Welcome to the blog where IBMers exchange viewpoints, share their perspectives to provide more insight around service oriented architecture solutions, and delve into a range of SOA-related subjects. We want you to speak out on SOA through comments in the blog -- from where your organization stands on SOA adoption, to your challenges and experiences -- to share with the larger community the impact of SOA on your marketplace. Sandy Carter is IBM's Vice President, SOA & WebSphere Marketing, Strategy and Channels. Discover the entry points to SOA and how companies worldwide are making SOA pay right away.

Credomatic - An Innovative Bank in Central America

While in Costa Rica, I had the pleasure of meeting with an innovative team for IT at Credomatic. Their leader & CTO, Alfonso Salvo, approaches the business with a focus on value.

Who is Credomatic?
The company is a leader in Central America. Credomatic began its operations in Nicaragua in 1971. Subsequently, it expanded throughout Central America as the pioneer in the bankcard industry, forming Grupo Credomatic, a network of service providers of integrated credit card issuing and merchant acquiring services. The development of financial products and services combined with quality, state-of-the-art technology and experience has given Grupo Credomatic a leadership position in the Central American financial market. As one of the signature brands within the BAC Financial Network, Grupo Credomatic has been able to successfully adapt to changes in the competitive environment, thereby consolidating its leadership position in the payment systems industry in Central America. Grupo Credomatic has an extensive network of financial institutions across Central America, the Caribbean and Miami.

A wow team!
What impressed me most about the team is their focus on the business. Their projects include Business Process Management. And a new exploration of Social Media. Watch this company for some best practices and leading IT practices!

Meet the team!

Costa Rica & IT-- Blog 1 of 3!

I am here in Costa Rica meeting with our Partner GBM and customers and had the honor of being able to meet the President of Costa Rica -- Oscar Arias Sanchez. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts to end civil wars in Central American countries. He is an amazing man well versed in IT.

Along with Gabriela Llobet, they gave us an overview of IT in Costa Rica. There are over 700 software companies here with over 10.6% of the country's GDP coming from ICT. Given they do not fund an army they invest in training and technology. They are the #1 high technology exporter in Latin American and the 4th largest in the world. They receive about $1.9B foreign investment in IT -- more than China, Brazil or Mexico.

They are super creative and technology focused. I was very impressed with the customers and partner I met here. In addition, I sat with Dr Roberto Sasso. He has helped Costa Rica with a digital strategy.Check it out!http://www.clubdeinvestigacion.com/

And their Minister of Foreign Trade is on twitter! That's right! Social Media insight abounds! Follow Marco Vinicio Ruiz at twitter.com/maviru.

I will blog and post pictures for my next post on Costa Rica...not at midnight!

Did you know!!!! Governments leveraging IBM to drive their effectiveness and efficiency!

Here is a whole set of things around Governments becoming more effective that I just learned and wanted to share!!!

IBM has helped the DVLA to become the largest provider of electronic services in the UK public sector and one of Britain's top 10 online retailers. More than 40% of UK motorists now buy their car tax discs online or over the telephone.

IBM leads the International Technology Alliance (ITA) a collaboration with the UK’s MoD and the US Department of Defense/US Army Research Laboratory that is tackling some of the most difficult fundamental science and technology challenges facing our armed forces. ITA in the UK is led by the IBM Emerging Technologies Laboratory in Hursley.

From the middle of 2009, the UK weather forecasts from the Met Office that you hear on the radio and see on your television will be brought to you from an IBM supercomputer. The supercomputer is supported by a new IBM data archive system which holds several petabytes of data and is one of the largest data repositories in the world - that's several million, million megabytes (or if you prefer several million, million, million bytes).

This is the first time in meteorological history that both of Europe's foremost weather forecasting centres - the Met Office and the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) - have selected the same supplier . Once operational, they will be the two most powerful systems in the UK and are expected to bring a socioeconomic benefit of hundreds of millions of pounds over the next few years from better forecasting and climate research.

Southwest One, the first shared services joint venture in the country that includes both Police and local authorities, is on target to save the tax payers of Somerset County Council and Taunton Deane Borough Council, £200 million over 10 years and help the Avon and Somerset Police Authority protect and improve front-line policing.

At the UK Border Agency, IBM’s Semaphore system has tracked over 78 million passenger journeys through UK airports since 2005, and has issued over 33,500 alerts to the law enforcement authorities leading to more than 2,700 arrests.

IBM helps to keep the RAF fleet of over 500 aircraft in the air by tracking and controlling over 700,000 repairable assets and confirming that aircraft are serviceable for flight. Since 2004, IBM has helped the RAF protect UK Air Space through a real-time command and control system that at any moment in the day tracks the thousands of commercial and military aircraft in the skies above us, and enables the RAF to intercept any aircraft identified as potentially hostile or posing a terrorist threat.

Every month almost 100,000 MoD civil servants are paid through a system designed, built and supported by IBM. Every year, the Aeronautical Rescue Co-ordination Centre (ARCC) based at RAF Kinloss responds to more than 1,800 Search and Rescue incidents , saving lives through efficient co-ordination of information and assets through IBM Rescue Co-ordination System.

By the middle of 2009, four of the five worldwide top 100 supercomputers operating in the UK will be from IBM. They are at: the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), the Met Office, a public sector organisation and Bristol University . The only worldwide top 100 supercomputer in the UK not from IBM, and in third position, is at Edinburgh University.

The Institute of Life Science (ILS) at Swansea University’s School of Medicine is using its IBM supercomputer, Blue C, to unlock unexpected insights from unstructured data - 20 new high quality research papers have been published in just over a year.

Cheshire County Council has achieved a 20% reduction in the time and cost required to perform in-home senior visits , and improved its ability to proactively manage the course of health and social care for senior citizens using a system designed and hosted by IBM.

Practices of Flourishing Families --

http://socialmediasandy.wordpress.com/

YEA! We just received 5 Hermes Awards for Social Media Marketing!

Great news! The organization has received 5 Hermes Awards! This is me celebrating in our crazy hat day!

Platinum Awards:
Impact 2008 (Event Marketing category)
Smart SOA Widget (Electronic Media/Other category)
IBM Smart SOA Newsletter (E-Newsletter category)

Gold Awards:
Smart SOA World Tour (Integrated Marketing/Other)
World Tour "Get Smart" Videos (Viral Marketing category)

Hermes Creative Awards is administered and judged by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals. The international organization consists of several thousand marketing, communication, advertising, public relations, media production, web and free-lance professionals. The Association oversees awards and recognition programs, provides judges and sets standards for excellence.

The home page for Hermes Creative Awards links to the winners' list.
Awards are here!

IBM Receives the 2009 ACORD Innovation Implementation Award & ACORD Infrastructure Platform/Middleware Award

YEA! IBM Receives the 2009 ACORD Innovation Implementation Award & ACORD Infrastructure Platform/Middleware Award

The yearly ACORD award recognizes organizations that are implementing XML standards in unique and exceptional ways and organizations that enhance the utilization of ACORD Standards. The IBM team continued the 2008 award winning tradition with a Proof of Technology and Redbook that demonstrate implementation best practices for Insurance companies. With these best practices, IBM customers can deploy end to end SOA Solutions based on Industry Standards in ACORD and the IBM Insurance Process Acceleration Framework.

Smart Work is about transforming companies to make informed decisions, build deeper relationships and work with more agile business processes. The Strategy & Technology team has established SOA as the state of the art for Smart Insurance at ACORD. With our customers, we continue to raise the bar on ACORD implementations and Smart Work.

What should you do?

First, Download this redbook !

Second, see the great
Showcase!!!

Finally, I'd like to thank Donald Buddenbaum, Brian Bokor, Qiang Wang, Bruce Wallman Ph.D., Stephanie Fetzer
and Rufus Credle who made this valueable work possible!

IMPACT comes to India!

IMPACT is coming to India on May 21st! Please join us! And you can contribute your thoughts on
SOA here!

And sign up here! India IMPACT!

IMPACT 2009 Day 4! Primeur

It was a pleasure to meet Peter Segdwick at IMPACT from Primeur! Primeur is a Silver Sponsor at IMPACT 2009!

I took a few minutes to chat about how Primeur tools compliment the WS software offerings.

Sandy: Do you offer tools for WMQ file transfer--that work with the new version of WebSphere MQ?
Peter: Yes we do.   We have had the ability, in our Spazio product, to transfer files over WMQ for a number of years.  Now that IBM has introduced WMQ File Transfer Edition, we fully support WMQ FTE as the product of choice for file transfer for  WMQ users.  We are very excited by WMQ FTE as we see this as a tremendous opportunity for IBM customers to further improve their RoI in their ESB/SOA infrastructure by implementing File Transfer  alongside their message based services and applications.  Overall, WMQ v7 really has opened up new benefits with its extended Pub/Sub and Managed File Transfer.

Sandy: How are users responding to the offer of your Security toolkit download? In the current economy, do you find that security is still something people are investing in as a primary need for their business?
Peter:We have been very encouraged by the increasing interest in Security, both for our toolkit download and for our full function offerings.  For a long time, companies have considered that link level security (SSL) is adequate, particularly for internal networks.  We are now beginning to see interest in securing data at rest for both messages and files as companies now realise the threat of highly confidential data being compromised even when stored temporarily in queues.  Securing data at rest is just one of the functions of End-to-End solutions, along with authentication and digital signatures.

Sandy: Can you tell us a little about the File extensions you've developed for WebSphere? How do your utilities enhance the value of the IBM software?
Peter:We at Primeur have developed three extensions for WMQ File Transfer Edition.  Our Spazio File Services Governance (Spazio FSG) provides monitoring, audit and reporting not only for FTE but also for all the commonly found Internet (e.g. FTP) and proprietary (e.g. Connect:Direct) file transfer protocols.  This means that users can get a single and complete view of all their file transfer flows regardless of the protocols they are using.  In capturing the information needed to do this, Spazio FSG also enables users to make productivity improvements of at least 18::1 in converting and modernising from, say, Connect:Direct to FTE.  Our Spazio File Services Security Suite provides end-to-end security for messages and files in a WMQ infrastructure, and Spazio MFTS can seamlessly interface an internal FTE network to the outside world using Internet or Proprietary protocols.

We will be explaining and demonstrating all of the above at our stand, S1, and also in Session 2287A on Wednesday afternoon where we are jointly presenting with Ben Mann, IBM’s WMQ and WMQ FTE Product Manager.

Summa's study on TCO and Open Source -- Discussion at IMPACT

I had the pleasure of chatting with Audrey at IMPACT 2009!

We discussed the benefits of using WebSphere instead of open source. Check out the work they have done!

Sandy:Tell me something about Summa and the solutions you have been involved in?
Audrey:Summa has been an IBM Premier Business Partner since 2003 providing mission critical IT consulting and system integration services and solutions to clients in many industries, including financial services, manufacturing, and education.
One of our key solution areas is around application modernization where we help clients develop and implement incremental solutions for modernizing their legacy applications, often incorporating modern SOA frameworks utilizing IBM technology to drive agility and incremental business value.
In the current environment, many customers are seeking ways to reduce their IT costs, and another solution area that we’ve been working with them on is to conduct open source viability assessments – helping IT and business leaders to evaluate the real total cost of ownership and manageability of open source software.

Sandy: Can you tell us more about Summa’s perspective on TCO as it relates to open source software?
Audrey - Summa, like IBM are proponents of OSS, and often recommend and implement open source components for our customers. As companies are increasingly considering open source software solutions, we advise them to consider architecture and TCO trade offs beyond the initial licensing terms which appear attractive on the surface. Some of these factors include their level of risk tolerance, operational ease of use and required hardware costs, the specific OSS vendors track record of delivering updates and defect fixes, etc..

Sandy: What is involved in a TCO assessment on open source viability?
Audrey: We start by talking to customers about their environment, including number and types of servers, and number and size of applications. The deliverable for the assessment includes a customized report that incorporates financial modeling that can be used to help the customer make informed buying decisions. The results can be eye opening, providing a perspective on the “real” costs that are often overlooked by development teams. We are here discussing the TCO process this week at the Impact conference with IBM customers, and the level of interest in our assessment process and methodology has been very high.

Day 3 At IMPACT!! Miami Dade County's Carmen Suarez

Our customers are really cool and I have had the privilege of working with them and learning from their success stories. Miami Dade County is a great example of working smarter with SOA.

Carmen Suarez, Acting Division Director for Enterprise Architecture Services joins me on the Day 3 keynote to discuss the Smarts of the Miami Dade Solution. Carmen is an amazing woman and I have met her several times now and never fail to be impressed by her talent!

I caught up with her at IMPACT for a quick view interview! Check it out!

Carmen: We have been able to re-allocate demand for shared resources as the needs of the government cycle change. For example, during the real estate taxes cycle we allocate more resources to that business need in order to deal with the volume of traffic. This same Internet present application leverages the legacy mainframe system in backend with a WebSphere Java application that has allowed us to extend the legacy application and allow the public to pay their taxes over the web. In this fiscal year to date (October to April) we have collected over $ 390 million in tax revenue alone.

Sandy: For the services your provide you county constituents, how do you see the roll of SOA and the emergence of Cloud computing working in concert to meet your business needs?
Carmen: These days our “consumers” are constituents, businesses, other governments, travelers, investors. SOA, cloud computing and other enabling technology is just that, it enables us to bring service to the consumers faster and by reusing components via multiple channels like kiosks, pervasive devices, the Internet.

Sandy: What knowledge or experience is your #1 priority to take home from Impact 2009?
Carmen: All the things that DataPower can do for me. Like AmberPoint's recently announced integration with WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance since we have been AmberPoint users for a few years now. And we have integrated the AmberPoint toolset with the WAS UDDI. Next step is to include WSRR (WebSphere Registry & Repository).

Sandy: How has the agility afforded by SOA empowered your vision to change around what services and offerings you can create to empower the people you interact with to Work Smarter?
Carmen: Our SOA vision and current roll out has breathed new life in to legacy applications by extending them to the Internet as self-service features. Additionally it has made our developers Countywide more efficient and given them whole new channels upon which they can deploy new functionality. Our eCommerce initiative alone has grown from $151 million in 2005 to over $468 million in 2008.,

Carmen, thank you for agreeing to do this interview! Great to hear from innovative customers like Miami Dade on how SOA done right = SOA Success.

Folks, if you are at IMPACT, don't miss the day 3 keynote coming up tomorrow

Audi on Main Tent at IMPACT 2009!

Audi's success story is a highlight of our Day 2 keynote and Armin Buttner, CTO of Audi AG graciously agreed to be interviewed for this blog. I love their route 2015 strategy featured in the keynote and here Armin succinctly summarizes the highilights of their SOA journey and how Smart Soa helped Audi align business and IT

There is the new Audi Spyder next to the STAGE! WOW!

Sandy: How does SOA help differentiate you within your industry?
Armin: SOA allows Audi to deliver solutions to our customers much quicker. We can do our IT projects quicker and with higher quality.

Sandy: What are the top things you are hoping to learn by attending Impact?
Armin: I am looking forward to learning more information on the SOA roadmap and how it will influence our IT strategy and projects.

Sandy: What are the top 3 things about your SOA approach - lessons learned - that you would like to share?
Armin: First, companies need to generate their SOA strategy across the company. The second is governance…it is not possible to do company-wide SOA without governance. The third lesson is that you need to build the skills internal to your organization. And I have an important fourth lessons learned – have a strong partner with experience to help you.

Sandy: How did you go about building SOA expertise/skills within your organization?
Armin: Pilot projects are key to learning SOA and getting the experience and skills inside your organization.

Sandy: How did you sell your investment in your SOA journey to your CFO or CEO?
Armin: SOA helps Audi get our products to market faster. I had to make sure that the CFO and CEO understood the business value. We have so many new products and our competitive advantage it so be faster to go to market. I needed to get early commitment from the CFO and CEO to make sure that our long term approach was successful.

Sandy: What is your favorite Audi car to drive?
Armin: A5, however in the summertime it is a convertible TT

Armin, thank you so much for speaking at IMPACT and taking time to share these insights!!!

Folks, give it up for Audi at IBM IMPACT, a great customer with a fantastic story! Don't forget to follow us on @sandy_carter for live feed from Vegas!

One of my FAVORITE SOA Customers -- Standard Life speaks about IMPACT 2009!

At IMPACT 2009 on Day 1, it is all about our customers and their success stories. We just heard from our customer, Russell Irwin of Standard Life talk about his company's soa journey and I thought it would be great to get a follow up Q & A to glean more insights.

Sandy: You have a world-famous story on the value of reuse in an SOA environment. Can you start by giving us a few numbers?

Russell: To date our SOA has realised a value of £26M pounds, around $40M dollars.
This is objective and conservative. It represents the value of our SOA approach over the cost of alternatives in development terms. We have not included the additional operational savings yet in our metrics. In Standard Life we sometimes debate the size of the saving, but not whether the saving is real. It is growing, the measures are all moving in the right direction. We log and measure through our software Framework and accompanying Infrastructure, so here come the numbers !

To date (August 2004 - March 2009)

227 service consuming apps in production

569 services in the catalog, where a service has to mean something to the business e.g. ‘Provide Customer Information’ is a valid service, while ‘Fetch Parm7 Yabba-Dabba Doo’ is not

Service re-use is consistently running at around 50%

~1.25 million service calls per day,

~ 300 SOA developers

1493 instances of reuse (where a service is used > once)

Multiplied by the cost of developing a typical bespoke service means £26 million sterling / nearly $40 million dollars

Or 2500 Honda Civics, or 200,000 fruit-based MP3 player-pods...

Sandy: Can you tell us how your SOA deployment has evolved over time?

Russell: We have been actively committed to SOA for 10 years. We started by getting the governance model, technology patterns, Software Framework, roles & responsibilities clear. We then began our work with some simple, but popular, services to illustrate the benefits of the approach and secure advocation and support from colleagues in Development and Business areas. The governance model has remained consistent throughout, so the costs to run our SOA remain fairly constant while the throughput and traffic has grown strongly. This offers exceptional efficiency gearing across our work. We now have an engaged community of some 300 developers who are very supportive of the overall governance and supporting patterns.

Sandy: What recommendations would you have to companies just starting their implementation of SOA?

Russell: In summary, smart SOA is working ! If you have already started your SOA journey, stick with it. If you have not started, start small with some services you know will get used, they don’t have to be the holy grail, think of the high volume traffic. Adopt a rigorous approach with strong SOA leadership and robust technology patterns. Measure as much as you can and report business value to your sponsor, not architectural purity. Report those measures in terms that your business will appreciate. Celebrate success ! Choose your technology partner carefully. And be clear on your governance model, roles and responsibilities throughout.

Sandy: What do you see in the future for Std. Life in terms of its involvement with SOA?

Russell: Smart SOA is working. We are committed to it. It has been a great success for us in the UK and we can now look to share the approach in our other markets.

Russell, what a great SOA success story and so happy to have you here at IMPACT! Thanks.

We announced WebSphere CloudBurst and BPM Blueworks! Up in the CLOUDS!

Hey Gang! We just pre-announced 2 major announcements before IMPACT -- both around SOA-enabled Clouds!

Our strategy is to enable organizations to create middleware and application clouds in the enterprise. Cloud services can be either private, on premises services or they can be public, externally hosted, such as Amazon’s EC2 cloud service. Using public clouds is a cost-effective way for companies to acquire temporary infrastructure to develop or test applications, while still running their mission-critical function in their private cloud.

So here are our SOA-enabled Cloud announcements!!

First, IBM WebSphere Cloudburst! It is new hardware appliance that provides access to software virtual images and patterns that can be used as-is or easily customized, and then securely deployed, managed and maintained in a private cloud. The initial release is targeted for private or on-premise cloud computing environments, as well as hosted public clouds and software-as-a-service environments, to simplify and standardize repeated deployments.

IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition is a version of IBM WebSphere Application Server software optimized to run in a virtualized hardware server environment, such as VMware, and comes preloaded in WebSphere CloudBurst.

Based on initial IBM projections, this test cloud environment can save clients as much as 50 to 75 percent on capital and licensing expenses and as much as 30 to 50 percent on operating and labor costs through automated provisioning and configuration of virtualized test resources. Additionally, these services can improve quality by reducing defects from faulty configurations and poor modeling by as much as 15 to 30 percent.

2. Public Cloud: IBM BPM BlueWorks - Available at IMPACT
IBM BPM BlueWorks is a key cloud-based tool to help businesses develop the smart skills to create and deploy dynamic processes. It is the world’s first business community that lets users model processes in the cloud and create business strategies. We are also making our software available in Amazon’s EC2.

BPM BlueWorks provides tailored content to increase understanding around how BPM can drive business improvement. Hosted business design tools allow businesses to explicitly map out goals, capabilities, tasks, and business measures to identify underlying processes and improvement opportunities. Businesses can speed the development of expertise through collaboration by leveraging insight from the community, and accessing shared process maps. Finally, BPM BlueWorks provides an easy on-ramp to BPM, allowing businesses to find, study, and extend process maps – and ultimately deploy them as working processes in their business.

If you are coming to IMPACT, you can see both of these great announcements

Redmonk's Provocative and Need I say, Insightful, Thoughts for IMPACT 2009!

Quite excited today to be sharing my conversation with James Governor, a good friend and co founder of RedMonk, the first open source analysis firm. James is an opinion leader in the enterprise middleware space and green technology. His blog Monkchips !Click Here! was recently names one of the top three industry analyst blogs.

Be sure to check it out!

Sandy: James, this will be your third time at IMPACT, the largest SOA conference in the world. What are your favorite things about the conference?
James: The people, the people, and uh, the people

Sandy: Why do you think SOA has been so successful in the marketplace today and give 1-2 examples of that success.
James: SOA is a 25 year overnight success. The principles have been around a long time, and this time they have been implemented with enough standards to make the approach useful. The need for more integration flexibility never lessens. It is very hard to isolate example of SOA success now- the Fortune 500 are all using the approach.

One of my favourite SOA examples right now is not a traditional high endian, WS-* SOA at all: Amee.cc is a web startup that provides back end carbon calculator services for B2B and web companies. Its simple but effective- a web service that can improve the world. It’s simple and effective. [disclosure: AMEE is a client]

Sandy: I know that you are leading a number of Green and Sustainability sessions. Can you overview your major take aways?
James: Sustainability and SOA go hand in glove. The key to successful SOA is helping employees and other stakeholders understand opportunities and responsibilities.

Sandy: What is the connection you see between Green and SOA?
James: That would be telling ;-) Suffice to say that Sustainability is the latest –ility to join reliability, scalability, availability and so on. Organisations increasingly need to be able to pivot around green issues for strategic planning. Rather than requiring an organisation to rewrite code every time circumstances or plans change, with SOA this can potentially be achieved via configuration.

Sandy: Do you think issues of Green & Sustainability will remain as hot as they were with the economic recession?
James: Sure – sustainability now means something it didn’t before. The concept carries ideas of survivability to major shocks, economics or otherwise. Sustainability is CSR taken out of the PR department and made into a stragetic, truly board-level concern. Six months ago I was worried sustainability and greening would drop off of the agenda, but I am a lot more comfortable now that won’t happen. Look at IBM- its agenda at the moment with Smart Planet is all about sustainability- and unless I am very much mistaken IBM looks a lot like the best run company in America right now – so far it has avoided major revenue shortfalls in the recession.

Sandy: Anything that you want to add?
James: I am excited about this being the first Impact under the IBM Smart Planet agenda, which is the most interesting umbrella strategy I have seen at IBM in the 14 years I have watched the firm. We all need to get smarter, better instrumented, make more effective use of data, whether at home or in business. An IBMer called Andy Piper describes it beautifully here: To bring this Q&A full circle, Andy is one of the guys IBM looking forward to hanging out with in Las Vegas at Impact. People, people, people.

Awesome, James, thank you for taking the time to chat!

Folks, come hear James Governor talk about going green, soa and sustainability on Wednesday, May 6th at IBM IMPACT 2009.

Follow him on Twitter @monkchips for his latest updates from IMPACT. Don't miss out

DataDirect at IMPACT 2009 - From SQL to SOAP to Events!

DataDirect Technologies is an IBM partner and provides data connectivity and mainframe integration software for corporate enterprises and independent software vendors. DataDirect Shadow is mainframe middleware software that accelerates the participation of mainframe systems with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), data access or business intelligence (BI) initiatives, and/or composite application development- all with unique capabilities to dramatically lower mainframe TCO through specialty engine exploitation.

I had a great discussion with Gregg Willhoitt, the Chief Software Architect at Data Direct about lowering mainframe TCO and their views on IBM IMPACT kicking of in Vegas next week.

Sandy DataDirect offers some excellent cost saving strategies. What are some of the messages you'll be sharing to help customers thrive in today's economy?
(One of their Session Titles is 'From SQL to SOAP to Events - with zIIP: Cost Effective SOA Solutions for CICS TS V4.1)

Gregg: I think it is very important that mainframe customers understand the tremendous opportunity that exist for lowering mainframe TCO while still growing their SOA initiatives. Sounds too good to be true, but this is what happens with innovation. The catalyst for this was the introduction of specialty engines for handling specialized workloads on the mainframe. This allowed processing that would normally be handled by the General Purpose Processor to be diverted to the specialty engine, where it could run without incurring a charge against contracted mainframe MIPS capacity. Initially the benefit was isolated to DB2, Java or Linux workloads – but not anymore. DataDirect has introduced patent-pending technology to more fully exploit specialty engines, expanding the range of environments that can use the zIIP engine to reduce mainframe TCO. With Shadow, DataDirect’s mainframe middleware, customers can offload up to 99% of their SOA-related integration processing to the zIIP specialty engine. For CICS customers, this means more control over costs and the ability to aggressively pursue their SOA initiatives. But the benefit doesn’t stop at CICS. We know the heterogeneous nature of most enterprises, so with Shadow you can leverage the zIIP specialty engine for Web services, SQL or Event processing across a wide range of environments, including Adabas, DB2, IMS, IDMS, VSAM, and Natural. The end result is extra mainframe capacity - a dividend if you will – to support the development of new business services, and in this economy, doing more with less is definitely a strategy for success.

Sandy: How does the Impact 2009 SOA Conference help DataDirect, a provider of world class solutions in Data Connectivity and Mainframe Integration, reach new customers and maintain your expertise in today's marketplace?

Gregg: To be honest, industry trade events have not fared very well in this down economy; however SOA Impact has been the rare exception. The event has grown to become an excellent forum for all things SOA, providing business and IT management, as well as application developers and systems programmers a great educational resource for examining the practical aspects of how to align SOA capabilities with business goals. Taking part in the technology exhibition is a great way to meet prospective customers, get a better understanding of their integration requirements and provide them with an up-close product test drive. This year, I am sure the focus will be on CICS TS v4.1 and how Shadow complements and extends the product with mainframe Web services, real-time event capture or SQL access. The education outreach this event provides is the perfect context for DataDirect to explain our product’s value proposition for accelerating mainframe SOA enablement. In addition, our technical staff always looks forward to this event for technical presentations and demonstration of the latest IBM SOA products.

Sandy: DataDirect is an official sponsor of the Impact 2009 zZone which showcases SOA solutions for System z audience. In fact, this is the second year; you've been an Impact zZone sponsor. What's so special about the zZone?

Gregg: The zZone makes all the sense in the world to us given as a product, DataDirect Shadow is singularly focused on the mainframe. Our goal for customers is to reduce the cost and complexity of integrating mainframe data and applications with Service Oriented Architectures, data-centric initiatives like Business Intelligence and Data warehousing, and new application development initiatives that rely on .NET or Java application frameworks. The zZone brings together an elite group of System z partners to complement the IBM System z experts and technology on-hand. It makes quite an impression to customers to see that big z10 mainframe sitting in amongst the exhibit booths. It is here, for example, where a customer can drill down into a technical discussion on zIIP offload or take a tour of our new mainframe TCO calculator for modeling MIPS savings, because it is the right context for that type of discourse. Also, the zZone is a destination for mainframe interests within a larger SOA context. Where else would you expect to find new strategies for redefining the economics of mainframe SOA? Last year, DataDirect was one of the founding members of the zZone at SOA Impact. It was then and still is an ideal setting for demonstrating how new technologies, like Shadow, can help accelerate the mainframe’s role within SOA. The new twist this year is how to make SOA cost-effective for the mainframe. In short, it is all about lowering mainframe TCO. Any mainframe customer looking for technologies to lower SOA-related integration costs will find it at the zZone at SOA Impact.

Great talking to you, Gregg! Don't forget to check out Data Direct at the Impact 2009 zZone.