Business Making Progress

Economic Analysis of the Cloud: Check the Fine Print – Your Results May Vary

I recently came across an interesting post on GigaOM: Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted? by Charlie Oppenheimer. The point of the article is to walk through an example that supports his claim that “if you have a significant amount of load that is well known and predictable then you may be able to save some money by bringing a portion or all of that inside,” or in other words, self-host. Amazon is MORE expensive. While the majority of his analysis was pretty good, there were a few gaps that - in my opinion - need to be addressed.

1. How often is this type of decision ever ONLY about cost? Rarely. There is a lot of strategy work and planning that should go into the Cloud vs. self-host decision. If you were an ISV start-up seeking funding, how many VCs would fund your business plan if it contained a large budget for buying hosting infrastructure hardware? My guess is zero. Deployment strategies can and should vary. Fortunately, there are ways to manage your deployment within a Cloud environment that can give you more flexibility. Leveraging reserve instances instead of running entirely on-demand could dramatically reduce your run-time capacity requirements without sacrificing the ability to keep up with fluctuating demand. Plus, it will ultimately lower the overall cost of deployment, too. A true win-win.


2. If you ARE focusing on cost, then you need to consider whether or not it is more effective for your business to work with Capital Expense (CAPEX) or Operating Expense (OPEX). More often, I hear from our partners and customers that OPEX is the way to go because it is much more predictable and stable from a budgeting and forecasting perspective. The finance department will thank you for it.


3. Labor costs CANNOT be excluded from the analysis or the conversation. There is just too much variation between the resource demands of a self-hosted environment vs. a Cloud-based environment in terms of time, money, and personnel needed to scope, implement, manage, and maintain the system. A big part of why we built Progress Arcade was to address the need to simplify application deployment in the Cloud for our partners and customers. Excluding labor costs from your analysis is like refusing to set aside money to pay your taxes each year. In either case, your revenue model will be distorted and incomplete. You can’t see the complete picture.

Bottom line: do your homework and make an informed decision based upon YOUR unique set of requirements. Don’t let someone else “calculate” your success.

Thanks and, as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Greetings 2012 – Say Hello to OpenEdge 11

As was mentioned in mid-December, the latest update to our OpenEdge platform is now shipping, and I am pleased to say that it is enabling hundreds of our customers and ISV partners to securely develop and deploy applications across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud.

One of the highlights of OpenEdge 11.0 is our patent-pending Multi-tenant Tables, in which data is physically (not virtually) separated in the database - providing greater security and control for Cloud deployments. Multi-tenancy is a critical component and key differentiator for our customers and partners, along with our multi-Cloud deployment options, business process-enabled development, and support for mobile devices.

Feedback has been very positive and many customers are migrating to OpenEdge 11.0 sooner than expected to take advantage of the increased security in the Cloud, greater deployment flexibility, reduced costs, and faster time to market. Let me share some of that feedback with you now.

Security and Flexibility through Multi-Tenancy

Jeffrey Brown, Senior Development Project Manager at Infor notes, “Progress provides us with the technology to power our Infor10 Distribution Business, a distribution application specifically designed to help distributors with complex business models run an efficient, end-to-end operation. We are interested in the new multi-tenancy capabilities in the OpenEdge platform that could provide us with the flexibility to add an additional level of security and separation of data at the database level that is unique in the industry.”

Reducing Cost While Speeding Time to Deployment

Another Progress partner, a global medical software and services provider, used OpenEdge to develop an order management system for internal call centers. Multi-tenant Tables in OpenEdge 11 provide a viable solution for compliance with data security regulations customary to the healthcare industry. Moreover, it facilitates the roll-out of their order management system to all companies they acquire moving forward, which will be deployed in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, and with better security measures.

Efficiency and Moving Down Market with SaaS

Over in Germany, EDV-Software-Service AG (ESS), a provider of ERP software and services for the mid-size housing and real estate market, is leveraging OpenEdge 11 Multi-tenant tables to move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to gain efficiency and expand into new markets. Their CIO Michael Förster explained, “Progress Software understands the needs of medium-sized businesses and helps us provide value to our customers and accelerate our time-time-market with new solutions. We took part in the OpenEdge Early Adopter Program and Multi-tenancy Workshop, and in only five days were given the tools and expertise needed to get our new release ready for launch in early 2012.”

I look forward to hearing more about how our customers and partners are taking advantage of OpenEdge 11.0. For more information on OpenEdge 11.0, please review the “What’s New in OpenEdge 11.0” feature highlight.

Here’s to a great start to 2012!

Thanks and as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Consulting our crystal ball: IT Predictions for 2012

With the New Year just around the corner, many are busy thinking up unattainable diet and fitness resolutions, but we here at Progress have instead spent our time collaborating on more realistic forecasts for the coming year.

The team here at Progress put our heads together to produce our top predictions on how the role of IT within the business will change in 2012. An increased emphasis on cloud development, data security and social integration are all issues we expect organizations to prioritize over the next twelve months, but the list doesn’t stop there. Here’s a quick look at where we see business IT going in the coming year:

1. Cloud on the move. Organizations will increase deployment of the public cloud, escalating demand for cloud-enabled systems and applications.
2. Cost control evolves to efficiency. While cost was the main driver of cloud adoption in the past, the focus will now expand to include system efficiencies and time to market.
3. Data security starts with secure access. Who will have access to the data? How will it be encrypted? Who is the core owner? A strong driver that runs on a stable and tested data interface like ODBC is the best line of defense as application stacks continue to grow.
4. RIP: Non web-based applications. Approximately 80% of business apps will be web-based, and they need to be business process enabled, web-based and cloud-deployed.
5. IT border control. More than half of all content and functionality will be out of your organization’s control … in the hands of outsourcers, supply chain partners and external community databases. How will it be protected is the question du jour.
6. What’s in the fire hose? While we may see companies promoting fancy strategies for managing “fire hose data,” only those focused on responsive analytics will make meaning from the massive deluge.  
7. Limitations of freeware. This year, we will see greater support for ODBC and investment in data connectivity as companies look for dependable, robust ODBC drivers to handle financial transactions securely and quickly.
8. All hail the social enterprise. Social collaboration apps will dominate as employees look for ways to more effectively share and innovate across regions and lines of business; in fact, users will begin to expect these capabilities to be offered as standard, embedded features in business applications. 

And there they are: Progress’ IT predictions for 2012… how do they stack up to what you have in mind? We welcome comments below or on Twitter at @DrJohnBates or @ProgressSW

Plan Do Check Act - getting closer to closing the loop in Supply Chain

I have been fortunate enough to have had worked for some incredible visionaries and leaders during my career. One such person is Sanjiv Sidhu, one of the founders of i2 Technologies. I learned a tremendous amount from my time spent at i2 and much was gained from the passion, intelligence and vision exhibited by Sanjiv. One simple, yet powerful, mantra Sanjiv preached was the notion of “Plan – Do – Check – Act.”

Granted this was not original to Sanjiv but rather a process by which companies can leverage as they strive for continual improvements. The beauty, as in many things, is in the simplicity of this saying for supply chains. The need to be able to plan well – how will I determine my end goal, allocated resources, make investments and distribute my assets. Then being able to do – execute towards the end goal, in a expeditious and profitable manner. Once the execution begins the need to constantly monitor how the process is trending – establishes milestones or alerts to indicate whether or not I will be able to achieve the goals I set. And finally to be capable to act – if and when events impact my ability to achieve my goals, can I take the appropriate actions to re-sequence my supply chain and get back on track. The simple process of PDCA allows enterprises and their supply chains to have a constant feedback loop on where they stand with regards to completing the goals they established.

 When it comes to supply chain management we have spent much treasure and effort in giving solutions for planning and doing – just take a look at the landscape of solution providers that allow you to plan and then execute. The ability to do the check and act has not been as evident within supply chain management. I realize vendors and service providers have tried to bring true visibility to end to end supply chain processes – with minimal success.

Today with flexible applications, the cloud, greater mobility and other advances with our systems and architecture we are closer to being able to finally round out PDCA. As we start to have true extended supply chain visibility coupled with complex event processing – tied to business process management – supply chains can truly check their process, understand the impact of events and act or re-sequence to ensure their end goals are met.

We are getting closer to true closed loop supply chain management.

 

Imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery

It’s nice to be first…

First makes you a thought leader. First means you are ahead of the curve. First tells everyone else “follow me…”

On September 20, 2011, Progress announced the general availability of Progress® Arcade™ - a portal environment for simplifying the deployment of SaaS applications in the Cloud. The Arcade platform is Cloud agnostic to prevent vendor lock-in, thanks to a partnership with RightScale. It’s so simple to use, it only takes a handful of mouse clicks to go from zero to the Cloud. You can move your application and data back and forth from the Cloud if you require without restriction. Initially, Amazon is the Cloud vendor for Arcade, with others following soon.

Now, read this:

On October 6, 2011 at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference, CEO Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Public Cloud, which I happened to learn about from a blog post on TechCrunch. According to Ellison, the Oracle Public Cloud is a platform for the deployment of Oracle applications in the Cloud. It avoids vendor lock-in through Cloud interoperability. It allows the application and data to move back and forth from the Cloud if needed. And, it can “play nice” with Amazon.

Sound familiar? It sure does.

Progress Software was first to market with Arcade. Oracle was first as well – first to follow!

Again, it’s nice to be first…

Thanks and, as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

SMB Business Outlook: “Cloudy”

Welcome back! Now that summer is over (sigh), it’s time to once again focus on work. I am sure you are busy reviewing your end-of-year strategies and tactics. Some of you might even be peering into 2012 and wondering what you can do to make an impact—maybe grow revenue through new customer acquisitions, make your business more efficient, improve customer relationships, etc. Hopefully, the Cloud is on your short list – and if it’s not, it SHOULD be. And here’s why…

We recently surveyed our Application Partners and ISVs and discovered the following:

• 90% are investigating Cloud computing
• 88% have given “a lot” or “some” thought on hosting in the Cloud
• 60% will begin work on testing the Cloud
• 50% will make some form of Cloud purchase in 2011

If you aren’t among this group, then you are at risk of falling behind and losing business to the competition. The Cloud is everywhere – even non-technical folks will be using the Cloud in some way, shape, or form in the very near future. Not sure about that prediction? Have you seen the recent commercials and ads from Microsoft® and Apple®? They make “going to the Cloud” seem easy and, dare I say, fun? I can imagine you yelling at the screen now, “Sure, storage in the Cloud is easy, but configuring and deploying business applications in the Cloud is HARD!” This is where Progress® Arcade™ comes into play, and you can reference my Welcome to the Cloud blog post for more information on this topic.

For those of you that are still hesitant about the Cloud, let me give you some additional food for thought. I was recently interviewed by InformationWeek for the article, Cloud Contracts: 5 Questions SMBs Should Ask. The article talks about five key topics you should discuss with your potential Cloud vendor(s). While there are obviously more things to consider, this article should help you address many of your greatest concerns prior to “signing on the dotted line.”

Thanks and, as always, please let me know what you think.

PS: I hope to see you at Progress Revolution, September 19-22, 2011 in Boston.

Welcome To The Cloud

Greetings! I decided to kick-off my inaugural blog post talking about a hot topic these days - the Cloud. It seems like everywhere you turn, someone or some company is promoting the “whys” of going to the Cloud. But I noticed there are very few actually focused on the “hows”of getting into the Cloud. As far as I am concerned, if you can’t get there efficiently and effectively, you will never experience those advantages in the first place!

Recently, CRN interviewed my colleague Mike Ormerod and me for an article, Marrying the Cloud? 7 Items to Include in a 'Cloud Prenup'. The article talks about the critical things to think about when developing your Cloud strategy. I realize that not everyone has the ability to invest extensive amounts of time researching the Cloud. Therefore, an underlying point that I tried to make was this: if I can help you become better informed, moving to the Cloud can be simple, straight-forward, and easy.

Beyond just information, another way that I can help make moving to the Cloud simple, straight-forward, and easy is with a new solution called Progress Arcade™. Arcade is a portal environment designed to facilitate moving OpenEdge applications to the Cloud.

Arcade provides free community resources to help you:

• Share – network and discuss all things SaaS and Cloud with others just like you
• Try - take a test-drive of other Progress applications and solutions with just a few clicks
• Browse - visit our virtual marketplace of complementary products & services

Then, when you are ready you can take advantage of premium resources to help you:

• Stage - configure and prepare your application for the Cloud quickly and easily
• Demo - offer prospects the ability to demonstrate your products in the Cloud
• Deploy - deploy your production application in the Cloud with just a few simple clicks

If you would like to learn more, I suggest you check out the Progress Arcade website for more information, visit Progress Arcade to have a look at the community and premium resources, or drop me a line and let me know what you think: mcicciari@progress.com.

The Travel Technology Revolution and What It Means For You

By Joshua Norrid, Industry VP, Travel and Leisure, Progress Software

It was a pleasure to attend the SITA Air Transport IT Summit in Brussels and to see more than 300 delegates taking part in a lively, energetic discussion on a wide range of issues affecting the Travel and Leisure industry. Interestingly, of all the topics of conversation we saw during the two-day summit, the one that delegates kept coming back to was the extent to which technology was helping to bring them closer to their customers. But how prevalent is the travel technology revolution in the airline industry – and can it really add value?

It’s clear that the industry today finds itself is in a period of significant transition. With more congestion on the ground, and more complicated systems and processes in place, there’s an increased likelihood of things going wrong, meaning that for many, irregular operations are increasingly becoming the new standard. As a result, more organizations are turning to technology to help them predict these irregularities, manage contingencies and add value to their customers.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that today’s customers are very different to those we saw five or ten years ago. Advances in consumer technology in recent years mean that we’ve seen sweeping changes in customer behaviour during the same period, which brings its own set of challenges. Today’s passengers are a new breed of technology-savvy consumer who are ready, willing and able to tell people what is happening at all stages of their journey, using their smartphone or other mobile devices – particularly if they feel something is going wrong.

This, in turn, means that airlines must work even harder to connect the dots for their customers, with many turning to complex event processing (CEP) software which allows them to keep track of everything from reservations to the status of baggage as they strive to be truly responsive to the needs of their passengers.

Another key theme at the summit was the willingness to embrace cloud computing as a solution. In the past, concerns over the feasibility of cloud solutions have dominated, but this year was different. Indeed, most of the people I spoke to seemed to agree that by owning 100% of their assets, they had been missing a significant number of opportunities. As a result of coming to this conclusion, many had been entering into serious discussions around investing in cloud solutions, with some building the infrastructure required to deliver reservation and departure information as well as enhanced customer service across this platform.

Of course, while concerns remain about speed and security of cloud services, it’s perhaps too much of a stretch to argue that widespread adoption of this technology is imminent.  But what is clear is the extent to which the industry is waking up to the fact that cloud and other technologies can benefit and enable their customers.

In the twenty-first century, the technology-enabled customer is king, and those in the industry are having to work harder than ever to give them the information they need, and to provide solutions which will increase the overall quality of service.  The role that technology can play in bridging this gap should not be overestimated – isn’t it time you asked how prepared your organization is for the technological revolution?

Comment to this post and tell us what you think!

Mary Szekely: A Progress Software Original

It’s not very often that an original employee sticks around for 30 years, however, Mary Szekely (pronounce C-K per the Hungarian origins of the name) is that very person at Progress Software. A software engineer and fellow at the company, Mary is one of the initial four employees at Progress and one of the first fearless females to enter the male-dominated field of software development. I recently had an opportunity to talk one-on-one with Mary and below is a summary of our conversation.

Q: What was it like when you first started at Progress?

Mary: When we started out there were three engineers and one person who focused on the business side of things. That person was Joe Alsop who then became CEO. The other two engineers, besides me, were Clyde Kessel and Chip Ziering. Clyde and Chip concerned themselves with the database part of the product and I took care of the compiler and run-time part of the product and... it was just a lot of fun. We were in a dentist's office in Billerica, MA. The roof leaked. We had what was then a novelty - a wireless phone. I would answer the phone, "Data Language Corporation, may I direct your call?” and pass the call to whoever was ready to act the part of President. I had four young children at home so it was a little scary to work at a place where I was not sure of any future or salary, but it was exciting beyond any belief.

Q. What did it mean to be a woman in the software industry 30 years ago?

Mary: There were few women. Actually, when I went to school, which was long before that, in the 50s and early 60s, I was the only woman in many of my college classes. I was taking engineering, math and computing classes. Math was my passion and computers were a way to solve intractable math problems, and that’s what got me excited about computers.

Q. What has kept you at Progress for so long?

Mary: The variety in the job. I'm still working on the compiler, and the language, and the runtime, just like I was back then, but it's all different now. Back then, you were working on a machine that had 256K of memory, floppy disks and no hard drive. To back up the product, we had to insert the floppy in the drive to copy the code then switch floppies to back it up because 256K was too little capacity to copy the whole thing. We took turns every night to go through the backup process. Nothing like today when some automatic system backs our data up somewhere in the cloud.

Q. What was your goal as a startup company?

Mary: Clyde and Chip were the best of breed of the engineers from MIT. We were experts on databases and compilers and we knew exactly what we wanted to do, which was to build a serious database product on what was then called “micro-computers” (now known as personal computers.) That’s how Chip, Clyde and Joe decided to formally found the company as Data Language Corporation on December 29, 1981. After 18 months, we had a product, RDL [what does it stand for?], now known as OpenEdge.

Q. What was your first big commercial success?

Mary: We sold a source license to ADR (Applied Data Research) in 1984 for $2M. They had a mainframe database system that was very popular at the time and they needed a personal computer version of it. They didn’t even want to think about building it themselves, so they came to us after seeing us at a Comdex show. They rebranded it as “PC Ideal” but their product didn’t sell very well because they didn’t understand the PC market. Ours on the other hand was doing great and one year later, we sold a second license to NCR for another $2M. Receiving that first $2M check from ADR is my most memorable moment at Progress. I will never forget that. That was like, you hit it. In fact, you hit it big.

Q. What differentiated Progress from its competitors back then?

Mary: Our goal was to do a very robust system that you could run a business with but at the same time, we wanted it to be easy to use. Everybody in the world at that time was scrambling around trying to get database software out for the banks and other businesses to use on their mainframes. By contrast, we wanted to supply it on this new platform, the PC, and we wanted it to be simple and easy, which is something no other company - I can say that, no other company struggled as hard as we did to achieve. That's always been our struggle and it continues to be today. We wanted our customers to not only have their problem solved, but to have it done as simply as humanly possible.

Q: How have the key technology breakthroughs from the past 30 years impacted you as a developer?

Mary: The key event that started the company was the very existence of personal computers with their 256K memory and little floppy disk that let us save our software. We then had our first hard drives, which allowed us to write more code. In the mid-80s, we got homogeneous networking that allowed systems to talk to each other within a vendor’s network. This was our first client/server networked configuration. But it’s when TCP/IP appeared that we really took off. We went through a whole period in the 80s where we were the only company that had a database product that worked across heterogeneous networks. Our database became one of the safest with the highest availability on the market. At that time, all I worked on was networking. I had cables all over my office. Then machines kept getting smaller, but much faster, with dramatically more memory and disk space. This allowed databases to grow much larger, which eventually led to 64-bit addressing. In early 2000, we went to a three-tiered architecture with a server, a thick application server client and a thin client. A lot of dramatic changes that required re-architecting again and again.

Q. How have you been able to keep up with all these changes?

Mary: We have gradually brought people on board who have been mentored until they understand the architecture well while becoming an expert at a particular section of the code. Mentoring is about keeping our code alive. We control the code through the expertise that is progressively developed and maintained over the years. Therefore when a paradigm shift occurs, like now with cloud computing, we can get our millions of lines of code to react faster. I have mentored very many engineers over the years, concentrating on keeping the code alive and capable of servicing our customers in the best possible way. It's fun to work with a lot of smart people.

Q. How do you think Progress has grown to what it is today?

Mary: Every single person who works here works really hard and they do their job well. I'm talking about people in your department as well as mine. It's the only way you stay alive for 30 years. Every single person has to do the best that they can, every day, without supervision, just because out of their heart they want to do the best job that they know how to. And to me that's what defines a Progress employee. Every time I get to talk to them I commend them for being very faithful to our work ethic. I've never found an engineer at Progress that just doesn’t care.

Q. What is your current role?

Mary: I'm working on the cloud computing multi-tenancy. We're modifying OpenEdge so that one database can serve many customers while keeping the data protected from each other. I work on the client side, like I always have.

Q. Where would you like to see Progress 30 years from now?

Mary: I would like to continue to see satisfied customers who become stunningly successful thanks to us; and happy employees. If we really work at trying to make these two things happen, we will be successful and we will last another 30 years and more.

Happy New Year from Progress Software!

Stamford Bridge, here we come

Tomorrow sees Progress Software taking over Stamford Bridge, home ground to the world-famous Chelsea Football Club. We’re not just there to check out the players’ dressing rooms – we are being joined by James Caan, of Dragons' Den fame, as well as the great and the good of the UK business community, to discuss how businesses can start to make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight, in their operations.

Gordon Penfold, Chief Technology Officer at British Airways, will be sharing his insight on ‘operational foresight’, revealing how the organization has set itself up to better deal with the irregular operations that have become a fact of life in the last year. And Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, will be sharing his views on where the next wave of truly responsive business management is coming from, and which trends to watch for. And Progress' own Chief Executive Officer, Rick Reidy, will be giving a keynote too.

I'll be there, speaking in one session but also blogging and tweeting from the event. So watch this space for the latest updates.

For those of you attending, I look forward to seeing you there.

www.progresssoftwaresummit.com

 

Know Your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud

This is the title of a session being presented at Exchange Online 2010 by Gary Cink on September 15th at 9:45 am. In this presentation, Gary will demonstrate how some of the complimentary Progress' products enhance the OpenEdge experience for business transaction management (BTM). BTM is a critical component in the new IT/Business relationship. Progress® Actional®, Progress's first class BTM product, translates data relating to an underlying IT estate into information that is relevant to various business stakeholders including operations staff, application development, quality assurance, and security & compliance personnel. With this knowledge the various stakeholders can make informed decisions, often proactively, to ensure the success of every critical business transaction necessary for the day-to-day running of a business. Actional also offers the capabilities of automating operational Service Level Agreements (SLA) against this estate, thus preventing issues or alerting appropriate staff to problems before they have even happened.

Learn more about Gary and this technical session on our View From The Edge blog.

You can also read the white paper SLAS: Lost in the Cloud? Service-level agreements (SLAs) are crucial any time a business service provider (BSP) provides an application or service to a client via the cloud. In the results of this survey, 76% of respondents report that SLAs are critical to winning new business. Yet, 84% are unable always to meet their SLAs.

Just how important are SLAs to BSPs in how they support, retain and win customers?

Progress recently commissioned independent research company Vanson Bourne to find out and here's a link to the results:

Survey Results: SLAS: Lost In The Cloud?

Read about the increasing importance of service-level agreements and the difficulties in achieving them. Whether you're a Business Service Provider (BSP) or a client of a BSP, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) deserve your attention. This report will give you some information about the changing nature of SLAs and how you can use them to your advantage. 

You can also learn more about how Progress® Actional® will help you manage your service-level agreements by enabling companies to meet SLAs and manage services to support business goals. With policy-based alerting tools, users can set service alert thresholds and define service behavior for dynamic IT management. Actional also provides business analytics about runtime operations and controls for changing process behavior, for example, to give high-value customers priority service.

Join Us At Progress Exchange 2010

Progress Exchange Online Conference is coming to a computer near you, September 14 – 16, 2010. This free virtual forum is the place for sharing ideas, tips and best practices on how to benefit fully from Progress OpenEdge in the cloud. You’ll be joined by OpenEdge users from around the world to explore hot topics like:

• Modernizing OpenEdge applications using GUI for .Net
• Combining Microsoft Silverlight and Progress OpenEdge
• Leveraging the latest and greatest of OpenEdge Architect
• Previewing OpenEdge 11 and the NEW multi-tenant database
• Enhancing OpenEdge performance
• Deploying OpenEdge in the Cloud
• Understanding how Savvion (BPM) and OpenEdge can work together

Register now and get ready to choose from over 36 interactive sessions in 6 tracks, including:

• Integration and Process Management
• Best Practices and Application Modernization
• Developer Tools & Productivity
• Operational Efficiency
• Software as a Service/Cloud Computing
• UI Flexibility

If you register before August 30th, you’ll be entered to win an Apple iPad. For more information and to register, please visit www.progress.com/exchange2010.

Is Performance Part of SaaS SLA Negotiations? And IF NOT – should it be?

Application performance, that is. Over a year ago we brought in a new Content Management System (CMS). And even though we looked at more than six vendors, the decision was made to go with a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. I’m just a user of the application so I have no idea how they negotiated the contract but I assume that the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) took into account performance, customer service, AND application performance. I’m happy to let IT deal with customer service issues because being told that I might have to wait a month for a new feature is completely acceptable. I understand and accept that we probably have a set number of hours a month for support services. But what about the actual performance/response time of the application? Shouldn’t that be something that a SaaS provider cares about and monitors?

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t part of our negotiations because after 2pm EST, our CMS reminds me of those three-toed sloths I love watching on the animal planet. We’ve been complaining about it since we launched, but our SaaS provider has never come up with a solution. It was initially blamed on our network - IT made some tweaks, but that didn’t help. At one point our SaaS provider gave us a little test to run when we were experiencing slowness, which we did, but the problem was that we’d then be asked to do something else… To be honest, we (the users) aren’t jumping at the chance to break away from our work to help our vendor with application/network performance tests. Just fix it and make our lives better. Isn’t that what the promise of SaaS is all about?

Well our constant complaining finally paid off. A meeting was scheduled to talk ONLY about system performance issues. We were asked to provide a list of all the things that we did in the CMS that were “time” intensive, i.e. waiting for screens to pop. One of my team members put together a very comprehensive list—it was great because it said everything I would have wanted to say. I (nicknamed “Pamela Pill” as a child) decided to record my desktop as I worked in the CMS for 18 minutes. I actually didn’t think anyone would watch it, but they did. And what’s more, they loved it! Even the vendor thought it was great. Just by watching this video, they could clearly see two actions that we were performing that were processing very slowly. This is what we call BUSINESS INSIGHT here at Progress.

I think it’s great that our vendor may be able to troubleshoot and fix our problems but it took over a year of complaining and a video for them to believe that we were really suffering. My point isn’t to bash our SaaS provider or SaaS solutions in general, my point is to remind service providers to talk about application performance during the contract negotiations, and for the buyers of the service to ASK about it. With SaaS you may lose much of your reliance on your internal IT department, but they probably still should be held accountable for pipe and power. If the pipe is open and the power is on (which we determined it was), the problem lies someplace else. I think all SLAs should cover those problems, especially if they affect the service being delivered.

Did you notice my use of “I think”? For those familiar with SLAs, am I asking too much? Do you have any best-practices for people negotiating SaaS contracts or specifically the SLAs associated with a SaaS contract? Am I expecting too much?

Progress can’t help you negotiate your SLAs but we do enable SaaS providers to build, deploy, and manage SaaS offerings and we have the leading enterprise service bus (ESB) in the marketplace (Sonic ESB), that is exploited as part of the OpenEdge SaaS platform to address the process integration issues surrounding SaaS deployments. However, the one area that I think our CMS vendor missed out on is what we provide to our Progress-based SaaS providers to better monitor and manage SLA’s – that is Actional. Progress Actional provides the business visibility needed for SaaS and business service providers to guarantee service level management. Having that visibility into the business transactions and ensuring that application performance is meeting the needs of the USER… that is what we call Business Assurance – and what I think was missing in our SaaS providers offering. Hopefully it's not missing in yours… Learn more about SaaS Enablement and Business Transaction Assurance.

Rumblings in the Cloud

Cloud computing... it's on everyone's mind these days. Personally I think it's a term that has attained such aggrandized acclaim that vendors, analysts, bloggers and anyone with marketing muscle has pulled and stretched its definition to such and extent that it could mean just about anything hosted. Cloud Computing Journal polled twenty-one experts to define Cloud Computing.  Just the fact they had to ask the question of twenty-one experts is rather telling in itself.  Well I read what the experts had to say.

So armed with my newly minted (yet fully stretched, but not of my own making) Cloud definition I happened upon this commentary about CEP in the Cloud or the lack thereof.  There's a great quote in the article: "I don’t care where a message is coming from and I don’t care where it’s going”. Correctly indicated, this in a sense defines a key aspect of CEP. Event-based applications should be transparent to messages (or events to which messages transform) origin and destination (sans a logical or virtual name).  However, unlike the author Colin Clark, I do believe the current crop of vendor products, most notably Progress Apama maintain this separation of the physical from the virtual.

The rationale behind the lack of CEP-based applications in the Cloud (ok, there's that word again) are found in other factors. To explain my reasoning I'll start by dividing CEP-based applications into two categories. Of course there are many ways to categorize CEP-based applications, but for the sake of this discussion, I'll use these two:

CEP-based Application Categories

1. Those that do things
2. Those that observe other applications doing things

Not sure I could make a simpler layman-like description, but needless to say it warrants further explanation (or definition in sticking with our theme)

CEP-based applications that do things

This category is best explained by example. Typical of event processing applications that do things are those in Capital Markets like algorthmic trading, pricing and market making. These applications perform some business function, often critcal in nature in their own right. Save connectivity to data sources and destinations, they are the key ingredient or the only ingredient to a business process.  In the algo world CEP systems tap into the firehose of data, and the data rates in these markets (Equities, Futures & Options, etc.) is increasing at a dizzying pace. CEP-based trading systems are focused on achieiving the lowest latency possible. Investment banks, hedge funds, and others in the arms race demand the very best in hardware and software platforms to shave microseconds off each trade. Anything that gets in the (latency) way is quickly shed.

In other verticals, an up and coming usage of CEP is location-based services. This is one that leveraging smart mobile devices (i.e "don't care where the message is going") to provide promotions and offers.  

• Algo Trading, Pricing, Market Aggregation
• Location Based Services (providing promotional offers and alerts)

CEP-based applications that observe other applications doing things

Conversely, event-based applications that observe other applications doing things are classified as providing visibility or greater insight into some existing business function. These event-based applications overlay business processes to take measures to improve their effectiveness. As is often the case critical business applications provide little visibility or the information is silo’ed. There is a need to provide a broader operational semantic across a heterogeneous mix of business applications and processes.  Here are a few typical examples of event-based visibility applications observing other business systems.

• Telco Revenue Assurance
• Click Stream Analysis
• Fraud Detection
  
• Surveillance
  

Of  course the demarcation line between these two classifications is not clear cut. Providing greater visibility is just a starting point, monitoring for opportunities to take action is just as important such as kicking-off a fraud watch if a suspected wash-trade occurred  (so in a sense they are doing things).

Where for art thou oh CEP
When considering the Cloud, an important point to consider is dependency. Specifically, there is a dependency that the underlying applications and business processes exist in the Cloud for (observing) CEP to overlay them.  I would offer that Enterprise business has not yet migrated their key business processes to the Cloud on a widespread scale just yet. Why not? What are the barriers? Security, regulatory compliance, DR, investment costs, limited skill sets are just a few of the challenges mentioned in this ITProPortal article.  I suspect these barriers are far reaching, keeping the pace of Cloud deployment in check to the point where it's not as yet strategic to many.
 
One of key things that makes the Cloud a reality is virtualization, it has clearly revolutionized PaaS as the Cloud. Virtualization does come at a cost, there is a latency penality for the conveinence, no matter how small for some use-cases that cost is too great.

Make no mistake, I am certain the Cloud with all it's twenty-one definitions is the future of computing. It's an imperative that will knock down the barriers and change the face of the Enterprise and when it reaches critical mass CEP will be there.

Once again thanks for reading, you can follow me at twitter, here.
Louie

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Provisioning Dimensions for the Cloud

At last Saturday's class for my Middleware Internals at IIIT-Hyderabad, I was introducing cloud computing and provisioning. Some basic questions came up - even computer science students from a Top-10 institution in the country have questions like "Isn't SaaS Cloud". What many miss is that Cloud Computing is more about virtualization-over-the-web and the enabling of mechanics such as integration and provisioning.

To this end (virtualization-over-the-web), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides the end users [i.e. the enterprise] value based views of a 'virtualized' application wherein all the operational and infrastructural aspects are managed by the service provider. Likewise PaaS provides the virtualized view of an application platform on which the end user can build a solution. Or with IaaS, where just the infrastructure/OS is virtualized over the web on which any solution can be installed and configured. The definition of cloud also varies based who you ask. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers will tell you that cloud is when you build applications on their platform. IaaS providers will tell you that if you use their infrastructure, then that is cloud. But I feel the real cloud is what the end enterprises see--a virtualized over-the-web application landscape in a combination of IaaS, PaaS & SaaS. It's a very heterogeneous environment that enables the IT solutions for the various business needs that the enterprise may have. This integrated infrastructure gets the best of breed with no constraints on technologies, platforms, payment models, and even physical location, while still enabling some common binding elements such as Web 2.0 enabled user interface, common administration approach, common integration approach and even provisioning capabilities across the various platforms in the cloud. 

Provisioning is also emerging as an important common aspect of cloud computing. It has emerged from something intrinsic to specific platforms such as Amazon EC2, and now to a more generic expectation across all cloud services.Though the dimensions and approaches to its realization may be different in different providers, a few key dimensions are hardware resources, application platforms or cross cutting dimensions like user provisioning or business service provisioning. Examples include specific resources like hardware (say 2 CPUs), OS (linux ver x.y), app platform (tomcat servlet engine), or an instance of a specific application. And more importantly non physical resources like provisioning a user (for example: enabling access to multiple systems/apps for a new employee).

Through 2010 I think we should be seeing more enabling abstractions, models and utilities for provisioning in the heterogeneous cloud computing environments.

Progress Software Announces Q4 results - Here are some highlights

Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS) just announced their Q4 earnings release. To summarize, it says "Earnings Up in Q4; Progress® Actional® Revenue Up with Triple-Digit Growth; Progress® Apama® Revenue Up with Double-Digit Growth." What I really thought was interesting was the Q4 highlights. The majority of wins involve building or enhancing an integrated infrastructure, and application modernization - both topics we cover in this blog. In case you missed the release, I've included these highlights below. Enjoy!

Q4 Highlights

• Progress Software announced that the Progress® Sonic® ESB (enterprise service bus) is deployed and operational at British Airport Authority’s (BAA) Heathrow Airport Terminal 5.
  
  The Progress solution enables BAA to provide airport integration capabilities using the Sonic ESB product. This includes the creation of reusable integration services for new Terminal 5 systems and of specialist adaptors for the integration of existing key operational BAA systems, such as the Airport Operational Database Integration. (Tag: Application Integration)
  
  
• Progress Software has successfully enabled more than 250 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to deploy thousands of on-demand, SaaS applications over the past five years.  These ISVs use the Progress® OpenEdge® SaaS platform to build applications that are used in some of the most demanding and diverse business environments in the world. (Tag: Cloud Computing)
  
  
• British Airways selected Progress Software SOA Solutions to upgrade their travel experience.  The UK’s largest international airline, British Airways (BA), will use the Progress portfolio of SOA solutions as a key part of its travel program to upgrade its IT systems by integrating over 600 different electronic systems and processes involved in getting BA passengers in the air. The flexibility of the Progress SOA portfolio allows BA to extend the features of its e-commerce site right through to its airports, by allowing greater self-service functionality and 'plug and play' capability. (Tag: SOA Success)
  
• match2blue stands out from the crowd with the Progress® Apama® Business Event Processing (BEP) platform by adding real-time capability to next-generation social networking. Enterprise platform enabler for mobile solutions, match2blue (www.match2blue.com), has selected the Apama platform to empower its social networking platform with real-time information on location, ideas, news and trends.  The Apama BEP platform will form a crucial part of match2blue’s back-end infrastructure, providing the performance and scalability needed, as well as supporting its business partners, who will be operating the location-based services to control and monitor their operations through dashboards. (Tag: Complex Event Processing)
  
  
• Alphameric Solutions Ltd, the leading solutions provider to the gaming industry, selected the Sonic ESB to revolutionize the way it handles content and messages across its network. Relying on highly complex and automated processes to deliver odds, prices, race information and documents across a distributed architecture – most needing to be handled in a sub-hundred millisecond timeframe – Alphameric needed a simpler way to incorporate new or updated information in real-time. (Tag: SOA Best Practices)
  
• West Bend Mutual Insurance Company has selected the Sonic ESB (enterprise service bus) and Actional products to underpin a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based IT infrastructure.   West Bend Mutual Insurance, a property and casualty insurance carrier, is pulling together dozens of disparate internal policy administration applications into a single integrated insurance portal. (Tag: Distributed SOA)
  
• Progress Software announced the availability of the Apama 4.2 Event Processing Platform.  The Apama 4.2 release extends the capabilities of the previously announced Apama Parallel Correlator, and introduces significant new developer productivity features that accelerate the deployment of event processing applications. The Apama Parallel Correlator leverages multi-core, multi-processor hardware to deliver high throughput, low latency execution that has achieved seven-fold performance improvements, as benchmarked with real-world customer applications. (Tag: Event Driven SOA)
  
• Slumberland, a leading furniture retailer, is now using standards-based data connectivity products from Progress® DataDirect® for reliable, high-performance support for all their major databases and 64-bit operating systems, for reliable connectivity to their Oracle applications, and streamlined reporting to improve fulfillment and customer satisfaction. (Tag: Semantic Data Integration)
  
• Progress unveiled the industry's first mainframe SQL engine for non-relational data, which can leverage zIIP specialty processors for lowering a mainframe’s total cost of ownership (TCO), with the announcement of its DataDirect Shadow Release 7.2.1.  The DataDirect Shadow release includes ANSI SQL-92 to Non-Relational Data with zIIP Offload and new capabilities that lower costs and attract new process-intense workloads to the mainframe.

Now That's a Real Forklift Upgrade

I have to admit... I don’t really know how our customers use OpenEdge. I do know there are a ton of customers - over 65,000. And, if that weren’t enough, there are over 1,500 partners too. What's more, many of them are in-production with SaaS offerings.

Damn, that’s a lot.

(If any analysts are reading... just think about the opportunity of selling Actional into that installed base even if we never got another “new logo” sale.)

This week’s press release follows on from several months of a beta period where about 20 or 30 OpenEdge customers tested the newly released Actional integration.

As TVH Forklift Parts realized, knowing what’s happening in their integrated infrastructure, and being able to assure a consistent level of service has tremendous value to a distributed and shared infrastructure.

Why is this important?

It’s about the business context. Without that context, solutions are just technology (we have good technology too… but that’s not enough).

That’s the difference between assurance and management. Assurance implies business-technology coordination to achieve a business result. Management implies your technical components are up and running. Big whoop. Just today I spent 2 hours on the phone with T-Mobile. All the technical components were up, but it still wasn’t working. I know you can relate.

Colleen points out that our partners are being viewed more and more as business partners, not just technology providers. Simply put, our partners need technology to understand the business impact of “events” within their infrastructure.

Understanding the business impact means that we (technology infrastructure providers) need to provide an awareness of the business context when problems occur. The only way to do that is to track business context all the time.

I’ve heard a few times recently of prospects who have a “competitive” solution in place to track business assurance… but when I probe, it seems they don’t run it all the time because (pick one):

1. It impacts performance of my applications. (it doesn’t scale)
2. It collects too much information. (it doesn’t scale)
3. It requires too much CPU on my app servers. (it doesn’t scale)

I don’t understand how people think a solution that doesn’t run all the time can do the job.

Let me rephrase.

If it’s not running all the time and collecting context of your business, how are you using the context of the business to make better run-time decisions?

Simply put, you’re not.

I’m glad to welcome TVH Forklift Parts to the Actional family. And, if you’re reading, thanks for sharing your story.

Holy Cloud! Thousands of Customers & Hundreds of Partners

At parties, I do everything I can to avoid talking about work. But, when forced, people eventually ask where I work. When I tell them Progress Software, it's usually followed by "No, we're actually a big public company that does more than databases."

I bet you didn't know we had thousands of SaaS customers in production using our products... Well we do!

And, by the way, it makes a great opportunity for each of those to use Actional for both cloud governance and inter-mediation for customer-specific policy and really flexible standards-based application layer security. If we never sold a new logo, we could still grow like weeds. Our tiny competitors are struggling to survive the recession after raising tons of money their investors will never see again, and we're in a position to thrive by delighting our existing customer base. Awesome.

And not only do we have thousands of customers, we have hundreds of partners adding vertical value to our software solutions.

That partner thing. It's big here.

Why does it work so well for us? Well, that's a huge thanks to the culture of collaboration here at Progress. Actually, it's more than that. It's like an open source attitude towards collaboration (even when we're creating commercial products). We listen, we adapt, and we learn.

We're a day away from the end of our fiscal year, and things are really crazy as you'd expect as we close our year end business. This has been a real transitional year for Progress and another successful year for Actional:

1. We've absorbed IONA and Mindreef, and rolled out new products around integrating those technologies with Actional.
2. We've received top recognition from Gartner and Forrester analysts, and Forrester even delivered a few use cases demonstrating hard ROI numbers around Actional deployments at our production customers in finance and telco.
3. We've delivered another major release update, demonstrating Actional's capabilities well beyond traditional web-services based SOA by integrating Progress OpenEdge, SAP ABAP, IONA Orbix IIOP, Spring, and Microsoft BizTalk orchestration support.
4. We've weathered a very bad economy, and we're quite well positioned for a very strong 2010 with our top-selling Business Transaction Assurance offering.

The great cloud crash of 2009

I've been following the recent story of how Microsoft's Danger division and the T-Mobile Sidekick.  If you don't know much about Danger, it's basically a cloud service tied to a hardware device (the Sidekick).  All the data is stored in the cloud (email, contacts, etc.) and cached on the device so that when the device resets, it starts up empty and reloads its data from the cloud.  Unfortunately, many customers found out recently that when they reset their device, all their data was gone.  Poof.  No more contacts, no more calendar entries, no more emails.  It turned out they didn't have any real backups and their data redundancy was foiled by human error.  Whoops.  While they have recovered most of people's data now, there are some important lessons to be learned from it.

One of the articles I read on this was titled Don't Blame Cloud Computing for the T-Mobile Mess.  While the author's heart is in the right place (he really likes cloud computing), I can't agree: Cloud computing is absolutely to blame for this fiasco.

Let me explain by starting with an analogy.  Recently we had a little event that some people call the "great market crash of 2008".  The root cause of this is pretty well known now:  A lack of transparency into different financial instruments (e.g. CDOs) made it impossible to accurately assess risk.  And, in the absence of an accurate risk assessment, people assume things will be ok and focus on their short term gain.

It seems to me that we have the exact same situation with cloud computing.  There's essentially no transparency into any cloud provider's integration infrastructure, processes, or planning.   As a result no user can accurately assess the risk of using one cloud provider over another.  Do you think that if sidekick users had know "Danger doesn't do backups" they would have trusted the service with their data?  Of course not, most users assumed everything was OK.  They assume their cloud provider is doing the right thing.  It was only a matter of time before a crash would happen (and this won't be the last one).  In the immortal words of Otter from Animal House, "You f*cked up - you trusted us".

Cloud providers, unfortunately, think that it's not in their best interest to be transparent because, frankly, customers are conditioned to just assume everything is OK so why rock the boat.  When was the last time you walked into a grocery store to buy apples and said, "Can you cut this one open so I can see whether it's OK on the inside?"  No, you probably look at the shiny skin of the apple and assume everything is OK with the inside.

Before cloud computing can become mainstream, users of cloud services must have the ability to accurately assess risk for themselves.  In order to do this, cloud providers must provide transparency. if not users must demand it by speaking with their wallets.  Don't let the cool, shiny UI fool you into assuming everything is OK under the skin.

Why on-premise SOA cannot offer cloud pricing

David Linthicum suggests that SOA infrastructure vendors must switch to a cloud pricing model and get paid only on delivering value, further taunting the vendors to put their money behind their products. Interesting proposition... But I don't believe it will work. And the comparison to cloud or SaaS may not even be valid. For SaaS, its easy to identify the value delivered - as that of a business solution being made available as a service. For cloud, the SLAs are at the platform level and can only ensure availability - they cannot ensure business value. On-premise SOA is even worse because the operating platform is not even in the SOA vendors control, so guaranteeing even the availability at the same level as cloud is not even possible. At best the vendor can assure that the SOA platform will not fail, but they definitely cannot guarantee against failure from the hardware, OS or other layers in the solution stack that reside with or on the on-premise SOA.

The business value that David refers to is way beyond just platform availability, and that surely cannot be assured by any single component in the overall solution stack - unlike in the SaaS model where the SaaS provider controls the complete solution stack and can provide the guarantees.

A New Renaissance for ODBMS? Part 1

Recently a team of our object database experts - Adrian Marriott and Luis Ramos - attended the 2009 International Conference on Object Databases. Not only did they present on design patterns and discuss the resurgence of object oriented databases, but Adrian won an award (and a netbook!).

Adrian Marriott was the first place winner of the award for best Common Persistent Model Patterns for Performance and/or Scalability Optimization. He beat out 25 other compelling patterns with his Query Visitor pattern which allows one "to define new result set formats without changing the underlying persistent object model."

Roberto V. Zicari, Editor of ODBMS.ORG, said of Adrian’s pattern...

"It is common practice that some database designers treat an Object Database (ODB) like a Relational Database (RDB). That is they are very query intensive rather than model intensive in their design. Some designers start with a “relational” model, and then adjust it to a model that is more "ODB-oriented", or closer to their problem domain, in order to get better results. This  task is difficult.  Marriott`s pattern, Query Visitor, can speed up the database  development process by providing a tested, proven development paradigm."

Luis Ramos contributed to the lively discussion in one of the more intriguing panel discussions at the conference: A New Renaissance for ODBMSs?  As part of our post-ICOODB2009 coverage, I asked Dr. Ramos to share some thoughts about object databases and their use.

Me: What are some use cases that benefit from an Object Oriented Database?

Luis Ramos: There's three main uses cases: complex (multi-dimensional) data, transactional caching, cloud-databases—and given today’s SaaS-world, you can see why ODBMSs are becoming more and more relevant.

By complex, multi-dimensional data, I mean data that is hard to render into rows and columns.  For an easy example of non-complex information consider the current roster for the Boston Red Sox Baseball team; the roster lists each player and their name, number, position and statistics–it looks like a rectangle with two dimensions.  This formulation makes it easy for me to ask the question – what is the current batting average of the 1^st baseman for the Red Sox?

But consider a slightly different question – how are individuals in a family tree related?  Consider Barack Obama’s family tree. If you visualize the data, it is not a matrix at all. It looks more like a tree of nodes. This would be very natural to store as objects with links to other objects. Consider asking a question like, is George W. Bush related to Barack Obama? Answering this question is quite easy in an object database. You simply follow pointers from the node representing Barack Obama and see if you can reach George W. Bush (and apparently they’re 11^th cousins). Following pointers or de-referencing references is certainly a lot more efficient than doing an arbitrary number of joins.

On the transactional caching use case. Our clients have selected object databases over other data caching technologies such as Memcache and Tangosol for a these important reasons: transactional access, durability, and automatic cache replacement. With object databases, there’s transactional access to the cache thereby preserving the data integrity of the cache – you don’t find this in many caching solutions.  Also, the cache is durable. If the application is terminated intentionally or otherwise, recreating the cache is fast and efficient because it is being populated from an object database.  In this case, there is no overhead for running SQL queries to find to the objects to bring into the cache and no overhead to transform between relational data and objects. Third, ObjectStore automatically manages the cache if the amount of data being accessed in the cache exceeds the amount of memory.

On cloud-databases, object-oriented databases are a more natural fit for persisting cloud data, which is inherently tuple-based, for a number of reasons. First, storing tuple-based data, whose values are arbitrary (strings, integers, double, boolean, etc) and that are automatically indexed could be challenging to do in a relational database. This type of problem is reminiscent of the issues related to formulating a relational model to store an object model that has an inheritance hierarchy. Second, scaling a relational database is not easy. The usual practice to scale a relational database in order to support more load is to use more powerful hardware. In an object-oriented database such as ObjectStore, it is easier and simpler. Since the queries are performed at the client (the cloud node or service), scaling the database can be accomplished by simply launching more services.

Stay tuned, the next post will cover additional Dr. Ramos’ comments about RDBMS to ODBMS, the market and where to get more information.

SaaS, PaaS... why not SOAaaS (SOA as a Service)?

A busy day in the rapidly converging SOA and Cloud worlds. Oracle talks about plans for the cloud, retracting from the skepticism expressed some months back. Intuit announces a PaaS platform. Another SOA infrastructure vendor dabbles with SOA on the cloud - striking dichotomy here. On one hand we are still trying to figure out how exactly to make SOA projects successful. And on the other, we are talking about SOA in the Cloud and PaaS platforms for SOA. Even so, I find it a natural progression.

PaaS, and therefrom the SOA impact, follows the success of SaaS. Which itself was the best thing to happen to ISVs in recent times. A combination of emerging application models, web based software UI approaches, new cloud platforms, and a very wide acceptance of externally hosted software solutions - less of technology and more of mindset. Now it is only a logical extension of the SaaS paradigm that now one will expect to build custom solutions on the web (PaaS). Or host solutions directly on the web based infrastructure (Cloud). And the moment there are applications, SOA cannot be far behind. The nature of the cloud beast is also such that the significance of SOA and distributed management/governance becomes even more critical given the rather loosely coupled and a less-controlled computing environment.

So while enterprises may be OK with having solutions hosted externally on the web/cloud, they may still want the integrated enterprise where these external solutions are seamlessly available in the enterprise integration platform (SOA) and also in the enterprise distributed management and governance platform. We can probably extend these to bring the external apps into the prevailing GRC and BAM framework in the enterprise, so it is only natural that SOA becomes a first class consideration when SaaS/PaaS/Cloud are in the picture.

Not far will be the support for SOA as a primary attribute of cloud platforms. Right off the bat one will have the ability to build and host applications over the web, with the default web based UI models and a very integration ready platform - both for consuming/orchestrating services over the web, and also to expose new services (off this application) over the web.

Now... taking this a bit further, one could look at explicit platforms just FOR integration and SOA!  Even now there are BPM vendors like Cordys that are providing a web based orchestration platforms (PaaS). These can easily be extended to offer a complete services and integration-application platform on the cloud. Only, we need to figure out the use cases where one needs integration off the cloud. Needing SOA as a Service (SOAaaS).

Follow Up to Cloud Computing Panel Discussion

I made a comment the other day on the EBizQ Cloud Camp panel that was off-the-cuff (meaning, I hadn’t prepared to say something like this, in fact, it kinda just rolled out of my brain on the spot).

It had to do with the difference between SOA infrastructure and the Cloud. I mentioned that cloud computing offers benefits of agility and time-to-market, and was called-out on the fact that that’s what vendors said the benefits were to SOA. What’s the difference? Why is Cloud going to be different?

My answer was that Cloud is going to force a lot of issues because as an external service provider, there can’t be any informal handshake agreements as their would be within an enterprise. Being formalized, cloud providers will have to figure out a way to do the governance... only the solutions they deliver to market are going to have to reflect the true cost. That is, the cost of the service plus the governance of the service.

@KevinJervis asked me to followup with what I meant. How will cloud force these issues?

In short, cloud companies need a valid business plan... reflecting the costs of the service they provide, and governance of the service. Innovative features are critical - easy versioning, rapid root-cause analysis, flexible and customizable security contracts, and personalized SLA’s. Critical for differentiation and for creating satisfied customers. These features come at a price... and their business plans need to reflect the costs of the “whole product.”

I’ve seen the following situation happen over-and-over. A customer plans a project. That project includes a “grand vision” of what they’d “like to accomplish.” Reality sets in and they find ways to do without. Perhaps they cut back on redundancy or they share servers with another project. They cut out “management” (gosh I hate that word) figuring that at first, they won’t have many users of the service, therefore “management” can come later. This happens “intrinsically” as well... shortcuts are taken in the development of the service just to “get it out the door.”

The problem is that these short cuts are often not really explicitly declared. Or, they are declared and conveniently forgotten.

These short cuts save costs and reduce functionality... yet when functionality is expected, the costs are not remembered. I hope I don’t sound bitter but I am frustrated. This technology stuff is hard, and we forget that because the baseline is so low to get started. But, to elevate it to an art-form... takes a seemingly-disproportionate amount of work.

So, what happens? A service oriented project is planned. As part of the planning, a “full” governance solution is designed. However, for the sake of time-to-market and cost, the governance stuff is left out until a later phase. Service levels are delivered through one-off agreements and over-capacitization (putting in a heck of a lot of capacity for not so much use - after all, you can’t buy 1/2 a server, right?). And, governance is forgotten. Service levels are met, until they’re not. Often, “cost-free” arrangements get project teams part way there. To some extent, you can use existing management systems, with manual configuration to get some of this stuff done. And, after all, why put in the capacity for versioning easily when you’ve not even deployed your first version?

I admit that this approach within the enterprise is normal - natural even considering business reality. It might even work for a year or two, or at least until, as with so many applications, the cost of ownership goes up. Services are shared much more than they were initially and manual procedures don’t work. So many things have been moved into and out of production, that you can’t trust anything but log files... and we all know how hard it is to troubleshoot a distributed application checking log-files across hundreds of machines.

Cloud providers can’t do this. Just to stay in business they’ll have many users very quickly. And, they’ll probably have custom service level agreement requirements from the beginning, they’ll need to decouple these customers from each other by default. They can’t have “informal handshake agreements” between teams to “do their best” to make this all work.

Even if they don’t have a “full blown solution” up front, they do need to make sure the right costs are built into their business model. And, that’s where it differs from within the enterprise. There is less rigor within the enterprise for building a proper business model. Many may disagree but I believe this to be true. (Not unreasonably so... it’s very difficult to account for everything that goes into a project, some costs are just assumed... but an assumed cost to a business unit directly hits a cloud provider in their bottom line).

Let me leave with an analogy this time.

We’ve all heard the idea of behaving in a way that wouldn’t leave us embarrassed if it ended up on the front page of a newspaper. Truth is, in the past much of our behavior would have no chance of getting that much air time.

Social technology changes that. We’ve all see videos of people throwing tantrums in airports, listened to recordings of obnoxious people on the phone, and even seen emails that executives presumed would stay within their company.

I believe this is one of the chief benefits of social technology. We will all be accustomed to always being on our best behavior because you never know when someone with a camera phone is watching.

It’s the same thing in enterprise technology. As soon as someone breaks a piece of something out of the enterprise, and offers it as a service, all the costs, implicit and explicit need to be reflected in the business model. These costs become exposed just like people’s worst behavior. Sometimes this exposure is OK because a specialist can perhaps do things cheaper than a company for which the activity is not their core business. However... in this case, we’ve been fooling ourselves into thinking we have been truly governing our services, when in fact, that is anything but the case. Cloud providers have no choice, and their business models will have to reflect that.

I know this is a long post, and I hope I’ve answered Kevin’s question well. As always, you can find me at @djbressler for followup questions and conversation on this topic.

Oracle buys Sun: Let the revolution begin

First, Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake."  Will Oracle buying Sun have a similar outcome?

If Oracle goes down one path, it could be a brilliant strategy.  Oracle was previously competing with two other enterprise software vendors: IBM and SAP.  Now, they only have one competitor: IBM.  Two vendors providing turnkey solutions: hardware, software, and services all rolled into one.  What's more, cloud computing is essentially a turnkey services business as well - so it positions Oracle to capture a huge slice of both traditional and cloud computing worlds.  Down this path, enterprises end up with the ultimate in flexibility: whether on-premise or cloud, powered by a common Java-based technology stack and hoards of consultants, the business needs rule the day.

On the other hand, if Oracle goes down the other path (taking Java, MySQL, and other Sun assets and clamping down on them), it risks alienating a large community of both vendors and customers.  Frankly, Oracle doesn't have a great reputation in this regard - so, even if they do everything right, people might still turn away because of (historically well justified) fear.  If this happens it could turn the continuous trickle of people moving from Java to other technologies (.NET, Ruby, PaaS, etc.) into a flood - a rebellion triggered by a ruthless but short sighted empire builder.  If this happens, the traditional enterprise software market as we know it could implode, to be replaced by fundamentally different technology base (almost certainly cloud native - can you say Google Apps?).

Which path do you think Oracle will take?

Cloud Computing Impact on Enterprise Integration Recap

Well, that was fun. Spoke at 7PM this evening, at the end of a long day of presentations at the Cloud Computing Expo. I was a little afraid of a 7PM speaking slot because I thought people would rather be at the bar rather than listen to me talk. Boy, was I wrong. Apparently, people were standing in the hallway. Had I noticed, I certainly would have rearranged furniture to get more people in - even if it meant more people sitting on the floor!

First, as promised, here are the presentation materials:

• Download Presentation (please view this in presentation mode for best effect)
• Download Cloud Computing Impact on Enterprise Integration Paper

The presentation was targeted at the Enterprise Architect and hopefully left people in the room with thoughts about how to approach (and explain) cloud computing, and how to get started in the enterprise with a few best practices. Based on the nodding-heads in the audience, I think I touched a few key points.

Summarizing in my own words:

• Cloud computing is about turning a commodity into a utility.
• Integration is way too hard, non-technical people don't understand, so discount the efforts.
• Moving what we can to a utility model, will let us focus on what's important and elevate our game.
• Integration, the easy stuff is way too hard, so we never get to do the cool stuff; just do it. Mistakes with cloud computing are much less expensive and irrevocable than they are with typical enterprise software purchases/deployments.

And as for the best practices... well, just download the paper or the presentation.

For a full "live blog" summary, check out Brenda Michelson's post.

Great feedback that I heard afterwards was that I was the "first presenter of the day who knew how to present." That was the best feedback of all.

Thanks to all my friends, real and virtual, who a ttended. It was great to see so much support.

Download ExpoPreso

NYC Cloud Computing Expo Preparation Almost Done

Well, we're just a few days away and preparation is winding down. We've got an article written and ready to go, and I've got my presentation mostly complete and just need to work on layout, notes and review. Sounds like I'm almost done... just hope I don't get sidetracked by some fire drill.

The media alert went out today and it got me thinking that it might be interesting to share the creative process.

Personally, I don't get nervous with public speaking. It doesn't mean I always do well, its just that I quite enjoy the opportunity to get in front of a crowd of strangers full of adoration for the gems spewing from my mouth. In fact, I tend to not "rehearse" for presentations as much as "immerse" myself in the content and visualize how it will go, the thoughts I'd have, the questions that might come up, and feed that back into the presentation in a way that makes it more robust.

This presentation started with work on a white paper I began working on about two months ago. It was a bit of a free form set of ideas I have about cloud computing. I had only the guideline of my submission - The Impact of Cloud Computing on Enterprise Architecture - and I ended up with content in four areas:

1. The difficulties of enterprise integration
2. The corporate challenges of enterprise software
3. A definition of cloud computing
4. Some best practices

The level that I speak at is relatively high, and I worry that it's not enough detail for people. I guess we'll see on Monday.

It took me a week of writing, with some interruptions I'm sure, to get down about 3,000 words on paper. That's about 3 1/12 pages of writing, and it was handed over the PR team for editing.

It may be totally behind the scenes but the people that have edited my stuff in the past, this time included, do wonderful work. It's always important to double check the content and the meaning, and to make sure that the important points stayed, but they really tighten it up and focus it down.

They turned my 3,000 words into 1,120. The final piece has just 20 additional words, though I had to do about a day of editing to bring some of the meaning back, and highlight some points that were lost originally. It'll be posted on Monday so keep an eye out for it. As always, let me know what you think.

I had been thinking about this cloud stuff for some time, and tweeting ideas to see how people would respond. I've also been vigorously reading the tweets and blogs of others to get a sense for where the conversation is. Hopefully, my presentation on Monday adds something to the conversation, in a way that constructively builds on what others are saying.

The difficulty with creating the presentation, of course, is that I didn't just want to put the paper in presentation form.

That would be boring. (Boring is bad.)

I came across a presentation titled "Charts are Cheap" by Major Dan Ward (who unfortunately, didn't include a link to his blog in his presentation, so I can't link you to him!). The idea was 1/2 - 1 idea per slide/chart. Simplify and people will understand more.

So, I'm trying something new with my presentation. It's really lightweight and a lot of what I'll say is not written on the slides. It is, mostly, written in the paper. And, what's not, would be great to discuss online after the event.

Part of the reason to do something different is my "middle of the night" speaking slot. And, I believe I'm also last for the day, so anyone that does come, and stays awake, has me between them and the bar. Not an enviable position.

Though, if they need a drink after my presentation, I believe Mike is organizing a Tweetup at ESPN Zone in Times Square after. Hope to see you there.

This Should Make It Obvious to Anyone

Looking at things from the perspective of how software is evaluated and brought into the enterprise, it's no wonder cloud computing is dramatically changing the landscape. Combine that with the trend of software vendors looking to compliance to shore up revenues, and customers pushing back to reduce their software maintenance costs, and I think we're in for some interesting changes in selling software over the next couple of years*.

In any case, I thought it would be interesting to put together a quick list of how software is piloted in a "traditional" purchase cycle, and how it might be piloted if "purchased" from a cloud.

So, assume a thorough selection process has been completed on a product and its alternatives (I don't think we do that well today either... I think it's too feature-focused and we're not nearly evaluating the "right" things), and we're talking about getting the first small set of people up and running on the selected solution.

Traditional Software Purchase

1. Software is purchased.
2. Hardware is purchased.
3. Space is found in data centers for the production kit.
4. A plan is created for moving into production, often a lengthy process inserted around specific rules/restrictions for changing production systems.
5. Development and test environments are setup.
6. Computer room space is found for the permanent location of the development and test kit.
7. Any databases required to support the application are purchased and configured, including hardware if necessary.
8. Administrative and security staff support is required to configure all this new equipment to company standards, backup procedures, and security policies.

Cloudly Purchased Software

1. Get a login.

Even people who don't know anything about software should be able to figure out which is easier. And, while I shouldn't need to ask, but, how much longer do you think the first process takes than the second from the time a decision is made?

If you want to follow the doings of a new startup taking advantage of just this difference, follow Mike on Twitter. He's starting a new company and taking full advantage of open source and clouds to have some incredible infrastructure and development cost metrics - actually showing through his own experience what can be achieved.

Want to hear more? Remember, I'm speaking at the NY Cloud Computing Expo later this month.

* "Ray" Wang has been tweeting and blogging about this topic quite a bit. I find it very interesting to follow.

SOA - Wanted! Dead or Alive

Burton group's Anne Thomas wrote an obituary  for SOA, and she writes: "SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”."

While this is dramatizing a bit, it is not entirely without merit. I have always wondered where exactly are the SOA use cases. In the real world (beyond the POCs, CTO proposals and pilots), time and time again I come across cases where someone in an organization bemoans that the promise of SOA was never delivered! A very rosy picture was shown during the POC and pilots, but post that, in the real world, the gains realized are nowhere close!

Yesterday, I was at a "SOA - past, present & future" panel discussion in Bangalore, along with SOA Matrix CEO and Head of the Java and middleware horizontal at Satyam. We spent most part of the hour talking about precisely this! Recognizing that mainstream acceptance is not as wide as expected, we were deliberating on the possible reasons. One consensus that emerged is that the complexity is not so much in the paradigms, technology nor the products. The biggest challenge is getting the required functionality at the right granularity, and this is more about the existing solutions in the enterprise than it is about SOA. Re-engineering the solution to "expose" the functionality with a coarse grain is never easy. Often the incumbent applications would be those with just a UI interface. In such applications, as we all know, the tier separations are not that rigidly maintained. A good amount of functionality spans the presentation and functional tiers. Trying to re-engineer this and create a single coarse grained function for the required service is not going to be easy at all! If this is the case for a single service, imagine the magnitude if the problem is one must get hundreds of key business functions "exposed" as services. (And without these hundreds, one cannot even begin to realize the dynamic enterprise promised by SOA, with easy to compose business processes, BAM on-demand, and more.)

Now, I can't imagine how any amount of technology can solve the above problem?

In this context it is interesting to see a pragmatic narrower view of the cloud as proposed by David Linthicum - SOA morphing into private clouds, or as a subset of the whole enterprise or the larger public cloud, as put forth by Mikael Ricknäs of IDG News service. Thankfully, ZapThink MD quantifies the reality realistically; as quoted in ITWeb: "People are asking the right questions about governance, loose coupling, best practices and business agility, one of the major benefits SOA confers," says Bloomberg. "And they're asking the right questions up-front, seeking to solve a business problem rather than adopting SOA for SOA's sake."

For more perspective on Anne's post, read my colleague Dan Foody's post, Goodbye SOA, we hardly knew you., or listen to his podcast, Cloud Computing - The New SOA?

Cloud Computing... It Depends on Who You Ask

What exactly is cloud computing? Lately, this is one of the most often repeated question in any discussion about the Cloud. And the answer depends on who you ask! (Personally, I think that if there are not at least three different popular definitions of a new technology, then the technology is not in its "hype" phase of the hype cycle :-) ).

Cloud is often confused to be just one of:

• Utility Computing - The on-demand resources with dynamic provision offered by virtualization platforms such as VMware, EC2 etc.
• Grid computing - Loosely coupled discreet computing nodes, that come together to form a larger computing-grid.
• SaaS - Just the notion of a software abstracted on the web is cloud to some.
• PaaS - To some, cloud is if one were to "build" the solution and then deploy it on a virtualized platform on the web.
• User centric cloud - RIA desktops that provide seamless and integrated access to information and services on the web, while still retaining a "sane" visual front to the user.
• Even Wikipedia defines it as: The majority of cloud computing infrastructure as of 2009 consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built on servers with different levels of virtualizationtechnologies. The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers.
• And, I am sure there are more!

Syscon attempted to reconcile the definitions by getting no less than twenty one (!!) industry experts to define cloud. Their definitions had wide ranging defining attributes: elastic, virtualized, services over the web, multi-tenanted, pay-as-you-use, massively scalable technology enabled services, SaaS is the consumer-face of cloud computing, distributed utility grid (wow!), on-demand resources with APIs, and more!

What I see missing though is the end enterprise view. It is this view that brings all of the above (and more) together. As I see it, this is "cloud computing". A fairly abstract IT enterprise landscape. Where the biz requirement is real—with its solution made available over the web, with simple web based user access, with guaranteed SLAs on service availability and performance, with seamless integration to other information sources/services over the landscape. The exact location, platform, configuration, size and such are all abstracted from the enterprise by the solution provider. Further, the solution provider also takes care of maintaining the application (enhancements/bug fixes), managing the production environment, and managing any backend integration requirements that the client-enterprise may have - offering a complete "managed service". The enterprise needs to focus just on the biz at hand, and in defining the IT solution that is needed. The solution-service providers takes care of the rest. All of them coming together to form the enterprise "cloud" - accessed over the web, managed over the web and probably even orchestrated over the web.

The enterprise Cloud will also evolve over time. When there is just one ISV making a solution available in the above managed model, that is SaaS. If the same ISV also "builds" it on the web before making it available on the web, then that is PaaS. If the ISV just uses storage on the web, then that is cloud storage. If the same solution is deployed within the enterprise network on a virtualized platform such as VMware, then that is virtualization. If the solution is distributed across discreet computing "nodes" on the web, then that will be the computing grids. Now fast-forward a few years... If the IT landscape in an enterprise architecture is a combination of all of the above types of solution environments, then there is an opportunity for a loose "biz grid" that can bring all of these together, which in many ways is already prevalent today - the SOA infrastructure! SOA is all about discreet services that are location agnostic, with standards based description and easy access. Today's SOA environments are very very vendor dependent (that is assuming the emphasis is on the reliability and performance). Soon we may see this a reality. A vendor neutral SOA environment that will bring together all the disparate IT solutions in the enterprise, both within and on the cloud. Likewise, Web 2.0 will define the user experience that brings all of the same solutions in a seamless integrated and very-functional UI.

Below is a visual of what I'm thinking... use Comments to let me know what you think.

You Can Look, But You Better Not Touch

Actually, touching would be great, but be warned... it costs extra! Did I ever tell you about that time in South Africa where I presented at a conference during one of their open sessions? Afterward, a guy actually came up and hugged me for my performance. True, I swear.

Come see yours truly at Sys-Con's Cloud Computing Expo in NYC March 31st and April 1st. I'll be talking about the impact of cloud computing on enterprise application architecture. I'm excited that they accepted my abstract, but now I need to flesh it out.

For a preview on my thoughts on the topic, check out the podcast I did recently about the impact of cloud computing on enterprise architecture.

Let me know what you think, but I'm on the fence about wearing shoes while I present.

I'm looking forward to seeing you there!

Convergence of SaaS, Cloud and SOA - Use Case

Was at the HeadStart (innovation showcase) and Compute (ACM Bangalore chapter) co-event this weekend at Bangalore. Was chairing the panel discussion on "Delivering SaaS from the Clouds". The panel included the Founder/CEO of Computational research Labs (part of TATA goup), Head of Cisco/Webex in India (they have a large dev center and equally large India sales ops), Lead Architect at Honeywell, and the Head of the RIA tools development at Adobe. There were an interesting mix of perspectives ranging from the glue and access paradigms from the fringes of the cloud (as in the RIA & webex rich desktops), to hard core grid paradigms and application/service abstractions on the cloud (bright by CRL), to cloud backends (CRL and Webex) and the usage perspective brought on by Honeywell exploring cloud for many of its field initiatives. We also had great discussions ranging from the market opportunities that each one sees to their take on the solution architectures and to the cloud trends that we can expect in 2009.

In particular, I found two aspects very interesting:

1. Build-on-desktop or Build-on-cloud? Unlike the more popular expectations of using the cloud to "host" applications that are built on desktops and 'uploaded' to the clouds to be accessed from browsers, there are also models (in industrial automation) where the application is built on the cloud and 'downloaded' to the devices. Essentially, they are engineered on cloud and downloaded to the devices in the enterprise - examples include energy audits and automation optimizations.
2. The serious production use cases are still elusive. Most people dabbling in cloud are still experimenting and playing around with it. Serious use models are yet to evolve. I believe that this is probably a manifestation of the hype curve. Hopefully the dust will settle down and serious usage emerges in 2009.

Talking about use cases, I came across another interesting use case in the same week. This is in the Governance risk and Compliance (GRC) space. Here the value proposition seen from the cloud is unique—beyond just SaaS. In terms of the agility and the arms-length distance:

The GRC space is extremely regulation driven. And is bound to change often. Today the model for implementing GRC is to "build it in" the existing operational solutions, which we all know is cumbersome and extremely difficult to manage changes. Given this, the proposition from this  company was unique. This company that specializes in governance and consults in best practices, has evolved a "canned" GRC model, and is offering the same as SaaS on the cloud. The compelling case to the clients is that this implicitly allows an arms-length distance between operational systems, easy verifiability of the GRC rules in effect, and is also able to easily modify the GRC rules as they evolve and change. The nature of this scenario is implicitly that of convergence. The value prop is SaaS - the runtime is the cloud and the solution involves extensive access to data and services in the enterprise which is best done using an SOA infrastructure.

Come to think of it, cloud in the enterprise will be deeply entwined with SOA. We are not talking about simple utilities like rate calculators or converters. If serious enterprise solutions are made available on the cloud by 3rd parties, these will always involve access to other enterprise information and services running either in the Intranet or possibly elsewhere in the web-cloud as well. So far, any SaaS solution provides for custom APIs to enable this integration. As the more generic cloud platform evolves, it becomes a question of time and the standards and generic approaches to integrate the enterprise into the cloud will emerge.

This will be yet another space to watch in 2009, even as we already are tracking aspects such as cloud performance, and the cloud monitoring and management (an extension of the SOA Management problem that Progress Software already solves very well with Actional).

Cloud Computing - The New SOA?

Presented by Dan Foody, VP of Products for Actional at Progress Software

Is SOA dead? It seems the technology buzz these days is all about cloud computing. What's the difference? Do they complement one another? Listen to this podcast and hear Dan talk candidly about how cloud computing and Web 2.0 are being integrated into today's enterprise architecture.

Subscribe to the SOA Infrastructure iTunes channel to hear more podcasts published by Progress Software.

Welcome Back!

As a huge fan of Calvin and Hobbes, one of my favorites was when he'd answer the phone by giving someone his pizza order, as if he had called them. In that vein, all I can say is "welcome back, where've you been?"

Actually, it's been quite busy over here at Actional, putting our push on for the end of fiscal '08 (Progress closes our fiscal year at the end of November), preparing for our next release (oooh, it's cool), and meeting all these new people at Progress who came over from IONA (welcome, and welcome back in at least two cases).

Though I've been quiet on the blog front, October was a busy month. In addition to two weeks off (I feel relaxed, thank you), I've been out there talking about governance of all sorts (SOA, Cloud Computing, and Data Governance). Some might think that with all this governance talk, we're all about governance, but in fact, Actional is just one component of an overall governance solution. Which is why you won't often hear us talk about governance -- except this past October.

So, please accept my apologies for the quiet blog and check out the following October events that recap '08 quite nicely, and give you a sense of where my head is as we turn to '09.

1. eBizQ Panel on Selling SOA Governance to a Skeptical Audience, check out Joe McKendrick's post on the event. Joe moderated the panel and there was some very emotional discussion by the very experienced panel members. If you really are having trouble "getting started" this Monday, you can read the full transcript. And, if that wasn't enough, make sure to register for the next event, Avoiding SOA Disillusionment.
2. Impact of Cloud Computing on Enterprise Architecture. Check out my first podcast. Hopefully there'll be more. Turns out, this is a subject I'm quite passionate about because I see awesome potential if we can just unlock data across the enterprise without breaking the connection to the data owners.
3. DM Radio and Data Governance, the Mission Critical Mandate. An interesting perspective on governance, data governance. If you think governing a SOA is hard, listen to us talk about the challenges of governing the data. I think that's where it starts to get exciting.

And, stay tuned. I've just finished my copy of Todd Biske's book, "SOA Governance; The Key to Successful SOA Adoption in Your Organization". It's a good book, I've even used the material in a couple of meetings. I'll be reviewing it shortly.

Impact of Cloud Computing on Enterprise Architecture

What impact will Cloud Computing have on your enterprise architecture? Why should you care?

In this podcast David Bressler, SOA Evangelist at Progress Software, presents his thoughts on how Cloud Computing will make it easier for you to get business-critical information to your consumers. As applications become more distributed, the data can often become muddled. During this podcast, David allows you to imagine what the impact would be if you could easily bring information from multiple data sources into the cloud, present it contextually, and then use it in the best way possible.

For more SOA podcasts, subscribe to our iTunes channel.