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SOA, ESB and Beyond
Sanjay Bose is the Program Director of SOA Requirements in the IBM Software Strategy division. He leads the program to address critical SOA-based project issues and gaps faced in using the IBM SOA Foundation portfolio by world-wide, field-facing engagement and service teams. His industry experience is primarily focused on defining and executing technical strategy, creating product architecture and design, and designing enterprise solutions. His areas of expertise include SOA, enterprise architectures, Web services, J2EE, and e-business technologies. He has co-authored the book SOA Compass and has published articles on IBM developerWorks and Systems Journal. He lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA and his spare time is spent with philosophical ramblings, books, movies and his Sony PlayStation.
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SOA Reflections, Business Intelligence and Facebook Walls
Another long hiatus from my blog and we’re nearly ready to thumb to the next annual chapter. Reflecting on my rearview mirror, the road of SOA adoption in the marketplace had mixed curves. A few key waypoints that need smoothening for better traction in ’08 are:
- methodology tightening, coupled with prescriptive tool guidance (and enhancements in the tooling portfolio to support these methods)
- equipping more architects on the fundamentals of the SOA approach and really skill-refreshing them on technology advances (including standards)
- factoring middleware, business-ware and people-ware in the decision making to recommend solution proposal(s) -- you cannot align business and IT without including all of them
If you are interested in a whirlwind recap of SOA, you can review the SOA Experience, Trends and Horizon Outlook session I shared with the CMU School of Computer Science faculty and students -- part of my role as IBM university ambassador to CMU.
I’m excited that we’ll be adding business intelligence offerings in our Software portfolio through the planned acquisition of Cognos and the just announced, Solid Information Technology. These will be instrumental in adding a critical axis to our 360 degree business dashboards.
My latest Web 2.0 muse is Facebook. I’ve found, interestingly, Facebook walls make the world flatter! Using its extensible platform, developers have created an array of compelling, social applications. Yes, there are legitimate privacy concerns and you need to apply careful judgment and fine-tune the privacy settings. However, I’ve overheard paranoia that is somewhat akin to the misplaced notion some had (or still have) about e-mail being a playground for impostors, such as, Nigerian princes out to gouge hapless folks!
Also, I was disappointed by Merriam-Webster’s choice for 2007: W00t. I’d have preferred a more topical and increasingly ubiquitous one: blogitics.
I'll leave you with the top 10 live performance in 2007 (short-listed by TIME ... the others lists here are worth checking out too) and wish you safe and happy holidays!
Categories
: [ BI | Facebook | SOA | general ]
Dec 21 2007, 11:21:52 AM EST
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Adieu and Tribute to Two Auteurs
Two inimitable auteurs passed away yesterday, Bergman and Antonioni. I have been mesmerized by the glow from their magic lanterns since I was first introduced to them during my college days and revisited deeper during my evening stint at film school in ‘99. How uncanny that they both died on the same day … sometimes tragic events happen in triads and I’m hoping that this is not the case.
It’s more poignant for me since this past weekend, I was enthralled by a rare interview with Bergman which was on the Cries and Whispers DVD as a special feature.
If you haven’t seen any of their movies, I’d suggest for Bergman: Fanny and Alexander, Persona, Scenes from a Marriage; for Antonioni: Blowup and The Night.
Categories
: [ film | general | tribute ]
Jul 31 2007, 03:32:11 PM EDT
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50 Year Anniversary of IBM Journals
The IBM Journal of R&D (first published in 1957) and IBM
Systems Journal (first published in 1962) are celebrating their 50th
anniversary this year. The current journal editors have assembled a special golden
jubilee edition that houses seminal papers in computer science and information
technology in several areas ranging from chip design to fundamental math/computation.
I’m sure you’ll enjoy this convenient segue and slip into time capsules with Haderle,
Fran Allen (2007 Turing Awardee), Zachman, and others.
Categories
: [ history | journals | papers | research ]
Jul 02 2007, 06:15:54 PM EDT
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RAM, iRAM and iPhone
Phew! 6 months just passed by in a blink.
Well I’ve been caught in a cave (actually a series of caves) since the last time I posted an entry. One prominent cave was to drive the requirements strategy to define asset lifecycle management and governance needs that had been gathering significant momentum in the SOA marketplace over the last 2+ years. To address this, the IBM Rational team has designed and delivered the Rational Asset Manager (RAM) product and today it is generally available (eGA).
To ensure that the first release of the RAM product would deliver the key features and facets that are needed, the RAM product leaders and I worked closely with key cross-IBM stakeholders in Global Services, Software Services and Research. With these cross-IBM focus groups, we gathered the requirement specifications, screened the details, reviewed the use-cases, validated the context, prioritized based on impact and business value, and finally conducted feature delivery planning. These features were delivered through incremental milestones and pilots were conducted with the same stakeholders for feedback and assess expectation impedance. As a result of this, there’s an internal deployment of RAM, informally code-named iRAM, that has IBM’s custom asset taxonomy, team spaces and governance processes and is available for all cross-IBM teams to use. By the way, this field-centric, RAM requirement exercise was also conducted with select IBM customers also.
I have to say, the RAM product has a very consumable and usable out-of-box experience. The RAM product’s human factors team did a wonderful job in ensuring that Web 2.0 and social collaboration facilities were applied and integrated in a meaningful fashion. Don’t take my word for it, check out the demos and try it out.
Finally, talking about consumability, today also is the day where long lines of eager gadget-philes are anxiously waiting to grope the iPhone. Based on the promos, it definitely looks like a leap in cell-phone innovation and consumability. I think I hear a jealous grrr in my Blackberry’s ringtone!
Categories
: [ Asset | Innovation | Management | RAM | SOA ]
Jun 29 2007, 02:49:40 PM EDT
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SOA Executive Summit, Best Practices and Playoff Hopes
In the 1st week of December, I attended the SOA Executive Summit at Dallas (the slides are available too) and also signed copies of my book, SOA Compass, for the event participants. During the breakout sessions, I was broached by customer executives with questions ranging from "Is SOA real or a hype?" to "How to I start applying SOA to my company and realizing the benefits?" I answered them largely along the lines I shared with the dW Architect Zone last year. Hearing some of the rhetoric presented at the summit, I get concerned that the marketing and sales machinery make SOA sound like a fast, easy elixir that can be injected into the business/enterprise architecture to magically resolve the business challenges and IT issues ... I think Grady also shared a similar sentiment on his blog. Just to re-emphasize again: SOA is just an approach - an approach which allows business and IT to align better. But applying this approach (or knowing how to apply, where to apply, what to apply, when to apply) is not easy. Also, SOA does not preclude the sound principles and practices of business engineering, process design, IT architecture and design ... it just refines them.
Having said that, the Four Seasons Resort at Dallas is a delightful hotel with sumptuous food, exceptional service, and top-notch R&R amenities to indulge in. And the IBM event team did a wonderful job at organizing and coordinating the 2-day summit.
During this event and other occasions where I meet customers, another frequent question is: How do the IBM tools such as WebSphere Business Modeler (WBM), WebSphere Business Monitor, WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) and their associated runtimes - such as, WebSphere Process Server (WPS) - relate to one another? Since most customers I meet are executives or decision makers, they are interested in understanding this from a iterative business process modeling, proactive business performance metrics, and executive dashboard perspectives. The figure below provides a high-level view of this relationship:
If you are interested in understanding the details behind this picture, I recommend the IBM Redpaper - Best Practices for Using WebSphere Business Modeler and Monitor, which provides reasonable depth (for a 100 page paper), shares best practices and connects them with simulated case studies.
Yesterday, IBM announced the availability of the alpha version of the WAS 6.1 EJB 3.0 Feature Pack. Being alpha, this feature pack does not provide a full implementation of EJB3, but enough to test drive the simplified business logic and new persistence models. Participating in the alpha allows you to experiment and provide feedback/inputs to the WAS development teams.
Finally, as the NFL regular seasons wraps up, the Steelers' playoff hopes are hanging on a thread of mathematical probability. The collective weight of Ben's off-season adventures, the non-existent offensive line (in most games), and perhaps a sense of foolish pride, have placed the Steelers in this precarious position, and most likely, will snap that thread. But this year, the city's focus has shifted from the field to the rink where a band of young Penguin phenoms led by Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin have started the NHL evolution and have begun the "March of the Penguins".
This will probably be my last post for 2006 ... so wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season and a terrific new year!
Categories
: [ Best | EJB3 | General | Modeler | Monitor | Practices | SOA | Summit ]
Dec 19 2006, 04:16:50 AM EST
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Election Mashup
With the U.S. midterm elections knocking at the door, there's a 2006 Election Guide mashup at NYT that provides an excellent dashboard for analyzing races, visualizing outcomes, contrasting with historical results & demographics, and creating your own prediction scenarios - it is definitely a delight for your inner psephologist.
Categories
: [ dashboard | elections | mashup ]
Oct 28 2006, 12:08:32 PM EDT
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SOA Blitzkrieg, YouTube and Radiohead
The IBM SOA marketing has launched a blitzkrieg and has sent its highly flexible and innovative media tanks rolling into the Web 2.0 land with a set of videos on YouTube.
A couple of pseudo-movie trailers about the Oct 9th IBM SOA launch are flashed there:
So out of a nagging itch, I did a search on YouTube using “SOA” and came up with some interesting hits. Among these there were three videos which caught my attention. I was mystified how these three tried to de-mystify SOA for the (yuppie) layman:
Wonder if Wolfgang, Coco and Frank Lloyd are collectively sighing somewhere.
Switching to sterner stuff, recently a customer project was modeling SOA processes and services using WebSphere Business Modeler (WBM) 6.0. Following this, they were planning to do some downstream data modeling in Rational Data Architect (RDA) 6.1 and re-use the business items already identified in WBM. The project architects were unsure how to achieve this and integrate between these two tools.
In order to do this:
Ok, now back to YouTube (which is an amazing site) again! Lately, while working late in the evenings, I’ve been listening to a lot of Radiohead. Their music is truly multi-layered and with each re-listen, you notice an unheard note, a subtle twist in the lyrics, and so on. If you have not heard Radiohead, you can try their haunting Creep or their captivating Karma Police. Taking about which, Lukas Rossi, of Rockstar Supernova fame, performed a hair-raising version of Creep during the show.
Categories
: [ Marketing | RDA | Radiohead | SOA | WBM ]
Oct 03 2006, 09:26:18 PM EDT
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SOA Killer App
I just read an interesting article from ZapThink about the concept of a SOA Killer App - a service-oriented architecture and modeling tool which would revolutionize the tooling landscape and truly have the capabilities to deliver on the promises of model driven architecture and end-to-end SOA solution life cycle.
I'm curious how you view the demand of such a comprehensive, well integrated tool ... and what additional business/technical requirements would you want such a SOA Killer App to handle?
May 04 2006, 04:33:23 PM EDT
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