A few weeks ago, Jeff Nolan announced his departure from SAP and has been in stealth mode awaiting the Office 2.0 Conference to make his big announcement. Finally, at O2O, Jeff made it official by announcing his position as CEO of Teqlo, Inc.
Teqlo, formerly known as Abgenial Systems, is principally backed by Peter Rip at Leapfrog Ventures and was co-founded by Rafeal Bracho and Jacoby Thwaites, both veterans of the EAI industry. Peter had been serving as the interim CEO, and is now desperately hoping for someone to give him a leg up elsewhere. :)
Jeff was kind enough to provide the Irregulars with the following FAQ:
Q: What is Teqlo?
A: Teqlo the company is committed to the vision that users should be able to assemble functional web applications without having to know how to program. The applications, called “Teqlos”, are assembled out of readily available web services. These services, called “Teqlets”, have a service wrapper around them that semantically normalizes web services by expressing inputs/outputs as microformats and then subjecting them to a routing algorithm that determines the proper sequencing of the services in order to create an application.Q: Wait a minute, how do you determine the “sequencing”?
A: Traditional programming using a flow-of-control model where application components are strung together and hardwired by developers. Do this, then this, then this, if error condition then do this. Teqlos follow a data flow model of sequencing that is roughly analogous to the internet itself with each Teqlo having a starting state and a successful completion state, and the Teqlo infrastructure determines the appropriate path to link the services together by routing data to each service based on what it is asking for and producing. The reason the internet is reliable and scalable is that each packet doesn’t have to have a predetermined path to completion, the routing infrastructure of the internet determines it as it is delivering the packet.Q: Teqlos are built up from Teqlets, but you don’t have many Teqlets available yet. How long will it be before I have the services I want?
A: The preview version of Teqlo.com is certainly not a finished product, in fact aside from demonstrating the concept in a functional system we do not expect that you will be productive in this release.The top three priorities we have are to 1) finish the development environment and APIs so that anyone can develop their own Teqlets, 2) enhance the runtime environment to be more user friendly and reliable, and 3) build out the Teqlet library.
Q: If I build a Teqlo, who owns it?
A: You do. The publishing process permits you 3 levels of state with public being wide open, private being only for you, and group enabling the invite processQ: If I build a Teqlet, who owns it?
A: You do. While we are encouraging the development of public Teqlets, we have a licensing model that enable Teqlet developers to license their Teqlets.Q: Will Teqlos run outside of Teqlo.com?
A: No, but this is something we are working on.
In the simplest of terms, Jeff and the Teqlo team are attempting to take the development of next-generation web applications out of the hands of the developers. Sounds like a bold ambition you say? Of that I have no doubt. But if you really believe (as I do) that there are inherent limitations in the power of web services to become ubiquitous if they're burdened by the conventional development lifecycle (i.e., getting IT involved); Teqlo and other composite applications ideas are intriguing in their potential.
The key message I think Jeff and his team need to tell is that Teqlo's value lies in the SEQUENCING, not necessarily as YADE (Yet Another Development Environment). Clearly, like any startup, Teqlo will be well served to start articulating tangible, real-life use cases and get away from a discussion of the technology innards. The great news is that Jeff understands this, and recognizing the challenge is halfway home to solving it.
Another immediate challenge will be populating the initial Teqlet repository. It's unreasonable to expect an non-techy person to simply look at a blank development environment and "get it" enough to really push the boundaries of what Teqlo aims to become. Much like with wikis, it's far easier to get adoption if there are pre-built examples for people to model and, frankly, to wrap their brains around. In speaking to Peter and Jeff, it seems that developing Teqlets is now a 7-10 day development process but with some economies of development, they hope to compress that time considerably.
Jeff will be helping Teqlo attack a completely different market than what he and his SAP team were after. SAP and its brethren squarely target the 50,000 largest enterprises in the world. According to Jeff, there are 38 million businesses in the U.S. alone with 10 or fewer employees. Teqlo will be going after those small and very small businesses that need simple technology solutions to improve critical business processes.
It goes without saying that I'm hoping for big things for Jeff and the Teqlo team and, like you, look forward to watching the company take shape in the coming months.
Related Posts:
- Jeff on joining Teqlo
- Peter on pulling back the curtain on Teqlo
- Dan's perspective
- Den's perspective
- Rod's perspective
jeff nolan teqlo abgenial social software emergent technologies composite peter rip enterprise2.0 software irregulars enterprise irregulars woodrow office2.0
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