Integrated Infrastructure Blog

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.

Don't Forget ESB-CON 8. It starts today.

Thursday, Aug 20th
10 am PT // 1 pm ET // 1700 GMT
Register now: http://bit.ly/h6fO6

Join and listen in as 3 of the industry's top CTO's talk about the ESB, SOA and software integration. Presenters include Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow, Vice President, CTO WebSphere, Ross Altman, Sun Microsystems CTO, Software Infrastructure, and Hub Vandervoort - Progress Software CTO, SOA Infrastructure Products.

Learn more >

Is the Travel Industry Out of Touch with Our Changing Business Climate?

Did you knw that the travel industry loses $11.5 million per year through failed transactions?

Last week Progress Software released the results of a survey commissioned with an independent specialist technology market research company, Vanson Bourne Research. The researchers surveyed 149 global travel businesses and found that 67% of respondents have noticed their transaction failures soar by almost a third – even though their transactions have only increased by 12%.

Dan Foody, VP of Products at Progress Software, sites: “This research clearly highlights the far-reaching effects of transaction failures within the travel industry. The trend of increasing IT complexity is further compounding revenue loss through increased lost transactions, customer churn and inefficient use of IT resources with 97% of respondents concluding that transaction failures were increasing operational costs."

 “Companies should consider introducing a more streamlined approach to monitoring transaction flows across their IT environments, delivering the ability to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur. This will enable business leaders to capitalize on opportunities, drive efficiencies and reduce the risk of impacting customer experience. The more responsive approach will provide visibility and increase understanding of the impact IT failures have on their own IT services and their customers,”

Get your copy of the report! The report IT Impact on Travel & Leisure Industry Reservation Management, examines the causes and consequences of this situation. Read this report and learn about some of the underlying causes for the increase in transaction failures, what the consequences are, and the limitations of most traditional monitoring and management systems.

Share your experiences and thoughts by posting a Comment to this entry.

A New Renaissance for ODBMS? Part 3

I’ve been posting comments from an email discussion I had with Luis Ramos one of our Object Databases experts here at Progress (previous posts: Part 1, Part 2). In our last exchange, Luis commented on the reasons to switch from RDBMS to ODBMS, the market, and where to get more information.

In our final post for this special series we cover the question, Are ODBMS coming back? I put the question to our team of object database experts: Luis Ramos, Jeff Wagner and Adrian Marriott.

Me: Are we experiencing a new renaissance for ODBMS?

Adrian Marriott, Principal Consultant Progress Software: There are many technical reasons why OODBMS are attractive and that's why they never went away. They've been used continuously by a huge number of programs world-wide for over two decades. There's no "renaissance."

In terms of the next 'big thing' that will drive adoption and faster growth for object databases, I think it's the appearance of solid-state drives. Hard-discs with spinning platters are using archaic technology, several orders of magnitude slower than memory access and this encourages developers to think of fetching data 'out there' from disc. As solid state drives become faster - particularly for write - the idea of a seamless persistent object model that survives program invocations and can just be used directly and transparently from disc will become more compelling.

Jeff Wagner, Product Manager ObjectStore: Adrian's right, Progress ObjectStore revenues have continued to beat our expectations year in and year out. We continue to see adoption of object database technologies as people search for ways to increase performance, lower their TCO and shorten their time-to-market. Object databases can increase performance over RDBMS’s because most products offer an in-memory cache component. This can result in 3 or more orders of magnitude increase in performance. TCO is much lower since developers are not burdened with object-to-relational mapping code. This code can account for over 60% of the total code for an application persisting data in an RDBMS. This also means that development time is reduced, lowering overall development costs and getting products to market faster. Maintenance costs are reduced once an object database is deployed since it typically requires little/no administration.

Luis Ramos, Principal Consultant Progress Software: I concur with Adrian's and Jeff's points. These are excellent arguments. To that I would add that object-databases have a fundamentally more scalable architecture because the queries and processing are done at the client side, where the caches reside, rather than the server side. To scale an RDBMS, you would need to get a more powerful and expensive box. To scale an OODBMS, you can leverage as much off the shelf hardware as you need to host the clients and their caches.

Regarding solid-state drives, I am sure proponents of Relational databases would make a similar argument that using solid-state drives would boost the performance of their servers significantly. However, relational joins will still be expensive because its time complexity is fundamentally an "n squared" algorithm compared to following references which fundamentally has a constant time complexity. Add to that the cost of OR mapping if the data needs to be cached at the client.

Do you agree with Adrian, Jeff and Luis? Do you disagree? Feel free to comment in our comments section!