologies, Wayne Williams, to examine the ongoing problems around archaic
PC apps management and how new models, taking a page from the popular app store model, can
rapidly boost the management of PC applications.
Wayne has more than 15 years of experience in founding and leading companies. He was
appointed CEO of Embarcadero Technologies in 2007 and he is a former COO, Senior Vice
President of Products and CTO at Embarcadero.
I want to welcome you to BriefingsDirect, Wayne. It’s good to have you with us.
Wayne Williams: Good morning. Thanks for having me, Dana.

2. Gardner: As I said, it’s kind of ironic that, on one hand, we have software taking over in a larger
sense how businesses are run and how industries are being
innovative in reaching customers in new ways. This has been
highlighted recently by Marc Andreessen in some of his writings.
At the same time, the corporate PC, also driven by software, is still
sort of stodgy and moribund, at least in the perception of how it’s
being used productively.
So let’s unpack this a little bit, Wayne. How is it that software is advancing generally, but PCs
remain, in a sense, unchanged?
Williams: I've been asking myself that question for many years. I've spent most of my life in
software, and I'm embarrassed to say that the industry has really done a poor job at making
software available to the users, which is the fundamental issue.
Windows is clearly the dominant PC platform but it has fundamental design flaws, which sowed
the seeds for the problem.
Part of the story
But that’s only a small part of the story. Software vendors are so focused on building the next
great application and on features and functions in that application that
they've lost sight of what really matters, which is making sure that the
application that you build gets used, gets in the hands of the users, and that
they get their work done.
When I look at the PC industry and where it has come, the applications
themselves have improved dramatically. I can’t imagine being as
productive as I am without Microsoft Outlook, for example, for email and
calendaring. And Adobe Photoshop. I don’t think you can find a photo
anywhere that has not been edited with Photoshop. It’s incredibly
powerful.
But unfortunately, a lot of the gains that really could be made have been wasted, because it’s
very, very tough to get an application from a vendor into a user's hands.
Gardner: It seems to me that while the technology is somewhat unchanged since the '90s, the
users are a different breed nowadays. We have different behaviors and different levels of
anticipation and expectation around what productivity is all about. We used to call these
productivity apps, but now productivity comes from being able to innovate, self-start, even learn
from your peers, that social fabric type of an interplay.
Are these some of the core problems? We're at a dissonance between expectations and behaviors
on one hand and the same old local area network (LAN) level of management on the other.

3. Williams: Absolutely. That’s a great point. At the end of the day, all technology is about
productivity. Software certainly is about productivity. And if you're going to radically increase
the productivity of a team, the knowledge that team can share about what tools are used for what
job is critical knowledge. That’s why we’ve built in the ability to rate and review apps into
AppWave. Team members can find the best tool for the job based on peer feedback.
Gardner: What about this as it applies to application development and deployment? I know that
Embarcadero has been involved with that for an awfully long time. Is there something of a
disconnect between development, gathering requirements, creating an application, and then the
operations, thinking about operations through that adoption pattern, and user expectation and
behaviors?
It seems as if we're still stuck in this era, where there's a wall between the two, but some of the
activities that you have been up to strike me as trying to close that, or at least create a feedback
loop, or a life cycle benefit, between apps, how they're developed, how they're used, and then
how they are iterated on.
Williams: There are a few ways to look at it from a development perspective. One way is that
software developers are probably the most aggressive in terms of the need for productivity, the
most aggressive users of applications and tools and all the issues that surround that.
At the end of the day, software developers, whether at a garage startup or one of the large
software vendors, are passionate about solving a problem, creating software that solves a
problem, and getting it into the hands of their users. That’s what really drives developers.
Important disconnect
The problem is that there's a disconnect between creating your software and getting it into the
hands of the user. You very rarely are talking about this happening in seconds, which it should.
It’s something that happens more on the order of months or quarters in a large company.
Gardner: I have to imagine that this contributes also to the security problems. So many
organizations now are really doubling down on what they need to do for security, recognizing
that it’s not something you buy out of a box, that it’s really part and parcel of process,
methodology, standards, and governance.
There must be some benefits by closing this loop, as you pointed out, when it comes to bringing
better security and then making changes that bring even better security on an ongoing basis.
Williams: There's a whole host of problems that emanate from the root problem, the root
problem that we're talking about, and security is one of them.

4. You have an environment which is high friction. It reminds me really of a state of manufacturing
before the Industrial Revolution, where you had processes that were slow, expensive,
unpredictable, and error prone. That’s how PC software has operated over the last 20-plus years.
When you have an environment that is so high friction, users will go around it. So you have this
process with the PC, where IT tries to get more control and locks down the environment more,
and the business users that need to get the work done find ways to get it done.
We have large customers that have a policy: when somebody is hired, all controls are turned off
so that they can get their desktop together and get the apps that they need for the first three days.
Then they'll lock it down. That’s not a good environment for security.
Gardner: That’s begging for trouble. You mentioned the core problem or the root problem. I
wonder if you wouldn’t mind fleshing that out a bit for us. What do you think the real root
problem is here?
Williams: The root problem is that software should move at the speed of light, yet it moves at
the speed of a glacier.
Let me give you an example. In a mid- to large-sized company, if an employee is looking for a
special pen for a new project, they can go to a catalog, take out a pen, and they can usually have
it the next day, and that’s a physical good.
Software is virtual. So it could and should move at the speed of light, but for many of our large
customers it takes quarters to get software into the user’s hand.
Looking for productivity
Gardner: So we've identified the problem internally. As I said, it's ironic, because when we
look to the larger landscape of business, we're still in a tough economic situation around the
globe. People are looking for productivity.
Marc Andreessen wrote recently that software is really revolutionizing how we procure things
like entertainment and books and how we discover new products and services online. We can do
this as a consumer. Doesn’t it seem almost absurd that, at a time when individuals using some of
the tools that are available on a retail basis, are leaps and bounds ahead of someone who is just
trying to get some basic work done in a large corporation?
Williams: Yes, you can take a fairly simple device like a smartphone from Apple or an Android
device and find and run applications literally in seconds. Yet you have this sophisticated
environment with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of software sold every year, powerful
hardware and processing power, but it's like pulling teeth for a user to get the applications she or
he needs.

5. Gardner: Wayne, you and I have been around long enough to know that the way to instigate
change in an enterprise environment is not necessarily to attempt wholesale radical shifts. You
need to work with what's in place and recognize that investments have been made and that those
investments are going to continue to be leveraged.
So let's start defining the solution at a high level here. We want the applications that have been
developed. We want the interfaces and data that folks are used to to continue to benefit them. But
we also want to start energizing this new sense of empowerment that people have through their
personal lives and their consumer roles and bring some of these things together.
Craft for me, if you could, the vision about retaining what's good about the enterprise and what's
been invested in and brought to the daily grind, but at the same time start to bring innovation and
allow people to exercise their behaviors and their empowerment.
Williams: As far as what's good and what can be retained, there's a great footprint of hardware
out there, PC hardware. A massive investment has been made.
It's the same with software. There are tons of software, both licensed and built internally. And the
internal part is really important. What I see from our big customers is that for every commercial
app that they license they will have 10 that are built internally. And while there is very little
visibility into how commercial licenses are used, there is some, but it's little. And there's zero
visibility into who’s using internally built software, for the most part.
There have been massive investments made in software, and unfortunately, a lot of the
productivity that could have been realized hasn’t been. But the good news is that it can be.
When I look at the opportunities, it's really two constituents, which you described. You talked
about the user for a second and then you talked about the investment and what can be reused, and
that’s really management, typically IT management, which is centralized. AppWave is about
bringing these two stakeholders together.
Gardner: How can we do that? I'm familiar with what you've been doing with developers.
Developers have unique requirements, but it seems like you've gained some insight and some
technology in serving their needs in a fast-paced, agile environment, and can now bring that to
the larger group of consumers within the enterprise.
Removing friction
Williams: If you look at mobile software, the friction between the user and the app is removed,
and the results are fantastic. For us, that was a great proof point, because we started on AppWave
before anybody had heard of the Apple App Store.
For PCs, the problem is much more difficult and it's much larger. Mobile software is about a $10
billion industry, and PC is somewhere around $300 billion. So the opportunity for productivity

6. gains and overall results is much, much bigger, and the problem is much more difficult. Now,
with AppWave the mobile experience -- find, run, rate, review -- comes to the PC. So the agile
enterprise has tools to support it.
Gardner: So bringing that mentality of search, discover, share your experience, ease of access
when you want to then act on that kind of information, almost instant gratification when the app
comes down, being able to run it, and then upgrade it along the way with very little oversight,
very little maintenance, certainly very little disruption, you have to ask yourself, why would I
want to do it any other way?
How do we bring these together? How do we bring the app store experience to IT? How do we
enable them to bring that to their own constituents, their own users?
Williams: The key is the system. With the enterprise app store we bring two constituents
together: users and management.
You mentioned a few things that are core principles. For users, there are really three principles
that drive everything that we do. One of them is self-service, the next is socialization, and the
third is instant gratification.
As a user, when I have a problem to solve and I'm looking for an app to help me solve it, I want
to be able to find it myself, quickly. I want to understand what my peers are saying about that
app. When I decide I want to try it, I click a button and run it. Everything we do goes through
one of those filters. It’s about the user experience.
From a management perspective, for IT they need centralized control and visibility into real
usage. So those are two principles that really drive everything we do with AppWave from a
management perspective.
People talk about the consumerization of IT now, and initiatives like "bring your own device."
The key for IT is to put an environment in place that draws users in and gives them what they're
looking for, but you can still maintain overall control and have real visibility into who is using
software and when.
Gardner: I'm curious. With AppWave, is there the opportunity to bring down apps fresh, or
more frequently than the typical install, lockdown, patch process that we're familiar with now? Is
there a hybrid model that incorporates some of the goodness from other trends like software as a
service (SaaS) or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but allows the same PC apps, the rich
graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the investments that have been made in the code and logic to
remain?

7. Results is conflict
Williams: This is one of the difficult engineering challenges we had and it goes back to my first
point about Windows sowing the seeds of some of the problems. If you look at Windows, it's
designed around the concept of sharing and sort of a utopian view, where applications could all
share parts, and typically those are called DLLs in Windows. Unfortunately, the end result of that
is conflict.
When a user wants to try a new application, that application is installed and will typically
conflict with other applications that were previously installed. The problem gets worse when you
get into new versions.
In the PC market, most vendors update their software multiple times a year. For example, we put
out new release of every major product once a year and then we will have point releases typically
quarterly. You have an awful lot of change, and every time there is a change, you stand to break
other things that are already installed on your computer.
That was one of the things we had to tackle, and we did with AppWave. That folds into instant
gratification. If I'm a user who has an existing version of a particular application, and I need
either the older version or the newer version, I should be able to click a button and be productive.
I should be using it in seconds.
Gardner: Well, we've defined our problem. We recognize that it's severe. We recognize that the
environment is propelling people for change. We know that people have alternatives in the
market for at least some apps, and we have been describing some of what is required of a
solution, at least at a high level. So I guess it's time now to really dig in a little bit. Describe for
us what AppWave is, what it does, and how it came to be?
Williams: AppWave is an enterprise app store for PCs that provides self-service. Users can very
easily type in a search term and get a result. The result is a set of applications. Then they can
click and run those applications, read ratings and reviews from their peers, and they can be
assured that when they do run those applications, they're not going to disrupt anything else that
they have on their PC.
Gardner: Tell me a little bit about that problem you mentioned a moment ago, that ability to
bring down new or quickly upgrade or change apps, but without losing the config, the
importance of the legacy, the use and trail of what that application has done for the user. How did
you solve that?
Williams: Years and years of engineering, but at the heart of it, we removed the dependencies
that applications would have with other applications and with the environment in general. Each
of these applications is able to stand on its own, which means you can have multiple versions of
a particular app and move between them painlessly with no concerns.

8. I think that’s important for just about any knowledge worker. I've seen company after company --
and ours is no different -- afraid to move, for example, to the newest version of Office, because
they're not sure if documents from the old version are going to work properly. Problems like that
are gone, because you can easily move from version to version with the click of a button.
This is particularly important in R&D,where a tremendous amount of time is spent retooling to
go from one configuration of applications for a particular system.
Prior to having AppWave, developers had multiple PCs, one for working on the new release
that’s going to come out this year and then one for going back and fixing bugs on last year’s
release.
What are the metrics?
Gardner: As you pointed out, Wayne, you've been doing this for some time. A lot of R&D,
starting with tools, is probably the hardest category to crack. And you've seen how organizations
have adopted and used your AppWave approach, creating this storefront, making those apps
available to solve some of these issues that plague PC software distribution.
What have people gained from this? Do we have some metrics? Can we look at some examples?
What do you get if you do this properly? How impactful is the shift when you go from say a
traditional distribution to an AppWave and an app store distribution model?
Williams: I can give you a few examples. It's been amazing for us certainly. We drink our own
champagne. We've made incredible gains, with the biggest gains being in two areas.
One is in R&D, where teams generally produce a daily build of most of the products. Those
apps, when they come off the build machine, are now immediately available to all of R&D. It's
particularly important for QA, because the downtime that you would have retooling and getting a
new app is gone. It’s literally seconds. So we've seen some great gains internally with R&D.
We've also seen it with sales. We've got roughly 20 products. We put out a minor release once a
quarter and majors once a year. So if you just looked at the explosion of that set of apps that a
salesperson would have to have on their PC, just in two years, it’s 160. That historically has been
a problem. It’s just a productivity drain and it’s error prone. Now that problem is gone.
There are certainly metrics out there as far as productivity and underutilization of software and
overutilization of software, but I think what’s most exciting is when a customer really sees that
this can help them get to market quicker.
A large financial services company had a nine-month rollout cycle for of a new version of a PC
app. They had a really pressing business need to get this done before the holidays, their biggest
season. It was impossible using their current methods for PC software distribution. With
AppWave, users were upgraded to the right version of software in minutes.

9. The thing that they loved about that whole experience wasn't really the metrics. Certainly they
put together their ROIs and they were impressive, but what that really did for them was that it
allowed them to move quickly, to solve the business need in a time that would really make a
difference.
Gardner: And at a time when software is more important than ever, they're going to gain an
advantage by being able to deliver that software, put it in the hands of their employees, and also
put it in the hands in the market, learn from that market and adjust, it just seems like you get
generally better business agility, particularly when you are in a software intensive field which, as
I said, most companies are nowadays.
Williams: One of the things that's frustrating for me, seeing how the software industry has
matured and grown over the years, is that everybody talks about ROI. There's nothing wrong
with the concept of ROI, but what I see often is a forest-and-trees problem, where people will
lose sight of what the real goal is.
Losing sight of the goal
They will get so buried in a metric here and a metric there to build up an ROI, that they will lose
sight of the goal. What’s the goal? The goal is to get my product or service to market sooner,
better, and with better quality than the competition. That ROI is almost immeasurable.
Apple is a great example. This is a company that was in serious trouble for a number of years.
It's the most incredible turnaround success story than any of us have ever seen. And all of that
may not have happened if the iPod was a year late. Sony wasn't totally sleeping. They owned
consumer electronics, and given a little more time, they probably could have stopped that move.
It’s so important for people to remember that software is going to help you get your product or
service to market sooner and better, which is going to help you beat your competition.
Gardner: I'm afraid we are about out of time, Wayne, but I wanted to look just at a couple of the
building trends now that point to the future. We're seeing tremendous uptake in mobile devices
and tablets. We're seeing people who want to be able to combine their roles as consumers and
individuals at home with what they do at work.
This is blurring the lines between on-premises, doing work within a corporate environment, or a
VPN even. But they need this. This is how they're going to be productive. It's putting an onus
now, a different level of requirements, on IT, on developers.
Is there something about AppWave and what we've been talking about that can be brought into
the mobile and even cloud spheres, these trends being sort of locomotives in the market right
now, that brings together them and what we have been talking about?

10. Williams: Absolutely. Our view is that, at the end of the day, it's all about getting the right app in
the hands of the user as quickly as possible and that should happen on all relevant platforms. So
certainly mobile tablets, Android tablets, and iOS, iPads, are very cool and powerful devices that
we are certainly going to support.
The important thing to remember is about getting the app to the user, regardless of what device
they're using. So whether it's a tablet, a PC, or it's their own PC, as opposed to the company PC,
they should still have access to all the apps that matter, with all the same kind of principles we've
talked about, instant gratification, very easy to find. Those are all things that we're covering in
AppWave.
Our initial focus was all about solving the PC problem, because in my view that’s the big
problem. That’s where so much productivity has been locked away. We've solved that for the PC
now and we certainly will support other popular platforms as they emerge.
Gardner: Well, very good. I hate to say we will have to leave it there.
You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly
creating productivity improvements and speed the value benefits for those PC users and across
the applications that they are accustomed to. This is something that’s been of interest to IT
departments and those users as well.
I'd like to thank our guest. It's been a very intriguing discussion. We've been here with Wayne
Williams, the President and CEO of Embarcadero Technologies. Thanks so much, Wayne.
Williams: Thank you, Dana. Have a good day.
Gardner: You too. Thanks. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, as
always, thanks for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod.x Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies
A sponsored podcast discussion of how enterprise app stores can bridge the gap between
software development and distribution and maintenance. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2012. All rights reserved.
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