Quinton Wall is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Integration at BEA
where he is responsible for articulating the strategic vision and direction
of the products such as WebLogic Integration and AquaLogic Integration.
Quinton, a certified Enterprise Architect and member of BEA's internal SOA
Practice prides himself with looking at technology and the business of IT 'a
bit different from the rest'. He firmly believes that tomorrow's problems
can not be solved by today's thinking; rather a fresh perspective is often
needed.
Originally from Australia, Quinton has been involved in the Java community
since early 1996 where a number of colleagues formed Australia's first Java
Users Group. Quinton now resides in Pacific Grove, California with his wife
and 5 year old daughter (and about 50 Barbies, My Little Ponies etc..).
I just finished blogging about the new AquaLogic 3.0 line of products and their tight integration to promote repeatable and manageable enterprise SOA and then along comes the icing on the cake!, a great article on searchsoa.com about AquaLogic 3.0. According to Seely, the articles author, and quotes from Chris Haddard, Vice President and Service Director, Burton Group Inc. AquaLogic 3.0 is "a comprehensive SOA platform offering that is highly competitive, includes best of breed components, and is the foundation for a cohesive suite of SOA infrastructure products".
If that is not enough validation that the 3.0 line of products are going beyond the rest to address the enterprise SOA requirements Haddard even suggests that ALSB will be disruptive to the ESB market.... hey who wants to be the same when you can change the game!
For the past 5 weeks or so I have been traveling pretty extensively through America and the Asia Pacific region working with our sales and partner teams talking about AquaLogic 3.0, SOA Integration, Information As A Service and Connectivity. It is always interesting to recap and reflect on some of the geographical differences that arise in regards to SOA adoption, perspective and of course food!
Americas: In general America seems pretty mature in regards to SOA and their requirements are now driving the next wave of service orientated differentiation through aspects such as Information As A Service, Event Driven Architecture and social computing. The teams that I spoke with are engaging daily with customers already doing SOA but are hitting against the concerns associated with driving to enterprise adoption, in particular governance and making SOA success repeatable. Here is where the AquaLogic 3.0 line excels with ALER at its core and organic meta sharing of information and models between all the products. A great example of this is AquaLogic Integrator 3.0 where you can seamlessly traverse from a Service Assembly Model, develop some ALSB pipelines and drilldown through a doubleclick into a WLI based process and back again all without leaving the one IDE. What makes the process managable, repeatable and visible (all the important things to any of us who have been responsible with running engineering teams and being measured on project efficiency metrics!) is that all of this meta data is automagically populated into ALER!.
So for the Americas the message was loud and clear - we are beyond simply exposing services and calling SOA; the next phase of repeatable, enterprise wide SOA is here. Unfortunately I didnt take any photos on my Americas travel but I hit Napa, New Jersey and South Beach Miami.
APAC: For the past 2 1/2 weeks I tripped through Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Sydney, Singapore and New Delhi. Here the SOA story was a little different. In many cases customers are still focusing on solving EAI based solutions and WebLogic Integration was very popular here. I spent a lot of my time talking AquaLogic Integrator which resonates very well considering it is based on WLI and ALSB but allows customers to continue to invest in enablement activities but seamlessly evolve their solutions to take advantage of service orientation and begin to expose assets as shared services. This was of particular interest where many customers had packages applications that could now be leveraged within their SOA environment through the unique BEA SmartConnect 3.0 product. I couldn't help but think this picture I took in Korea really summed up the APAC technical landscape which was stepped in existing application infrastructure but a firm embrace of new technology leading the region solidly forward (even the guy in the picture seems to be looking forward dont you think?). Aside from a cool picture I thought I could draw a better analogy from that one than this picture of cows tongues in Korea that Steven Leung, our Financials Services Marketing go-to-guy and Thanh Tran, SVP and GM of AquaLogic devoured as I stuck to my noodles (Im a vegetarian after all) - although we all tastes the local beer which was pretty good!
But the fun in AsiaPac didnt finish there, many customers were very interested in our Financial Service Bus solution that provides SWIFT certification and a great graphical message designer to solve payments gateway and trading requirements. This was especially true in Australia, my home country. Aside from some great conversation the team managed to spend some time in Bondi at the very cool Flying Squirrel, which is kind of an Australian version of a Tapas Bar
Well training is now over, I am back and focused on rolling out another year of cool products and cool solutions and customer successes built on AquaLogic 3.0.
I am always on the lookout for good SOA related material so when Ron Schmelzer from ZapThink reminded me about the Practical SOA events making their way around the country and the globe I was certainly happy to hear about it.
Aside from obviously spending your hard earned dollars and time attending BEA events such as the Dev2Dev days rolling out to a town near you, I have always been a fan of ZapThinks no hype approach to SOA so the event is surely worth attending.
Good news for BEA shareholders obviously, the board did a great job raising the purchase price some $2.50 from the previous offer of $17.00 but in the fast changing world of IT there are always other industry events going on, two which caught my attention that will likely have even more impact now I guess I am an Oracle employee:
Sun acquires MySql bringing them in direct competition in the database market with Oracle. My take is that is a great move for Sun lets just hope they do a better job of it than other software initiatives. I'm watching downstream information as service type vendors such as Worklight, Ponyfish and Knownow to be gobbled up as Sun and Oracle look to differentiate themselves from the rest (remember Oracle now has ALDSP! (*start shameless plug* btw ALDSP 3.0 was just released *end shameless plug*)
SAP completes the business objects deal. Again its about what you do with the data once you have it that makes a difference! Yahoo and Google get it and certainly Oracle and SAP understand the importance of turning that data into information!
I wonder if Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was onto something when he said "Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking"
I recently spoke to Steve Marlin, managing editor for Treasury and Risk Magazine about how BEA SmartConnect can address organizational drivers and how they relate to a companies mission of increasing shareholder value. A subset of this conversation was posted yesterday and is available here.
I wanted to add a few additional items that were discussed but did not make it into the Treasury and Risk article; in particular around corporate drivers and the importance of leveraging existing packaged applications through BEA SmartConnect in order to increase shareholder value:
Driver: Reducing Expenses and Maximizing Asset Utilization
SmartConnect allows an organization leverage existing ERP and packaged applications in a ubiquitous approach that facilitates sharing of assets across single business units, reduces idle time of these systems as more and more new innovation is enabled on-top of these systems. In addition organizations will no longer require dedicated hardware to run proprietary adapters therefor releasing funds that can be better utilized elsewhere to grow revenue
Driver: Grow Revenue and Improve CashFlow
reduction in operating expenses through more visible and flexible process improvements. With connectivity solved organizations are no longer constrained in rigid processes as defined by large packaged apps and have a greater visibility into critical information and financial controls. This increased agility allows organizations to focus on obtaining new customers by entering new markets, increasing customer satisfaction and ability to cross sell.
Driver: Manage Risk
Through increased re-use, visibility, performance and management organizations can improve customer service, employee satisfaction and diversify offerings, markets etc resulting in decreased exposure to fluctuating market conditions.This is especially important for organizations to be able to rapidly comply with evolving regulatory changes.
Looks like packaged apps are not going anywhere soon (who would have guessed). Since BEA announced SmartConnect, as a solution for service enabling packaged applications we have been getting quite a bit of media interest. The most recent one I saw was from SOA World magazine
The great thing about SmartConnect is that here at BEA we are also taking the ubiquitous solution to connectivity to heart and integrating it across the stack. Now that packaged app connectivity is just another common service (JACS) applications and products can govern and manage it seamlessly throughout the enterprise.
Now that sounds like something to celebrate in the new year!
My fingers were sore from typing yesterday so I wanted to try something a bit different. Sit back and watch a short overview of the need for a revolutionary solution to packaged application connectivity called BEA SmartConnect.
I have said it before and I will say it again, in my opinion Java is the cobol of the 90's! Yes thats pretty harsh words especially for someone who works for a product company that build their applications in Java but I believe it is true. So as the sting begins to subside from that statement let me explain the shades of gray in the statement and premise the conversation with the note that Java is still fundamentally important but in a different context.
I was in a session this morning presented by Yefim Natis, Gartner VP where he was speaking about the future of application platforms. During this session Yefim much more eloquently than my statement above how application servers as we know it are becoming a commodity and we will begin to see parallel product offerings that support more agile frameworks such as spring (just in case you didnt know WLS 10 already supports Spring!) and going forward there will be a delineation between lightweight java (Spring etc), JEE, and Java Extreme Processing. This is where we get into the meat of where my statement above starts to ring true. Cobol traditionally has been reliable, stable and around for years, Java is moving that way too. This is evidenced by the declining release schedules of J2EE and JEE. I was around when we got a new version every few months. JavaEE is now a commodity no doubt about it. Lightweight Java; Spring, Hibernate etc will continue to drive enterprise innovation but I believe even those technologies will soon be swallowed by dynamic languages such as Rudy and PHP and way cool frameworks like Flex and Apollo for what they are good at; agile web applications.
Now there is the rub. Java is great at certain things which are especially critical to higher transaction and concurrent applications which happen to be BEA's traditional sweetspot. With the evolving SaaS environment growing rapidly languages such as Java will likely play a heavy lifting role behind the scenes and will continue to use products like WebLogic Integration, ALSB etc but users will be sheltered from the complexity of using them (IMO through Rudy, PHP, AJAX and Web2.0 related technologies).
Sounds kind of similar to cobol still running on mainframes and new innovation being done in more modern technologies doesn't it?
Perhaps the Gartner conference has me thinking of what technologies and circumstances have brought us to where were are now or perhaps it is the late hour but I got to thinking if I had an IT crystal ball that could not only look into the future but allow me to go back into the past and change something technology related what would it be?
Perhaps my thoughts will be biased in the fact that I no longer am responsible for maintaining applications and as a result may not look to change all those systems I implemented with EJB1 or AWT (remember that fun little toolkit before Swing) or something similar but one area that kept coming to mind was how pervasive the use of databases were (and still are) and the fact that these often resulted in the most complex areas that required continual change management to keep them in sync.
I think perhaps I would change how I used databases and instead I would have looked more at differential development and maybe even Jini (Yes I am still bummed about this one never taking off!)....but I have so many things I would change I am sure these are just the tip of the iceberg.
In regards to what I would like to see what the future holds for technology would be to see where the convergence of social computing and mobile computing is going to take us and what opportunities are just beginning to germinate today.
So many possibilities I really can not just pick one. What about you?
Day 1 - Gartner Application Architecture Development & Integration Summit
I am in Las Vegas attending the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit and it seems that there are more and more acronyms and buzz terms than every before...most good, some bad but all very interesting. Here is but a few:
WOA - Web Orientated Architecture
APAAS - Application Platform as a Service (ala Salesforce.com)
XAAS - Everything As A Service
Yes its kind of terminology overload here but in the midst of it all there were some great nuggets of information in particular around the true opportunities for innovation where there is an intersection of technologies such as Cloud Computing and Social Computing. With so much changing and the fact that no one has a blank slate the need to leverage existing assets to align your environment to mirror the business and adapt seems to be pushing us into, as Gartner calls it, the Zone of Competitive Leadership.
So what does this mean to your daily demands of working with legacy (or the new politically correct term, Heritage)? It means thinking of applications differently with as much design and composition as close to run time as possible and understanding that you should now start looking at applications as either bought or an endless combination of mashups the landscape looks decidedly different, according to Gartner
I had to put my brakes on here for a moment.... legacy and run time composition in the same sentence? Something smells odd here but the more I thought about it the trick comes down to granularity. If I have a tool such as WLI that is designed to integrate systems in a highly performant and transactional way then I combine it with the runtime composition ability of ALSB I get a mashup of functionality (in a product BEA calls AquaLogic Integrator!) that lets me control the granularity of processes and services exposed within my environment. I will always need some heavy lifting and long running transactions but I want to make these atomic business activities at a level of granularity relevant to the business so they can achieve this run time composition into tools such as ALBPM, mashups or whatever.
I thought about this for a while and threw in a helping of Gartner research which stated that in 2008, organizations must be doing SOA just to keep up with the competition and came to the conclusion that yes I concur with this statement but many of us have been doing composition of some sort for a long time now, the difference is, as I mentioned at the start of this rant, that convergent opportunities need products, processes and people to take full advantage of them. Traditional software products just may not cut it, at least not without mashing up the old and new and creating something that addresses the new use case presented to us.
Perhaps the next trend we will see is convergent products like AquaLogic Integrator that address the convergent opportunities Gartner alluded to today. Who knows? Perhaps tomorrow will yield an answer or perhaps more questions. We will see...
Yes i admit it I am a gadget freak. Just ask my wife who has to deal with my salivations over the iPhone despite the negative criticism of its closed system and their relucant commital to open up the platform to third party apps... but I digress.
Some time ago I speculated whether web 2.0 could break free of the browser and I am glad to say the answer seems to be a resounding YES!. BEA is pushing this notion already with Project Genesis from a software vendor standpoint but I was very excited to see the wisdom of crowds mentality embodied in TomTom's new GPS that lets people share comments about maps, locale etc...
If you thought Web 2.0 wasnt changing the way in which we collaborate past the browser I think its time to pick up your iPhone, drive to your next meeting with directions from TomTom and blow away the competition by leveraging your dynamic business application all before lunch.
If 2007 is anything to go by 2008 is going to be impressive indeed!
I am back and revived from a weeks vacation and as usual straight back into the mix of the wonderful changing world of technology that we live in.
The first this that hit me was the way some companies seemed focused on breeding deipnosophists and avoiding some of the real issues of the day. Yes the economic environment plays an incredible influence on IT as it does business, focusing on big bang changes just doesnt make sense to me.
So does that mean the old saying of less is more is more true than ever? Well I guess to one extent yes but its more than just that. How does an organization leverage changes and opportunities that result from a difficult economic environment? I believe the answer is very similar to how we handle similar changes at home.
If money is tight at home you comport yourself in a certain manner; you dont go out to dinner and instead you fish around in that murky corner of your freezer for something that you can re-use even if it takes a bit of creative magic to make something edible out of it (yes even those fish fingers encased in that block of ice in the back corner start to look like an option)....but the point is you look at what you already have.
So I as a business may need to recognize some of the realities of operating in a climate of change and uncertainty and identify opportunities that may arise through such activities as M&A, layoffs etc. Whatever the change there is an opportunity associated. One perfect example is how do I leverage my packaged applications in new and innovative ways or in the case of a merger do I need to extirpate the ERP system of the acquired company or can I innovate on top and align it with my processes and integration strategy?
What is important in such leveraged opportunities is to see beyond the fish fingers encrusted in their packaging and avoid a quick tactical win for an smart tactical win. For example simply re-using existing adapters to access, say SAP, does serve a purpose but the result is continued issues in regards to performance, the need for specific hardware etc. A smarter tactical approach would be to take a service orientated approach to connectivity such as offered by BEA SmartConnect. The tactical objective of accessing a packaged app is achieved whilst at the same time further enabling change and productivity in the future...
So what is SmartConnect? In a short sentence it is a service orientated approach that radically changes the landscape for how companies think about ERP integration and connectivity as a whole. Traditional approaches suffered from a number of problems including lack of performance and quality, the inability to perform any data format customization or transformation and were often independent of enterprise security initiatives within an organization. By leveraging the abilities inherent in ALSB such as management, monitoring, security propagation, transformation etc SmartConnect provides native transports to truly unlock information often buried in packaged apps without the associated issues of previous adapter based strategies.
Over the next few days/weeks I will provide much more information about where BEA is going with its revolutionary connectivity strategy and make sure you check out the product pages which are being updated as we speak with a plethora of SmartConnect information.
I had the pleasure of listening to Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel at this mornings keynote presentation. Paul spoke about two topics that, for anyone that reads my regular rants on dev2dev, are of particular interest; architecture and most importantly design.
Paul spoke about the role of the architect and what it really means. I am certainly one of those people that think the term, in particular when related to IT, has been so over used and polluted. Using, one of my favorite figures in design as an example of a true architect, Frank Lloyd Wright Otellini quoted Wright as saying: "The architect must be a prophet.. a prophet in the true sense of the term...if he cant see at least ten years ahead dont call him an architect" to demonstrate how Intel approaches innovation and design. Within Intel, in order to keep pace with Moore's Law they need to come up with an evolutionary design every 4 years. Without these true architects this would not be possible.
What a great quote and a great presentation. With my zen level charged up again I am ready to face the 43,000 other attendees for Day 2
Rethinking Connectivity
Connectivity, a critical aspect to any IT solution has received little attention of late. This article presents a broader view of how organizations may approach connectivity through the definition of 4 dimensions; internal, external, industry and hosted connectivity. Apr. 16, 2008
Rethinking SOA Governance
SOA governance comes down to understanding and addressing two complementary factors: cost and profit. This article looks at the incentives for organizations to undertake an effective SOA governance model through a pragmatic approach to addressing cost and profit. Mar. 14, 2007
Understanding the Service Lifecycle within a SOA: Run Time
Knowing how to effectively manage the lifecycle of services is fundamental to achieving success within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiative. Quinton Wall returns to tell us about the run-time phase of this service lifecycle. Nov. 8, 2006
