Go Go Amazon!

No, I'm not a Christmas shopping fan, though most probably I miss some good deals as I write... But Amazon is not only a book store, it's a large cloud computing resource provider with its EC2 initiative.
But, I assume this is not new to many of the readers.
The newly interesting offerings Amazon has are the big deal (IMHO).
The Turk thing, which allows recruiting human workforce for computer-based missions that can be distributed over the net.
Maybe even more interesting, one can find the ability to bid for cloud resources in Spot Instances offering.
I find this offering innovative and different from other cloud offerings as it is the first to allow discrete and manageable resources to be consumed virtually. I would expect such an initiative to become part of an enterprise cloud as well.

A look into the future - SixthSense

In most cases, our imagination can't take us far enough, to lead us into new and revolutionary ideas. This nice fellow takes 5 minutes of your time, but not only he provides a nice show, he also allows us to imagine. Worth watching!. Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Video on TED.com

SaaS - Between Service and Software

Trends drive our business. In the last couple of years there's a trend around services. Ofcourse there's the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) but not only.
Web services, Software as a Service etc.
It is so trendy to discuss about services, that I read and hear people discuss SaaS and mix it with some other trends like cloud computing, on demand computing etc.
I'd like to explain my view of SaaS, which is totally a business perspective.
One of the main challenges IT has in the last couple of years is to show solid ROI, reduce costs and allow business flexibility and agility.
SaaS provides a way for IT to purchase "software licenses" from its OPEX budget and not from CAPEX. In most firms, this is a dramatic change, allowing a much flexible budget planning and accounting wise brings other values to the firm.
Note, this has nothing to do ofcourse with the software features nor service over the web or not.
Cloud computing takes the software and places it in a remote datacenter, hosted on the web, allowing IT not to deal with purchasing and maintaining this hardware and underlying software. In most cases, cloud computing based software is sold as a service.
On demand is the ability to consume additional licenses / hardware with no extra effort of upgrading or ad-hoc business engagement. This allows flexibility in consuming extra computing power during pick periods.

Sun, Oracle and all others

I thought of writing about it the minute I heard. This is certainly not a common PR.
Yet, I held myself, counted to ten. Now I'm ready to elaborate my opinion.
First of all, Oracle and mainly Larry are magicians. They keep doing one of the most important keys to success in business - which is taking your future in your hands. Be active and not passive. Larry keeps acting on every field he believes there's value for its shareholders. Meanwhile he certainly does right.

Now, many predict on the different line of products of Sun and its future.
So, generally speaking Sun has few important intellectual property - Hardware, Unix operating system, Java community ownership, SOA platforms (mostly open sourced) and couple more packages (like Identity management and others).

So, the most interesting stuff for Oracle would be the green fields - Hardware, Unix and Java community ownership. Not that others are not important, but they overlap.

For Oracle, they made it to the one-stop-shop league, just like the big ones HP, IBM.
Yet, Oracle is different - they have infrastructure, but also packages.
This might lead HP/IBM to think differently about packages... So maybe SAP is under the hood?
Whats with the SOA platforms and Java world? I think it is a mystery and we'll have to wait for Oracle with that. Too much power is in their hands now in the Java zone. It might break the long partnership of all non-MS big vendors.
SOA? I believe Sun was not a major player in the SOA world, and therefore Oracle will benefit from some of the technology intellectual property and integrate it into its portfolio, but nothing more than that. Here, certainly the BEA acquisition was much more important for Oracle.
And yet, having said all that, Oracle buys so many companies, many of these acquisitions fail and loose their value.
Whats with the competition? I'm probably not the only one who thinks so, but IBM and SAP could have been better without this deal... Still, time will tell if it threats IBM, HP and SAP more than Oracle and Sun did so as separated companies.

WebSphere Application Server 10th birthday

Just like any birthday, celebration includes party which allows you to be a WebSphere rockstar for a second, and a memory book, review of the past.
Go ahead, take couple of minutes and review the memory book. It brings an interesting piece of history.
Unfortunately, I personally can't state I was there right from the start, but I joined quite early when there was still WebSphere Application Server v3.0, when we had free love everywhere ;-).

BPM 2.0

I read recently about the IBM BPM as a service initiative named BPM Zero, part of Project Zero.
There's not too much of information on this project, yet the initiative sounds innovative and it might bring BPM to the cloud.
See this post by Christina Lau (IBM).
I'll wait till more information is being published.

Revese BPM

I think this is something I can copyright. At least the term...

I must start with some words on the economic situation - although not directly related. The last couple of weeks / months are nightmare for managers - either they are customers, suppliers or anywhere else in the food chain.
The financial storm made most (not all???) companies take out their "optimization programs" and act. As our financial forecast is totally unclear, it is up to each companies economic atmosphere, entry point to the situation and risk assessment to decide how far should their plan updates go.
The name of the game is basically credit lines and cash flow. It affects many other territories in the company but it all starts there - basically this is the major challenge for each company these days.

But, that's not what I had in mind to write about.
So what's Reverse BPM? practically, what I mean by reverse is a different approach to BPM. As most businesses think business process today, yet it might not be reflected in their IT environment, it means that the best value they can get is from putting closer the business processes and the IT. Yet, investing in IT is excellent (well, I'm a stakeholder here) but expensive and has a lead time. So, what do I offer? minor to no change in IT with marginal impact on business visibility into its business processes.
This can be achieved by integrating Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) into existing applications and platforms. This will provide business process insights and KPIs that will allow the business user to optimize the process in time and hence cut costs and generate more revenue.
This reverse approach is not widely adopted, can you figure out why?

BPM Lifecycle - It is real!

For the past couple of years BPM lifecycle is marked as a promising solution for business agility supported by intelligent technology.
I feel that within the last year, this promise becomes reality.
I still hardly see organizations nor integrators that fully uncover the promise of full BPM lifecycle.
I do see islands of BPM - IT, O&M (organization & methods), BI. All are very relevant, but not integrated - no single language, no single focal point, no central meta model.
In my next posts, I'll review the new capabilities and technologies that allow correlating all these islands into one land (or is it sea?).