Integrated Infrastructure Blog

BPM Gives the Business a Technical Role in Process Improvement

Do you think that's a good thing?

I’m trying to get up to speed on Business Process Management (BPM) - in case you missed it, Progress Software acquired Savvion in January – and I'm really embracing the part of BPM that gives the business a technical role in process improvement.

One of first Savvion resources I read was the interview-style paper, The Benefits of Adopting SOA and BPM, and the first thing that made me go “yeah!” was:

“The key to understanding the significance of BPM is to understand the significance of the most critical element of businesses, the people. Regardless of the role people play in the business, they care passionately about what they do and how they do it. They also care about improving the way they do their work. Because the people are involved in how processes are executed, it is important to enable them to perform their work easily and effectively by delivering the right information to them at the right time.”

In this quote, I think "the people" are the business because they are usually the closest to the business process. Early in my career with Progress, I worked on projects with IT to deploy various web functionality, including single-sign on, lead flow into our CRM, and launches of two CMS’s. When I first started, IT owned practically every process and you had to work through them to get even the smallest change made to the website. I recall working on the single-sign system and feeling very frustrated because they’d say, “you don’t need to worry about that” when I asked questions about how the flow, or visitor experience, would work. I came back to them with a Visio flowchart of how I thought it should work and the jaws dropped – they were either stunned that someone from the business wanted to be involved, or they were thinking “who the hell does she think she is.” (Personally, I think it was the latter.) In any event, we ended up working on that diagram together for a month or two and outcome was a great functional spec that we could refer to throughout the development process, and beyond. Out of that experience came my intense respect for the role of IT, but also the importance of “the business” being involved. I know that BPM is not just about aligning IT with business owners but today... it is the key point that made me think "that's cool.”

As I continue to read and reflect on my experiences, I am interested in who actually presents the idea of applying BPM to their existing enterprise infrastructure. Is it IT, perhaps a CIO? Or, is it the business, perhaps a CFO? Whoever decides, in my opinion, bringing the business (the people who know what they want and need) and IT (the people who know what technologies can help) together is a really good thing. And if it works, I’m confident that companies will reap the rewards of operational innovation, efficiency, and a greater return on their investments.

Why BPM should be on the CIO’s agenda in 2010

New article by Giles Nelson published in CIO (http://bit.ly/biSKFo) online.

"In 2010, the business prerogative across all sectors is to use IT to drive efficiency and enable a business to react more quickly to customer and market changes. To do this, I believe we need to take a different view of BPM technology and try to see how it can be used to make knowledge-based business more ‘operationally responsive', reacting to customer needs and market changes instantly. This is already beginning to happen, and as it gains momentum, BPM will prove its usefulness in bringing ‘order to the chaos', and will make it onto the strategic agenda of every CIO."

The article does a great job at illustrating the synergy between business process management (BPM) and complex event processing; or in this case business event processing (BEP). Giles even provides examples of industry's already deploying these technologies. Most of us know the benefits of BPM but as he points out... "The next stage is to match it with the other side of the coin, where it can help an organisation respond to events and become truly operationally responsive - something worthy of the full attention of any CIO." Read the full article.

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.

New Videos - Savvion Acquisition Part I & II featuring Dr. Bates and Dr. Ketabchi

> Link to Progress Software's YouTube channel

Listen in as Dr. Bates, CTO of Progress Software, and Dr. Ketabchi, founder and CEO of Savvion, discuss the recent acquisition, and Progress Software’s entry into the business process management (BPM) marketplace. Savvion's BPM suite is a perfect fit with our enterprise BEP and BTA solutions.

Adding Leading BPM (Business Process Management) Solution to Our Portfolio

Our integrated infrastructure (or SOA infrastructure) portfolio just got broader and better! On Monday Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion, Inc.  Savvion offers a comprehensive, standards-based BPM suite that helps more than 300 of the world’s top-performing companies – including 24 of the ‘Fortune 100’ – automate and continuously improve critical business processes. Dr. John Bates, Progress Software’s CTO and Head of Corporate Development, says, “The Savvion BPM suite is a perfect fit for Progress because it offers leading capabilities for business process modeling and execution. The suite also uniquely includes other integrated key capabilities, including business rules management, document management, an event engine and an analytics engine.”

Progress Software made the announcement during our Global Field Operations Conference in Orlando, FL, which is being held this week. Those lucky enough to attend were able to hear David Bressler deliver a great sales pitch that really communicated the benefit of having the industries best-in-class BPM technology in our briefcase. The combination of our Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and Integration portfolio, coupled with Savvion's BPM suite, will enable enterprises to achieve the highest levels of operational responsiveness.

To learn more about this announcement, visit our Apama Event Processing blog and read two posts by Dr. John Bates:

• Why businesses must evolve their business processes to be highly responsive, dynamic and predictive – or they will cease to be competitive
  
  
• 10 Reasons Why Progress Chose Savvion

Welcome Savvion to the Progress family, and stay tuned for more details.

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.

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).

CEP as XTP, in SOA Environments

I have been tracking caching based application platforms such as Gigaspaces for sometime now, and I was surprised to see a new spin on these - as XTP (Extreme Transaction Processing) complimenting SOA. They are extending the caching capabilities to SOA solutions. Labeling this stateful SOA environment as a SOA Grid, and projected as an enabler to build next generation applications are in the areas of fraud detection, trade resolution, and risk management calculations away from the mainframe to low cost commodity hardware. Now, this is exactly the pitch from complex event processing (CEP) environments as well. And even CEP is seen as extending SOA infrastructure to support the capabilities to handle large volume event streams such a the banking or credit-card transaction events, needed for fraud detection.

At some level, the notion of "stateful" SOA grids proposed in the above paper is a contradiction of sorts. SOA is by definition discrete and loosely coupled services environment that are brought together in an orchestration environment to realize required business functions. Products such as Progress Sonic ESB do extend the orchestration capabilities to a more distributed environment (itineraries). Here one can see some value for a distributed state information (that caching products such as Giga and Terracota provide). But expecting this to provide the required capabilities for large volume event stream processing is a real stretch!

For starters, CEP is more than (surely, different from) a fast data-access/query mechanism, which is what caching solutions are. Caching solutions essentially extend the database processing model by providing a faster access to data. While CEP is less about data and much much more about quickly 'reacting' to events and detecting temporal patterns that occur in and across these large volume event streams, combining this within an SOA that can emit the events (based on the biz processing occurring within), or provide the required biz processing after the complex-event is detected, is in itself an XTP environment. It is capable of processing a very large volume of event streams and it needs to detect complex patterns in these streams. And, largely due to the unique approach used in the Progress Apama Correlator engine, it flips the conventional store-and-query approach (which is where caching products come in) to a look-ahead-and-react mode. This has already been proven in some of our successful Apama CEP deployments, such as Algorithmic Trading and Fraud Detection (the very same cases referred in above blog post). See the diagram below to see how Apama CEP works:

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.

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...

Actional @ Codecentric.de

Our very own Eric Schaumlöffel presented the latest on Actional and DataXtend SI at Codecentric's Friday meeting. They've written up a short blog-post which I'd like to comment upon briefly.

Actional doesn't actually "mark the messages with a unique tracer" as they say in the post. We do have a unique (and patented) way of tracking message dependencies across nodes, discovering consumers and producers that can't be replicated (or hasn't been yet) by vendors who do port sniffing or who have "agents" that are really intermediaries. The important thing is that we do not affect the message, nor do we depend upon the message being in the clear. Why is this important? Well, for starters customers don't like having their messages messed with. But, from a technical perspective, it means that: (1) you don't need to have Actional everywhere in order to get value (we don't have to be on both sides of the communication), and (2) you can remove Actional without affecting your application or requiring any recoding. Yeah, it's like magic... only it's real.

Another thing. The key difference, and the basis for many other differences in our product from what is expected of a solution, is that Actional tracks dependencies BETWEEN nodes, whereas most products, like Dynatrace care about what happens inside nodes. Sometimes products can do "one-hop dependency tracking" (meaning, they can see which nodes communicate with each other, but they cannot trace the communication across multiple hops, like from a consumer, to a portal, to a web service to a database, and then identify unique cluster members for each message for every message in real-time/run-time) whereas Actional can track end-to-end flows, without affecting performance or scalability. And we do it on across a list of platforms and protocols that's quite long (Ouch. Note to self, update website with latest platforms/protocols!). Yeah, again, it's magic. Magic in GA! Shipping. Really.

Finally, they mention that it's weird to do security in a management tool. This is where language fails us. A topic that's close to my heart (here and here). Actional has three offerings (products?), all based upon the same technology so that it is easy for customers to move between them and so that all integrate seamlessly (single UI, single policy expressions, single server to manage 1000+ nodes, etc.). The three are:

1. Actional for SOA Operations, our "monitoring" tool that provides automatic visibility, policy management, and root-cause analysis,
2. Actional for Active Policy Enforcement, our "security" tool, that includes all Actional for SOA Operations functionality, and
3. Actional for Continuous Service Optimization, our "business optimization" tool, that includes all security and monitoring capabilities of the other offerings.

The reason for this variety of offering is because customers value capabilities differently from each other. Some customers drive their "governance" efforts around security, whereas some just want to address the "visibility gap" while others perhaps are not ready for "business optimization."

I'd like to personally thank Codecentric for the opportunity to speak at their meeting, and I'm confident that they found Eric knowledgeable and informative.

Marrying Best-of-Breed Tools for SOA Governance

1+1=3: Marrying Best-of-Breed Tools for Business Process Governance
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 11:00 am EST
Register to participate >

Communication is the basis of any successful relationship, including the communications between business people and technologists. Bringing together BPM and SOA Governance enables business drivers to be translated quickly to SOA implementation, with full accountability, lower cost of ownership, and business-level SOA optimization.

Join David Bressler, Actional Product Evangelist, and Marc Smith, Director of Product Marketing, Lombardi Software, tomorrow, April 29th, for a live webinar entitled, 1+1=3: Marrying Best-of-Breed Tools for Business Process Governance .  Listen to what David and Marc believe are SOA best practices for company's looking to ensure consistent enforcement of policies across all teams building SOA applications.

Other upcoming SOA infrastructure webinars you may be interested in, include:

• Visibility and Tracking for Critical Applications – Optimize Application Performance and Increase Revenue
  Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 11:00 am EST
  Presented by: Julianna Cammarano, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Progress Software

Extreme Volatility

Based on the title, this post can be about either:

1. The stock market
2. My personality

Obviously, there are two different audiences that might be addressed here. What's needed is more context around the description above to decide whether this post is actionable or not.

More context is needed. Where have I heard that before? (SOA What?)

Well, if you were in Europe in 2006 just after the acquisition, you probably heard me talk about capturing context of the messages flowing across your SOA infrastructure. It's one of my favorite topics because the benefit is so powerful.

Imagine having a system that pushes contextual information along with alerts, so that the root cause and business impact can be immediately known? This information drives action, improving user experience, and overall system performance. Cool, right?

Here's the message in my head:

1. Actional is different because we track EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE flowing through the SOA.
2. We do it across multiple protocols and platforms, giving people who care, an end-to-end view.
3. We track every single message, all the time, WITHOUT AFFECTING PERFORMANCE (it's magic).

What does this mean?

1. We have every message, and know the relationships automatically - so we can build flows that help us know where to look when a problem occurs, and where the dependencies are (even if we don't have prior knowledge of those flows ahead of time).
2. Because we're tracking every single message, there's no "inference" involved, no guessing - just the facts.
3. We can gather data about the flows and relate it to the flows to add business meaning to what we observe.

Why is this important?

1. No more urgently responding to alert messages that don't impact the business.
2. Preventative alerts let people know what's going on - improving the user experience.
3. The context provides the ability to act on events, in ways to preserve what's important and prevent further service deterioration - important customers, important orders, important channels of business can be prioritized above those less important.

And, most importantly, no more reading blog posts about SOA when you hope to read something about this crazy stock market.

Oh, yeah. I've got a webinar coming up on April29th entitled 1+1=3: Marrying Best-of-Breed Tools for Business Process Governance, during which I'll be using some customer examples of our partnership with Lombardi. If you remember, we shipped integrated SOA Governance with Teamworks, the Business Process Management platform from Lombardi, when we shipped Actional v7.1. Join us for the live event and hear about our success.

The "genius award" goes to...

The guy who made airline-seat TV screens into touch screens.

Yep, there I was as asleep as I could get on my red-eye between JFK and SCL, and all of a sudden I feel someone poking the back of my head. Poke, poke, poke.

As I was counting to ten, in a sleep befuddled daze I played back the experiences of the flight in my head, and sure enough realized what was going on. I don't use those tiny screens. In fact, they annoy me to no end. Flashing lights and colors just inches from my face when the person in front of me reclines. But, I remembered touch screen controls.

More evidence that airlines are purposely doing everything they can to make flying miserable. I can't wait until mobile phone use on airplanes is widespread. Though, admittedly, I made a Skype call from my laptop once on a Lufthansa flight. Why? Well, because I could.

Well, SOA what?

Let's pretend for a minute that my seat is a service in an SOA. As a passenger, there are several processes that passengers undertake that include my seat... sleeping and entertaining. Each of these processes use the same seat service, and clearly in my case, those processes interfered with each other when they both used the same instance of the service!

Both processes use the seat service as it was intended. Perhaps the service designers didn't take into account how it would be implemented. There isn't enough support in the chair design to protect the sleeping beauty from the poker.

The analogy falls apart a bit, but if we measured satisfaction with the service, I might have been unhappy, but the guy behind me was quite happy. On average, it was OK! Yet, that didn't make me feel any better rested when I arrived.

If I really pulled my soapbox out and ranted... I'd mention those people who use the service not as it's been designed - as an arm rest. Walking past and shaking me awake without any consideration for the beauty rest I so needed.

All of this really happens. Services used, as designed, by different (business) processes interfere with the quality each process receives, and that's further complicated by innovators using services in ways they weren't designed to be used. And, for those of you who think having a reg/rep will solve this problem, good luck!

It's important to have discrete visibility and policy-based management from the perspective of all processes (and personas and applications) using a service. And, it's important to know for sure how each service is being used... not just how the developer designed it to be used.

Fortunately, I didn't trust my service provider, and arrived two days early for my IDC presentation. That's quite a lot of overhead. Not everyone in a shared service world is going to have that luxury. That makes Actional a necessity for anyone serious about satisfying their customers by delivering meaningful SLA's without keeping you awake at night.

We're Running Out of Words II

It's interesting when you have a shared blog... sometimes coordinating posts with others so there is no talking over each other leads to no one posting. It's especially hard for me, as I'm a "mood poster" - meaning, I post when I'm in the mood. Fortunately, I'm usually in the mood to talk about something I profess to know something about, so there's no shortage of material.

Which of course, leads to a brief apology. I've been quiet lately, even though there is a ton of good stuff going on (not all of it in my head). I just find it hard to be creative when I'm busy, and it's been a busy few weeks (in-and-outside of Progress) for me. Probably will be for another three weeks or so... so to all my fans, my apologies!

Back in November, I jokingly titled a post that "We're Running Out of Words." Something you could, of course, never tell by how much I talk.

The idea is that we "overload" words with meaning and often don't even realize the assumptions we make (and more importantly, others hear) when we use overloaded words. The most overloaded word in our space (IMO) is discovery. Another, management.

When I first started at Actional, our mission was to educate the market. I started presentations with a slide that said "Web Services Management" -- what the market was calling our space at the time. I then went on to put big red X's through Web and Management. What we were doing had little to do with the associations that come up when people think "[World Wide] Web" or "Management." It was a challenge then, and it's a challenge now.

SOA What? Well, today, you should be asking "SOA Why Now?" - I mean, I talked about this back in November.

My brain works weird. I read Dana's post, Progress Software adds cross-process visibility with Actional 7.1, over at ZDNet, and one thing stuck in my head. Knowing that I haven't been around for a while, I thought I'd comment on how we've overloaded the phrase "Business Process" (and the associated "Business Process Management"), and as a result might be missing the really interesting point.

Let me share an customer situation: very large telco in the mid-east - actually an Oracle customer. It was about 20 months ago, so that gives you an idea of where Oracle's BPM solution was in terms of maturity. This customer needed visibility into their business processes. Oracle told them (as would most anyone out there, I'm singling out Oracle, but picking on everyone) if they wanted to track business processes, they needed to implement them in a BPM engine. Long story short, they took their existing processes and implemented them in Oracle BPM. It was hard to do... so they only implemented their most important processes. Once implemented, they realized they had only 1/12th of the performance they had before - all in exchange for knowing where a process fails and being able to track it from end-to-end.

So, let me summarize:

1. They reimplemented processes that were already working just fine. BPM offered no process-value-add.
2. They were limited to their most important processes because of the difficulty they had implementing their processes in a BPM engine.
3. They suffered performance and scalability in exchange for visibility; visibility that was limited to what was going through their BPM engine.

This is the key point that Dana, and I think everyone else, misses when they look at Actional. Processes don't need to be orchestrated to be managed. Ad-hoc processes can be managed just as easily as anything else. And, perhaps, that means in some cases (not nearly the majority - but some) BPM isn't needed. I'd argue that most processes are actually informal... and only become formal so they can be orchestrated and controlled. What if you could gain all the visibility and control you need, without the overhead of orchestration?

Instrumenting an SOA infrastructure with Progress® Actional® means they get all the visibility they need, into ALL their processes, whether those processes are orchestrated or not, without impacting performance or scalability, and they get it cross-platform and protocol:

• All the visibility they need; anything on the platform is automatically displayed and correlated across the entire infrastructure.
• All their processes; since there is no need to change code or re-implement a process that already works, every process (ad-hoc or orchestrated) can be tracked in real-time and, more importantly, in the business context in which it is executing [that telco I was telling you about had a provisioning service - we were able to track it for landline vs mobile separately with just a few configuration steps. Then, we enhanced tracking by separating mobile provisioning into pre-paid and post-paid just as easily, and without affecting performance].
• Without impacting performance or scalability; if Oracle slowed things down to 1/12 with just some processes orchestrated, then we can be said to have been more than 12x faster than Oracle!!! And, Actional has no single point of failure like a BPM engine (and many other service management solutions) does.
• Cross platform and protocol; Do I even need to explain this? Gosh, we have customers using TIBCO BusinessWorks alongside Sonic ESB, and exposing everything as web services over SOAP, and we can track everything end-to-end from the HTTP call to the portal, to the service, to the "bus", to the BPM engine, out to the database, and back - synchronously or asynchronously. A mouthful, I know, but cool nevertheless.

There's a reason Forrester ranked us #1. But, to know what they know, I need to ask you to listen to what we mean, at least until we can make new words.

By the way, if you want to see this end-to-end visibility yourself, apply to evaluate the solution. It won't include the business process "stuff" we do, but will give you an idea of how easy it is to discover and correlate across platforms and protocols.

Benchmarking SOA with Tom Hanks and Apollo 13

I don't know Tom, though I respect his accomplishments. I suspect he's a pretty smart guy, which would only mean that he'd be smart enough to have nothing to do with SOA, especially if he really were an astronaut stuck in space with a fraction of a chance to get back home.

Being a geek and a technical diver, one of my favorite movies/stories was the return of Apollo 13 after a fire and explosion crippled most of the ship. The part of the movie where they restarted things and new the exact amps required and the order in which to restart the equipment... man, that just rocked. And, I've been there myself, stuck inside a shipwreck at 200' searching for a missing diver and trying to optimize my bottom time knowing that once I ran out of gas, the situation would no longer be a search, but a recovery. In those situations, the difference between knowing and guesstimating is truly "mission" critical.

SOA What? Fortunately for us, and for Hollywood, SOA is not a life-or-death situation. I mean, those guys at NASA know their stuff, but most SOA Consultants can't tell the difference between JBOWS and SOA (here and here).

People wonder where to start when it comes to SOA Governance. There's all this talk about storing services in registries, or centralizing policies (that can't be shared by enforcement points anyways), or governing developer's activities... how about starting by trying to know what the damn thing is actually doing?

Imagine an SOA version of the movie Apollo 13. It would be a very short movie. Here's the script:

[Background: in 2007, The Bank, the largest bank in North America, did the equivalent of "walking on the moon" with 2007 earnings through the roof, while minimizing exposure to the worst credit crisis since the great depression.]

[Situation: One week into the new year, this darling of Wall Street has a catastrophic systems failure. Dan, on the trading floor has a single phone line to get advice, but physical help cannot reach the bank before it's too late. He's on his own, with only the advice of his trusty sidekick, David, who is in the command center in Houston.]

"[Background noise on the line] Hey David, it's Dan. I'm calling from The Bank. Trading floor's down! Power's out, and half our computers are fried. We need to bring up just the systems absolutely required to keep the bank from going under, but we need to bring up everything in sequence to maximize the use of power, messaging throughput, and CPU capacity that we have left in the computing grid, all within the context of our most important business processes. If we don't, the bank will go out of business and my bosses will shoot me, literally."

[David] "I'll tell your wife you loved her."

[Roll credits]

"But, what do you DO?"

My grandfather's curiosity makes him seem younger than his 90 years. After the war, he, an immigrant in NY, became, among other things, a tailor. For the past 10 years or so, each time I've visited, at some point the conversation would turn to my job, and he would pointedly ask, "But, what do you DO?" I didn't quite understand his emphasis on "do." So, I'd respond that I travel, talk to people, listen a lot, and ultimately advise customers and our field on ways to move opportunities forward. I'd give examples. In return, I would get a confused look and a repeat of the question, "but what do you DO?"

Finally, one day in exasperation he says, "When I went to work, I made clothes. When you go to work, what do you DO?" Now, that was awkward... you see, I don't really DO anything. I'm an enabler. I'm more like a carrier of a disease than a tailor. I travel around picking up experiences in one place and leaving them in another.

I know... fascinating. But, SOA What?

Well, we just had our annual sales meeting here at Progress. And, coming off a great year, we Actional people were pretty popular. I was delivering the Actional message to a group of new employees - which I consider the 2nd most fun thing I get to do all year - and they kept asking, "what's the business benefit of Actional?"

What's the business benefit of Actional?

I'm not going to answer that here. Suffice it to say that my answers left the people in the room last Sunday somewhat unsatisfied. They wanted something tangible to take to their prospects--something that would quickly and dramatically get their attention and priority. I gave them talking points that they could use to start conversations, but nothing that would turn people's heads. The whole thing got me thinking...

Can an enabling technology have a direct business benefit?

Notice the word direct. I think an enabling technology enables business benefits. But, it requires some deeper understanding of the business situation, and then the application of technology expertise to that situation in order to achieve some tangible benefit.

An example will help. Actional has a large number of travel and hospitality customers. We help them optimize their delivery of product across various channels. Using Actional, these companies are able to differentiate service levels by customer, channel, and dynamically based upon, among other things, immediate local market conditions. In one case, a company has saved millions of dollars on hardware investment by better utilizing their shared infrastructure. They optimize their SOA infrastructure based upon "business level SLA," rather than blindly adding capacity. In short, they more closely coupled their "business" with their "infrastructure." These benefits apply equally well to any services business, and in my opinion will be a critical differentiator in the coming years.

If you look at the benefits I just described, you might think we compete with a highly customized point-of-sale system, or some reservation system, and probably a bunch of other things, however, as much as people want the "soundbyte", it's simply not the case. We don't really do anything tangible for these companies, though we are a key part of their enterprise infrastructure for delivering a highly differentiating service. I think there was a Dupont commercial that summed it up quite well... "we don't make your business systems, we make your business systems better."

Once my grandfather realized I didn't actually "DO" anything, he was able to start to understand what I accomplished. Perhaps we need to look at enabling software the same way?

The Future of Customer Service: "Our systems have failed, how does that make you feel?"

Breaking a bit of tradition… there is a funny story in here but not until after I let you into my head for a second. Now, don’t be scared.

I've recently been doing some research on social computing. I'm not even close to being a "visionary" - that's Dan and Hub's job - so maybe I'm stuck in the myopic world of SOA. But when I hear web services, I think integration/SOA, but as I read more and more, it seems I'm in the minority. Most people hear web services and think Facebook, Twitter and a host of other things that are seemingly more about social computing than web services. Perhaps they are converging? I think I like that idea…

I [personally] care about businesses using technology in a way that takes the 'technology factor' out of it. It enrages me when I ask a question and the answer is phrased in terms of the technology used to solve the problem.

I recently had a rather humorous conversation with Continental -- I encountered a problem related to manipulating a reservation on their website. It was a (polite) 20 minute conversation where I insisted it was a reservation problem while she insisted it was a website problem. Why did it matter? Because she could help me with a reservation problem but not a web problem - even if the reservation was made via the web. I enjoyed the semantic disagreement because I knew that under the covers somewhere there was an IT vocabulary driving the interaction. (Totally aside, in the end, it turned out she could help me... she put me on hold, called the online department, and then came back online and said, "they are aware of the issue, try again in three weeks." Yes, I wish I was kidding.)

KISS - Keep It Simple Sally!

To my own astonishment, there are times when I appear to be the "smart guy in the room." In fact, when I delivered the last new employee training, someone jokingly changed my title to Condescente. Or, was that Cognoscente?

Whatever, my point is... that it's not that difficult to accomplish really big goals when you keep just one or two minor points top of mind. For example,

• I've worked 300'/100m underwater remembering to "come up slow and keep breathing"
• I've dueled strangers in 8 different countries trying to remember to "cut my opponent in half, everything else is secondary"
• I've introduced Actional in some 20 different countries by helping them understand the simple key point that "it's the architecture that differentiates Actional features and performance"

Here it is, everyone together... SOA What?

How many of us have read/written page-after-page of RFP wondering what it all means? I remember one where it seemed that the RFP was simply an aggregation of every possible WS-standard, real or imagined (I mean, emerging). It was a little odd - though we won anyways! And, while the process served to educate and build a relationship with the customer, I don't really believe it helped them pick the "best" vendor for the solution they ultimately deployed. The requirements were too vague and decoupled from the implementation.

On the other side of the spectrum, the best process I have ever experienced was run by WebLayers for a financial customer in NY and London. What made it good? It was simple. They went to a dozen vendors and asked one product/technology related question. The question was, "what ten things should we consider when evaluating your product?" Simple, huh? From there, they had over 100 questions on which to structure their conversations with the vendors to help them understand our strategies, directions, and products. The presumption being that the customer understood their own strategies and directions, and were able to select a partner they thought would be the best long term fit. That's not to say it was a short process, nor was it easy.

Please, don't confuse simple with simplistic. Brevity, conciseness, and focusing on only the really important things is what makes people and projects successful. (Ironic, in this blog post, huh?)

Keeping with the theme of simplicity, I want to share something from another customer who recently selected our product. I'm always curious why people select Actional (curious, not surprised). It's funny how rare it is to have a simple answer to the question of why we've been selected.

For this customer, key goals of SOA and Web Services Management were defined as the following basic needs to be met in order to avoid pain:

1. Accurate inventory of services
2. How services are performing
3. If services are meeting SLA's
4. Ability to enforce SLA's by business criteria, even when a service is shared
5. Traceability and root-cause analysis

And, in case this doesn't get the message across, they reinforced that "it's all about supporting the business."

Simple. Simple goals, simple strategy, and most importantly, simple to measure success!

If you're not sure where to start when defining your SOA and Web Services Management initiative, start by figuring out what to measure. Add in requirements for scalability and performance, and perhaps consistency across a vendor's product line, and you've got all the right ingredients for success. Just start!

We're Running out of Words

Forrester calls us SOA and Web Services Management. I like Forrester, they ranked us quite well.

I was re-listening to a David Linthicum EBizQ SOA Visionary podcast of an interview with Actional's very own Julianna Cammarano. Julianna makes a point - people don't think they need SOA Management until they're in production. This is unfortunately a very true customer sentiment that, I must admit, frustrates me to no end.