SOA & IT Infrastructure thoughts

Time for change

2011-07-05T00:31:00.004+03:00

Long time since my last post. I guess I've been busy ;-).
It feels to me that the middleware platforms have gone a nice way in the last 10 years, making them a robust and mature platforms for serving enterprise applications.
Still, there's no one-size-fits-all so there are few options for modeling and deploying business applications and yet, it became a kind of commodity.
In a commodity market, Java and its enterprise platform needs a change. Else, most probably it will loose its place to more innovative solutions.
It might be that these platforms will eventually evolve to the next generation platforms of 4th generation languages, allowing BPM and Advanced Case Management be the development platforms for the future.
IBM BPM 7.5 with its extensive support for BPMN (coming mainly, but not only, from Lombardi) provides such a direction.
IBM Advanced Case Management (ACM) bring another layer of application templating, which seems an even more innovative programming concept.
Yet, I wonder who will survive...

Lessons learned from World Cup 2010

2010-07-28T00:29:00.004+03:00

It's been a while since my last post.
So I'm a proud father of a new baby girl, Maya, sister of Nadav and Yuval who seem to adopt her to their heart. Makes me a real proud father.

Passed month was World cup month. I tried not to miss the late rounds games.
I've tried to analyze if there's a lesson one can learn from what we've seen in the world cup this year, from the soccer point of view, and maybe for other disciplines.
So, what did we have there? Practically, teams who went up the hill like Germany, Holland, Spain etc. played elegant soccer, very good defense and sometime good offence (mainly Germany).
Still, is there a common dominator for all? I think it is their EFFICIENCY. They managed to create few score opportunities, but managed to successfully score with high ratio of opportunities to scores.
This makes me think about our sales organization these days with the new (still?) world economic situation, we must be more efficient.
Sure we all want to sell in every opportunity we work on, yet, we are not alone...
But being more efficient means working internally on the sales opportunities and placing more efforts on existing opportunities in order to enlarge our ability to win these, instead of working on opening many more opportunities that will follow the statistics of opportunities to closed sales.
It requires different tactics ofcourse, but I think that this is an important lesson we can learn from others.
It did work for Spain ;-)....

Go Go Amazon!

2009-12-24T00:26:00.003+02:00

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

2009-12-06T22:57:00.002+02:00

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

2009-08-03T23:16:00.003+03:00

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

2009-04-26T23:24:00.006+03:00

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

2009-03-18T21:21:00.002+02:00

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

2009-03-11T22:11:00.002+02:00

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

2009-03-04T23:14:00.005+02:00

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!

2009-02-17T00:16:00.002+02:00

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?).

Time to apologize ("Yom Kipur")

2008-10-09T20:54:00.003+02:00

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)

2008-09-24T11:29:00.003+03:00

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?

2008-07-13T22:35:00.002+03:00

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?

2008-07-13T22:28:00.002+03:00

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

2008-07-13T21:42:00.002+03:00

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

2008-06-23T21:21:00.000+03:00

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?

2008-06-15T22:54:00.002+03:00

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

2008-06-15T22:36:00.004+03:00

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 !!!

2008-06-10T23:36:00.003+03:00

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

2008-06-01T23:42:00.001+03:00

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

2008-05-10T20:46:00.001+03:00

Yet another way of watching technology - IBM TV.

WebSphere catchup through Web2.0

2008-05-06T22:05:00.003+03:00

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...)

2008-04-23T23:14:00.002+03:00

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

2008-04-16T22:21:00.002+03:00

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

2008-04-10T22:55:00.000+03:00

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

2008-04-10T17:47:00.001+03:00

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

2008-04-10T17:45:00.001+03:00

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

2008-04-10T02:31:00.004+03:00

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

2008-04-09T01:16:00.004+03:00

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

2008-04-08T21:44:00.005+03:00

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

2008-04-07T16:44:00.003+03:00

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

2008-04-07T16:36:00.001+03:00

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!

2008-04-06T12:31:00.002+03:00

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

2008-03-18T20:44:00.002+02:00

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

2008-03-11T23:06:00.003+02:00

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!

2008-03-03T23:10:00.004+02:00

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

2008-03-03T22:32:00.000+02:00

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.

Open source code maintainers

2007-09-15T22:56:00.001+03:00

I guess not all of you heard of this job in the open source community - a Maintainer.
The maintainer of a project is a developer in the project that is allowed to check in code into the project. He's entitled to this by the community and it is ofcourse based on his skills.

Yet, this can pop up some interesting ethic issues like what if the maintainer is from a competitive company to the developer who sent the code update? For example - AMD and Intel...

Looks like the open source community is highly reliable as it allows such a positions to exist - and yet keep the projects stable and reliable AND up to date.
In many cases, such communities include people from all over the world and all over the business eco system.
I've got my view over this from a good friend - Avi Kiviti. See here an interview with him.

Jazz - the new IBM Rational collaborative development platform

2007-07-12T22:31:00.000+03:00

Seems like IBM takes MS Team System couple more steps ahead.
Just like in many other places where IBM extends the ideas into new domains, seems like here IBM takes the collaborative development into new areas.
IBM does it in couple of ways:
1. Shared project - Jazz platform is managed like an open source project, although it is completely commercial and IBM. People are encouraged to participate and share their ideas.
2. The Jazz platform brings in ALL the development life cycle tools together with collaboration tools - supporting GDD (Global Distributed Development).
See www.jazz.net and Jazz Videos.

OS Application Statistics

2007-05-10T21:30:00.000+03:00

I just ran into this interesting site, with interesting statistics about open source applications usage. It is ofcourse based on participant but indeed looks relevant.

Open Source Application Statistics

Mugshot and Fedora developers are working on ways to browse and find popular applications. Here are the current statistics for users sharing application usage with us. Read the full details

Site - http://mugshot.org/applications

Messi - One of a kind

2007-04-21T23:36:00.000+03:00

Stop the technology - Lionel Messi is here...
This is indeed the most amazing score in the last several years.
Messi in action - Spain cup semi finals

SOA and the hype

2006-09-20T18:29:00.000+03:00

I hear so many times the questions "Leaving aside all the slideware, what is SOA?", "What is SOA in terms of technology and products?".
Seems like the big vendors have manages to attract the crowd with the concept, yet they didn't manage (YET) to provide good answers to the technical people.
So, just to clear things out, SOA is not a product specific methodology. It is related to many products that might correlate themselves to SOA.
BUT - There are some fundamental products that are part of the SOA infrastructure and include the following:
ESB / EAI
BPM
Portal
Information intgration (II)
Do you think this is the shortest list or it is not enough?

Home - Open SOA Collaboration

2006-08-05T21:36:00.000+03:00

Home - Open SOA Collaboration: "the website of the Open Service Oriented Architecture collaboration"
A new web site introduced lately, sponsered by the leading market vendors that support SOA standards like SCA and SDO. Interesting technical documents... hope they'll keep it updated.

JEE installation - why is it so difficult?

2006-08-05T21:17:00.000+03:00

Seems like one of the major penalties of JEE over DotNet and many other programming languages and platforms is the installation / deployment phase. For some reason, JEE commitee (and vendors ...) didn't get to this painful point yet, while other platforms have already solved many of the issues there.
I'd like first to describe the scope of the problem and then discuss some faults I see in the current situation.
An installation of a JEE based application should include the following parts: platform (application server) and application. In order to install an application, there are several required configurations that occasionaly need to take place - resources (JMS, JDBC), security, logging etc. Note that some of the configurations are on the platform level while others are on the application level.
I see the platform part of the installation as in many cases the platform is OEMed as part of a complete solution and should be shipped and installed along with the application.
If the SMB market is a target for the JEE platform (and it is - see Oracle, IBM, BEA and others), the installation process must be clear and simple for the end user.
So, what are we doing today?
Many of us are building ant build files for the installation and configuration. Most platforms support scripting based configuration which enables scripted deployment (build files) to configure the platform for the installation.
So, combining InstallShield like installers with Ant capabilities provides a solution, but certainly this is not enough.
Consider a multi platform solution - IBM, BEA, Oracle, JBoss ... you need to create a different installer with different scripts for each platform. No so easy to maintain.
IBM took a move recently (couple of months), issuing an IBM Installation Factory product, works with WebSphere platform only ofcourse.
This is a very interesting move, which includes not only the platform itself but also the fixes and refresh packs to allow a complete installation process. The tool supports WebSphere 6.0.2 and 6.1 versions and my feeling is that other vendors will have to provide a similar tool to support their installation procedures as well.
How much time will it take them? Will we see some standards in this area?

FIFA World Cup 2006 Finals!

2006-07-12T22:56:00.000+03:00

Wow! I'm back from semi-final and finals of the 2006 FIFA World cup. Italy won, beating France in the finals. words are not enough ... so I added a picture.

IBM WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 announcement

2006-07-12T22:28:00.000+03:00

IBM has recently announced the new WebSphere Portal v6.0 availability. This new exciting version seems to include more Workplace Services Express (WSE) features bundeled into the portal.
I still miss some Web2.0 features to be part of the Portal, like the blog workplace application that was published under the alphaworks but is certainly pre matured and not supported (aside the fact that it is aimed at Workplace and not Portal).
I recommend taking few minutes and reading the announcement (see link) with the different editions (new Server edition) and new key features.

IBM WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 can help you improve the efficiency of your business: "# A new user interface featuring AJAX and drag & drop customization can help portal users accomplish more with fewer clicks.
# Portal applications can be enhanced with workflow and electronic forms services that can help employees, partners, and customers execute transactions faster.
# Application templating and WebSphere Portlet Factory help to accelerate application deployment and customization through innovative use of services oriented architecture (SOA).
# Inline content editing and powerful personalization can help you increase employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
# Intuitive administration tools and performance improvements helps deliver responsiveness and reliability at lower cost."

Microsoft launches collaborative open-source dev portal (a.k.a sourceforge)

2006-07-12T11:11:00.000+03:00

Interesting move from Microsoft, which seems to find itself fights in a new battle field which is quite strange for her and her developer community. Still, there was some large move within the open source community to adopt C# and DotNet with the migration of common Java OS frameworks like NHibernate, NAnt and many others.
Application Development Trends - Microsoft launches collaborative open-source dev portal: "Microsoft, long the bastion of the closed source code model, has launched CodePlex, a collaborative software development portal. The company is billing the site, which will host open-source and shared-source projects, as 'a forum to bring together developers from around the world.'"

IBM works on Web2.0 solutions - end-user programming.

2006-06-30T23:50:00.000+03:00

Interesting to see that IBM invests so much energy in Web2.0 and customer facing applications (like its competition from Redmond). Certainly a good infrastructure for Web2.0 will be an enabler for IBM's platforms, but it is cerainly not the standard playground for IBM.
IBM eyes programming for the masses | Tech News on ZDNet: "IBM is working on a project, called QEDwiki, that takes a stab at a long-held industry promise: end-user programming."

New business model - "Fair use" - JAJAH - web-activated telephony

2006-06-30T23:14:00.000+03:00

Interesting service announced today from the new startup Jajah (Yair Goldfinger, ex. ICQ is one of the investors). They provide a free service but ask to limit the usage and use some of the paid services. Can't say this is a truly business model, sounds more like an eye-balls like model...
JAJAH - web-activated telephony: "What’s the JAJAH “Fair Use” Policy ?
The Jajah “Fair Use “ policy asks our users to “play fair” and behave in a manner that best serves our greater calling community. We ask that you limit your free hours to about an hour a day, five hours a week,or about 1.000 minutes per month. If you use it more than that, we ask that you also use some paid JAJAH services such as text messaging (or scheduled calling?) We can only offer the free service if enough people also use some paid services. "

WebSphere to support Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism (SPNEGO)

2006-06-29T23:43:00.000+03:00

At last, IBM added out of the box support for SPNEGO (SSO with Windows domain) for its WAS platform.
BM adheres to the WS-Security specification and the Web services Interoperability Basic Security Profile—a set of open Web services specifications that provide security for key infrastructure technologies such as SOAP messaging, the transport layer, etc. Additional security improvements include a trust association interceptor (TAI) that uses the Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism (SPNEGO) to provide an integrated single sign-on environment with Microsoft Windows 2000 or 2003 Servers. HTTP users log in and authenticate only once at their desktop and are subsequently authenticated (internally) with WebSphere Application Server.
Article link

Sharing server configuration for RAD6

2006-06-29T23:36:00.000+03:00

Common problem in RAD6 is setting adding a configured server instance to the SCM (CVS or others). This can be configured using the following steps, so when creating a new server the server will be stored and shared in the SCM.

Open Window -> Preferences
Select the "Server" category
Tick the "Create server resources in workspace" box
Create a new server definition

HTTP protocol debugger - Fiddler HTTP Debugger - Fiddler

2006-06-29T23:25:00.000+03:00

From the Microsoft factory, a nice tool, alternative to the widely used Apache TCPMonitor.
Fiddler HTTP Debugger. It does seems like a more featured utility than Apache's though ...

Ajax for Java developers: Exploring the Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

2006-06-29T23:22:00.000+03:00

Interesting Ajax framework by Google. Provides an interesting alternative for JSF with swing/swt like programming techniques.

Ajax for Java developers: Exploring the Google Web Toolkit: "ork that provides a great deal of useful functionality. However, GWT is something of an all-or-nothing approach, targeted at a relatively small niche in Web application development market. I hope this brief tour has given you a feel for GWT's capabilities and its limitations. Although it certainly won't suit everyone's needs, GWT remains a major engineering achievement and is worthy of serious consideration when you design your next Ajax application. GWT has more breadth and depth than I've been able to explore here, so do read Google's documentation for more or jo"

Welcome

2006-06-29T21:59:00.000+03:00

What a pleasent place and date to start.
We're just before the final stages of the world cup 2006 and I decided it is a good timing to kick off my personal blog in which I'd like to share my thoughts with all of you.
So, just as a welcome note, as there are many posts yet to come - good luck to us all!

Ronen