« August 2007 |
Main
| October 2007 »
September 2007 Archives
Quinton Wall's Blog
Quinton Wall's Homepage
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..).
BEAWorld SF Blognoting Day 2
Posted by quinton_wall on September 12, 2007 at 10:21 AM | Permalink
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
It is the last day of BEAWorld SF and I am blognoting again listening to this mornings keynote speakers.
First on the agenda was Paul Patrick, VP and Chief Architect at BEA Systems. Paul extended on the Genesis vision that Alfred introduced in yesterdays keynote and revisited the analogy that BEA used to describe the need for SOA a number of years ago. This analogy drew on a Building representing current applications with a City being the plumbing or service infrastructure for enabling SOA.
Paul focused on the reality that cities are actually made up of neighborhoods with their own personalities rather than simply a collection of buildings. These neighborhoods evolve and are formed around local utilities or landmarks such as shops, restaurants, parks etc. They are all different but need to exist in the broader ecosystem. The intent of the updated analogy was that there is a need to manage this ecosystem. For BEA this ecosystem enabler is going to be Genesis and specifically a Service Fabric.
Again, at the speed of collaboration unless you are here or regularly read analyst reports you are probably thinking "What is he talking about?". Let me try to summarize Paul's comments:
The Service Fabric is a multilayer mesh consisting of aspects (Paul used the word Layer but I am shying away from using as to me it denotes complexity) enabling Foundation and Hosting environments, Service Networks, Business Processes and User Interaction.
Ok so this good but boiled down what does it all mean to customers looking to continue to innovate and keep up with business change? To use Pauls exact words, it needs to be "dead simple". The fabric must be able to dynamically discover and enable dynamic business applications in a dynamic fashion by taking the complexity and abstract it away in a viral type environment that adapts and moves forward with your business. This also includes the ability to support multiple programming languages and paradigms such as scripted languages, SCA, protocols such as BPEL and what ever new language becomes the next enabling force.
Follow Paul (and currently speaking) is Jeff Marshall, CIO and SVP of Kohls and the IT challenges and complexity of keeping up with a business that grows at almost 18% annually. To give you an indication of the explosive growth Kohls had around 250 stores in 1997 and by 2010 they will have something like 1200 stores! For Kohls this is only the start. With such growth in stores it is not surprising that sales and revenue are growing such as rapidly. Kohls approached this problem through a transformation program that focused on three aspects; architecture, process (Project methodology, aligning IT with business cases) and people. Having my education in organizational behavior I was especially excited to see how Kohls is ensuring that in conjunction with the organizational changes they are ensuring that IT jobs are aligned with business units and career planning is factored in from the start.
Jeff went on to highlight a few very interesting aspects of such a growing business in regards to net income. Net income is directly effected by operating efficiency and guess what the IT systems have a direct input into this metric. The real kicker is that as the business grows so does the complexity of the IT systems and support structures. As Paul articulated earlier things have to be able to adapt and adjust in time with the business.
Another important aspect that Jeff highlighted was the demand for data and integration across the organization. As the business continues to innovate with partnerships with Chase, product launches with Vera Wang the demand for transform data into information is critical. Kohls is addressing this problem by ensuring that data is defined and described in a consistent and ubiquitous manner.
Thats it for the first half of this mornings keynotes....time to find the snacks.
BEAWorld SF Update Day 1 - Keynotes part 2
Posted by quinton_wall on September 11, 2007 at 4:17 PM | Permalink
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
It is mid afternoon here in SF and the technology tracks are well underway for the first official day of BEAWorld. Full of energy after a wonderful dim-sum lunch I thought it might be helpful if I recapped the second half of the keynotes.
Guy Churchward, VP of WebLogic products, and very funny guy followed Andrew Baer after a short break to discuss how virtualization will dramatically change the way in which IT operations are today. As if to support this statement across the street the VMWorld conference is being held with a very large attendance. (although I cant help but that a vmworld conference that requires real and physical attendance is almost an oxymoron. Perhaps next year it will be held in Second Life.... I know I would attend!)
After starting off with some Shakespearean dialog (and I thought I was reaching back in time with my references to Ted Codd and suggesting that Shakespeare was the father of mashups, Guy articulated the need to break free of the medium upon which any sort of information is constrained by; from photo albums being a mashup evoling to the web2.0 equivalent of medium free albums all the way to mainframes, Pandora, point-cast and napster. The analogy was very powerful and was intended to highlight the fact that right now, the IT industry with its emphasis on SOA is still contrained by the medium of physical servers. BEA LiquidVM and WebLogic Server Virtual Edition is a strong demonstration on where the company is focused and delivering in this immensely important environment if history is anything to go by.
The final keynote of the morning was from one of customers, Sony Pictures. After an amazing preview of an up and coming movie called Vantage Point the discussions following were a strong indication of how Sony are clearly offering a service and are leveraging their communication channels very effectively to deliver all the way from online games to shipping reels to cinemas and way beyond. It will certainly be interesting to watch how a company, happy to take risks to promote innovation (in the end if Sony Pictures cant innovate what fun stuff do we have left...) is relying on BEA to produce some of the best entertainment communication on the planet.
Thats it for this mornings keynotes. Its off to the tech tracks.First on my list is Paul Patrick, BEA Chief Architect talking about BPM and Integration.
Blognoting at BEAWorld SF Keynotes
Posted by quinton_wall on September 11, 2007 at 10:16 AM | Permalink
| Comments (2)
| TrackBack (0)
I am sitting in the keynote session at BEAWorld San Francisco and currently watching Andy Baer from Comcast who followed Alfred Chuang. Being a technologist at the core I was extremely excited to see the public announcement of the Genesis platform from BEA. Considering that I am sitting here and Genesis was just announced I am guessing that its too early for even the press and analysts to pick it up yet so here is a very quick synopsis:
Genesis is an infrastructure environment that supports the development, delivery and management of Dynamic Business Applications. Due to the rapid need for change driven from the business we can no longer wait months for change but need to reduce this to days. In order to achieve this vision, flexibility, visibility and control must be core to this without reducing the ilities that allow IT to continue to scale. For BEA Workspace 360 is one of the core aspects of enabling this. The term Alfred used which sums this space up very well is "Built for Change, Architected to Last"
So this is without a doubt the continued evolution of technology enablement beyond SOA but one theme that I really picked up on especially between Alfred's speech and the current speech of Andy Baer is pretty simple but very powerful: Communication.
From the start of the internet era (and obviously much much longer than this, remember the printing press in the industrial revolution and previous historical communication landmarks) everything has been about communication and how can one collaborate efficiently. If you look at this way the vast majority of businesses these days either offer information or services or both. Very many organizations such as Comcast offer services intended to deliver information. Undoubtably such convergent needs are going to have to rely heavily on the need to innovate, as Comcast would say on-demand
Back to the keynotes....I will update some more soon.
Smashup or Mashup? The choice is yours
Posted by quinton_wall on September 7, 2007 at 9:06 AM | Permalink
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
Looks like I have another brainteaser for you: What do you get if you combine web 2.0 capabilities with difficult to change and proprietary integration? If you ask me you get a smashup. Yes I know it is lucky I am not a comedian for a living but the notion of a smashup is certainly real.
Over many years there have been multiple attempts at solving the integration problem. Not matter how you look at it this is a difficult space which requires complex solutions. I get that picture very well having lived with it for many many years and products such as WebLogic Integration, AquaLogic Service Bus and AquaLogic Integrator certainly focus on providing foundational business integration services to address this complexity. My fear is that if you rush too quickly into some of the web 2.0 style mashups without first ensuring that your foundation is up to standard that somewhere soon things will fall apart in a big way. I guess it is kind of like putting a new coat of paint on a rusty car; it looks great when it is sitting still but put it on the road and parts will start to fall off. Put it into peak hour traffic and the results can be downright dangerous!
So how do you avoid smashups while ensuring that you leverage the agility and collaborative empowerment inherent in web2.0 technologies? I think the answer is controls:
- Start with controlling the integration points to ensure where you do need to enable custom integration (and face it we all need something unique) you do it in such a manner that you don't have to integrate the integration points Look for graphical tools that support the standards but you can leverage existing processes to enable higher order types of technology such as SOA, BPM, mediation etc.
- Next control what end points you make available to be consumed by web 2.0 tools and processes. Ask yourself if by making this end point/service/process able to be consumed for say, a mashup, are you simply painting over the rust or have you expunged the poor under side and made it ready for priming?
- Finally, take advantage of the collective intelligence of your organization and enable/embrace collaboration. This should be done to ensure that your new shiny car is the color you (and your customers/stakeholders/shareholders) want. I have seen those pink Cadillacs driving down the highway and it ain't a pretty sight :)
Smashup or mashup. It's your choice. For me I am staying right away from that rusty pink Cadillac swerving lanes in front of me! I hope it doesn't get in my way on my way to BEAWorld next week in San Francisco. Maybe I will see you there.
 |
