Business Making Progress

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!

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.

 

Responsiveness in Retail Banking

A general theme for this blog is how organisations are having to become more responsive, whether to customers, competition, regulation or to squeeze further operational efficiencies out of processes. I want to talk about some of the likely areas of innovation in retail and wholesale banking that will make these organisations more responsive.

Regulation is one obvious area where banks, over a multi-year period, are going to have to become more adept at dealing with change. The implications of the Dodd-Frank legislation in the US is still being understood and, in the UK, banks may be facing an almost existential threat if one gives credence to the rhetoric currently coming out from government and regulators.

Regulation and compliance with regulation is only going to become more and more important. This is being recognised by non-banking institutions that work in financial services. Thomson Reuters, for example, recently announced the formation of a Governance, Risk and Compliance division to deliver information solutions to those needing to comply with regulation. Useful certainly, but regulation will always manifest itself in different ways in different banks. The processes that support regulation must be able to change on a frequent basis. Applications set in concrete only allow this to occur slowly and expensively. The method of building applications needs to be responsive itself and needs to focus around dealing with complex events, business rules, workflow and user interfaces, not around programming language coding.

As an example, a bank, now a customer of Progress Software, had to deal with complying with new regulatory requirements in a matter of weeks. This was not just a box-ticking exercise – the regulator wanted visible demonstration of the systems that had been put in place. The bank’s existing application was simply too inflexible to be changed for reasonable cost and in the time required. An alternative approach, based on Business Process Management and event processing technology was selected which allowed the compliance process flow to evolve and change over time in a much more dynamic way and which could be tailored to meet the bank’s own unique combination of circumstances.

Regulation isn’t a nice to have or something aspirational. It’s a must-have – the risk of legal sanction makes it so.

Another focus for this year will be customer experience. Generally speaking, banks have been behind other industries in getting more responsive to customers’ individual needs and how they’re actually interacting with their bank. A recent US survey, by the industry analyst firm AITE, found that only 22% of small businesses were “extremely” satisfied with their bank and that 65% of larger corporates believed that banks did a bad job of understanding their needs.

A personal anecdote will illustrate a wider point. Recently, I moved money from a savings account with my usual bank to one paying a higher rate of interest with a competitor. The first bank finally contacted me about why I wasn’t using my savings account, but only after all the money had exited the account. By then it was simply too late. Banks still haven’t got sophisticated enough about monitoring how their customers are interacting with their accounts, online, by telephone etc., and sensitively interpreting what these actions might mean and responding in a timely fashion. Again, a watchword here is responsiveness.

Customer onboarding, the process of dealing with a customer’s application for a loan, credit card etc., has got some attention, both to improve the customer’s experience but also to increase the operational efficiency of the bank’s processes.  Some banks have now a real-time view of these processes and can determine immediately whether a high-value business loan should be treated as a greater priority than a car loan or whether a number of card applications have been spending too long receiving credit checks. By knowing this kind of information now (rather than often days or weeks hence) is vital to spotting exceptions quickly and re-prioritizing resources.

One of the core services that a bank performs is payments, whether these payments are executed using cards, direct bank transfer, cheque or otherwise. This year might see some significant innovations in payments processing which will require banks to respond in a way they’ve not been forced to previously. A key tipping point may be Apple introducing a near field communications (NFC) chip into the next iPhone, expected to be released about mid-year. This will allow an iPhone to be swiped across a store terminal to pay for goods. This isn’t that new. Particularly in Japan, NFC chips have been built into mobile phones for some time. However, Apple has a current habit of energising markets and it doesn’t just have the iPhone. There are 160m iTunes accounts which already handle payments. Google and Paypal are also considering offering NFC services. The question is, will this really disrupt existing payment systems which still, even in Paypal’s case, rely upon the core payment infrastructure provided by, primarily, banks? We should hope so. Banks have been hopelessly slow at innovating in payments. It took a diktat from the UK regulator to introduce “faster payments” into the UK. Still too many payments take 3 days, which, in today’s world is very slow for any kind of transaction. Cross-border payments in Europe are still slow and expensive.

If new technology does force payments innovation, banks will be forced to keep up by increasing the flexibility and speed of their own infrastructures to deal with, potentially, many more smaller payments. Guess what? They will need to make them more responsive. If they’re not able to move quickly banks may end up simply being sending round the larger aggregated payments resulting from all the transactions occurring using more modern platforms. Cost pressures will also be present. A recent Boston Consulting Group report indicates that payments providers need to reduce costs by between 10% and 35% by 2012 to keep cost-income ratios stable.

Retail and wholesale banking may often move slowly, but, through regulation, customer pressure and new-entrant innovation, expect some significant changes this year. As Chris Skinner, omnipresent observer of all things banking has recently said on his blog, banks will have to learn “how to be real-time nimble in a world of change”. 

(This first appeared as an opinion column in cio.co.uk)

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.

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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.

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!”

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.

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

How Being Complex Makes Transaction Assurance Simpler

I have been seeing an increasing amount on interest in the marriage between Business Transaction Management (BTM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). On July 29^th Dr Dobbs Journal published an article called Complex Event Processing: IT Liberator or Over-Engineering Hell? This article was about the synergy of BTM and CEP (although I felt it was rather biased towards one company). Also, last week Jean Pierre Garbani at Forrester published this blog in which he discussed the evolution towards BTM and CEP working together.

Business Transaction Management is a rapidly growing area of Application Performance Management (APM). BTM enables users to look into the transaction flows within their business and ensure everything is running as expected. BTM enables problems in transaction flows to be discovered – such as a bottleneck in an important business process. The really appealing aspect of BTM is it can do this without the need to change the applications in the business; BTM can “discover the transaction flows” by tapping non-intrusively into the flows going through application servers, middleware buses, business process management systems and other systems within the environment. Over time, BTM can build up a picture of the environment’s business flows, look inside the transactions and flag up immediately problems that can really hurt the business.  Thus BTM works really well in legacy environments – not just modern SOA environments. And of course it appeals to business executives and operations users – not just IT users.

Complex Event Processing is the ability to correlate events flowing through a business  - to identify patterns in real-time. These patterns might indicate opportunities and/or threats to the business that have just happened, are in the process of happening or are likely to happen right now. Events are occurrences in the business, such as stock market quotes in trading, call data records being generated in communications or packages changing location in logistics. An example of a real-time opportunity is a trading “statistical arbitrage” opportunity – to sell one instrument and buy another at a micro profit; another is the ability to upsell something to a customer who has just purchased an item on their credit card – based on their spending and buying patterns, their location and context. Threats to be detected include risk exceeding a certain key level in a bank or gaming fraud occurring in a casino. This kind of business level visibility and immediate response also appeals to business users as well as IT.

Listening to the descriptions of BTM and CEP, does it sound like there is a little overlap? Well there is some. What BTM is really good at is non-intrusively discovering process endpoints and the events they exchange – and then tracking these events. What CEP is really good at is correlating complex real-time business events in real-time, including arbitrary user-defined patterns, which can evolve over time as the business evolves. So it makes perfect sense to put these capabilities of BTM and CEP together. For BTM this strengthens the real-time correlation and pattern detection capabilities. For CEP this enables discovery of services without the need to do expensive and time-consuming instrumentation of the environment.

At Progress we have two leading products in the BTM and CEP categories: Actional and Apama. We believe that BTM and CEP capabilities are converging for certain business use cases, so as part of our Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite we now provide seamless integration between these capabilities. Of course RPM does much more than that. More on that later!

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.

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.

Poor Customer Service and Snoring Keep Me Awake...

Last night, like many weeknights, I pre-planned my escape by putting my phone in the guest room. As I entered the room and got ready for the one-click alarm set, I noticed that I had a new voice mail so I called in to check it. Here is what it said:

"Hello, This is an automated voice message from Jet Blue Airways for Pamela Gazley with important information about a change to your scheduled flight. Your flight has been canceled. We look forward to serving you. Goodbye."

My first response was "why?"; my second response was "which flight?" My 2nd response was a little silly because of the 4 flights I have scheduled for the next week, only one involved Jet Blue; however, what if there were others? Does Jet Blue Airways know that there are products out there that can improve their processes so that they can deliver better customer experiences? Does Jet Blue have any business analysts that might think, "hey, what if when we send out the automated voice message, we include the flight number, date of travel, and the reason for the cancellation"? I guess not because I was completely annoyed.

Now I don't work for Jet Blue but I'd bet that they have some kind of integrated infrastructure that would allow them to improve business processes. If this "automated message" knows my name (though pronounced wrong), it should know my flight number, the date of travel, and the reason for the cancellation. My advice to Jet Blue: learn more about business transaction assurance,  business process management (BPM), and give us a call because we can help you achieve operational efficiency and improve your customers' experience.

Celebrating the shadow of Punxsutawney Phil

As the week of Punxsutawney Phil’s appearance commences, I must admit I’m one of the few that is happy to hear we have another 6 weeks of winter to look forward to! Why you ask, well that means more skiing and an extended window of time until I have to start worrying. Worrying about when to apply “Step 1” nutrients to my lawn, about how much the voles and moles have destroyed my plants, and about whether or not I warded off the dreaded Dutch Elm disease with the systemic treatment that was applied last fall. Bottom line is I have a 6 week reprieve.

But... what if I could apply technology to my yard, garden and even the infrastructure of my home. What if I could apply some fundamental concepts like automatic discovery, monitoring, management and control, across my household infrastructure? The possibilities are endless. I could set up points of visibility at strategic points in my yard such as the base of my newly planted Double Pink Weeping Cherry and at the perimeter of my bulbs. In the house I’d want visibility at the base of my water heater, sunk pump and egresses. With all this visibility I’d then establish a console where a complete infrastructure map would clearly reveal all activity that transacts in and around each point of visibility and if any issues were detected I could quickly and easily pin-point the root cause. And with points of control I could then dynamically control and avoid potential danger or damage such as voles eating the bark of my young cherry tree or avoid having my basement flood. Ohhhh wouldn’t this make life so much easier and a lot less costly.

Even though technology has not yet met my household needs, I still have hope. Maybe someday the principles and benefits of solutions like Actional for business transaction assurance will apply not only to the needs of enterprises with business critical transaction but to my needs as well. With Actional enterprises gain complete and automatic end-to-end visibility into their heterogeneous environment. Visibility that helps organizations understand the value of each transaction with the ability to dynamically control and optimize outcome. If enterprises can gain this level of business transaction management, I think it only makes sense that our next market should be the household management sector!

Reduce Order Fallout and Improve Your Customers' Experience

A New Video / Flash Presentation

Our audio presentation, Lost in Transactions – A Day in the Life of Application Failure, presents the fictitious story of one company struggling to find the root cause of application performance problems. If your enterprise identifies with their pain, take the next step by learning more about business transaction assurance with Actional.

Visit our website to view the Flash, or visit the Progress Software YouTube channel to watch the video.

Enjoy!

[Note: The voice of Karen is me, and the voice of Chuck is our own David Bressler.]

SOA? What do you call it?

Some of you may have noticed that we renamed our blog from SOA Infrastructure to Integrated Infrastructure. This came about when our product marketing team wanted to create a new “Open Integration” blog – same authors, same topics. Admittedly, I wasn’t a proponent of it because I wanted more blogging activity here, and I wanted to leverage the audience (and SEO truth be told) that we've built up over the past two years. So, I recommended that we re-brand it and we did.

I have no doubt that one of the reasons we wanted to move away from SOA was due to last January’s post by Ann Thomas Manes, SOA Is Dead; Long Live Services. Lots of SOA evangelists commented about the post, including our VP of Products Dan Foody who agreed with Anne’s perspective. Me? I personally think that SOA in itself is just a marketing term for a number of fairly distinct things, including enterprise integration.

With that said, this wouldn’t be a post by me if I didn’t offer or promote something, so I’m going to let you fill in the blanks.

Our new white paper The Foundation of _________ Quality is now available! What does _________ quality really mean? This white paper not only answers that question but it also examines the many facets of _________ quality. Read it and learn how you can ensure that your _________ initiative, such as Web 2.0, cloud computing, and BPM, can deliver the visibility and operational responsiveness that your enterprise demands. Get the white paper.

If you’d like to learn more about how your enterprise can achieve operational responsiveness, visit the Progress Software website.

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.

British Airways Selects Progress SOA to Upgrade the Travel Experience

British Airways announced yesterday that they had selected Progress Software for a revolutionary project that is integrating more than 600 different electronic systems and processes which are involved in getting BA passengers in the air.  This new highly automated infrastructure will bring increased agility to the airline. Rollouts will be easier, and associated cost and time will be reduced.

As is often the case with these kinds of announcements, however, it wasn’t really news to an “insider” like me.  I had visited BA earlier in the year and met with numerous people in the organization from the CTO to Architects and Developers on a number of the projects where they are implementing our technologies.  The thing that was most gratifying to me in those meetings wasn’t the scope of this cutting edge project or even that they were implementing using nearly our entire portfolio of SOA infrastructure products, namely Progress® Sonic® ESB, Progress® Actional® for SOA Management and Progress® DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (SI).  It was that, at every level in the organization, they expressed how pleased they were in the selection of Progress.  

At the senior executive level, they were discussing the partnership that they had developed with Progress and the vision we had provided to address real business challenges, for example, improving customer service by extending the features of BA’s e-commerce website into airports.  At the architecture level, there was a great sense of partnership on how the products we provided could be brought together in a coherent SOA based approach to their infrastructure that increases agility and operational responsiveness.  The developers were just happy that it really was “best of breed” technology that “just works”.  

At a time when most airlines are cutting back, it’s great to see British Airways taking advantage of what SOA has to offer and at every level of the organization they can count on Progress as a trusted partner to help.

Worried About Business Transaction Failure?

Besides costing you money, each failed transaction diminishes customer experience, and can even push your customers to competitors. We just released an Infographic that shows how Progress® Actional’s patented architecture and other key differentiators work to preserve the health of all transactions. It will allow you to see exactly what makes Actional unique, and how transactions are automatically discovered and tracked in a typical process flow. 

With improved business transaction management, you will:

• Enable centralized management and distributed policy enforcement for a cost-effective solution;
• Achieve real time exception management to diagnose and repair transaction problems quickly;
• Get the ability to optimize and create quality services before they are deployed.

WANT TO LEARN MORE? Download the PDF our Business Transaction Assurance Infographic. You can also register to get our E-kit which includes insightful papers and an E-book that will help you ensure that your web services never fail.

CORBA is now Actional-ized!

This is really cool, and I can finally speak about it. Wow, gag orders just don't work very well for me. I mean, I can keep a secret, it's just that the really juicy ones are harder to keep than the others! And, this one's juicy. Ready...

Today we will release Orbix 6.3.4 with support for Actional.

Whoa! I bet at this point a lot of you are like SOA What? (yeah, remember that blog-ism we did here back when SOA was cool?)

Well, let me give you end-to-end visibility into the import of that sentence above.

As with all the other technologies we cover, including the recently announced SAP ABAP integration, Actional integration with Orbix gives customers:

1. End-to-end message flow visibility across an entire CORBA environment, in run-time, without any impact on performance or scalability. That same visibility extends beyond CORBA, and does so consistently to provide a unified view of message flows and business transactions in their environment.
2. The ability to centralize run-time policy creation, allow for distributed enforcement across multiple environments, and to ensure compliance with corporate and regulatory policies across the entire messaging infrastructure.
3. The same tools our current customers have that help them achieve an 80% reduction in time to resolving critical production incidents and a 20% reduction in major production incidents per year by simplifying root-cause analysis and problem resolution.

Now, you might think with all these great benefits, there would be a high cost. Nuh uh!!!

• No additional coding changes to get this up and running. Instrumentation of all CORBA services is automatic.
• No architecture changes, Actional won't impact scalability.
• No extra capacity required, Actional won't impact performance.
• No additional staff are required, dependencies are dynamically discovered and maintained to help keep the cost of ownership low. In fact, case studies independently verified by Forrester Research of our customers who are in production showed a rather quick payback of the investment due, in part, to the low cost of ownership.

Of course, if you follow Actional and Progress at all, awesome technology is old news. Actional has been working on non-SOA distributed applications since early in the development of our product and anytime we add a new technology, protocol, or platform, we've always added the same rich features, while maintaining the enterprise-class performance. Let me say that again, because I've accidentally brought up a very important point.

The single Actional Agent adds all of the functionality, across all of the protocols and platforms, and provides the same outstanding performance you've come to expect from us. In contrast, many other vendors can support all the platforms/protocols, and all the business-transaction-management features, and do so non-intrusively... but THEY CAN'T DO IT ALL AT THE SAME TIME!

Back on track, sorry for the diversion. I'm almost done here, I promise.

There are other equally interesting implications from this release that I'd like to share (in no particular order).

1. This helps to, in part, validate the strategy that lead us to acquire IONA in the first place. There are a lot of cross-product synergies.
2. This continues to prove the applicability of our technology far beyond the common understanding of SOA infrastructure (SOA and HTTP/JMS). We have successfully broken out of the "SOA management" niche, and are providing real value to customers across the entire breadth of business transaction management needs.
3. In this "recovering" economy, Progress can help customers gain more value from their legacy technology investments by upgrading the capabilities in mission critical platforms like Orbix/CORBA. Whether it's from the operational perspective of lowering their operating costs while providing higher-levels of service, or from the business perspective of preventing "revenue leakage", Actional solves real-world problems without impacting the architecture or requiring coding changes to existing applications.

In closing, I wish I could share some of the early adopter customer quotes here. I can't, but the feedback from the (former) IONA field was equally funny. The IONA field is (relatively) new to Progress and hasn't necessarily developed the instant-automatic love for each-and-every Progress product because we all share a logo color scheme. We actually had to prove ourselves to these guys and gals (a very capable team I might add). Once the engineering team was finished, they took the early software and implemented it at some rather large (and equally skeptical) customers. After running it through it's paces, people were actually smiling. When was the last time you saw beta users smiling at performance results? To quote one guy working at a large airline... "it simply worked the way it should."

Beat that!

Smart Integration Infrastructure for Insurance Industry

Those of us who have been entrenched in middleware and SOA infrastructure technologies over the years know the importance of having a smart integration infrastructure. Well, today we released a press release announcing that West Bend Mutual Insurance, a property and casualty insurance carrier, chose Progress Sonic ESB and Progress Actional as core applications for their service-oriented architecture. West Bend Mutual Insurance will use Sonic ESB and Actional to supplement its existing policy administration system, so its insurance agents can conduct business more easily and effectively via a single integrated portal. The insurance portal will also be a critical tool to help them improve their customer retention and acquisition. The best part is that West Bend Mutual will finally be able to enjoy operational responsiveness by being able to respond to changing conditions and react more quickly to business opportunities.

For industries like insurance that need to constantly offer new products and services to remain competitive, creating an infrastructure that is agile and scalable, and one that delivers end-to-end visibility of back-end systems, is essential. SOA is a great fit. Read the complete release.

Business Transaction Management with SAP

If you follow Actional, you may have seen that Progress Software announced Actional 8.1 today.  The most interesting part of the release is our new support for SAP.  Yes, we already supported SAP NetWeaver (like most of the other people in our space) so unless you're an SAP aficionado, you probably won't recognize the importance of natively supporting SAP ABAP - which is what we've announced.

SAP supports two main application server environments: one based on Java and one based on ABAP, SAP's own programming language (you might also hear the term "basis" which is another name for the ABAP application server stack).  OK, with me so far?  While SAP support both, almost all of the SAP packaged applications are written using the ABAP stack - Java is primarily used for infrastructure services (things like their portal).

With this new version, we've added the ability to trace business transactions into and through ABAP - so we can detect problems even within the ABAP portion of a business transaction.  This is critical for many SAP customers because - without the ability to do this - SAP packaged application logic is seen as a black box silo.  And, with 100's of millions of lines of code in the SAP packaged applications, that a pretty big area to have a blind spot.

While there are a lot of business transaction management vendors out there that support SAP, they are usually referring to the Java side of SAP. As a result, once a transaction hits ABAP (and almost all of them do) it enters the black box and can't be seen again until it leaves ABAP.

As you might have guessed, we're really excited to extend Actional's patented transaction tracing to SAP's core platform.  If you're an SAP user, and need to ensure the success of business transactions that span SAP and other applications, platforms, and middleware then hopefully you'll get a chance to see whether this unique Actional capability can help you.

Now That's What We Mean By Performance!

Was visiting a customer in Switzerland last week and a funny thing happened.

They presented us with where they are in their deployment... they've deployed their first "major" application early last year (Inventory Management), and this year are planning two more applications in the suite to be deployed in 2010 (E-Ticketing & Centralized Checking-in).

They're using a very old version of Actional (v6x), and I was hoping to help them understand why it was important to upgrade to the current release (v8.0). The Inventory Management application contains about 300 applications (including TIBCO BusinessWorks and Oracle/BEA WebLogic Server), and is designed for 400 million messages per month. They're currently doing about half that. (It was really cool to see the Actional console with those sorts of numbers in the dashboards!!!)

Each of the new applications will probably add a similar amount of traffic. 1.2 Billion messages per month. Surely, there's my in.

I started talking about how we've made major improvements to auditing performance, user-interface usability in large scale environments, and CPU and memory utilization, along with general performance improvements you'd expect in two years of development. I was sure this was a certain driver for them to upgrade to a recent version, when the lead architect from Progress leaned over, and whispered in my ear...

The current architecture's not even breathing hard. Even with that traffic growth, we'd probably only be at 30-40% of design capacity.

What can I say? We have a really fantastic engineering team.

And, I'll have to work with the customer on building a business case for upgrading using a different angle.

Actional for IONA Orbix & DB

I've been on the road since the end of May and I have also moved, so needless to say, I'm behind on my blogging and tweeting responsibilities. I mean, you know you're busy when you don't have time to tweet!

My colleagues have been out there though, doing some great things. We've got some early trials going on with Actional being evaluated at a few IONA Orbix (CORBA) customers. Since the team has tweeted this, I thought I'd blog about it!

As Frank Lynch said, "CORBA users will be mighty pleased to have Actional visibility, an no performance penalty to boot." Yep, couldn't a' said it better myself.

Why is Actional/Orbix integration important?

1. It demonstrates a key differentiator between Actional and all other solutions out there... we're not designed specifically for web services. Never were. Extending Actional beyond web services started in late 2003, and continues with the work we're doing with the Orbix team.
   
2. CORBA customers are "interesting" in that they are typical enterprise class deployments. They have high message rates, are deployed in critical infrastructure, and are sophisticated deployments due to their maturity. Right in Actional's sweet spot.
   
3. In this down economy, Progress has a key advantage over our smaller competitors, so much so that it's hard to actually view these customers as competitors. Where these small guys have to go and develop new customer relationships, we can continue to delight our existing customer base (in over 100 countries) with innovative integrations between the products in the Progress portfolio. This continued innovation enables us to drive market adoption while delivering products that meet real enterprise customer needs.

On that last point, I've got a bit of a new role here. Or, better said, my role is being further formalized as Actional Product Evangelist. I'm very pleased to have the responsibility for socially-marketing some of the new integrations we are delivering to market. In particular, those integrations between products in the Progress portfolio and Actional, and between Actional and some partners. I'm hoping I can have a real impact with this formalization to my role, as well as some fun introducing Actional to some new technologies.

That said, my initial focus is going to be on IONA's Orbix, Progress OpenEdge, and Sun Glassfish. Glassfish support has been released, and both IONA and OpenEdge are in early trials (pre-beta). As I get organized around communicating these solutions, feel free to drop me a line with questions if you are interested in seeing what we've got!

Any existing Orbix customers interested in the Actional integration should contact your sales rep... or me. You're required to have Orbix 6 or later for Java (for now... we're working on the C++ and Java/C++ for Orbix 3, but they're not ready to trial yet).

PS Why not follow Maneesh Sahu (Sr. Solution Architect, Partners), Dion Picco (Engineering) , Frank Lynch (Sr. Solution Architect, East), or Marcelo Jabali (Sr. Solution Architect, West)?

How to Be Agile Without Falling on Your Face

Eric Knorr of InfoWorld recently wrote an article about how testing was the key to how to be agile without falling on your face.

While I agree that IT organizations are squeezed and that quality is often given short end of the stick, I don't think Eric's solution of "optimize the efficiency of your testing tools, environments, and methodologies" is necessarily the right way to think about the problem.

Most organizations think of quality as a role (the role of the tester) - and as a result most testing tools are just that: specialized tools designed with the needs of the professional tester in mind.  The problem is, with modern applications, quality doesn't start and the tester and doesn't end at the tester.  Quality is a responsibility not a role - a responsibility of everyone involved from development through production.    This is one of the reasons that developers really like our free Actional Diagnostics tool (used to be called Mindreef SOAPscope) - it's designed from the perspective of the needs of developers, but it focuses on improving quality. For example, we found in formal ROI analysis that deploying our products in the hands of developers reduced the number of production issues by 25%.

So, rather than focusing on how to make testers more efficient (which will only get you so far), it's better to focus on tools and SOA infrastructure to help developers and architects avoid defects before they are created.  But these aren't testing tools because developers don't use traditional testing tools.  If you have 10 defects, avoiding just one of these development (something which is eminently doable) is as beneficial as improving testing productivity by 10% (something which is probably a lot harder).

On the other end of the spectrum, with today's interconnected applications the number of defects which will show up in production is significantly higher than traditional applications, and you'd likely have to increase your testing by a factor of 10x to get to the same production-defect-rate as a traditional silo'd application.  Alternately, a 10% reduction in the time-and-cost of resolving issues in production easily pays off as much as a 10% improvement in testing efficiency.  And, achieving a 10% reduction in this is definitely achievable... Now imagine you could reduce the time-and-cost of resolving issues in product by 85%...

SOA Infrastructure - Back to Future, No. 1

The New SOA Maturity Model

Originally introduced in 2005, the SOA Maturity Model white paper and the Quick Reference diagram were co-authored by business partners Systinet, Amberpoint, BearingPoint and Sonic Software. During a 2005 live webinar an audience poll noted that 40% of the webinar participants were “currently developing a SOA project,” and 37% noted that they would “begin a SOA project within the year”. That same year, Gartner, Inc. predicted that by 2008, "SOA will provide the basis for 80 percent of new development projects." (1) But over the past few years, there has been much skepticism about the ROI and business value of SOA. That doesn't mean that SOA is dead or that companies should abandon their SOA initiatives, it means that it might be worth stepping back to review your original goals and best practices, and move forward to seek the right solutions that will help streamline and cut costs.

The players have changed—Systinet was acquired by HP, Sonic Software was brought back under the Progress Software umbrella, and Progress Software acquired Actional whose product offerings align with Amberpoint—but the goals of any SOA technology provider or practitioner are the same; software reuse, agility and the improved alignment of business and IT. (I like Miko Matsumura’s 2005 post, The Rise of the Software Architect in an SOA World.)

With that, I’d like share the New SOA Maturity Model white paper and quick reference diagram which were updated in 2007. The tone may have changed slightly but it still provides a framework for discussion between IT and business users about the applicability and benefits of SOA in an organization across five levels of SOA maturity, including: Functionality, Cost Effectiveness, Responsiveness of Business and Collaborative Services, Transformation, and Optimization. The benefit of these resources also remains the same… to not only to provide a means for organizations to benchmark current implementations, but to offer a source of inspiration as IT leaders successfully advance the value of SOA within their organizations.

Enjoy!

White Paper: The New SOA Maturity Model >

Quick Reference: The New SOA Maturity Model >

1 Hayward, S. "Positions 2005: Service-Oriented Architecture Adds Flexibility to Business Processes," Gartner, Inc. Feb. 2005.

Webinar Link: Controlled Velocity

Recently, Didier Mamma, our Director of EMEA Strategy, presented at a SOA Event in Paris (I thought the link might be helpful for my American readers) called Sustainable IT Architecture. In it he talks about how to achieve "controllable velocity". Velocity is critical, controlling it ensures speed is achieved with the least amount of cost and waste possible. It's a powerful presentation he gives... though I've heard it in English, this one is in French.

Enjoy!

Astounding Statistics Regarding Order Fallout & Revenue Leakage

Sometimes it’s really nice working for a profitable and established public company. With the launch of Actional 8, we’ve put some discipline on our focus around Business Transaction Assurance (BTA). We’ve rolled out lots of internal materials to train our field to understand the “problem” from a customer perspective, so that they can engage in conversations around the problem, rather than “pitch products.”

In any case, I’m reading through some research around order fallout (revenue leakage) Progress just sponsored that was completed by Vanson Bourne. Vanson Bourne carried out over 200 company interviews (these, to my knowledge, were not all Progress customers). The companies are in the USA, Europe, and Asia/Pacific and all had a minimum revenue of $200M. The study was not limited to the Telecommunications industry, but does call out specifics about both the Telecommunications and Hospitality industries because of their heavy reliance on consumer transactions.

Even realizing that we sponsored the research and so it is perhaps somewhat suspect, I can’t help but be amazed at the raw statistics the report showed. Some examples:

• 86% of telecommunications companies believe that order fallout causes delayed or lost revenues; 64% believe it causes customer churn also
• 98% Say that order fallout “definitely” or “probably” causes increased operational costs
• 75% say that having to deal with increased order failures increases demand on resources (warning: circular reference here... increased demand on resources causes order fallout to worsen, and so on...)
• Transaction volumes increased in 2008 by 16% on average, yet transaction failures increased 35% on average over the same period of time
• 86% of companies reporting high levels of IT complexity admitted to an increase of transaction failures; those with the most complex environments had their transaction failures increase by almost half in 2008
• On average, these companies have 11 full-time employees manually finding/fixing transactions, and it takes approximately 2 hours on average to fix them; Telcos have teams of 18 people, on average.

There are phenomenal implications to these numbers. The inefficiency is outstanding. And, there is plenty more where that came from!

I’m a student of life, and in particular of software companies. I’m always amazed when companies spend huge efforts to win new business, only to discard the relationship once the deal is won. Sure, no one does this purposely, but... through compensation and other more subtle motivations, there aren’t too many people in companies whose job it is to deal with happy customers without problems to keep them happy. I find this curious, because “relationship revenue” has a much lower cost of sale than “RFP revenue” and puts much less burden on every aspect of the company.

I digress a little, only to make the point that the companies in this survey are LOSING MONEY THEY HAVE ALREADY EARNED. Therefore, these lost transactions represent the most profitable ones they process! It’s like there’s a queue for service, with someone at the head saying “I’ll take yours, I’ll take yours, I’ll take yours, Nope - you, drop that on the floor, but don’t worry, keep our service.”

The report goes on to talk about some of the interesting “management” facts that usually are part of press releases about “new software versions” but often don’t actually make it into the software release (hasn't anyone developed a compiler that can compile press releases yet... it's a product some companies really need). It seems like there are a lot of difficulties with the software meant to solve these problems. Such as:

• The performance of the apps being monitored is negatively impacted (>60% companies reported this to be the case)
• The management system requires additional servers (~48%)
• Management systems need additional people to run them  (~47%)
• Can’t run all the management/monitoring features in production due to their resource requirements (~42%)
• They use up too many CPUs (~38%)
• 44% of companies don’t manage the end-to-end order process because of the above reasons!

All that said, I still have a personal favorite...

When asked “How often do you lose orders even though these systems say everything is OK?”, fully 35% of companies admit this happens “often” or “frequently.” The number soars to 56% of the very large companies (revenue >$2B) and 69% in companies that have the highest IT complexity scores. (78% of companies self-classify themselves into the highest complexity ratings)

It goes without saying that I believe Actional solves the problems in the first list, without introducing the ones in the second.

Who cares what I think though when you have Forrester studying two of our IN PRODUCTION customers, and finding the same results:

• Staff required to fix root-cause messaging problems was reduced by 85%
• Service quality reports are available in near real time, and created automatically; in the past they were difficult to prepare and were not readily available
• Of the two companies studies (admittedly, not a large sample!), one had a payback of <12 months, the other around 20 months

I’ve blogged before about the importance of the scalability and performance of the management system, without which features don’t really matter. This report validates my earlier post, and calls out specifically that many management features can’t be used in production because of the impact on performance. I wonder if the vendors of these management systems didn’t oversell their products... I wish they had asked that question in the survey! (And, when looking for that link, I found another post that was also mentioned in the report... the importance of actually knowing you have a problem.)

Thank you for reading this far. Email me if you like a copy of the Vanson Bourne report and the Forrester case studies. (These case studies are anonymous, but all research was completed by and validated by Forrester Research).

Welcoming Scottish Widows to the Family

For the record, I think I've had three hours of horizontal sleep in the last 48 hours or so, and that was on a hard wood floor - though I did have a pillow and blanket.

That said, the title of this post makes perfect sense to me... See, we've just announced (this past Tuesday) a new customer relationship for Progress - Scottish Widows. Scottish Widows is a part of Lloyds TSB Group, and is a well known provider in the life, pensions and investment industry in the UK.

The press release is typical - you can read it - but it essentially says:

Scottish Widows performed a 20 month selection of an integration platform and selected Progress' offerings because they perform better than other offerings. Scottish Widows hope to

1. launch new products faster
2. integrate easier (probably why they hope to launch new products faster)
3. lower their IT costs overall

In fact, it's this last point that's very interesting. I was only involved with the deal on the periphery but from the beginning the deployment team of both Scottish Widows and Progress are integrating metrics into determining the success of the deployment. Among other things, they will be measuring their cost savings by using Progress Software. From an Actional perspective, this means diagnosing issues faster and reducing support costs, as well as improving customer (and end-user) satisfaction.

We've done a similar case study with a Financial Services institution, validated by Forrester Research. Email me if you'd like a copy of the case study or watch the on-demand webinar with Forrester that explains the results (as a special perk to readers... you don't have to register). The case study provides real numbers about the Total Economic Impact (TEI) and measurable results achieved by this institution.

The press release also mentions that Sonic ESB and DataDirect Shadow (mainframe integration) were also selected. Congratulations to those teams, they're great products. We're starting to see some really interesting dynamics driven by customers selecting multiple products from the Progress SOA infrastructure portfolio, but more on that after I've gotten some more sleep.

Boy, Did This Guy Understand Actional!

I love talking to people who get it.

I was talking with a guy from Cornell today about AppZero's server virtualization technology and he mentioned that they have a consultant talking to them about ITIL, and the challenge that all the information being put into their ITIL compliant CMDB would be out of date the second it was entered. Sorry Greg, but the conversation turned from AppZero to Actional's end-to-end visibility in less time than it took me to shift so I was standing between this guy and the door.

I commiserated and mentioned that it's one of the really interesting things about Actional - that we track that message flows automatically and therefore provide two key benefits:

1. Accuracy
2. Low cost of ownership (due to non-manual discovery)

We started talking about one of our oldest customers, University of Phoenix. They're the largest online university and they use our products to track the flow of messages as they flow through the network. Our conversation was a breath of fresh air. Not that many people get it so quickly:

"Wait, you can track dependencies?"

"Yep."

"Boy, could I have used you recently. We were taking down an old system and we emailed everyone, we checked log files, and we sniffed the network. But, what it came down to was simply disconnecting the machine and going to see where the screams came from."

I laughed, because that's one of the oldest case studies I talk about. An early customer of ours had a similar problem and it would cost them two weeks every time they decommissioned a system. It was nice to hear someone else pitching my story to me.

Here was a guy who understood the difficulties of the anonymous consumer, as well as the futility of manual discovery when his own internal processes were not robust enough to keep up with the changes in his environment.

I'm sure I'll be talking to him again soon.

SOA Governance in SMEs == Cart Before the Horses

I have always held that SOA governance is premature yet. While we are struggling to just get SOA adoption in the right spirit, governance is the least of our problems. If we cannot identify a mechanism to first re-engineer "service orientation" into IT solutions and have the IT teams in an organization be "SOA aware" ground up and not just deliver the POCs that the CIO or CTO demands, where is the need for operational processes and governance? In this context I found this article that professes a SOA governance approach for SMEs to be quite out of touch with reality.

While the thoughts proposed, such as agile approach to governance and the business users defining the need and IT groups quickly implementing the same, a managed governance process is not necessarily bad. It's just that we are dealing with more fundamental issues right now. Issues that are preventing the widely touted gains of SOA. That led to the drastic predictions of SOAs death!

In the present stage of SOA adoption, where we have just crossed the hype-curve's chasm, and are just now pondering over the serious practical use cases with a full grip on reality (of issues with SOA adoption), all that is immediately needed is anything but SOA Governance. Good tools and utilities to help quickly create services, test services, deploy and manage the same in production. The need for complete SOA lifecycle governance is still a few years away. At least, and surely not for SMEs, their SOA problems will be much more fundamental. SOA Management is what they will need now.

 

Actional Business Process Visibility (Definition)

I haven't been writing much (here) lately but, well, I've been thinking of writing.

The process is weird. Topics come into my head often enough but I talk myself out of sharing. I'm not sure how useful they are or how biased I'd sound.

I'm working on the outline for training materials integrating Sonic and Actional, and I had to explain Actional Business Processes (tracking of)  to some new people.

As I did that, I remembered hearing a prospect earlier this week say "Actional sounds good but really functions more at an IT level, we're interested in monitoring at a business level."

I must admit my bias but Actional not only monitors at a business level, but we tie it back to the IT level, to achieve two great benefits:

1. Business people and IT people can communicate because they are working off the same vocabulary of processes, services, KBI's, Dimensions, etc;
2. Staff can look at the same picture (automatically drawn and updated in real time) and see the business impact of a technology change/failure, and vice versa.

My definition to the training team earlier today went something like...

"Remember how Actional automatically learns flows. Well, Actional business processes are really just named sub-flows. Meaning, without any orchestration or BPM we can take a 'free form sub-flow,' name it, and we have something we call a business process that we can track as a unit. We can track it that way even in a shared environment, so shared components report in only their statistics for that process, when implementing policy or service level agreements. If other processes or services use those shared components, we can separate all the different performance statistics (for policy based management) so that things aren't lost in the average statistics as they are with so many other management systems."

You saw our press release earlier this week about Q1's results. Actional rocked, again.

It's because we do some really unique, creative and relevant stuff, like business process visibility.

SOA Next- Just a New Skin for the Same Problems

After the recent (and dramatic) proclamation that SOA is dead, is it a question of time until we see the rising of the proverbial Phoenix? Seems to be starting... at least going by the interview with Miko Matsumura in Information Week. Referring to the Gartner hype Cycle, he says, "I think we're on the 'Slope of Enlightenment' before we reach the 'Plateau of Productivity'. Anne Thomas Manes' pronouncement about the death of SOA was made in the depths of the 'Trough of Disillusionment'." I particularly liked the reference to "coarse grained cost-cutting", where he says when a whole division is rendered obsolete, what happens to the systems that the division was responsible for; that may still remain operational? SOA infrastructure is supposed to solve this!

Miko's solution is that if the services are well defined - with dependencies clearly modeled and governance practices in place - then it is easy for the organization to deal with such extreme situations as a whole division not existing anymore! This seems like Utopia. Really!

To me, the scenario is more the promise of SOA. The issue though (leading to the proclamation of SOAs death) is the reality, which is far from the promise. None of the anticipated flexibility and value is realized beyond the POCs and pilots! Not much mainstream gains yet. But, like I mentioned in an earlier post, the issue is more about the adoption approaches rather than any inherent deficiencies in the SOA design approaches or the platforms/technologies selected.

So even if we were to invent a "new SOA" or "SOA Next" or "SOA Whatever", the problem will remain because it never was about the technology, per se. It is more about the practical difficulties in getting an organization (its management, architects and developers) to understand and appreciate the SOA principles even half as much as they yap about the next minor revision to a WS* standard as the necessary consideration in their present SOA projects.

At the end of a successful SOA initiative, it's not just about the individual IT groups/teams understanding the need for defining a services layer, it's also about their well defined UI and DB layer which have to be ready for enabling coarse-grained services based on sufficient cross-functional business analysis of the organization. What's more these should be XML-aware layers, beyond just the fringes ("wrappers"). Now, all of these need to be in a single solution, regardless of who needs it now, and what SOA platform is in place. In this bottom-up approach to SOA adoption, the principles are adopted and ingrained first, and then comes the platforms, services, orchestration and governance.

Simply put, successful "service orientation" is the single most significant key to successful SOA in any organization!

Progress Software Introduces Actional Diagnostics

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

With Actional Diagnostics, you can accelerate Web service development, testing and validation with tools to improve service quality, performance, and compliance, and simplify time consuming XML-oriented tasks. Listen to this podcast and hear Dan talk talk about the features and benefits of introducing a service quality and validation tool into your SOA infrastructure initiative. Register to be alerted when the FREE download is available.

For more SOA podcasts, subscribe to our iTunes channel.

Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

There was a time when I was diving intensively and I'd call my boss at the end of vacation to let him know I was still alive and would be back in the office as planned. I even left my passwords and his information with my brother so my bro could send him my laptop if a fatal event occurred. Have you ever written a "here's what to do if I die" letter to anyone before? I highly recommend it. It's good for the soul.

But, I digress... We're not here to talk about my death but the death of service-oriented architecture (SOA). It's all the rage since Anne's post the other day.

A good summary of the chatter it's stirred up can be found on Twitter, so I won't head there. But, I will point out that the second comment on Anne's post was mine - and I think my one line summarizes most people's feelings - whether they believe SOA is dead or not:

"SOA must die, so we can move on with, well... SOA"

From our perspective here at Actional, the death of SOA from a marketing perspective (but not from a technical one!) has been going on for some time. So, I wanted to give some insight (I'm usually not punny but couldn't resist - go ahead, click on the "insight link" to see what I mean) into our messaging and positioning of the Actional platform in advance of some releases you'll see later this month.

Clearly, we're defocusing our SOA message. There's been a bit of disillusionment with SOA, and associating with it doesn't seem to be in vogue. Now, we're not the only ones to do this. One of our competitors has decided there are many "hot topics" to grab onto and has a flash animation scrolling through them all to make sure people realize their solution is as good for cloud, SaaS, Web 2.0, and composite apps, as it is for SOA.

Our perspective is different. From our perspective, a SOA message is limiting. Fundamentally, we're about managing/controlling services, and anything built upon services, regardless of whether a SOA architecture is used or not. We (and I) believe that by messaging around SOA, organizations that are disillusioned will "throw the baby out with the bathwater" when, in fact, huge ROI* can be achieved with Actional.

The Buyers' Guide I wrote recently mentions SOA only once, and talks more about composite applications and business processes (both based upon services) and the benefits of a performant solution like Actional providing visibility and control. (Email me directly if you want a copy without registering.)

For the record, I believe fully in SOA, SOA principles and the use of SOA to drive business and IT alignment. Done properly, SOA infrastructure adds agility, accountability, and makes IT's contribution more visible to executives from a business perspective. I'll be very happy when the SOA paparazzi move onto a younger celebrity and let us get on with our SOA lives.

* Later this quarter - frankly, I'm just not sure of the date - we will be releasing some independent third party ROI analysis and case studies of some of our production customers. The idea being that these customers have adopted Actional for some time. What did they achieve? What was their ROI? What is their future expected ROI? And, how can you use this information (discounted for risk) to justify a decision on Actional? Stay tuned.

The problem with good governance

I saw an interesting story in the news two days ago.  It's about a company that has received multiple "good governance" awards.  Well, it turns out that their "good governance" has led to the chairman having to admit that their finances were falsified.  Know who I'm talking about?  Satyam.  Yes, that good governance award winner - the one that turned out to have over $1B of "falsified" cash on their balance sheet.

Sure, this is corporate governance, not IT governance - but it raises an interesting question for IT and SOA governance: How do you know your governance is not being bypassed? Because this is exactly what happened in the Satyam case.

The thing that likely got Satyam into the problem was likely one key thing: Their governance checks were manual, not automated.  This meant that they could be easily bypassed or avoided.  They were people processes, not automated processes.

SOA What? The moral of the story is that governance that's not automated (with the checks in the right, unavoidable, places) is governance that doesn't work.

Goodbye SOA, we hardly knew you.

Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group posted how SOA is Dead; Long Live Services.  This one is too juicy not to comment on!

Firstly, I totally agree with Anne.  I think "SOA" is definitely dead in 2009.  And I also agree that the need for services will grow.  But, we still wrap too many things into the same terms.

At a simple level, I'll break it into four points, I'd like to talk about where I think things are going:

Service-oriented applications.  BPM, cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS, composites, mashups. All of these are doing well and will continue to do well even in the 2009 economy.  Why?  1) They can be leveraged as needed; 2) They can be done fast; and 3) Using them typically provides measurable benefit from day one (if it doesn't, then you should do something else shouldn't you!).  It's precisely the laser focus solution aspect of these that is their greatest strength.  Get in and get out while solving a problem that someone really cares about.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA).  This is where you look from a higher level above all your service-oriented applications to create a cohesive architecture that all of these follow.  Dead in 2009.  Why?  Because approaching this from an architectural perspective will always fail.  Is it a noble goal?  Sure.  But without other changes in your organization (see below), it just can't be successful.  Said another way, before you can start on a successful SOA infrastructure initiative you must finish the items below.

Service Delivery.  By service I don't mean what you're probably thinking (a thing you create).  I mean service in the most pure sense: as in "what value do you deliver to others" (with the follow up of "how do I continue to improve the value I deliver to others").  This requires a transformation for most IT organizations... and most haven't even started yet. To be fair, there are organizations that have figured this out (take S&P for example: their whole business is service delivery, so of course they understand it) - but the vast majority don't fit into this category - and if you do not pass go, you can't collect your $200: So this is the next step for most IT organizations that want to transform.  Think: "How do I create my first true service?" Here's a hint: you can't do it by creating a project, task force or cross-functional team (more on this in a subsequent post since this is a richer topic than I can cover here).

Service-oriented IT.  Once you've mastered service delivery on a small scale, then you can tackle it on a larger scale: turning IT from being project and application oriented to being service oriented.  Warning: this is a major transformation that can't be done without the CIO leading the charge.  Sorry, but no enterprise architect can make this happen.  And it can't happen until you've figured out service delivery.  This is not a 2009 project for most organizations.  It is a 2010+ transformation.

Most organizations that went down the SOA route tried to do SOA without first figuring out what it means to deliver a service, and without realizing they needed to get this right (and begin the service-oriented IT transformation) before they could never be successful at service-oriented architecture.

Service-oriented architecture is a technical and architectural transformation.  But it can't exist without first focusing on the organizational and cultural transformation of service delivery and service-oriented IT.

This is why SOA is dead in 2009 and why services will live on. But who knows... maybe once an organization figures out service-oriented IT, SOA will be resurrected - but don't wait up.

Business Transactions, Exciting Stuff!

Last week, I had an opportunity to listen to some of our top solution spokespeople here at Progress Software present, watch the audience respond, and then drink with the sales people who are tasked to sell our solutions in what could be the worst economy in recent history. I made a note to myself about a topic to blog on and am really excited that Jason Bloombergat Zapthink beat me to it!!

My note was simply:

"Process Mashup = Business Transaction"

In the Zapthink post, they talk about "data mashups" solving the "swivel-chair integration problem." They make a whole lot of talk about SOBA this and SOBA that, but at the very end, say something pretty interesting:

"From a business perspective processes always involve information, and there's no way to get value out of information without doing something with it, and when the business does something, that activity constitutes a business process." (Run on sentence is theirs, not mine.)

I think an important generalization can be made...

From a business perspective, there's no value in infrastructure unless it directly relates to what the business is doing. And, measuring the value requires the ability to directly relate it to the business.

Earlier this week, I mentioneda customer of ours who had 98% up-time but their largest customer was without data for over 3 weeks. Another example is a customer of ours - a large cable company. They have business owners of their "products" -- including cable, Internet phone, cable-Internet.

They use Actional to monitor the provisioning process for these services, and then share it with the appropriate business owners through browser-based dashboards. The first thing these managers do in the morning is bring up our console and look at how their business process is doing.

The important thing is that even though there is a mesh of underlying support systems for each of these products, as well as the famed "triple-play", they don't care about the infrastructure. They care about the results to their business.

Underlying this all is a Process Mashup which, is just a fancy way of saying "multi-product, multi-vendor integration to implement a solution." They've taken the component processes (provisioning, ordering, credit-checking) and made it into a single Process Mashup that helps them understand and deliver an outstanding customer experience. Importantly, the person responsible for the process doesn't really care about how it happens, as long as it does. But from an IT perspective, it's important to know when it's not happening and why.

For example, take FedEx (not a customer). They ship me a package and it arrives on time. I get an email and all is good. If it doesn't arrive on time, I call for help, and someone drills into the step-by-step tracking of where it's been to figure out where it is. At that point, they see which distribution center it shipped from, how it got routed, what the weather conditions are, and so on. Of course, ideally, they'd tell me (rather than have me call them) there's a problem, but... the important thing is that there are many steps in the process. We can police the end-result and use policies to warn us (ahead of time or after the fact) when things don't go as planned. We can also get all the detail we need to assure those important business processes (or Process Mashups as Jason and I like to think of them) keep the business optimized.

SOA What? Well, I find this exciting because we can start to really talk directly to the business in a way that shows hat we (as IT people) understand what's happening. We can talk about results the business cares about (the customer can watch cable tv in two hours from the time they sign up) and speak to results no one cares about, except when they have to ("There it is, the request to provision them got stuck in the queue. Yeah, that happens sometimes. Why were you waiting for it to finish?").

I'm very aware, that in addition to being a brilliant technologist, I'm also the check-out guy at Home Depot (where I always choose to self check-out), I'm a travel agent (book online, don't call the airline, they charge you more), and even a bank teller (using an ATM - just today I found out I don't need to fill out a slip to make a withdrawal from a teller... it's been that long since I've spoken to one!). In all those cases, it's quite easy for me to switch providers and completely opaque to companies as to why I would. And, I will switch if service is promised and not delivered. If a service provider doesn't communicate in terms customers can relate to, and then assure those processes using the benchmark the customers understand, customers will go to service providers who do.

Meaningful Measurements

At our annual sales kickoff in Miami last week, I heard a story about one of the Regional Sales Managers that put a smile on my face, and it made me like Progress a little more. When asked by the CFO how he did last year, the regional sales manager responded "six cents".

Six cents. Huh?

Well, apparently there is a culture here at Progress that you look at regional profitability, and then each sales manager knows how their deals affect the company's bottom line. Being a numbers geek, and one who likes to measure things properly, I think it's cool.

SOA What? Well, I also heard a story about a new Actional customer who had over 98% up-time for their IT systems last year - a number they were proud to report. (Realizing, of course, that each industry has its own benchmark for up-time.)

They were proud to report it but it was meaningless to do so...

Why? Because as it turned out, while they had this brilliant up-time of their underlying infrastructure, something was preventing their largest customer from receiving any information for over three weeks. Do the math, 52 weeks in a year - down for 3, that's almost 6% downtime.

Where was the discrepancy?

The IT team was not tied into the business and was assuring system up time but NOT assuring their business transactions. So now, in order to gain credibility with the business and to make more insightful technology decisions in support of the business, the team chose Progress Actional as the management solution for their SOA and distributed applications (links to good article on what this is about by Anne Thomas Manes). Hopefully, they'll do better next year.

Have you ever had a situation, even in your personal life, dealing with a company's technology where they say all the systems are up but still, it's not working? Create a comment here and share your stories...

Sometimes It's Just Too Late

Down in Florida for Progress' annual sales kickoff meeting and using the opportunity to visit my grandparents. Needing a car to get around, I rented a low-end model from Dollar/Thrifty, an Actional customer. Normally, the car is full featured but this time, I got a car without power locks. No big deal, right?

Saturday morning, I went to the mall, parked, had breakfast, sat in Starbucks and caught up on email. When it was time to go, I realized the problem with not having electronic locks.

I couldn't find the car.

You see, I didn't really pay attention to where I left it. I figured I could walk around, punch the alarm, and move towards the beep. I ended up having to walk the aisles looking for a red Dodge.

This weakness in my plan would never have occurred to me until I experienced it... at which point it was too late to do anything about.

SOA what? You've got similar challenges with SOA management tools. You don't really know what you need until you need it and it's not there. Unfortunately, once you've put the SOA infrastructure in place, it's too late to compensate and you must do without (or find a work-around).

It's important to think things through carefully, but realize that you're going to miss something. This assumption makes your decisions about architecture way more critical than individual features when it comes to product selection. Features can be changed (quite easily in fact) but they are limited by the capabilities, performance and scalability of the underlying architecture of the solution.

Evaluating software for managing your distributed applications? Then this is a must read.

At least, I think it is. Just because I'm the author of the recently released Software Buyer's Guide, doesn't mean my opinion on its relevance is biased, really. If you follow me on Twitter, you've already been notified of the Buyer's Guide. And, as I said before, if you join the conversation and direct message me on Twitter, I'll send you a copy without requiring you to register.

Personally, I get quite frustrated by the vendor-initiated confusion around the problem that Progress® Actional® solves. It's not really a management problem. I mean, you can say a pilot uses his instrument console to manage his airplane, but what he's really doing is flying the beast. Well, Actional and other competitive solutions are the equivalent to the pilot's instrument console. And, the pilot is... Well, I think the pilot is anyone who drives business and the technology on which it runs. But, the right persona is a bit more organization-structure dependent and a bit less obvious than the "pilot" analogy.

While this guide talks explicitly about managing distributed/composite applications in a mission critical environment, it was written in a way that starts by proposing a framework for evaluating enterprise class software. I define enterprise class applications as being:

• Scalable
• Performant
• Resilient

Software that does not have the right enterprise architecture, should be disqualified before a feature-by-feature evaluation begins. I realize that's a strong statement, but I believe:

Architecture deficiencies are mortal. Feature omissions are easily corrected.

I think this simple rule is often overlooked by the whiz-bang of a pretty UI, or the easy sale-ability of a specific feature that touches the purchaser's hot button.

The guide goes on to discuss a few areas that are often part of "managing" a distributed application and tests for each that can be used in a POC. I've said it before, and I'll say it again... DO A PROOF OF CONCEPT BEFORE BUYING SOFTWARE. I've worked in the enterprise "plumbing" business since 1995 and the only consistency is that vendors try to avoid POCs. If we're trying to avoid them, you should be trying to do them. And, when you do them, take the time to do them properly. Little upsets me more than doing something so you can check it off a list somewhere. </rant>

We've also put out a brief teaser release highlighting the buyers guide. You can see it on our site, or over at SOA World Magazine (thanks to BusinessWire).

EDS AirlineSOA Goes Public

I'm a bad blogger. I've been very quiet lately. It's that time of year, after our fiscal year ends, but before we announce our results, and so I've obviously been busy with customers (remember them?) but can't really share the excitement.

I was trying to find the recording from last month's online eBizQ conference and ran across a blog entry by Joe McKendrick (one of my "must-read" industry analysts) talking about EDS' AirlineSOA initiative, and in particular the Lufthansa Airlines project.

SOA What?

Well, which SOA management vendor do you think underlies AirlineSOA?

I'd also point you to a recent post by Anne Thomas Manes that highlights the single most important "new product" that should be budgeted for in SOA implementations... that of a management solution.

It's interesting that both Anne and Joe blog about the same thing... Anne in the abstract, and Joe in the specific. I know AirlineSOA and Lufthansa in particular, use a host of different technologies from various vendors including TIBCO BusinessWorks. But, the only "fashionable" product used differently from the past (when it was just "airline" not "airlineSOA") is Actional.

What do you think of that? (I think it's pretty cool; but clearly I'm biased.)

And, there's more. Why do you think EDS selected Actional?

Performance.

For those of you reading this evaluating your own solutions, I'll share that EDS put a big effort on behalf of Lufthansa to make sure the performance was what they needed. This wasn't a simple "show us what you got, we're going to dump on the vendor" POC. They knew their environment and they invested the time in understanding our architecture, how it mapped to their environment, and how to optimize it all together. If you're serious about evaluating an enterprise tool, you need to make a serious investment in understanding it.

Of course, I still haven't found that recording (in part because I wrote this post). EbizQ has a new face on their site, and it's a big improvement, but old recordings are still hard to find (or, I'm just an idiot).

Now, Even More People Can Enjoy Me!

That's right, another podcast!

Get answers to the SOA questions that keep you up at night:

• Why SOA is like dieting? Many shortcuts but no discipline = no results.
• What do those pesky users want now? More change? Why can't they just let us finish something and move on?
• What's the difference between me and a billboard? Hopefully, I have better hair. Otherwise, not much.
• Why is there so much job security in IT/Software? Change is hard and complicated. SOA makes for a lot more moving part, making change significantly more difficult.

And, yes, I love the phrase 'a priori' -- it reminds me of statistics class in college. I had a funny professor... come to think of it, I was the only one who laughed.

This podcast is a lead into next week's SOA in Action Virtual Conference hosted by eBizQ. It'll be fun, and it's virtual, so you don't really have to pay attention.

Register for the eBizQ event >

Interested in more? You can also listen to the podcast, Impact of Cloud Computing on Enterprise Architecture , which is part of our iTunes SOA Infrastructure podcast channel.

Can You Unpeel a Banana?

Maybe, but the banana won't ever be the same. If we extend this really poor analogy, we'll have a more flexible and scalable banana. (Sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

Glanced at twitter and saw @windley tweet "The trend to disaggregation gives users more choice, but necessitates other tools for threading the experience together.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I liked the way he said it so much, I kept re-reading his tweet. There was something in my head that wanted to come out.

As a public representative of Progress Actional, I’m quite widely available online in various communities, blogs, and such. As my mind skitters over all sorts of news and information, I leave comments here and there, I tweet on various ideas, and blog on more comprehensive thoughts.

But being the scatterbrain that I am, I lose sometimes track. Was my comment approved? If not, I may turn it into a post of my own. I just signed up to the SOA Interest Group on LinkedIn, but did they approve my request? Has that forum been quiet, or did something happen to my subscription? How do I keep track of the services I’m using, my interactions with them, and turn that to a stream of consciousness to achieve my goals? How do I analyze the progress I’ve made, the themes that resonate, and capitalize on the effort?

Damn good questions, but SOA what?

Well, reread the last paragraph there, but think services in the context of composite application development and SOA, not sites and communities.

All you services and SOA experts out there, how do you keep track? How do you track users of services? Dependencies between services? How can you keep track of which services use which protocol, regardless of whether they are part of your SOA infrastructure, or just part of your integration backbone? How do you track from the earliest part of the lifecycle when the entire system is contained on a single laptop, through to production when it’s fully deployed and distributed? Worse yet, what if you’re using shared services in development, and your development project depends upon resources outside of your team and your control? It's worse because then you have a versioning problem even before you release a single line of code to production.

Now that we’ve disaggregated, we need to re-aggregate. That is, we need to unpeel the banana. But, we can make improvements (I have the theme song to The Six Million Dollar Man in my head). Re-aggregate automatically, only loosely, and do it using a layer of meta data around the business. One user may want a view by product, another by business process, and a third by customer type, or product class. Well, I hope you get my point that the whole idea is that it doesn't matter what your meta data layer is, only that it maps scalably and flexibly to address your current and future business needs.

That's where Actional comes in. Once services are used to disaggregate an integration project, Actional is the tool to thread the experience together at a meta, or logical, layer based upon the business. And, that's how technology can help a company use service-orientation to address business needs more rapidly than ever before.

What does that web service mean to you?

Do you have the right SOA infrastructure tools in place that will help you achieve better business visibility?

SOA management tools that aid in runtime governance and service quality will help. Listen as Dan Foody describes how a popular industry automobile website had some troubles because users were learning how to "game" their system.

Interested in more? Visit and subscribe to our iTunes podcast channel.

I Don't Know Jack...

But, he's said something nice about Progress Actional. He's sharing his perspective on use of intermediaries and monitoring services. He's got a good perspective, because he's talking about his real experience, and NOT his vendor-bias.

I wanted to make sure I shared it here, since he's in Europe, and has a relatively small blog.

Thanks Jack!

Question: How Do You Manage Your Policies?

Answer: Hopefully better than the NYC Department of Traffic.

Before you laugh at them, think very carefully about your model of SOA Governance.

Gartner analyst Frank Kenny uses a slide that shows SOA Governance containing four key governable elements:

1. Service Governance
2. Process Governance
3. Policy Governance
4. Profile Governance

I agree with Frank's model and think that it's really important to be able to fully decouple policies from the SOA infrastructure so that they can be properly governed. Proper governance enables policies to have have their own lifecycle, and even to be owned by a team separate from the service owner.

SOA What? Why is this important? Well, governance drives policies. Governance doesn't dictate "on your next release, you must..." Rather, governance demands compliance by a certain date or in a certain time period. These policies therefore have a life of their own - a life that needs to be managed. Also, often the "policy expertise" (think security or corporate governance) is often not in the development team. In fact, distributing "policy expertise" to the development often leads to problems of interpretation... developers are left to do their best interpreting policies as they implement their services. Again, security is a good example. Not all developers are security experts. And, it's easier (and cheaper!) to have security trained staff write a good policy, than train every developer on security policy interpretation.

Fully decoupling policy has other advantages as well if the product that implements the policy has the right abstractions built in to enable dynamic policy-service coupling. For example, a policy can be written for all "external customers" -- and automatically inherited by any new external customer as they are discovered (configuration implies a prior knowledge of the customer... don't get me started on how little we actually know about what our systems are really doing). Another great example, is Actional's ability to evaluate policy once, closest to the customer, as a way of: (1) optimizing policy calculation and overhead, and (2) driving policy to relate directly to meaningful customer/business experience, rather than "arbitrary" technical statistics like CPU load or response time.

Now that you've had time to think about the policies that govern your mission critical applications, I bet you can relate a little bit more to those guys at the NYC Department of Traffic. Scary, huh?

SOA Management. Do you really need it?

What the cost is for not having it.

Did you forget to think about SOA management when you developed your SOA infrastructure deployment plan? If you haven't already, listen to this podcast presented by Dan Foody, VP of Products for Actional at Progress Software, and hear an example of a company that did just that and regretted it. Make your SOA more agile by making sure that the right SOA management tools are in place before you deloy your SOA infrastructure.