Business Making Progress

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

 

Tomorrow - Webinar Discusses How Smart Grids Are Helping Utility Companies

Paving the Way to Smart Grid Modernization: A Standards-Based Reference Architecture
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 1:00 pm (EST)
> Join us for the event: http://bit.ly/smart-grid-webinar

During this live event, presenters - Terry Nielsen, VP at UISOL, and Conrad Chuang, Product Marketing and Mark Brooks, Principal Solution Architect, at Progress Software - unveil our unique, standards-based reference architecture that uses a product integration bus to simplify technology deployment and upgrades. By leveraging their domain, technology and integration expertise, they'll provide insights on:

• Market and regulatory conditions.
• The readiness of legacy applications to support real-time smart metering data.
• he cost and difficulties of integrating disparate utilities systems
• Steps for moving to a smart grid-compatible environment, cost-effectively and non-intrusively.

Pre-register or join us tomorrow!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 1:00 pm (EST)
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 10:00 am (PST)

View the archive of this webinar >

Telecom Standards and SOA - Spreading further

The telecommunications industry has been one of the early adopters of SOA infrastructure - given their much higher level of need for integration in general. The complexities are unique with the vibrant M&A activity and a very large number of seriously inter-dependent solutions, aggravated by the hardware solutions that form the solution space. Over the years and as SOA models have evolved, they are now faced with multiple layers of integration, including:

• Services: The primary integration backbone for business functions across the enterprise solution/apps space. (Progress Sonic ESB fits in here very well.)
• Data Integration: By itself for MDM and such, and also for services integration when sending data as inputs for or as returned data from services.  (Progress DataXtend SI is a unique, and probably the only, product that helps here.)
• Management/Governance: Extends problems such as Business Transaction Assurance. (Progress Actional addresses these challenges.)
• Events: Complex BTA and BAM analytics. (Using business events intercepted by Actional, Prorgess Apama can perform more complex correlation and analysis.)

Consistent with the above, Telecom Management Forum (or TM Forum) has defined a plethora of standards that enable telecom Software ISVs, Telecom operators, and SIs to simplify the integration solution space. The Global SIs based out of Asia and the Telecom operators in this region are seeing a rapid uptake of these standards (specifically the SID model).

Reflecting this, NASSCOM (the Indian National software industry association) is organizing a half-day NASSCOM Symposium that will discuss and deliberate on the three facets of emerging telecom industry trends - Standards, Key Business Problems (Transformation and Migration) and case studies. Progress Software (India) is helping organize this event and Michael Aubin, VP focused on Telecom at Progress Software, is delivering a key session on the telecom standards and trends. For more details, visit www.nasscom.in.

Putting SID to work

On July 21st at 10am (ET) John Wilmes, our Chief Technical Architect for the Communications sector, will be speaking along with John Reilly, the TM Forum’s Senior Program Manager for the Information Framework, on the Information Framework (SID).

You can register here

Everytime I attend one of the webinars that John Wilmes does with the Forum, I’m always impressed by the TM Forum’s completeness of thought. Unlike a lot of other industry and architectural frameworks out there – the Forum didn’t focus on just part of the puzzle.  What was understood, and what the Solution Frameworks (NGOSS) highlight, is that business transformation requires addressing elements that live both within and between business process, information models, logical applications and technical architecture. Part of the joy of hearing John talk about the SID is to hear again how the data, process and applications all interrelate to each other.

For those of you who might be new to the TM Forum – or even those of you who are looking for a solid conceptual framework for thinking about transformation problems - in addition to this webinar there have also been several other webinars from the Forum that John has done over the years, including:

• What is NGOSS and What Can it Do for You: If you’re looking for a great introduction to the Solution Frameworks
• NGOSS Contracts: The Key to Improved Interoperability:How Business Services (NGOSS Contracts) can improve interoperability across multiple business silos / stovepipes
• SOA and NGOSS Contracts: A Practical Approach to Integration: How SOA and the frameworks fit together

For an alternate, non-telco example of a similarly complete framework that spans process, data and applications—there was also the recent webinar by Boris Bulanov and Frank Neugabauer about the Insurance industry’s approach to transformation the ACORD Framework. Many of the concepts are similar and it's another proof point that one must consider the whole problem and all its requirements when initiating an integration or transformation project.

The ACORD Information Model

Congratulations are in order for our hard working data services and engineering teams. Progress was recently awarded two ACORD Accomplishment Awards for our work with the insurance standards organization, ACORD.

We won an Innovative Implementation Award for the Progress DataXtend Browsers for ACORD, in P&C and Life flavors. These browsers will enable ACORD members to more easily use and understand the existing ACORD standards for P&C and Life.   We also won an Early Adopter Award for our work supporting the unambiguous mappings between the existing ACORD XML standards and the new ACORD Information Model. 

If you’d like a seven minute summary, you should watch our interview with Frank Neugebauer, the Assistant VP of Technology at ACORD. John Petrie, Bill Gino and Boris Bulanov discuss with Frank our work with the Browsers and the Information Model. While the interview is a great summary, I'm sure that many of you would like to learn more about the new ACORD Framework, its core components and the business value it offers. 

At 3:00pm ET on June 25th Frank Neugebauer of ACORD and Boris Bulanov gave a webinar on ACORD Information model. An archive of the event will be posted here.  It’s a great opportunity to join your colleagues to learn more about the ACORD Framework and how the ACORD Information Model provides the foundation for information architecture in insurance.