Business Making Progress

Forrester Recognizes Progress Sonic As A Leader in the ESB Market

Did you know that Progress® Sonic® was the industry's first Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? It was, however, introduced in 2002 by Sonic Software which was an independent operating company of Progress Software Corporation.

In April independent research firm Forrester Research, Inc. named Progress Software as a leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Bus, Q2 2011” report. In this detailed review of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) providers, Progress Sonic ESB was recognized with particularly high scores for its ESB architecture, orchestration as well as change and control capabilities. The report also gave Sonic ESB high scores for product strategy and strategic alliances, while also scoring the product highly for its large customer install base.

Strategic businesses worldwide have made Sonic ESB a core component to their service-oriented architecture (SOA). A few of these companies include British Airways, Royal Dirkzwager, AutoTrader, and most recently UK-based PD Ports. Why did they choose Progress? Because Sonic ESB delivers the best overall combination of architecture, orchestration, mediation, connection as well as change and control features. It helps them achieve the business and operational responsiveness they need to be successful.

Cruise past your competition and make sure your integrated infrastructure is powered by the 1st and best ESB... Sonic ESB. If you are interested in the report, click here. It will be available FREE FROM REGISTRATION for the next five business days only. What a deal! ;-)

Feel free to also share your ESB integration and deployment experiences here.

Multi-tenant Distributed Process Environment (Part 2 of 2)

Last week at Chennai, Nasscom EmergeOut conclave recognized the prominence SaaS & Cloud hold in IT psyche today, and they had Innovation in the SaaS/Cloud space as its primary theme. I chaired a session called 'Software Procurement Model Trends'. It was interesting to note the amount of serious adoption in the whole gamut of companies from very small startups thru SMEs to large corporations like Diamler. And while today it is more about Software as a Service (SaaS), companies are now beginning to seriously look at Platform as as Service (PaaS) as well.

I also shared views on  SOA & BPM in the Cloud at the Great Indian Developer Summit in Bangalore last month and geared my thoughts on multi-tenant business processes. Like I had noted in my earlier post, as business processes get more integrated into the enterprise IT infrastructure landscape, new solution architectures are possible. We’ll begin to see whole cloud and distributed application models being encapsulated into single-solutions with embedded business processes. We’ll see these same solutions being deployed on the cloud, and even further being deployed in a dynamically scalable multi-tenant model.

This is, in my view, the more advanced of the three possible models for SOA/BPM in the cloud:

• Using Business Process Management (BPM) for integrating applications in the cloud
• Above BPM itself running in the cloud
• BPM embedded inside solutions running in the cloud (single-solution view)

BPM in a SaaS model, wherein one can model and execute their business processes over the web, is not exactly new. Gartner reviewed the web based BPM modeling and deployment possibilities in 2008, and cited the three possible deployment models:  For each application instance it may have its own BPMS and repository on a shared server, or a shared  repository, or the extreme form of shared BPMS+repository an a shared server. The whole web based BPM modeling and deployment fad has come and gone. This is partly due to limitations on the kind of use cases that fit in into BPM on the web, with solutions and services they access possibly being within the enterprise. And accessing services inside the enterprise firewall from outside is not the easiest of configurations to open up for secure access. So, model and execute on the web in a SaaS model is probably still time away from mainstream adoption. Until enterprise IT landscapes mature some more; with more widely distributed solutions over the web- possibly accelerated by rapid acceleration of SaaS model business solutions and also the accelerated adoption of public clouds within enterprises.

Now, one possibility not explored much is BPM and SOA becoming an integral part of a single solution. Though SOA is an integration paradigm and BPM is a model-driven business process layer targeting integration solutions & human workflow processes, both do offer a very elegant model for today’s modern applications. The granular coarse-grained services professed by SOA is a very good way of partitioning and abstracting sub-systems in any application. What’s more, BPM is a good mechanism to model all first level business processes and flows in any application. This is the single solution view of SOA/BPM.

However, once we switch to a single-solution view, with SOA/BPM being used in the solution as a first order design paradigm (and not just to integrate external applications or services), SOA/BPM can exist in two forms. 1) A simple solution model with an embedded BPM layer that helps organize the solutions functional sub-components better thru coarse-grained services, and all first level of solution capabilities modeled and realized as BPM processes. 2) A solution model that is actually distributed, but still in a single-solution context enabling and providing functionality for a single business solution. Extending this further, you could look at this single-solution environment as one that actually has distributed functionality (a la normal SOA - even as all the web services are essentially modular functionality that aggregate to form the whole application). These applications will use distributed sub-components in a SOA services abstraction and have business processes that provide a higher level of functionality in the application that access these components. Similar to the single solution view described above, but now these sub-components and business processes also are distributed across servers.

It is in this single-solution SOA context that SaaS and multi-tenancy become relevant. Using this model, an ISV could build an application on a platform that leverages the modularity offered by SOA abstractions and the easily customizable first level business process flows enabled by BPM. And, they can make this application available in a SaaS model. If there were to be a BPM+SOA based application platform made available by any of the BPM/middleware vendors, then it is only natural to expect this to also support declarative multi-tenancy.

Multi-tenancy enabled BPM/SOA-platform? Does it sound far-fetched? Not really… Last my month my class (Internals of Middleware Systems course at IIIT-H) built a multi-tenant SOA platform as the course project. They demo’d the solution at the end of the course. It had full working declarative multi-tenancy built into the SOA platform they built, and it included a business process (orchestration) engine based on Camel and a web services platform, registry and repository, and declarative multi-tenancy. (Phew! J ). I was pleasantly surprised. They actually got the whole solution working (albeit in a basic POC mode). So technically, a PaaS for Multi-tenant BPM/SOA based applications is definitely feasible. Sometime, hopefully soon, there could be commercial offerings in the market.  

SOA. It’s back… but it’s got more sparkle.

I’ve been working in high-tech marketing roles for over 20 years now and every time some new marketing collateral comes across my desk and “I get it”, I get excited. As a matter of fact, my first job in a high tech company was as a marketing assistant to an R&D group at BBN Systems and Technologies. They were introducing a very innovative product called BBN Slate which was a multi-media editor for Unix. Because my previous jobs involved word processing (Wang), spreadsheet analysis (Lotus), and creating pretty charts (DEC/VMS – yes, really), “I got it” and I was committed to championing it. I loved every minute of it. Well, in 2007 I was tasked to optimize the Progress Software website for SOA. We already had great traction for the enterprise service bus (ESB), but not specifically for service-oriented architecture (SOA). Well, “I got it”, got going and started optimizing for SOA Infrastructure – a popular long tail term at the time - less than two months later. As a matter of fact, this blog was once the SOA Infrastructure blog.

In January of 2009, Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton group published the blog post SOA is Dead; Long Live Services. The industry had a lot of fun with that. Now, I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but suddenly Progress stopped talking about SOA and they asked me to change the name of this blog. I was sad, I admit it.

This responsive business integration diagram was taken from a presentation by Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Enterprise Infrastructure. Listen to the archive.

Well yesterday I saw some sparkle. We announced our new Responsive Business Integration (RBI) suite. Truth be told, I’ve known about it for a few months because I had to post the content and work on my SEO plan. I know it’s not nice to play favorites, but I was delighted to see my favorite Progress technology/products back in the game – Actional, DataXtend SI and Sonic. And, I’ve concluded that the RBI suite is SOA pimped up! It’s taking the existing service and application foundation most enterprises already have (or are building) and it’s enhancing it with semantics, policy management and mediation. The Progress RBI suite is going to allow businesses to decouple systems which will give them improved visibility, agility and the ability to change.

Read more about Progress Responsive Business Integration. And check out a great presentation by Progress customer Southern Union Company. They built their enterprise integration strategy around RBI and didn't even know it.

For the lack of a better term, do you think RBI it is our next-generation SOA? Give us your comments!

Multi-tenant Distributed Process Environment

As part of the Internals of a Middleware Systems course (one of the two courses I teach at IIIT-Hyderabad), I wanted to dabble in multi-tenant service oriented architecture (SOA) as a course project. About two months back when I first thought of this as the project, I assumed it was going to be an academic exercise where the class would build some interesting multi-tenant SOA platform (building on Camel, CXF on JMS, with a home-grown approach to partitioning the tenant domains for same set of services & processes (camel routes) available in the environment). But as I started getting more into it, I began to realize that there is probably more to it than an academic angle!

We actually started looking at business processes as being a more integral part of an application infrastructure, and not necessarily just part of the integration layer. Our thought process even brought us above and beyond our recently introduced OpenEdge BPM solution that enables our Application Partners to have key parts of their business logic defined as BPM processes, thereby allowing easier customizations for unique business flows and requirements. (Many years back had proposed embedded buziness preocesses (in Java applications) as a theoretical possibility in application architectures. At that time didnt realise there will actually be a simple platforms that brings both BPM & application logic together as well as our OE-BPM now does). With BPM and application logic now part of an integrated platform, it is only question of time before this architecture extends to a more distributed deployments with application logic composed as distributed services that is then orchestrated in the BPM layer to enable first level business capabilities and flows. Thus bringing in SOA also into the mix. And the moment this solution goes on the cloud in a SaaS model, the whole platform- Application logic, SOA & BPM- will now need to be multi-tenant capable.

Most of multi-tenant SOA seemed common sense.Still, when I was trying to find some academic basis, I came across this comprehensive overview in an IEEE article, Multi-tenant SOA Middleware for Cloud Computing. This article summarizes the various aspects of multi-tenancies - from the well known models for database centric solutions to enabling multi-tenancies (one DB per tenant, one schema per tenant or the more advanced tenants across multiple schema's (each shared)), to the more complex problem of actual application multi-tenancy. The application multi-tenancy also had a sound approach presented in this paper - Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail - where they present a few levels, from the basic custom instance per tenant, to the next level where it is still one instance per tenant but the application is architected for easy configurabation. This paper further presents the next level where there is a shared instance that can service multiple tenants, to the most advanced level that it is a shared instance across tenants that can also be clustered & made highly-available. All great stuff. But what does this mean for SOA and BPM environments?

The more fundamental question that begs to be answered is what is the play for SOA in the cloud? Is there a SaaS play at all involving SOA? In the past few years that I've been dabbling in cloud  computing and talking about cloud environments at seminars here in India,  I never really thought SOA had a major angle. But surely in today's enterprise IT landscape, any enterprise integration solution will need to also access solutions in the cloud either by running a SaaS platform, custom built on a PaaS platform, or in a cloud-based virtual infrastructure platform. As SOA adoption matures, the other aspect that is rapidly emerging is a new class of business applications that use business process management (BPM) and service abstractions as a more integral part of solutions. All the simplicity, rapid development, composability and maintainability value that SOA offered for enterprise integration (in terms of atomic coarse grained business functions and processes that are composed off of these services, and that are easy to define and modify), now makes sense even for individual applications. Who would say NO to applications that are easy to build and maintain?

Given this, the use cases emerging for BPM solutions are now very different. And once BPM and SOA get into the application architecture, the need for (and value from) the cloud and multi-tenancy is immediate. We've seen the SaaS model get serious traction from ISV's because it delivers flexibility as well as a low-cost & ease of ownership. Once we go the full hog, then why just business processes? The applications can also have first level business services (aka SOA services) that can be composed into next level business processes and business workflows. A full-fledged SOA platform now forming the basis for applications.

So, in order to multi-tenant enable these BPM + SOA solutions, what are the challenges? ...Stay tuned.

Belgacom and the Case for Business-oriented integration in Communications Providers

It is no secret that the telecommunications industry has been exploring various ways to tackle issues such as declining ARPU (average revenue per user) and increasing customer churn over the last five years. The keys to proactively addressing these issues are agility and responsiveness. For example, responsiveness around customer service – to make customers feel they have a personalized valuable service – which reduces churn; and agility -- around launching new and compelling services rapidly – to increase ARPU.

Despite this quest for the Holy Grail, many communications providers have failed to lay sufficient foundations. While there may be some useful technologies deployed in an attempt to provide an agile and responsive integration platform – these technologies have often failed to deliver what is needed by the business. SOA is a prime case in point. While SOA technology has been successful in many ways, it has also led to a lot of disappointments. Often the business was sold on the promise that SOA would make operations more agile and responsive.  However, what resulted was technology for technologists that looked like plumbing and was daunting and too generic to the business.

Business people want solutions that can deliver visibility to problems and opportunities – such as key business events (e.g., an opportunity to sell a new service, based on context or location) or process failures (e.g. persistent dropped calls for an important customer) – so that problems can be responded to quickly and opportunities taken. The business also wants solutions that can enforce business-level policies and service-level agreements, as well as solutions that can interconnect services at a “semantic level” – not just plumb data together. In other words – the business wants to deal in business-level concepts, and be assured that the underlying complexity will be managed by the system.

Today’s announcement that Belgium operator Belgacom is transforming its business and IT integration programme (more information here) represents a huge step forward for the telecommunications industry. Belgacom is clearly focused around being more responsive to the needs of their customers in order to tackle issues such as churn through improved integration. By selecting the right business integration foundation to support their IT strategy, Belgacom has taken a critical step forward in a long-term strategy to become more operationally responsive to their customers.

Due to the nature of the economic times we live in, it is vital that the telecommunications industry as a whole ensures that they have the best possible integration technology in place. Only then will operators be able to enhance their customer experience management offerings to attract and retain their business customers, differentiate their offerings, and lower their service costs.

 

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!

When it comes to Integration, Contracts Make all the Difference.

It may seem odd to talk about contracts and SOA in the same sentence, but without them experienced enterprise architects and integration developers understand the negative consequences that will ripple through the business.

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) requires establishing contracts between its participants. The first or most basic SOA contract provision concerns what formats and protocols are used. When two service participants, a provider and a consumer, establish a contract, it must start out with some protocol and format artifact (or transport and data-level semantic), such as an XSD and the associated WSDL describing the interface between that consumer and producer. These decisions establish the beginnings of interoperability, specifically how the first-level pin-outs get wired together.

Beyond this basic level, IT professionals tend to think about contracts in two broad areas: the service-level agreement (SLA) and security. For IT, an SLA usually specifies scale, response time, and availability: for example, handling 10,000 requests per second with a response time of less than 500 milliseconds, and availability to four 9s, or 99.99 percent uptime. From a security standpoint, a contract covers four or five areas.

In installment #7 of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series, Hub Vandervoort delves into the sixth point of mediation - Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Privacy/Protection. But rather than providing a comprehensive account of the idea of QoS and QoP, the video podcast and technical paper offer a high-level overview of some capabilities within Sonic ESB by itself and in association with Actional, which is largely built into the ESB infrastructure, and how those come together to create the foundation of QoS\QoP—trust and commitment —required for effective contracts.

---

Check out all of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series white papers and videos here!

Busy week in India (Product Conclave and SOA Summit)

Over the past few years there has been a significant rise in new tech start-ups in India.This is most evident at the National Software Products Conclave organised by Nasscom (national industry body). Till a few years back this was essentially for, by and of global multi-national product majors and few leading Indian product companies. In past two years, however, this has transformed to now an event completely targeting tech start-ups. A very demand driven shift! This years edition is due next week and theme is Lean Startups in the Cloud.

I am happy to be part of this event. I am part of the core organizing team, and am moderating a panel discussion on the opportunity being opened by UID (a majorly funded federal program to issue citizen IDs - a la Social Security Number in many countries ).Topic being - Ride the New Mobile Solutions Wave Triggered by UID. The UID organization, headed by Infosys Co-founder, is looking at much beyond just the ID. Implicit in the envisioned architecture is the mechanism to authenticate ID verification with bio-metrics also in place. And this is being made available to all solution providers and SIs to build custom solutions in segments ranging from Supply Chain, Logistics and beyond to bottom of pyramid solutions. This is a serious opportunity for a completely new class of solutions. And lot of interest from the government to promote the platform and encourage new solutions. This is by and large a distributed solution with potentially large number of users/endpoints involved. Our Responsive Process Management may also have a play in this. I will be moderating the discussion to identify such solution possibilities. At an event with over 500 start-ups, and leaders from few hundred established product companies & SIs, present!

While on Responsive Process Management, one more interesting opening is that at a Business Technology Summit due also next week, have been invited to talk on  'Beyond BPM'. Here again, our vision for beyond BPM is Responsive Process Management, Where business process management in an organization is extended to the processes that are not yet automated thru SOA Orchestration or BPM. Without any re-engineeirng, to extend the visibility and control that BPM enables to other non automated processes in the enterprise. My talk will discuss extending BPM models to Responsive Process Management as a emerging solution space, and what it can mean for businesses. How the RPM as a solution approach helps with the sense and respond decision control based on modeling and tracking business flows without changing/modifying the code of any of the existing applications that participate in  the business flows.

Looking forward to the Nasscom Product Conclave, the discussion on UID and later the RPM talk at the Business Technology Summit at Bangalore next week.

Sense and Respond to Event Streams in Real Time

Last week we introduced one of the key benefits of  responsive process management (RPM) - real time visibility. We've heard what it means to be operationally responsiveness, why it's so hard to achieve and how we deliver it through the Progress RPM® suite. Today we'll look at another key benefit of RPM – the ability to immediately sense and respond to business events so that you can quickly reveal opportunities, threats or inefficiencies, and take action.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 5 of our 7 part video series, Immediate Sense and Respond, John talks about the how one of today’s smart technologies, complex event processing (CEP), allows businesses to process event feeds and have the ability to sense and respond to the opportunities, or threats, that occur in real time. A good example of how CEP benefits companies is in fraud prevention.

The best part? You drive. A business control panel will give you the ability to gain real-time visibility into business events, immediately sense and respond to changing conditions, and achieve continuous process improvement. Learn how Agent O applies RPM to tackle credit card fraud in real time.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Watch the 3-minute teaser, Gain Efficiency. Avoid Risk. Seize Opportunity, by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, and then download the entire video. You may also be interested in the paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time written by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?
Delivering Operational Responsiveness
Four Types of Business Process Visibility

 

Actional 8.2 Released

It’s a great time to be in New England. Bright fall colors frame every road as the trees that provide refreshing shade during the blistering summer days now provide a canvas of brilliant color. Nestled among the trees that line Route 3 north you’ll see corporate headquarters for Progress Software, a leader in Business Transaction Management software with Progress Actional.

Actional 8.2 was just released and continues to show significant advancements in supporting enterprises that need to ensure the success of every single important business transaction. As the heterogeneity of IT infrastructures increases, Actional can help organizations achieve this level of assurance by extending visibility into transactions that traverse environments that include Apache CXF and JBoss ESB. And if improving the customer experience and the performance of mission-critical applications is on your radar, be sure to visit the Actional website for details on expanded alerting—and other enhancements. This release is targeted for organizations that are looking to work more intelligently and with a laser-focus on quality and efficiency.

So does the release of Actional 8.2 trump New England’s fall foliage? With a true Bostonian accent I’ll just say, “When driving one’s cahr through Hahrvahd yahrd, one can rest assured that transactions are running smoothly, application perfahrmance is optimized and the customah experience is at an all time high!”

Transformational IT change at British Airways

Gordon Penfold, Chief Technology Officer, at British Airways, started off by telling us that not only is the Boeing 747 40 years old this year, but so is the IT that supports the 747. Having been early to the world of real-time processes, the technology is now facing end of life at the end of 2010, and it's time for a major change.

Gordon shared with the audience at the Progress Software Summit (#progressswsummit) that to get to a SOA-based infrastructure that will deliver the vision of a single real-time infrastructure linking retail, customer, operational and corporate data and processes has required significant technical and strategic change. BA needs to use their enterprise architecture to improve quality and minimise cost, directly affecting BA's objective of being a global airline of the highest quality and providing exceptional customer service. And the term "global" isn't some platitude in this case as BA has operations and staff distributed all over the world. As Gordon said, BA is a peripatetic company.

BA's ‘common architecture’ will ensure consistent implementation, enabling BA to run existing services and implement new ones effectively. SOA is Gordon’s preferred option. The aim is to reduce complexity and increase agility, introducing a plug-and-play capability that can also manage ‘heritage’ applications, created by the industry and service providers – all to support over 15 million transactions a day.

Progress is supporting the change at BA with its Sonic, Actional and DXSI products, and is working with Gordon’s team on a proof-of-concept for Savvion and on how Apama can support with interactions with partners and other airlines. At the half-way point in the implementation, BA is now live with its Progress powered Service Integration Platform, which links the business to IT processes in a controlled way.

Gordon made some kind remarks on working with Progress - the best-in-class products and the added value provided by the Progress people who worked at BA on site. All great to hear from a business with very real mission critical requirements.

Are you a sitting duck or one that will respond immediately to threats?

While many organisations are being ‘cautiously optimistic’ about what the future holds, the realities of today’s tough business environment could leave them as sitting ducks, according to Rick Reidy, CEO at Progress Software. They might take consolation that they’re in the same pond, but when interest rates in Japan hit near-zero, banks continue to fail and mistakes can lead to a ‘flash crash’, the pond is not a safe place to be. Businesses may have money, but fear and uncertainty is holding back decision-making – we await further regulation and want to know the consequences of recent government changes.

 
Listening to Rick’s keynote at our UK business summit (#progresswsummit, if you want to follow on twitter), in the impressive surrounding of Chelsea Football Club’s ground, London, it seems most of the audience agrees – it’s not good enough to sit around and wait to see if growth returns, and you cannot grow simply by cutting costs. You have to take control of your own ‘growth agenda’, as Rick put it. Businesses that want to survive the next five years need better visibility, through putting processes in place that enable them to react quickly to meet customer demands, adapt to market changes and take advantage of new opportunities. As Rick has advised, businesses need to act on up to the minute information so that leaders can make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight.
 
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll already know that we call this ‘operational responsiveness’: the ability to sense and respond to customer and market changes so that organisations can move quickly to meet challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. 
 
Rick has talked about what this means in the airline industry: the notion of irregular operations has become a weekly reality as companies face intense market pressure, striking staff and disruption from natural phenomenon. ‘Swivel chair’ communication between operational areas is no longer good enough. To react quickly enough, they need responsive processes in place that can help them maintain services and inform customers, almost as-it-happens. If they don’t, they will face massive fines, lost custom and damaged reputation – risks no company can afford at present.
 
We’ll be hearing more from Gordon Penfold, CTO at British Airways, about their approach to becoming operationally responsive to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Watch this space for my take on his talk…

 

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

 

Who's Job is it (to Sequence and Process Errors) Anyway?

It is a common software and integration architectural principle that the more dependencies built into a service, the less reusable that service becomes.  So then, why do some many vendors and enterprises continually create tightly coupled services and therefore lose re-usability?

The answer likely has something to do with mediation, more specifically sequencing and error recovery mediation. Sequencing and Error Recovery mediation are the two topics covered in a new webcast and technical paper posted today on Progress.com.  Both discuss why and how you should delegate sequencing and error recovery completely away from services, how this makes services unaware of what order they’re called in and the order the processes execute in, and ultimately how this makes services maximally reusable and your business more operationally responsive. 

The paper also explains how the Sonic ESB is designed to perform sequencing and, with multiple output paths on each endpoint, enable error recovery processes that are separate from the “happy” path. Just as important, Sonic offers the unique benefit of enabling you to orchestrate services using BEPL or itineraries—whichever is optimal for your process scenario.

Be sure to watch the Sequencing and Error-Recovery webcast and download the technical brief to learn more about the Seven Points of Mediation and the importance of each in relation to supporting a truly agile and responsive business application infrastructure.

---

Check out all of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series white papers and videos here!

The Seven Points of an ESB

When discussing an ESB, many people keep it simple, sticking to the generalities of SOA and sharing services to build composite business applications.  Certainly, these are incredibly important benefits of an ESB but what do these dicussions really mean at the architecture level? 

Another word for integration when it comes to ESBs is mediation.  After all, that is truly what an ESB does - mediates the differences between application components (services) that were not intended to work together.  So then, in context of mediation, how should an ESB be examined?  Here at Progress, we view there to be seven points of mediation that serve as a set of key principles that apply to any integration infrastructure. They are critical because adherence to all seven is necessary to achieve the ultimate goals of SOA: reuse and agility.

Any one point that is not mediated becomes a point of brittleness. Put another way, interoperability needs to be tested along seven key points, which, briefly, are:

7 POINTS OF MEDIATION
Transport/Protocol
Location/Destination
Semantic/Format
Sequencing
Error Recovery
Quality of Service/Quality of Protection
Interaction Model

To help examine these points in-depth Progress has created a series of technical briefs (white papers).  These papers use the 'Seven Points of Mediation' as a way of describing how an ESB is, in fact, a comprehensive infrastructure onto which services can delegate these points. The overriding idea is that if a service delegates each and every point of mediation, it becomes more reusable in more contexts. These papers explain how Sonic ESB enables a service to free itself of these considerations, ultimately, so that it can provide the agility that SOA promises.

Be sure to watch the Transport, Location, and Semantics podcast and download the technical brief to learn more about the Seven Points of Mediation and the importance of each in relation to supporting a truly agile and responsive business application infrastructure.

---

Check out all of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series white papers and videos here!

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.

Dynamic Routing Architecture - Strength Comes from the Core

This week's deep dive into the gears of Enterprise Integration take us to the Dynamic Routing Architecture or DRA.  SonicMQ's Dynamic Routing Architecture (DRA) technology allows the delivery of messages between applications regardless of the cluster that the application is connected to. In case of a connection failure, (e.g. between regional offices), DRA will route messages via alternative operational paths, and facilitate expansion without incurring significant administrative overhead. Clusters may connect to other clusters as needed, creating highly distributed deployments across loosely-coupled locations.

As mentioned in the first series brief, “Messaging Architecture,” every Sonic broker has a set of acceptors that define it’s connectivity to the rest of your messaging architecture. These can play three roles: as a client link, as an inter-broker link (in a cluster) and as a DRA link enabling two clusters to communicate across a WAN. In addition, because Sonic acceptors can handle multiple protocols, the DRA link can work over other various types of connections as well.

But, DRA goes beyond the Sonic clustering architecture. It optimizes communications in many complex, distributed topologies while providing administrative transparency, or single-entry administration. As a result, DRA enables easier scaling and greater agility in changing the IT environment to meet changing business needs and market
conditions.

Be sure to watch the DRA video podcast and download the technical brief to learn more about how DRA provides unmatched high-availability and delivers transparency and administrative efficiencies that truly ripple to both the bottom and top-line of business activity.

---

The forth brief and whiteboard video in the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series, Dynamic Routing Architecture,  explains how the Progress enterprise integration solutions work. This brief focuses on the Progress® Sonic® Dynamic Routing Architecture® (DRA), its purpose and capabilities over and above the Sonic clustering architecture as well as some special use cases..

Integration & Performance - It's all about the Clusters

As we continue our series on Enterprise Integration as a foundational element for Operational Responsiveness we venture into the world of Performance, Scalability and Reliability.

These characteristics are vital to distributed networks, and in large part, depend on transparency in the cluster to be fully realized. A cluster is a number of independent machines that behave as though they were one single logical entity. The rationale for clustering is that this single logical entity will easily scale and provide uniform performance: if one member fails or goes offline, messaging can continue. There are three dimensions of transparency that can be examined to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of an enterprise messaging solution in delivering this vision. These are administrative transparency, functional transparency, and high-availability and load-balancing transparency.

Check out the complete discussion on this topic by viewing the video podcast whiteboard session or downloading the transcript as a technical brief.

The second brief and whiteboard video in the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series, Clusters and Technologies, examines how the Progress enterprise integration solutions work. This brief focuses on administrative and functional transparency in the cluster architecture of Progress® Sonic® versus its competitors, showing why Sonic provides greater operational responsiveness at lower cost.

Shipping logistics with event processing

On Friday last week I visited Progress customer, Royal Dirkzwager, in the Netherlands. It’s nice to be able to talk about a customer publically - Dirkzwager have been a generous public reference for some time. This was my first visit to their head office in Maassluis, near Rotterdam, and it gave me a new insight into their business. Dirkzwager’s offices are right on the main entrance to the port of Rotterdam and it was great to be in their board room and watch the container ships move by as Paul Wieland, head of IT, took me through their business and what they are using Progress’ products for.

Dirkzwager is in the business of supplying information about shipping movements to the maritime industry. Its customers include the Port of Rotterdam, shipping companies and the logistics companies involved in supporting the ships and handling the goods. Dirkzwager currently supplies information on shipping movements at sea and in and out of ports from Le Havre in France to Denmark. Rotterdam is its epicentre - the biggest port in Europe and one of the biggest in the world, handling around 30,000 ships per year.  

Dirkzwager are users of the Sonic Enterprise Eervice Bus (ESB) and the Apama event processing platform. Sonic is used for delivering information to customers reliably and Apama is used for processing and analyzing the events reporting the positions of ships, up to several thousand per second. Live data is augmented with data from a reference database on tonnage, flag, crew, and lots of other information. Applications range from simple to more complex. One example is: “alert when a ship crosses this line”, to give an official port entry time (important for calculating harbour fees). A more complex example is the calculation of an actual time of arrival, using course, speed, weather conditions and historical information about the ship’s movements. This latter application can bring very significant benefits: on average, 50 companies are involved servicing a ship when it’s in port, from loading or unloading goods to servicing the radar. If these companies can receive more accurate information about a ship’s arrival time, they can optimize their operations resulting in the whole supply chain becoming more efficient – capacity is increased and costs are lowered. Paul gave some insight too into how Dirkzwager had become more efficient by using Apama to automate tasks that were previously done manually and in the process saving substantial amounts of money (the details of which, unfortunately, I can’t share here).

Dirkzwager’s industry is changing. Currently, most ships identify themselves by a VHF-radio system. This is shore based and has a range of approximately 60km. This is changing to a satellite based system which will give more continual and accurate reporting and also give simpler access to ship movements anywhere in the world (approximately 80,000 ships are in transit at any one time worldwide). This gives business expansion opportunities and also challenges when dealing with the new quantities of data that available. Paul Wieland clearly believes that complex event processing (CEP) is an ideal way for Dirkzwager to analyze this data and provide the monitoring of logistics and supply chain processes that they support for customers. Paul’s obviously a visionary – the room was buzzing with ideas. Now his team is experienced with Apama, Paul reported that people’s approach to problem solving had changed – they were thinking naturally about things in an event based way, both architecturally and in terms of data processing.

One might not necessarily think of shipping logistics as being the most innovative of industries, but Dirkzwager has always been at the forefront of technological innovation. Shipping was, and continues to be, vital to the Dutch economy. When the company was founded, in 1872, people used to stand at the opening of the port with binoculars. As a ship was sighted and recognized, someone would mount a horse and rush back to the port to report. Dirkzwager had the first commercial telephone line in the Netherlands. Paul showed me a room where some of the computing and communications equipment used previously by Dirkzwager is stored – examples include a megaphone, semaphore flags, telephones, telex machines and a mini computer. It was a mini museum for the communications industry. The use of event processing software is simply another step in this historical evolution.

Wait-and-see won't protect you

Moving your IT organization to service oriented architecture is hard, no doubt about it.  But, at the same time, avoiding SOA isn't going to protect you.  Whether you like it or not, you'll end up with many of the same problems in your IT environment whether or not you choose to wholeheartedly adopt SOA...

Heaven can wait

Too often organisations consider acquiring IT with an ambitious programme of IT infrastructure change and the belief that a radical, multi-year re-architecting of the organisation’s systems will lead to a more capable and modern IT architecture that is better able to respond to the requirements of the business. While this "IT heaven" may be a laudable objective, it is a very difficult one to achieve and, in our opinion, is unsuitable for most organisations.

IT heaven can wait. We encourage clients to take an approach which is focussed on definable business projects each delivering value, typically in a 9-12 month timeframe. It sounds obvious doesn't it? A recent experience with a large investment bank shows that to many it isn't.

The bank had gone out to tender for the capabilities it wanted to procure in the IT organisation. These capabilities were ambitious. The programme's intent was to transform the way that IT projects were delivered - all very exciting. Naturally I imagined that they had a whole set of business projects lined up just waiting for the right infrastructure in order to deliver them. When asked about this though, they appeared to be rather taken aback - "Projects in mind? No, we don't have any specific projects in mind." I was surprised, and disappointed. They were operating in a vacuum. They certainly had vision, but they had no justification for actually implementing it and for spending any money with us. They just hadn't got other parts of the organisation onboard with this programme of activity. As I write, they have yet to make their planned investment…

Maintain your vision to be sure, but make sure you deliver some demonstrable business projects along the way.

SOA What? SOA is all about enabling incremental change. It's about modern and legacy systems working together. It’s about working in a heterogeneous world and evolving your SOA infrastructure in non-disruptive way.