Time to apologize ("Yom Kipur")

I have nothing to apologize for ;-) - so if anyone feels he deserves and apology from me - here it is - I apologize. That's the spirit and tradition of the Jewish "Yom Kipur", ending today.
I do feel that in the very near future many of my colleagues will have to apologize. Not that they can do anything about it... Seems like the economic storm has knocking on the High-Tech door.
Few of the recent posts over the web -
According to Om Malik, Sequoia Capital recently told its portfolio companies to hunker down for a long economic downturn. Sequoia is one of the largest and most prestige venture capitals and ofcourse they vision is one we should respect.
This and more, SAP issued a third-quarter warning. eBay announced plans to lay off 1,000 employees. Microsoft & SAP admitted they've stopped all recruitment all over the world. These are only three out of many recent announcements of high-tech and IT companies adjusting themselves to the new economic situation.
This ofcourse doesn't mean lay offs all over the place, but we're all looking around. If your suppliers, customers and competitors lays off - watch out for your business - you're next.
And yet, within this storm, one positive mark - IBM announced its third-quarter earnings per share rose 22% year over year. IBM claims this growth is based at the emerging markets. Out of many sad announcements recently - this is certainly a positive way to finish this post ;-).

Shana Tova! ("Happy new year" - Hebrew)

Yet another year ends and just right next to it stands the new one - waiting to enter.
We end this year with a financial storm which I'm among the believers that we haven't seen its end yet. I predict next year (coming in 5 days) will still have shaky grounds.
Yet, for the IT services market and the SOA market specifically, we find this market storm as an opportunity - regulations and need for innovation will require the financial markets to enhance their IT infrastructure in order to support global business amendments.
The Israeli market is not yet there (will it be?!) but US financial market changed dramatically in the last couple of days - 2 of its largest investment banks (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) turned into regulated banks. This means a complete business renovation.
From our perspective, this means a strong need for IT, and strong correlation to SOA.
So, lets have a toast for that and for the coming new year!
Shana Tova!

Israeli Hi-Tech tsunami is here?

Just read about Qlusters R.I.P. They left this world with 11M$ in the bank. The company just recently closed a 10M$ round.
So, what's the story? Well, Qlusters developed a very promising technology and gained some awards for their achievements throughout the years they existed.
The company raised quite a lot of money and its burn rate was not so fast, at least as I can estimate according to public numbers.
And still, the company investors decided to take back their investment and shut the company doors. This means not only the investors couldn't see how the company works out the near-coming-bubble-blow, but they stopped believing in this company ability to exist in the market. Just after they decided to invest...

Well, always look at the bright side of the moon....

ESB or BPEL?

Yet another interesting question I tend to get asked about almost in every SOA panel. There are many flows that can be implemented as mediations (ESB) as well as BPEL (BPM).
Almost all vendors bundle ESB and BPEL engines in same product edition which allows even better flexibility to the architect / designer to decide which technology to use for the implementation.
Examining the SOA architecture, it is quite clear that BPM and ESB are there for very different needs - BPM for the business processes requiring analysts to model and business owners to monitor, while ESB for integration specialists to mitigate protocols, models and technologies.
Marc Fasbinder, BPM Integration Solution Architect, IBM, gave a nice summary of features and differences between BPEL and ESB which gives some key directions in choosing the correct technology for each flow.

Business rules and Policies

A key role in the SOA promise of business agility and flexibility is by dynamic rules and policies.
These two seem to overlap each other and I got several questions by customers who drill into SOA architecture and concepts about what goes where - how should one determine whether a decision logic is a Policy or Rule?
I read a nice blog entry by Christina Lau, IBM describing this dilemma and giving some examples.

SCA and Spring Framework - Open SOA Collaboration

Spring seems to be natural integration to SCA framework. Recently I've bumped to this SCA and Spring Framework - Open SOA Collaboration which explains how to integrate SCA with Spring.
Obviously we'll see more of these integrations natively implemented or supported by the major SOA platform vendors.

Euro2008 - Best ever?

Is it a dream? Greece, Italy and France already on the way out, both Switzerland and Austria will not interrupt.
Portugal (Ronaldo and Nani), Holland (Rubben), Spain (Villa and Torres) and Sweden (Ibrahimovitz, Larson) look great and score well.
So? How can it be? When will Germany kick off the nice soccer and take this championship as well?
Lets hope this Euro is kept as is - at least let it last 1-2 more rounds.
Meanwhile, Arjen Roben reminded me Van Basten with his zero-angle score.

Tuscany - SCA Infrastructure - Graduated Apache incubation

Tuscany the Apache based platform for SCA components was recently announced graduate Apache incubation.
Tuscany is incorporated into WebSphere Application Server 6.1 as a feature pack and SCA itself is the base concept for WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB.
Some insights on this adoption by IBM of Tuscany technology at Bobby Woolf blog.

IBM reaches petaflop - 1,000,000,000,000,000 !!!

Certainly an amazing achievement announced this weekend.

IBM’s latest Roadrunner system, designed for the U.S. Department of Energy and its Los Alamos Lab, is the first supercomputer to achieve performance at the petaflop level. The accomplishment was announced today by the U.S. Department of Energy in conjunction with the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, TOP500.org and IBM.

This type of breakthrough was just what Thomas Watson wanted for his company when he implemented the THINK motto in IBM in 1914. "Thought has been the father of every advance since time began," said Watson. That mantra is in part what drives IBMers to achieve technical greatness and why IBM technology has helped people walk on the moon, see surface pictures of Mars, map the human genome and achieve countless other breakthroughs.

Every IBMer can be proud of this supercomputing milestone. It speaks volumes to our heritage as a company that embraces possibility, inspiration and a culture of innovation. In the world of industry firsts, everyone remembers the company that makes a technical mark of such unprecedented scale.

Roadrunner is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which has, at least until now, been the world's fastest supercomputer. Roadrunner is six times faster than our competition's systems.

How fast is it? One petaflop equals one thousand trillion flops or one quadrillion calculations per second. The fastest computer in the world 10 years ago was capable of one teraflop (one trillion calculations per second). Since that time, supercomputing power has increased by 1,000 times. In fact, a complex physics calculation that will take the Roadrunner system one week to complete would take the 1998 machine 20 years to finish, which means it would only be 50 percent complete today.

Another way to think about a petaflop of performance is to imagine the entire population on earth — about six billion people – all working on handheld calculators at the rate of one calculation per second. In that case, it would take more than 456 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day.

Google I/O - Behind the curton of Google

I think that one of the most interesting and amazing infrastructure our world seen is located at Google. Although it is so commonly used, only rarely there are details about how Google manages its own business. I recommend reading this interesting article on this Google I/O - Google spotlights data center inner workings

IBM TV

Yet another way of watching technology - IBM TV.

WebSphere catchup through Web2.0

Takes some time, but IBM manages to find its way to the Web2.0 world through interesting usage of the social networks and public spaces. Recently IBM published WebSphere Education movies on YouTube. Most if not all are presentations on the different products, and certainly are a good starting point for learning about the different products and offering.

WebSphere goes Virtualized (ManU - Barca still 0-0...)

While waiting for Barcelona to score (or ManU to surprisingly score), I'd like to share with you some news and thoughts about the WebSphere virtualization directions.
IBM announced at IMPACT 2008 that WebSphere 7.0 (ah - there's an open beta coming on May08) will also have a virtual image for rapid setup.
IBM claimed they reached this after their lawyers agreed to bundle the OS with the shipping (Linux ofcourse) with no legal concerns.
This looks like IBM will contribute an already installed VM with OS+AppServer installed and configured for standard use.
BEA WebLogic has already shipped such appliance at VMWare market place (I recommend browsing the list of appliances there - it is already an impressive list).

My impression is that these VM shippment will allow quick jump start for non-WebSpherians but I hardly see people with some WebSphere knowlege use these plain vanilla boxes instead of having the installation made by their cookbook (and scripts).
Certainly, for the more complex platforms like Process Server and Portal this might be a relatively fast jump start that might enable prospects in putting hands on these technologies.

WSRR Advanced Lifecycle Edition

IBM announced last week an offering that combines the capabilities of Rational Asset Manager for service and asset development, coupled with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) for service deployment and runtime.
Actually, this offering is a sales offering as these two products complement each other and both required for a complete SOA Governance solution.
The bundling will allow customers an easier entrance with a single offering from IBM, branded in the WebSphere brand.

SOA Policy - enabling true SOA governance

Speakers: John Falki - Chief Software architect, SOA Governance & Maryann Hondo - Software architect, SOA Policy (shares a new blog)

Policy enforces consumability and adoption of SOA.
Each policy has its own lifecycle - author , transform , enforce and monitor (generally, each has a separate product and serves different roles).

IBM has a federated approach for policy management - there are federated policy repositories (like SOA Policy manager, Tivoli Security Policy Manager and WSRR).

Two recognized standards for policies - WS-Policy and XACML.

The Policy lifecycle -
- Author - Apply language syntax and semantic.
- Transform - Different programming models may have internal policy representations though they want to use a canonical form for broader coverage.
- Enforce - PEP - Policy enforcement point, for example DataPower.
- Monitor

There are still not enough best practices to where to place PEP in the architecture. Certainly it will be in the ESB and applications, but potentially in more points.

Web Services, EJB and Batch in WebSphere 6.1

As JAX-WS is a feature pack for WAS6.1, we first discussed the importance of feature packs for WAS.
Apparently, a feature pack is an enabler for innovation while not disturbing platform stability. IBM is committed to support the feature packs as long as the main version is supported.
Feature packs tend to find themselves into a future version of the product.
JAX-WS feature pack has till now 15k downloads!
This current f.p. is based on Axis 2.0 and brings a new standard to replace JAX-RPC old standard for WS interaction programming model.
More over, JAX-WS 2.1 that should be out soon, will be integrated into JSE 6.0 - this means that pure java modules will be able to consume web services without the need to add software libraries (did anyone say that dot.net does that for years already?).

EJB 3.0 is another feature pack for WAS6.1. It brings a much simpler programming model and allows concentrating on the business logic and not the container meta data.
Note that the two feature packs do not integrate well - an EJB 3.0 bean can't expose services using annotations ...

One interesting issue in EJB3.0 is the new persistence framework, JPA. It is based on the implementation of Apache OpenJPA, developed together with BEA, based on the core of Kodo product, acquired by BEA years ago.
IBM & BEA cooperate on this Apache project.

Batch processing has a focus for version 7 of WebSphere. Seems like the business case for Batch is quite clear. Also, the batch sequence of actions seems to be much the same in all verticals. This lead to a bean-based framework, rather simple batch programming model.

Federated ESB - No single ESB per organization

That's a hot topic here.
I've heard this couple of times in the past, though got the "official" legitimation to use this.
Most of our customers tend to see the ESB as a single centralized ESB for all purposes in the organization.
Seems like mid and large size organization will not be able to work with a single bus, but will rather use several buses in different patterns.
This will be referred as Federated ESB pattern, and we expect each domain zone to have its own ESB.
For an example, one could think of large retail with department stores. Each department has its own domain ESB while the centralized datacenter has its own ESB.
For these cases, IBM has several solutions for ESB - WMB, WESB, WDP - these all provide different answers for different requirements.
There are technical differences between these ESB implementations and therefore they can be relevant for different purposes.
Seems that IBM do not see to much overlapping - mainly from the prospect point of view. I have heard couple of times, from differect executives, that the 3 products are here to stay and keep on being developed with full engines.

sMash, project Zero, Mashups

IBM Seems to pay close attention to the mashup technology and buzz.
Today IBM announced a group of interesting new product portfolio, all in the area of mashups for business.
Mashups - a kind of application flows that enable rapidly creation of new applications in a form of widgets / portlets - just with much easier programming skills and models.
Mashups are to be consumed and used by end users and business users within the organization, allowing data and front end integration in a simple manner.
IBM announced the following tools available:
* WebSphere Portal v6.1 - the 6.1 is the new part here. Yet, no mashups for this one, but improved Web2.0 capabilities, exciting AJAX support (based on DOJO) and ease of deployment.
* InfoSphere MashupHub - lightweight information management environment for IT professionals who wish to unlock and share web, departmental, personal and enterprise infromation for use in REST-style Web 2.0 applications. It is a kind of ESB for mashes. Includes a very nice visual tool for transformation and re-mixing of feeds.
* Lotus Mashups - mashup environment that supports fast and easy assembly of enterprise and Web content into simple, flexible and dynamic applications.
* WebSphere sMash - I've seen this in work more deeply. Provides developers with an agile development environment to deliver script-like based mini applications (in PHP, Groovy and alike). This one was codenamed Project Zero.

These all combine to a protfolio of products in the area of mashups. Not sure yet how they'll address security and enterprise connectivity issues...

IBM is working together with others on industry standards for the mashups in something known as iGadget protocol that exposes the gadget interface in a standard manner.

One another interesting issue about project Zero - It is an open project developed by ibm and allows people to see the source code, report issues (bugs and requirements) and see all design and architecture documents. Yet, the project is solely developed by IBMers. Numbers of participants though are pretty low (IMHO) - 1000 registered users, 15000 downloads.

IBM SWG Roadmap & Strategy

A session lead by Julie King, IBM, a distinguished engineer, chair of the SWG AB at IBM.
- WebSphere Portal v6.0 was developed over more than 10 sites worldwide. That's a distributed development environmen. Truly global integrated development environment.
- Acquisitions strategy will continue - divided into 4 tactics - bold market entry, complementary point products, opportunistic consolidation & market leadership (Rational for example).
- Rational Brand strategy - Moved from individual to team space (CC, CQ), then to organizational focus (requirements) and now to business space.
- 2007 announcements - Asset manager (RAM), AppScan, Functional and Performance tester for SOA and developer tools for SystemZ.
2008 will deliver updates to much of these tools and more on team collaboration with Jazz. It will be an environment for better collaborating all the people involved in the development.
- AppScan (recently WatchFire) which apparently we at Risotech specialize at, seems to be one of the revenue generators for 2008.
- IBM itself uses RAM for services assets (GBS).
- Lotus brand - Aimed at more collaboration. Lotus connections which is a kind of facebook for intranet. Has tagging, blogging and many other features.
- Information management - focus on Information / Data / Content.
- IBM Enables information as a service to connect the information into SOA. Key element for this is the master data management (MDM). One set of accurate and complete information.
- Emphasis is placed on performance management and score boards, based on Cognos acquisition.
- Tivoli - A change from Service management instead of system management. ITCAM and ITCAM for SOA has made a good progress to analyze the complexity of connections between the services. Tivoli has acquired a company to enable green datacenter management.
- WebSphere -
architectural focus - CEP, consumability, data center architecture.
The need for CEP - correlate all sort of events into data. Same as AMIT.
CEP/BEP engine is based on AptSoft acquisition that allows writing rules to combine different events from diferents sources into actions.
- plusOne initiative - prescriptive way of constructing and deploying cross brand software solutions that address customer business requirements incrementally using proven collateral.
- Virtualization is an important space for IBM to play in. They're looking into simplification through virtualization. Working on OVF standard to allow different images to define what they need to work together.
- WAS v7.0 will have a virtual image ready to run on Linux, instead of going through the installation path. Lawyers at IBM allow the SWG to distribute a product image WITH linux, which is a big change.

- Telelogic acquisition completion was just announced last Monday. This will affect the Rational and WebSphere portfolio.

- WMB, WESB, WDP roadmap - all play in different fields and from this point in time, they all have a roadmap and do not overlap. IBM sees them all as a class of capabilities.

Reporting LIVE from IMPACT - Day 1

IMPACT kicked off with Harley Davidson CIO riding a motorcycle. What a start!
Drew Carry led the fun part of the conference start. Basically, his major question was why IBM states they do "Smart SOA" - is there a "Stupid SOA"?. Apparently, stupid is not politically correct - but certainly there is.
IBM gained a very nice portion of the SOA adoption in the world, more than 60%.
VP Marketing, Sandy Carter announced a social network - SOA Community exchange - for IBM SmartSOA and apparently part of this is happening right now - SOA JAM.
An exciting announcement of the new WebSphere Business Events product (acquisition of AppSoft). This replaces completely the AMIT/CEP product developed by the Haifa Labs in Israel, and tends to gain attention in 2008. It aims at SOA event based functionality.

IMPACT2008 - Pre conference - Business Partners day

Finally made it to Vegas, total of almost 2 days. Never thought Vegas is so far.
Weather is great, people are enjoying the pool while the geeks (unfortunately I'm one of them) enjoy the convention.
I've managed to make it to few of the sessions after noon and the partners reception event at the evening.

IBM got ready to this event - there are many new announcements with SOA relevancy happening right at the conference.
Few notes I took that might be interesting to explore:
1. IBM attracted many SAP R/3 or AI1 (AllIn1) based customers with its AIM (Application & Integration middleware) offering and managed to achieve excellent ROI with placing IBM as the main integration platform instead of SAP XI/PI. This does not mean a complete replacement but rather a complementary. I have all the details and will continue to explore these case studies which seem very clear.
2. New SOA authorization policy model is introduced into the SOA environment, from the brand of Tivoli. It is federated authorization mechanism, allowing the definition of access control policies over services in all SOA platforms and can be governed by the platforms themselves or the governance products like DataPower or WSRR.

Notice the Blog2Print widget

Take a look at the right hand side of my blog - you'll notice there's a new widget there, allowing you to print a hardcopy of the blog entries, right from the blog.
Responsible for this technology is a company named Sharedbook - good friends and customers of mine.
Asides the innovative approach and business model for Web2.0, of which you can read about at http://blogger.sharedbook.com, Sharedbook runs its technology on JEE platforms and provides an hosted service for its partners.
Go ahead and share the rumor - help an Israeli startup to make it happen!

Almost there - Vegas here I come!

I should have been to Vegas at this time already, but a small (?) problem with the engine made our pilot decide to return back to Tel-Aviv and caused a delay of 6 hours.
So, I'm at the NYC airport and will be getting to Vegas within couple of more hours.

Markets rock-n-roll

Financial markets are shaking.
It has been a long time since we've seen such a dramatic sequence of events in the financial markets, although it is months now that this could be spotted.
From the Israeli market point of view, seems like our economy manages to hold up part of the quake, yet I fear we ain't seen it all yet.
Specifically, in the IT market, where Risotech plays, we have customers from the financial sector and ISVs that I expect to react to the new situation and reduce budgets as well as perform massive firing.
I can't see a situation in which financial institute that lost 10% of its share value keep the same headcount and expenses in the mid-term.
This ofcourse has a direct impact on service companies and integrators and we take these effects into count in our short/mid term plans.

WSRR 6.1 - Important step forward

IBM released WSRR v6.1 recently.
Following several meetings with prospects interested in SOA Governance, looks like IBM did a major step forward with its Governance offering.
WSRR v6.1 adds:
1. Ability to manage non-web-services services.
2. Graphical Impact Analysis
3. More customized workflow for service lifecycle management.
4. Plugin to MS.NET which enables DotNet prospects to leverage the registry and repository.
These were all crucial points when we presented the product to prospects.

Good work...

More info on WSRR.

IMPACT 2008!

I was just invited by IBM to join the IMPACT2008.
Conference is hosted at Las-Vegas, MGM Hotel.
This event features the hottest information from the big blue on SOA solutions and best practices.
I'm excited from the opportunity to meet world leaders in SOA offering and hear about first class SOA implementations.
I believe this will enable us at Risotech to import at least part of the knowledge back to Israel as many of our customers are in transition into SOA.
I will update my blog during the event with news and pictures - stay tuned!
You can see a sneak preview of the conference on youtube.

Risotech joins Elad Systems group

As of 3rd of January, 2008, Risotech has joined the Elad Systems group. This is a powerful step for Risotech and RIO (Risotech's daughter company).
Risotech will continue to lead and innovate in IT infrastructure and SOA as and will have the endless power Elad can provide to our operations and business.