BEA World 2007 SF Day 1 Keynote Report

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Bill Roth's Blog | September 11, 2007  10:40 AM | Comments (0)

Another BEA World is upon us, and this year things are a bit different. In addition to the usual developer content, the focus of this year's event is to focus on how real customers are using the technology.

Alfred Chuang

Alfred started out by talking about his core believe that we are on the cusp of fundamental change, with the advent of iPods, Web 2.0, and social networks. He started with a discussion of Mashups, and talked about how most of them are consumer facing. He then said "The era of innovation in packaged applications is over."

He then called out the key needs he has seen recently from customers. This includes:

• Businesses require greater agility
• IT can't respond fast enough to satisfy the business.
• What IT needs is an innovation layer of services from packaged and custom applications.

The need for a new market category was defined: Dynamic Business Applications, a term which Forrester defined. They key elements of Dynamic Business Applications(DBA) are:

• Embody Business Process
• Built to be Changed
• Adaptable
• Information Rich
• Tailored for the individual

SOA was never meant to be the destination. The destination has always been about simplifying

We have developed a Dynamic Enterprise Application Infrastructure, we're calling Genesis. Its is a simplified platform that transforms software at the application layer. We see a future of user-focused situational applications, and it will have user-based.

Mike Stamback (BEA Demo God) came on stage to show a demo of the progress we've made with Workspace 360, some of which has already been released. More will be released toward the end of the year. He showed a business analyst portal, and then talked about how he could add a a sales commission application. He started with ALBPM to show the business process. From there, he transitioned, in the same tool, into an early version of our Service Assembly Modeler(SAM), which is our eclipse-based implementation of Service Component Architecture. He then showed how he could drill into the ALSB or WLI from the SAM model, and then showed how you could manipulate the ALSB(service bus)  proxy (service).

Alfred then mentioned that this was only the beginning, and that we'd have more to show in the future.

Andy Baer, Comcast

Comcast is a $30B consumer entertainment and communications company. He started by talking about Comcast's business, and his industry challenges. Baer then showed a video on the origins of Comcast and its business. It discussed their cable, Internet and voice products, and their lineage from 1960's Tupelo, Mississippi.

He then showed one of their Slowsky ads, and some statistics:

• 26% of Homes Passed
• 55% of HSD growth from DSL switchers
• 7 out of 10 customers use Comcast.net
• 12M customers make the portal a Top 10 Site
• They are the #1 of the residential Broadband provider
• They will be the 4th largest residential phone company by year end.

He also pointed out that the generation entering college is the first generation that has not known life without the Internet. He then showed a "Broadband to Wideband" video. It contrasted the cable modems of of 1996 to now, hosted by Brian Roberts, their CEO. His question was: What will people do with this bandwidth? He didn't know, but he knew it would get used. Just as work expands to fill the allotted time, people's use will expand to fill the allotted bandwidth.

He then discussed his business challenges.

• All his products, and all the locations started individually. They are offering a converged product.
• Rapid introduction to new products
• Rapid growth of products
• Extending existing  products
• The changing definition of customer

He talked about rapid product delivery time, not in terms of months, he would like to be able to launch product from conception to production in 24 hours. He also talked about OCAP, Open Cable Application Platform which will allow 3rd party apps to be published to your set-top box.

He then discussed the "reinvention of of the Back Office with SOA". He then mentioned that they were doing several things for this:

• Offer a mediation layer to encapsulate legacy applications
• Using Enterprise Service Bus provides application-agnostic infrastructure
• Focusing on operational support, making the platform fault tolerant
• Registry and Repository facilitate information sharing and reuse.

Comcast is betting their back-office business on BEA, and showed a slide as to where it was positioned. He then disagreed with Alfred, saying Enterprise Apps will not go away, but be wrappered to participate in the SOA.

He also had additional projects that they as working on:

• Improving Technician productivity
• Improving Call center productivity
• Video in demand platform

He then talked about some new language he's trying to spread, called Triple Slanguage, like:

• Televisiphonernetting: simultaneously using the TV, phone, and Internet at the same time
• Quizjacking: Using fast Internet to get the answers
• Snurfing: Surfing where you are supposed to be on the phone. (something I have been accused of frequently)

Mark Carges, Business Process Management and Social Networks

 After the break, Mark Carges, who runs the Business Interaction Division, then came up to talk about BPM and social networks. He mentioned a McKinsey study which showed that the US Economy at the beginning of the 21st century, only 15% were in transformation work (mining, manufacturing, etc), the other 85% spend 100% of their time interacting. This suggest that there is a huge potential market in helping people to interact.

He also pointed out that organizational structure, Pioneered by Alfred P Sloan in the 1920s, creates gaps, and those gaps need to be overcome. The manifest themselves as boundaries in an organization that need to be overcome. There is a transformation from the social networking and collaboration tools on the Internet to enterprise space. In other words, how can we help people interact and spend less time on the gaps in a large organization. Those gaps are filled by people interacting.. The problem is the information and knowledge are not easily leveraged, and if people who are filling gaps leave, then much information is lost.

One of the solutions to this, is to allow knowledge workers to collaborate, and furthermore, learn who the experts in a particular topic, which can be done with tagging (Folksonomies) and situational teaming around topics, or communities of interest. Mark gave a great example on how this applies to a business process like insurance claims processing.

The fundamental change is that the user is the center of the interactions. The information, enterprise data, and collaboration come to the user rather than the user having to search. We call this kind of interaction Enterprise Social Computing, and this manifests it self in our PEP products, which stands for Pages, Pathways and Ensemble. We are offering the following new functionality:

• Connections to interaction and collaboration tools
• Modeling ad hoc communication
• Democratize enterprise processes

He closed with the following points:

• BEA enables the next level of business productivity
• BEA delivers tool today for the new workplace
• Manage interaction and activity as a core business asset.

Guy Churchward, Virtualization

Next up, is the ever-avuncular and convivial Guy Churchward. He started with a quote from MacBeth showing that Shakespeare was the first SOA Architect. Not kidding. Watch the reply to see it for yourself. He then talked about a "chain is only as strong as its weakest link". By this he meant that as BEA in an SOA we view services a this kind of ephemera on a network, but they are only as powerful as the underlying equipment that runs the software. In this context he talked about the  Liquid VM which is:

• A virtualized Java Container w/o the need for an operating system
• Reduces memory consumption
• Enables Java application appliances
• All on a VMware technology base

What we do differently is that we're focusing on efficiency and utilization rather than management. The benefits to customers are:

• Efficiency: Cost cost thru virtualization
• Simplicity: Pre-configured software appliances
• Control: management of virtualized resources.

He then suggested mashups are a kind of virtualization. He also did a wonderful timeline to show how this is an evolution. His final points are:

• Business Efficiencies are critical
• Agility is Key
• Sustainability and Controls are crucial
• BEA WebLogic: Rock solid Mission Critical applications

It was a great kick off to a great day.

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