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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..).
Oracle dips its toe into the BEA talent pool?
Posted by quinton_wall on October 12, 2007 at 1:44 PM | Permalink
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I am not going to get into the debate on whether the recent announcement regarding Oracle's bid to acquire BEA is a good thing or a bad thing, as all the speculation really doesnt help anything IMO.
What will happen will happen but it is always pleasing to see the that the analysts suggest that one of the motivating factors behind Oracle's bid is potentially due to great products and great people:
""BEA has had a longstanding reputation for having high quality products and engineers who've built those products." The acquisition would give Oracle access to a large "pool of talent.""
Right now I am happy to be part of that pool of talent what ever happens :)
The 70% Integration Assembly Opportunity
Posted by quinton_wall on October 11, 2007 at 4:38 PM | Permalink
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I read an interesting analyst research paper the other day which resonated very well post BEAWorld Barcelona customer sessions which articulated a common misconception that "SOA makes integration problems go away. If many of the customers who spoke at BEAWorld are anything to go on this is certainly true.
To anyone at all familiar with the mantras of SOA, A major aspect of any solution is the ability to assemble and compose applications from standards based services. Within the report the analysts suggest that more than 70% of services in an organization are likely to assembled from existing assets. When you consider than this much of an organizations assets are likely to reside in non-SOA applications, the need for comprehensive integration is certainly not going away any time soon. In fact some of the core features of Integration including process orchestration, routing, transformation etc are going to be fundamental to accessing this 70%. If this report is even halfway accurate there is certainly a large area for opportunity to improve the ability to have a direct impact in reducing the complexity of Integration and SOA based solutions.
Perhaps its time to retire the 80/20 rule and work on the 70/30 rule when working with SOA Integration projects.
Social Computing - Barcelona Style
Posted by quinton_wall on October 9, 2007 at 2:38 PM | Permalink
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Im back on deck in San Jose somewhat jet-lagged still after a great BEAWorld Barcelona. Post conference I managed some sightseeing. The return also signaled the beginning of my new role in BEA as part of the Integration Product Marketing Team. Expect to see a plethora of Integration related posts and information in the near future as my focus changes. (hopefully for the better)
Btw just in case you missed the Capricorn 1 reference....read up here
Pragmatic advice for sucessful Integration projects
Posted by quinton_wall on October 4, 2007 at 5:42 PM | Permalink
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It is about 2am here in Barcelona and I just arrived back from a great after BEAWorld dinner with friends Victoria Griggs, WLI PM, Simone Geib, EMEA SE, Dain Hansen and Jon Mountjoy at a great tapas restaurant called Taller de Tapas. I am still buzzing from the liquid chocolate we had for drinks afterwards so I thought I would add my notes from the last day of the conference while they were still fresh in my mind and the sugar rush was still kicking in. Tomorrow is sightseeing day so its now or never.
I was pretty busy on the booth again today but did have the opportunity to host a session by a BEA customer, Pedro Vill. Pedro works for ICEX,the Spanish Foreign Trade Institute who amongst other things are tasked with diversifying the export markets for Spain. Pedro was tasked with enabling ICEX's diverse applications to communicate more effectively through the reduction of multiple entry points of data, the breaking down of application silos and general information quality.
Pedro went on to explain how, after examining many other integration products in the market they chose WebLogic Integration because it was the "best solution because of the robustness of the integration platform". By leveraging WLI, ICEX were able to implement an integration broker which enabled them to "propagate information not mistakes". I thought that this was a great statement that showed how an integration solution was able to assist solving a common area of concern for customers, syncronization of data across applications. With the integration broker in place and the creation of an information quality team who could resolve issues before they were propagated further ICEX were able to cleanse their data of redundancies and build an operational data store in a very short period.
Not content to rest on their success, Pedro explained that further enhancements are planned which will fully automate error prone processes through WLI. By prioritizing their efforts ICEX can focus their activities to ensure early success. To date some of their successful automation activities such as Invoice Transaction Processing has reduced processing time by around 90%...often down to days instead of months!.
Pedro finished his session off with some great advice on how they are tackling their integration projects by breaking them down into 3 distinct phases:
- Development new web applications to support efficient data entry
- Automate integration points with back end systems
- Automate the business process to reduce the time it takes to process and eliminate errors
This is certainly good pragmatic advice and a great way to end the conference (apart from the tapas of course!)
From Barcelona its time to say Adios Amigos. Next stop for BEAWorld is Shanghai!.
Notes from BEAWorld Barcelona Breakout Sessions Day 2
Posted by quinton_wall on October 4, 2007 at 1:12 AM | Permalink
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Between rushing around to ensure my track was running well and manning the booth at the solution showcase I had the good fortune to sit in on a presentation from Ben Hnatow from JP Morgan on how they leveraged AquaLogic BPM to help standardize processes and improve operational agility. Aside from just plain being a great presentation and a compelling story I was very pleased to hear a story from the trenches that quite often, as Ben highlighted, "BPM tools are not solutions by themselves". In JP Morgan's case the entire solution included integration with 10 or so backend systems which were eventually leveraged by the BPM process. The end result for JP Morgan was substantial cost savings and greatly improved visibility of their processes by focusing on both BPM and Integration. Ben continued to comment on the fact that through the implementation of a solution that involves alignment and visibility of the business process there is a lot of human centric and organizational change that accompanies it.
Looking around the packed room I noticed many nodding heads when the Q&A session covered some of the complexities of integrating with so many backend systems. It was not surprising shortly after this presentation we had many visitors at the WebLogic Integration and AquaLogic Service Bus pod. The great thing is that right across the carpet the AquaLogic BPM booth is in easy access so make sure you come and visit both.
The stars were out last night at BEAWorld Barcelona
Posted by quinton_wall on October 4, 2007 at 1:07 AM | Permalink
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What a night it was at the customer appreciation event at BEAWorld Barcelona. Coming from such a great San Francisco event where we had Jay Leno as the leadliner so I was not sure what to expect here and it was well....interesting to say the least!
From 6pm to 9pm there was a constant stream of celebrity impersonators ranging from a very scary Michael Jackson through to George Michael, Tina Turner, Kylie Minogue (who looked liked she was fresh off the plane from the MardiGrai in Rio) and finally Sting (who was actually pretty good). I know some collegues snapped some pictures and I will try to get them online today.
All we needed was an appearance from (yes ever bit of useless knowledge is truly on wikipedia as well if you need any more proof of the Wisdom of the Crowds) and my nightmare would have been complete :)
BEAWorld Barcelona Day 1
Posted by quinton_wall on October 3, 2007 at 1:27 AM | Permalink
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It is officially the first day of BEAWorld Barcelona and I am blognoting again before the keynotes start. This mornings speakers include Alfred Chuang, British Airways and more. I am sure there will be a lot of other BEA folks writing about the keynotes so I thought that I would try and broaden the coverage and write about the breakout sessions and event in general.
Although today is the official start of the conference yesterday saw a full day of activities from customer meetings, user groups, welcome receptions and the opening of the showroom floor. I spent most of my day installing the demo for the the WebLogic Integration and AquaLogic Service Bus booth. I recently joined the Marketing team with a focus on Business Integration so it is certainly a great opportunity to talk to customers and understand how they are leveraging BEA products and direct feedback. Having recently come from the BEAWorld San Francisco event it was interesting to see the differences and similarities around the world.
The afternoon saw the opening of the solutions showcase which is area that provides vendors and partners the opportunity to demonstrate their services and interact with event participants. As the afternoon turned into the evening a steady flow of chocolate dipped strawberries, seafood on a stick and great conversations ensured. Although I didn't get much of an opportunity to circle the floor and explore other vendors booths such as HP, VMware and many others, I did however get plenty of time to speak with many customers across most industries. One common theme that came through was the continual need to leverage existing systems and processes but do it rapidly and in a way that change is visible to the organization.
I spoke with one customer in particular that was very interested in adapters through the Enterprise Service Bus. This is a typical scenario but as we spoke further it was clear that there is still a strong need to truly clarify the integration space and how to ensure we do not develop systems that re-implement problems of the past. Of course, in the customers environment which I was talking to yesterday is critical to their environment care must be ensure that the actual process enabled through these adapters resides in the correct location. Due to the ease of much of the tooling these days it is often difficult to determine exactly what goes where when considering future growth of your business and system.
As the night continued and I spoke to more customers, and other folks in the industry (including John Mountjoy, dev2dev editor) there was a real buzz in attendees who recognized the continuing need to enable the business, more often than not through integration of existing assets and the requirement to improve time to market. It seems clear that it is no longer just about business or IT process integration but also about development/design process integration. By this I am referring to the ability to discover what is already in your environment at design/development time through repository introspection. This integrated ability to discover what already exists is critical to achieving the increased speed of delivery that is required to continue to provide competitive advantage in any industry.
Today's agenda looks just as interesting with keynotes, meet the experts sessions (I am at the WLI 10.2 session so make sure you drop in to visit!), roundtables and of course the return of the pod people and the booths. Today I have some time to attend a number of sessions and explore the showroom floor and should have plenty more to report later in the day.
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