Integrated Infrastructure Blog

PRGS Announces the RPM Suite - A Convergence of BTA, BEP, and BPM

It’s been raining here in Massachusetts for 3 days straight, but today I got to add a NEW acronym to my arsenal...

Introducing RPM - Responsive Process Management

In case you missed it, a Progress Software press release went out this morning that announced the launch of our NEW Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. The Progress RPM suite brings together our best-in-class solutions for Business Process Management (BPM), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA), and Business Event Processing (BEP) (most commonly referred to as Complex Event Processing (CEP)). The Progress RPM suite will enable enterprises to achieve a higher level of business performance than previously possible. It is scheduled to launch in late April, and the market opportunity for this type of solution is expected to be greater than $10 billion [based on IDC Research*]. The release includes a quote from Maureen Fleming, program director of IDC's business process management and middleware research service:

“Over the past two years, one of the fastest-growing areas of software investment by enterprises has been to improve their situational awareness. Logically, the next step is broadening the focus to not only gain visibility into problems or opportunities but to rapidly respond. Enterprises will increasingly look for vendors that offer a knowledgeable and comprehensive approach to building this next generation of critical business applications."

It may sound like a pretty complicated implementation but core to the Progress Responsive Process Management suite is the Progress Control Tower™, a unified product dashboard, or GUI, that displays real-time alerts, interactive interfaces and tools. The Control Tower will provide users with the ability to view what is happening within their business and to improve it from a single source - thereby gaining greater ROI. It’s fully configurable, feature-rich, interactive framework delivers a wealth of relevant, KPIs and business information. What’s more, a powerful modeling environment enables new business processes to be rapidly created, modeled, monitored, controlled and improved dynamically.

To learn more, read our 7 page brochure and visit our website. We've also written the white paper Achieving Operational Responsiveness Through Responsive Process Management that you can register for.

Over the coming months, we’ll introduce more collateral, white papers, and webinars so stay tuned.

TTYL!

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.

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.

Progress Software Announces Q4 results - Here are some highlights

Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS) just announced their Q4 earnings release. To summarize, it says "Earnings Up in Q4; Progress® Actional® Revenue Up with Triple-Digit Growth; Progress® Apama® Revenue Up with Double-Digit Growth." What I really thought was interesting was the Q4 highlights. The majority of wins involve building or enhancing an integrated infrastructure, and application modernization - both topics we cover in this blog. In case you missed the release, I've included these highlights below. Enjoy!

Q4 Highlights

• Progress Software announced that the Progress® Sonic® ESB (enterprise service bus) is deployed and operational at British Airport Authority’s (BAA) Heathrow Airport Terminal 5.
  
  The Progress solution enables BAA to provide airport integration capabilities using the Sonic ESB product. This includes the creation of reusable integration services for new Terminal 5 systems and of specialist adaptors for the integration of existing key operational BAA systems, such as the Airport Operational Database Integration. (Tag: Application Integration)
  
  
• Progress Software has successfully enabled more than 250 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to deploy thousands of on-demand, SaaS applications over the past five years.  These ISVs use the Progress® OpenEdge® SaaS platform to build applications that are used in some of the most demanding and diverse business environments in the world. (Tag: Cloud Computing)
  
  
• British Airways selected Progress Software SOA Solutions to upgrade their travel experience.  The UK’s largest international airline, British Airways (BA), will use the Progress portfolio of SOA solutions as a key part of its travel program to upgrade its IT systems by integrating over 600 different electronic systems and processes involved in getting BA passengers in the air. The flexibility of the Progress SOA portfolio allows BA to extend the features of its e-commerce site right through to its airports, by allowing greater self-service functionality and 'plug and play' capability. (Tag: SOA Success)
  
• match2blue stands out from the crowd with the Progress® Apama® Business Event Processing (BEP) platform by adding real-time capability to next-generation social networking. Enterprise platform enabler for mobile solutions, match2blue (www.match2blue.com), has selected the Apama platform to empower its social networking platform with real-time information on location, ideas, news and trends.  The Apama BEP platform will form a crucial part of match2blue’s back-end infrastructure, providing the performance and scalability needed, as well as supporting its business partners, who will be operating the location-based services to control and monitor their operations through dashboards. (Tag: Complex Event Processing)
  
  
• Alphameric Solutions Ltd, the leading solutions provider to the gaming industry, selected the Sonic ESB to revolutionize the way it handles content and messages across its network. Relying on highly complex and automated processes to deliver odds, prices, race information and documents across a distributed architecture – most needing to be handled in a sub-hundred millisecond timeframe – Alphameric needed a simpler way to incorporate new or updated information in real-time. (Tag: SOA Best Practices)
  
• West Bend Mutual Insurance Company has selected the Sonic ESB (enterprise service bus) and Actional products to underpin a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based IT infrastructure.   West Bend Mutual Insurance, a property and casualty insurance carrier, is pulling together dozens of disparate internal policy administration applications into a single integrated insurance portal. (Tag: Distributed SOA)
  
• Progress Software announced the availability of the Apama 4.2 Event Processing Platform.  The Apama 4.2 release extends the capabilities of the previously announced Apama Parallel Correlator, and introduces significant new developer productivity features that accelerate the deployment of event processing applications. The Apama Parallel Correlator leverages multi-core, multi-processor hardware to deliver high throughput, low latency execution that has achieved seven-fold performance improvements, as benchmarked with real-world customer applications. (Tag: Event Driven SOA)
  
• Slumberland, a leading furniture retailer, is now using standards-based data connectivity products from Progress® DataDirect® for reliable, high-performance support for all their major databases and 64-bit operating systems, for reliable connectivity to their Oracle applications, and streamlined reporting to improve fulfillment and customer satisfaction. (Tag: Semantic Data Integration)
  
• Progress unveiled the industry's first mainframe SQL engine for non-relational data, which can leverage zIIP specialty processors for lowering a mainframe’s total cost of ownership (TCO), with the announcement of its DataDirect Shadow Release 7.2.1.  The DataDirect Shadow release includes ANSI SQL-92 to Non-Relational Data with zIIP Offload and new capabilities that lower costs and attract new process-intense workloads to the mainframe.

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.

Open Source Software Powers the Biggest Physics Project in History

Today Progress Software announced that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN*) is using Progress® FUSE™, to run its operational grid activities of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) re-launch which happened this month. FUSE is an open source product line based on several Apache projects for which IONA (acquired by Progress in June 2008) provided leadership and Progress today continues to be a significant contributor. There are many skeptics that believe open source software isn’t meant for large-scale projects but CERN has proven that wrong. Not only has FUSE will underpin all grid monitoring systems used in CERN’s quest to find the Higgs Boson—known as 'The God Particle', but CERN welcomes the opportunity to contribute back to the open source project and deploy it freely across all their sites.

James Casey, Technical Architect at CERN, sites “We needed to find a partner that could help us bring agility and reliability to our IT infrastructure.” He added, “We have a pipeline of projects that we need to deliver over the coming years, so this first step lays the foundation for change.”

In addition to using FUSE, CERN also deployed Progress® SonicMQ® to form the communications backbone of its Technical Infrastructure Monitoring (TIM) system, designed to alert researchers in the event of an emergency. The use of open and “closed” source software creates a true open integration environment that re-enforces the fact that every organization has the power to choose the solutions that best fit their integrated infrastructure requirements.

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.

Have you deployed your NGMP yet?

WIN has! After doing a review of their technology, WIN and their technology partner, Tech Mahindra, selected Progress® Sonic® ESB as their Next Generation Messaging Platform (NGMP). Because rapid change in the mobile sector is driving consumer demand for innovative multimedia and high-bandwidth services, they needed to look at a service-based infrastructure (or SOA) for its new platform. Here’s a quote from our recent press release:

“As mobile services evolve into widgets, applications and mobile video on-demand, much of the integration work we do to meet our customers’ service requirements is custom-built,” Graham Rivers, CEO at WIN, explained. “But to create an efficient and agile model that allows providers to roll out new services quickly, service re-use is key. SOA brings that flexibility to our platform.”

For many companies today, SOA is a significant part of improving infrastructure response. But superior operational responsiveness and SOA deployment require innovative technology to be effective. WIN knew that in order to remain competitive and deliver the best solutions and services to their customers, including Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Sony Ericsson, their NGMP needed to deliver high performance and reliable communications. Sonic ESB gives WIN the power they need to meet customer demands and deploy an event-driven architecture that will scale with technology and innovation.

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.

Recap: Gartner EA Summit in Orlando

This guest post comes courtesy of Larry Fulton. Larry is an independent consultant who spent 14 years as a solutions and enterprise architect at UPS and 3 years consulting on, among other things, strategic integration infrastructure issues and enterprise service bus (ESB) technology as a senior analyst at Forrester  research.

The enterprise architecture community is always surprising to me for its enthusiastic optimism - remember that this is a field where the majority of us spend a lot of our time explaining what we do and why it is valuable, often to our own management. Attendees were very clearly engaged in the session topics, there were plenty of insightful questions, and the attendees I spoke with personally saw a lot of value in the material presented. The focus was on the practice of EA rather than specific technical aspects of modern enterprise architecture, which of course begs the question what EAs are doing to stay on top of the technology landscape.

Gartner sees the influence of EA growing over time, especially in those organizations where EA is successfully involving itself in the business and its processes. Aside from the expected pro-EA and how-to-improve-credibility messages, I heard a number of new and refreshing perspectives on EA and its future:

Gartner's Anne Lapkin confronted the "Is EA an art or a science?" dilemma head-on, and clearly stated that many aspects of EA are in fact an art. She was referring specifically to the real work of fitting and re-fitting EA's mission to the current and evolving needs of real businesses. There may be a lot of well-defined process around the tools of the trade - modeling various aspects of current and future architecture, establishing effective governance processes, and so forth - but it takes real insight based on experience to assess what EA can and should be doing to help the business succeed, and to know when that needs to change as the business itself evolves. This is an area where many experts, have been reluctant to come right out and say, "Look, you need to have the right leaders, and you can't necessarily just pick someone who is skilled in another area and expect to train them to this level of EA perspective". Another way to say this is that skilled solutions architects need to be part of EA's activities, but solutions architects don't necessarily have the perspective to define the EA agenda.

Betsy Burton's sessions illuminated the reality that enterprise architects often must fill the role of counselors - working with disparate teams with different perspectives to find common ground and move forward. On the broader business front, this same theme emerged in her recommendation that enterprise business architectures need to include a model of how people actually work together in an organization.

She also mentioned that EAs need to spend at least five per cent of their time playing so they can remain aware of current technologies. My own opinion is that this is not enough - unless you can commit at least half a day each week to some kind of research, which is to say at least ten per cent of your time, it is very difficult to stay on top of important developments.

I particularly enjoyed Bruce Robertson's session on "architecting for emergence". He talked about "EA light", or ways that EA groups should focus on what matters the most and promote application team innovation elsewhere. The idea of establishing policy and technology "guard rails" that essentially say you can do what you like as long as you conform to these particular things and as long as you don't do these other things is not new. But, looking at an organization in a methodical way to identify exactly those rules that really matter and promoting choice elsewhere is where many EA groups need to be headed. Certainly his advice to EA groups to understand local influences and priorities and their relationship to enterprise influences and priorities is a good idea for any EA group, and especially those operating in large organizations.

One of the keynote speakers, Mark Rashino, represented in my opinion the central message to EAs - IT needs to ask itself, "What new strategic capabilities can I offer?" When CIO's are asking themselves that question but don't have an answer, where will they turn? EA needs to be ready to answer that question, whenever it is asked.

Buysides Finally Getting Some OTC Derivatives Love!

The ISITC OTC Derivatives Working Group, of which I am a member, recently announced its Market Practice for Contract Notification. I've been involved with OTC Derivatives trading operations and technology for almost 20 years now, the last 10 primarily on the buyside.  When I first joined an FpML working group, allocations weren't even part of the spec, and we are only now beginning to see vendors who provide buyside OTC Derivative trading solutions.

The industry itself has lagged in recognizing the buyside's role in the OTC Derivatives market.  The first movement around helping the buyside deal with the complexity of these instruments started about 5 years ago with the Swaps Best Practices Initiative jointly sponsored by ISITC and the Asset Managers Forum within the old Bond Market Association.  The BMA is now part of SIFMA and the AMF's Swaps initiative evolved into the Derivatives Operations Committee and the formation of the ISITC OTC Derivatives Working Group.

While custodians and other service providers including DTCC, Markit and SWIFT have stepped in to assist their buyside customers to process OTC Derivative trades, there are few off-the-shelf solutions. The majority of sales of Progress’s OTC Derivatives solutions for FpML, DTCC Deriv/SERV, Markit Wire and SWIFTNet FpML still go to buysides and custodians who are adding support for buyside functionality to systems designed for sellside. I am happy to report that Progress now has software vendors as customers looking to address this market. I’m optimistic as buysides spend more to meet new regulations we’ll see more complete vendor solutions.

A New Renaissance for ODBMS? Part 1

Recently a team of our object database experts - Adrian Marriott and Luis Ramos - attended the 2009 International Conference on Object Databases. Not only did they present on design patterns and discuss the resurgence of object oriented databases, but Adrian won an award (and a netbook!).

Adrian Marriott was the first place winner of the award for best Common Persistent Model Patterns for Performance and/or Scalability Optimization. He beat out 25 other compelling patterns with his Query Visitor pattern which allows one "to define new result set formats without changing the underlying persistent object model."

Roberto V. Zicari, Editor of ODBMS.ORG, said of Adrian’s pattern...

"It is common practice that some database designers treat an Object Database (ODB) like a Relational Database (RDB). That is they are very query intensive rather than model intensive in their design. Some designers start with a “relational” model, and then adjust it to a model that is more "ODB-oriented", or closer to their problem domain, in order to get better results. This  task is difficult.  Marriott`s pattern, Query Visitor, can speed up the database  development process by providing a tested, proven development paradigm."

Luis Ramos contributed to the lively discussion in one of the more intriguing panel discussions at the conference: A New Renaissance for ODBMSs?  As part of our post-ICOODB2009 coverage, I asked Dr. Ramos to share some thoughts about object databases and their use.

Me: What are some use cases that benefit from an Object Oriented Database?

Luis Ramos: There's three main uses cases: complex (multi-dimensional) data, transactional caching, cloud-databases—and given today’s SaaS-world, you can see why ODBMSs are becoming more and more relevant.

By complex, multi-dimensional data, I mean data that is hard to render into rows and columns.  For an easy example of non-complex information consider the current roster for the Boston Red Sox Baseball team; the roster lists each player and their name, number, position and statistics–it looks like a rectangle with two dimensions.  This formulation makes it easy for me to ask the question – what is the current batting average of the 1^st baseman for the Red Sox?

But consider a slightly different question – how are individuals in a family tree related?  Consider Barack Obama’s family tree. If you visualize the data, it is not a matrix at all. It looks more like a tree of nodes. This would be very natural to store as objects with links to other objects. Consider asking a question like, is George W. Bush related to Barack Obama? Answering this question is quite easy in an object database. You simply follow pointers from the node representing Barack Obama and see if you can reach George W. Bush (and apparently they’re 11^th cousins). Following pointers or de-referencing references is certainly a lot more efficient than doing an arbitrary number of joins.

On the transactional caching use case. Our clients have selected object databases over other data caching technologies such as Memcache and Tangosol for a these important reasons: transactional access, durability, and automatic cache replacement. With object databases, there’s transactional access to the cache thereby preserving the data integrity of the cache – you don’t find this in many caching solutions.  Also, the cache is durable. If the application is terminated intentionally or otherwise, recreating the cache is fast and efficient because it is being populated from an object database.  In this case, there is no overhead for running SQL queries to find to the objects to bring into the cache and no overhead to transform between relational data and objects. Third, ObjectStore automatically manages the cache if the amount of data being accessed in the cache exceeds the amount of memory.

On cloud-databases, object-oriented databases are a more natural fit for persisting cloud data, which is inherently tuple-based, for a number of reasons. First, storing tuple-based data, whose values are arbitrary (strings, integers, double, boolean, etc) and that are automatically indexed could be challenging to do in a relational database. This type of problem is reminiscent of the issues related to formulating a relational model to store an object model that has an inheritance hierarchy. Second, scaling a relational database is not easy. The usual practice to scale a relational database in order to support more load is to use more powerful hardware. In an object-oriented database such as ObjectStore, it is easier and simpler. Since the queries are performed at the client (the cloud node or service), scaling the database can be accomplished by simply launching more services.

Stay tuned, the next post will cover additional Dr. Ramos’ comments about RDBMS to ODBMS, the market and where to get more information.

Patently Confusing!

Well, if you track our "space," you'd have seen that Forum has been awarded a patent on XML security appliances. Apparently, it's patent number 7,516,333.

As it turns out, Actional has a patent in the area of web service security too - Patent 7,480,799.

It seems that Forum's patent focuses on appliance devices (hardware) that incorporates acceleration, though doesn't limit itself to web services.

To help compare the difference between the two patents, you might look at the top level claims.

Forum's states that their patent is...

A method for applying security policies to data in a network, said method comprising the steps of: intercepting data being transferred across the network; determining that a security function to be performed can be offloaded for acceleration; utilizing a JAVA.RTM. Cryptographic Engine (JCE) to transparently offload the data; performing the security function in hardware, said hardware performing the steps of: entering a request in a JCE layer for a cryptographic function to be performed; invoking JAVA.RTM. Native Interface (JNI) hooks in a JNI layer to function as an interface to an operating system specific C programming language interface library; unpacking data from the intercepted data so that the unpacked data can be manipulated in the operating system specific programming language; and marshalling the unpacked data in a cryptographic messaging layer so that the unpacked data can be transformed to a standard format.

Whereas our patent is...

A computer-implemented method of implementing security for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages which can be exchanged between client and server programs, the method comprising: receiving a SOAP message; determining whether at least one security rule has been defined for the SOAP message, the at least one security rule being defined based on a security policy for exchanging SOAP messages between at least one client program and at least one server program, wherein the at least one security rule includes at least one decryption rule; and performing at least one security related operation on the SOAP message based on the at least one security rule when the determining determines that at least one security rule is associated with the SOAP message, wherein the performing of the at least one operation comprises: determining whether the SOAP message is encrypted, and decrypting the SOAP message based on one or more decryption keys which are associated with the at least one decryption rule.

Looks like ours deals with how policies are applied to SOAP messages, even when they're encrypted.

I want to congratulate Forum for being second to the patent game here... ours just beat theirs, being approved January 20th, 2009.

Of course, we're not new to the patent game. We've got a few around our unique runtime governance technology as well... it's why our competitors are constantly saying, "you know who you do business with" or "you don't want to have all that information in your display, it's too confusing." The method we use to discover services in a network is unique and they can't do it (while running in production all the time, on any protocol, and not affecting performance).

In case the two summaries above aren't enough to put you to sleep on the spot (I've found myself dozing off as I write this myself), below are links to the others. I believe there are also a patent or two pending on the Actional Team Server / Actional Diagnostic technology too.

Patent 5,732,270 (1998)
Patent 6,349,343 (2002)
Patent 7,330,889 (2008)

This last one is the real interesting stuff relative to Actional. The title is "Network Interaction Analysis Arrangement", and relates to the way we (and our partner Software AG) compete successfully against solutions from HP, SOA Software, and Amberpoint.

The abstract:

In a network through which service providing nodes are interconnected, one or more software elements at each service providing node process the network operations. A client interceptor coupled in an examine node to a selected software element intercepts transmissions from the software element to record transmission flow control information. A server interceptor coupled in the examine mode to the selected software element intercepts transmissions to the software element to record transmission flow control information. An administrative node of the network examines the transmission flow control information from the selected software elements to assess network operation.

And the top-level claim:

A computer network interconnecting a plurality of service providing nodes each including software elements for performing computer network tasks and an administrative node for monitoring the computer network tasks, at least one of the service providing nodes comprising: a plurality of software elements in an application layer of the service providing node for coupling to other software elements in the same application layer and in the application layers of other service providing nodes of the network to process operations of the network; an interceptor unit for each software element of the at least one service providing node, the interceptor unit being coupled to its software element in response to selection of the software element by the administrative node for intercepting transmissions in the application layer from the selected software element to other software elements in the same and different service providing nodes and for intercepting transmissions in the application layer to the selected software element from other software elements in the same and different service providing nodes wherein said interceptor unit further forms a record of information pertaining to the transmissions at the selected software element and each record of transmission pertaining information further comprises a chain correlation identifier to identify an operation of a selected software element in its performance of a network task and an interaction correlation identifier to identify an interaction of a selected software element with another software element; and a transfer unit responsive to a transfer command from the administrative node to the selected software element for transferring the record pertaining to transmission pertaining information from the interceptor unit to the administrative node, in order to monitor operations of network tasks.

Oracle buys Sun: Let the revolution begin

First, Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake."  Will Oracle buying Sun have a similar outcome?

If Oracle goes down one path, it could be a brilliant strategy.  Oracle was previously competing with two other enterprise software vendors: IBM and SAP.  Now, they only have one competitor: IBM.  Two vendors providing turnkey solutions: hardware, software, and services all rolled into one.  What's more, cloud computing is essentially a turnkey services business as well - so it positions Oracle to capture a huge slice of both traditional and cloud computing worlds.  Down this path, enterprises end up with the ultimate in flexibility: whether on-premise or cloud, powered by a common Java-based technology stack and hoards of consultants, the business needs rule the day.

On the other hand, if Oracle goes down the other path (taking Java, MySQL, and other Sun assets and clamping down on them), it risks alienating a large community of both vendors and customers.  Frankly, Oracle doesn't have a great reputation in this regard - so, even if they do everything right, people might still turn away because of (historically well justified) fear.  If this happens it could turn the continuous trickle of people moving from Java to other technologies (.NET, Ruby, PaaS, etc.) into a flood - a rebellion triggered by a ruthless but short sighted empire builder.  If this happens, the traditional enterprise software market as we know it could implode, to be replaced by fundamentally different technology base (almost certainly cloud native - can you say Google Apps?).

Which path do you think Oracle will take?

Conversation or Rant? LMK

As Dan mentioned earlier, Software AG have decided to OEM Progress Actional. This is good news for us, and we're quite happy that Software AG made the decision the way they have. I personally look forward to working closely with Software AG and helping to make the relationship a success.

Neil Macehiter @ MWD Advisors wrote a very thoughtful post on his take of Software AG's decision. Rather than rehash his post, and my thoughts, I'd just like to reference his blog, and let you know it's there. My comments and thoughts, somewhat impassioned (what else?), follow his post in the comments section.

Post a comment and give me constructive criticism if you've think I've gone over the line in talking about a competitor.

Actional's Strategic Partnership with Software AG

Today, Software AG announced the strategic OEM partnership between our two companies.  What makes this especially noteworthy is that, up until now, if someone wanted to buy full-lifecycle SOA governance, they only had two choices:

• Buy all the pieces, design and runtime, from one vendor (knowing that one or the other was weak - since no vendor had even a half decent offering on both sides of the fence).
• Buy market leading components - but have to buy them from different vendors

This partnership will allow customers to buy full-lifecycle SOA governance from one vendor, without having to compromise.

One other important note is that Actional's direct competitors have tried to create FUD in the market by claiming that Actional is tightly tied with Sonic.  Of course we do work well with Sonic, but a very large percentage of Actional customers use us with platforms such as BEA, TIBCO, IBM, Microsoft, JBoss, and others - no Sonic in sight. Our competitors certainly liked to paint a picture that Actional was "Sonic centric" even though this was far from the truth.

To have a successful SOA management and runtime governance offering:

• Your products need to be vendor neutral - working equally well with the SOA infrastructure of many vendors.
• As many more organizations are scaling up their SOA initiatives - building mission critical applications that are service oriented - SOA management can't cause your applications to slow down, or cause you to lose transactions.  It needs to be scalable and reliable.

These were two important factors in Software AG's selection, and this partnership clearly demonstrates Actional's leadership in these areas.

Supporting SOA Governance Monday

Whew. What a rough weekend.

I was listening to Condi talk on Friday with a sense of relief. The Russians had invaded Georgia and she brokered a cease-fire. I was worried about friends I have there, though, when I spoke to them they didn't seem concerned. I guess it wasn't as bad as they were showing on TV. That happens a lot.

I was glad my friends were OK, but more glad for the ceasefire. I think had the Russians cut off Jeb's retreat from Florida to Texas, George would have been forced to act to save his brother. A third front on this war on terror, and this one in our own backyard! I mean, it's bad enough we can't get a good cigar because of the Russians in Cuba, but if peaches became scarce because of the Russians in Georgia, I'd volunteer for the draft. I like peaches.

I was really getting stressed, until someone at Edward's told me the Russians attacked the other Georgia.

That's pretty scary, such a simple mistake. Good thing I wasn't the guy with my finger on the missiles. And, before you say that there's no way a commander with such important responsibility would make such a dumb mistake, think very carefully about how this country is run*.

Truth is, I knew which Georgia they were talking about. But, the whole weekend, I kept thinking how funny it would be to blog as if I didn't. There are only two Georgia's... or at least there are only two I know of, but I'm sure there are more. Driving to Vermont this weekend, I drove through Cairo, Malta, and Hague... yeah, we reuse words a lot. My favorite ambiguity though was the sign that said "New York 165 miles." You see, I was in NY when I saw that sign. I knew it meant NYC, because I had the right context (and a brain). But... it would be totally understandable if someone looked at that sign and cursed the idiot that put it there.

SOA What? Here's another word with too much ambiguity around it... Governance. If you think keeping track of two Georgia's is hard, imagine trying to keep track of all the meanings behind [SOA] Governance!

Last week, Dave Linthicum expressed his frustration with vendors that start by asking, "what do you mean by governance?" Well, what else can we do? It's such a morass right now. Frankly, I think most people hear governance and think registry / repository... but I'm not going down that rat-hole right now.

In my opinion, the word Governance is devoid of meaning due to overuse (as it relates to SOA). Dave, founder of Governance Monday, has a long standing belief that it's about People and Process as much as technology. I agree but... still believe that as software companies, when we talk about governance, it's a good bet we're talking about the software bit.

Another aspect of governance was blogged about by Lori MacVittie over at F5. She points to an interesting InformationWeek article about service mediation. (That article's a good read but I'll have to save my thoughts for another post! This one's already too long.) I believe intermediaries are an important part of a SOA infrastructure as Lori says... I think intermediaries belong at the border of the cloud, where a SOA is really a set of clouds-within-a-cloud. [Discovering how those clouds relate to each other and are used in real-time is the core Actional benefit. Email me if you want a copy of our Concepts Guide that describes this.] I probably differ in opinion from Lori though in believing that the intermediary design of a SOA can incorporate BOTH hardware and software intermediaries, without any sacrifice of performance and reliability. (We here at Progress don't sell/develop a hardware based intermediary solution but I do believe they are an important part of the "right" SOA architecture. Just because we don't sell one, doesn't mean they're not important.)

Dave also tweeted that Design Time Governance is dying (I don't know if it is or not but I sure wish it would so we could focus on what's important!), though Todd Biske thinks otherwise. Todd tweeted something very important. Todd's a big Design Time Governance proponent, but says "it depends upon your goals." That's a phrase we should all live by! Todd posted his latest governance post before Governance Monday, but it's still worth reading. Actually, I'm a big metaphor fan (I learn better and express myself better through metaphors) so I really like his post.

Wow, that's a lot of referential reading! Monday's a good day for that, there are generally lots of "status meetings" on Mondays during which we can multitask. But if you want "in" on the conversation, follow me on Twitter, and check out Dave, Lori, and Todd as well.

* I feel the need to clarify. My "jokes" actually not only don't reflect the political views of Progress, but they don't necessarily reflect my own either. I'm just trying to bring some humor to an otherwise dry topic.

The secret is out: We acquired Mindreef

Well, my intrepid investigative reporter friend, Jeff Schneider, broke the news.  We've acquired Mindreef.  You can never time these things perfectly, and we didn't want to have news of Mindreef get lost in all the noise around some of the other acquisition stories.  So, we had been planning to announce it a bit later.  Of course Jeff, never one to let go of a breaking story, couldn't hold off :-)

On the Actional side, we first started partnering with Mindreef back in 2003 or so (long before Actional was acquired by Progress).  One of the first things that attracted us to work with Mindreef was the way their products make working with XML and web services easy.  As Mindreef expanded their product line they added the ability for a team of SOA stakeholders to collaborate, working together to ensuring that services are delivered successfully - something that still separates Mindreef from any other SOA quality or validation product.

In the SOA space, there's often been a clear dividing line between products that focused on design time concerns and those that focused on runtime concerns. But, SOA isn't so clear cut.  When I've built a service that's in production, and you want to design a consumer for that service, is this design time or runtime?  What if I've built a consumer that's in production and you want to change your service, is this design time or runtime? Well, it's both really.  So why then do we have such a divide between design time and runtime SOA governance products?

By bringing together Mindreef and Actional we're doing what's only natural - removing the artificial dividing line between design time and runtime, addressing the complete SOA lifecycle with technologies that are leaders in both.

Welcome Iona!

As you've no doubt heard, Progress announced the acquisition of IONA yesterday.

The Actional team has been partnering with IONA since well before this acquisition business started.  It was actually a very good match because a large percentage of IONA's customers run mission critical applications - applications that typically not only have high volume of use, but which are composites of many different platforms and technologies... as most real world applications are.  In many cases, these are applications where revenue depends on the success of the business transactions.  This type of real-world application is something Actional excels at, so the partnership is a great fit and we've generated a significant amount of momentum together.

Of course what made the partnership really work, though, is that both of our teams worked really well together.  The team at IONA have been great to work with all along.  So, let me wish them all a warm welcome. I look forward to working with the IONA team when the acquisition is approved.  'Nuf said!

Never the twain shall meet, eh?

IONA CTO, Eric Newcomer, and I had to laugh when we recalled the panels we've sat on together and (somewhat pedantically) debated the merits of IONA Artix and Progress' Sonic. We shared the religion of distributed systems, alright, but we argued about them like we belonged to different sects. That's because a matter of principle—architectural principle—was at stake. In the highly-distributed SOA environment, what's the preferred approach: smart end-points or smart networks? Like all religious arguments, this one had a lot to do with up-bringing—and the particular tool we were both holding in our hand at the time.

Eric, coming from a CORBA heritage, had a natural affinity for the smart end-point approach, which IONA had successfully commercialized. On the other hand, I saw the problem through the prism of an enterprise messaging background and argued for smart networks—the solution Sonic had chosen to build. The schism, however, proved to be as nonsensical as the RPC vs. MOM religious wars of the early 90's. In our hearts I think we both felt that the argument was a bit contrived. We always knew that both models were valid—like a hammer and a screwdriver they are tools that address different needs. Neither replaces the other and they are rarely interchangeable. When you need the flexibility to put intelligence in the network (and can't or don’t want to change your endpoints), then the smart network approach is great. And, the converse is true too: when the network (or networks, for that matter) is a given, and I'm looking to service-enable a variety of endpoints, then the smart endpoint approach is perfect. The fly in the ointment all along was the decision we baked into our respective architectures at design-time.

Like a tattoo, you had better be sure you liked it—as CTOs, our mission was to defend it at all cost. But that's all changing now that new standards like Spring and OSGi give us the flexibility we need to defer those decisions to deployment time, where they always belonged. And thus a doorway is opened—a doorway to the best of both worlds!

SOA What? Bringing IONA and Progress together means that we can dispense with the pedantic debates and truly offer our customers the best of both approaches. It's a great time to be working in this industry, and fantastic to be joining forces with IONA. But, now what will Eric and I argue over? Well, there’s always emacs vs. vi!

By the way, if you haven't had a chance to hear what Eric Newcomer, CTO of IONA, has to say about the Progress acquisition of IONA,

The Power of the People

As I'm sure everyone is now aware, yesterday we announced that Progress is joining forces with IONA Technologies with a goal of strengthening our position as a leader in independent, standards-based, heterogeneous, distributed SOA infrastructure. The innovative approach to professional open source and strong adherence to standards in the IONA product set really gets a technology geek like me excited about the possibilities that this combination enables. If you are like me, and spend your leisure time digging into OSGi while thinking that the Spring Framework is the best thing to happen to Java since Hibernate (admittedly I try to have a life too), then you too may be salivating over the future possibilities. But I digress…

What I want to talk about is how impressed I am with all of the people that I have encountered at IONA throughout this process. Posts I have read over the course of the day are quick to point out the proximity of our US offices and our mutual 20+ year history in the software industry as similarities, but the alignment goes well beyond geography and highly adopted heritage platforms (the marketing guys have finally driven the word legacy out of my vocabulary ;-)). Rather, we have a remarkably similar way that we think about the problems that we solve for our customers and a passion for the technology and standards that we leverage in our mutual product lines. Technology and strategy discussions I have had with IONA employees (before the acquisition was even contemplated) have been lively, insightful, and very productive. Furthermore, IONA employees have a deep understanding of the requirements around creating mission-critical, high-performance, transactional systems. This pedigree is highly valued in the industry and a core tenet of all of the products that we release at Progress and IONA.

SOA What? Well beyond the product, standards, and open source opportunities that Progress+IONA represents, perhaps the most valuable asset that we are obtaining is the world-class team of technology leaders and innovators. I look forward to working with my new colleagues from IONA and welcome them to Progress.

The past will predict the future

As you have probably read in today's press and blogs, Progress is going to acquire IONA.  This is great news and I welcome my new colleagues from IONA.  But what does this mean to our combined customers?  While I am not going to directly comment on what the Progress and IONA products will look like going forward; I will review some of the past acquisitions to understand the benefits for everyone involved.

If you look at the Actional acquisition, you will see how these products have evolved over the last couple of years to not only stand on their own and compliment other vendors' stacks, but also how they have enhanced products like the Progress ESB.  The same also goes for products from Pantero, now DataXtend SI, where we support full life-cycle of canonical models and the transformations in and out to save our ESB customers many hours of work, but again also provide the same to the application server vendors out there to ensure that we never have to go into XSLT hell again.

As I said earlier I am not going to comment on combining roadmaps, etc., but you can see from the past that not only is Progress Software adding more capability to our SOA infrastructure portfolio by allowing us to help our customers solve larger and more complex problems, but we can equally play as well in combined vendor solutions.

Web 2.0 and RIAs is Driving SOA Middleware Growth

An interview with Gordon Van Huizen, Vice President, Products, at Progress Software

If if haven't had a chance to read the interview by Jeremy Geelan, Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events, take a moment to read it.

Middleware is one of the fastest growing segments of the software industry today because of SOA. Gordon talks about why and how he believes that the increased interest in Web 2.0 and rich Internet applications (RIA) will further accelerate this growth. He also explains what he believes are the current barriers to SOA adoption and that IT infrastructures need to move toward normalization, as opposed to homogenization, and that the adoption of SOA infrastructure such as enterprise service bus (ESB) and SOA management will help normalize infrastructure interactions with backend systems.

Gordon also talks about the Progress Software approach and how he believes 2008 will be the "year of the events" and that events are the decoupling agent in modern enterprise computing architectures and are as important as services and processes.

The sky is falling (for SOA)

There's been a lot of discussion recently on how the upcoming recession will impact SOA. My rule of thumb is that in good times businesses care about agility while in bad times they care about efficiency.  So, if you want your SOA initiative to survive the recession, you better deliver (not talk about) efficiency and cost savings.

It's only two months ago that Dave Linthicum gave me a lot of flack when I criticized his statement to (and I quote) "resist the temptation to redirect resources toward tactical business needs."

However, recently Dave changed his tune when he said, "the best approach is to focus on short term objectives that are directly related to the generation of revenue."  Dave, it's good to see you're listening... even though it took a while :-)

While commenting more on Dave's flip-flopping would be rubbing salt in the wound, I think the advice I gave in the series of responses (1, 2, 3, 4) to Dave's original post are still appropriate as we enter the upcoming recession.

The Legacy of BEA

A lot has been said about this acquisition over the last few months, though I don't know why anyone doubted Oracle would acquire BEA. What Larry wants, Larry gets.

But, now that it's official, overnight Oracle has created a new product category: Legacy SOA Infrastructure.

Like it or not, it would be bad business for Oracle to have two app servers, two ESBs, two process engines, etc. So, in each category, Oracle are going to have to pick one to go forward.  Because of this, customers that made a different choice will end up with legacy SOA infrastructure products that they will have to deal with.

Of course, the $19.375 question (for each product category) is "which one wins?"

The Buzz Is Getting Louder!

It's been a good month, and I thought I'd take a post to celebrate AND educate. This post's a bit more sales-y than usual, don't say I didn't warn you.

Though, I swear that the stories I tell here are true, I do try to keep these posts pretty light hearted. At the same time, I share my experiences. At least those I think we can all learn from. I hope the feel is that you realize I enjoy what I do and that I've got some good experience to share...

I know, SOA What? Right, well, you might notice I got to that question quite early in this post!

A lot of people who you wouldn't think have given us some recognition lately...

The US Department of Commerce. Yep, the USPTO has awarded Actional a patent on our discovery and dependency tracking technology (among other things). I can't think of a greater recognition of the innovation upon which our product is built. Actional is not something that evolved out of a "good idea by a few tools developers while working at a big company." Actional's product is well thought out for scalability, performance, and unique value to complement existing products on the market.

And, Forrester agrees with me. Forrester Wave Report ranks Actional Web services and SOA management solutions #1 in Core SOA Management. Look at those charts baby!!! Way and above any other solution out there. And, I'll tell you - even though we're number 1, I still think most people "miss the point." If you've got a SOA project, why not download our SOA Operations offering and try it? You won't believe your eyes.

Progress' HR Department. Yep, even they've taken notice. In spite of the beatings, I've managed to hang on for five whole years. A record, and more importantly, a testament to the team (of which I am a junior member!). A team that has stuck together through a divestiture (adapter business to iWay), a merger (with WestBridge Technologies), and an acquisition. I had never thought about it, until the other day when Dan Foody mentioned that we haven't lost a single Actional engineer since the acquisition. How's that for success? And, obviously it shows in the quality and consistency of our product as recently recognized by both the USPTO and Forrester. Oh yeah, and by customers. Join the fun...

PSDN has improved a lot recently too. If you've never checked it out, why don't you? There's some awesome content there, including an interview with yours truly (you're going to have to register/login, but it's not info we use for sales - so no annoying sales calls, promise). I know you can't get enough of me... so why not try me on your ipod while driving?

soa management

Progress Sonic Extends Lead in Distributed SOA

Today, Progress Software announced the release of Progress® Sonic™ Deployment Manager (SDM). The Sonic Deployment Manager is an installation and configuration tool that helps project teams streamline incremental development and rollout of large-scale Sonic product deployments. By automating the installation of Sonic products (including Sonic ESB and SonicMQ) and tailoring the configuration to suit each host, Sonic Deployment Manager reduces the time and cost of project development, delivery and maintenance.

Two of the key use cases for the Sonic Deployment Manager product are lifecycle management and large scale deployments. In both of these use cases SDM delivers on the critical need to have consistent, repeatable deployments both between lifecycle stages and also across a widely distributed environment. Unique to SDM is its ability to create a completely reproducible package of all components and configurations of a given deployment instance. This capability allows precise rollback and re-creation of any given environment, enabling configuration management, auditing and regulatory compliance.

Learn more about the SDM >
Read the Press Release >
See What's New in Sonic ESB 7.5 >

Stop picking on Microsoft!

Or rather, pick on them, but save some energy for others committing the same SOA infrastructure crimes.

A lot of commotion around Microsoft "missing the SOA boat" in the blogsphere over the last couple of days. I find it interesting on a number of levels.

Why only pick on Microsoft? Are they the only ones who commandeer "the market" to their own advantage? Why isn't anyone beating up Oracle or SAP? TIBCO or IBM or BEA? I think they're all "just taking advantage of their captive market to convince them that SOA is all about [their own] platforms and not about architectural advantage" as Dave Rosenberg over at MuleSource says about Microsoft.

Beyond the SOA Tipping Point: Heat? Light?

In the technology markets I have been working in for the past 20 years, July and August are typically slow.  The promotion calendar drops back a few notches, Europe takes a holiday, and in general life is restored however briefly to a more manageable pace and rate of change. Not so this summer. 

Sock Puppetry

According to a New York Times article, The Hand That Controls the Sock Puppet Could Get Slapped, sock puppeting is "the act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one’s self, allies or company."

Just this past weekend, in fact, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an inquiry into the sock-puppetry of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who posted shamelessly under a pseudonym to boost Whole Foods and bash Wild Oats – their only relevant competitor and now the target of acquisition – by Whole Foods.

Pass the Cheez Whiz®.

Sadly, this renders unctuous a medium once filled with promise. But we mustn't toss the baby out with the bathwater. Nor must we abandon the dream that new media enable even a small, comparatively quiet voice to soar when it speaks the truth. In technology, smaller companies like Progress can aggressively challenge the giants like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft – because a focused message about disruptive innovation can reach out and grab the attention of even the giants’ customers.

Don't stoop to Mackey's and Whole Foods' practices. Speak. Sign your own name. But speak.

Good products aren't based on which company's the loudest, or how many items are checked off on the features list for that matter. Providing the best solution to a particular problem will win the day. No new media necessary for that message.

SOA What? Sharpen focus on the business problem you face and are trying to address. Buy the solution you need to solve that problem. Don't buy a bunch of extras you don't need because they're part of the package. They may sound like a good deal but the best deal is the one that meets your needs today.

Business imitates baseball *

If you follow Major League Baseball, you know that below the surface of the run-of-the-mill baseball "news" is the story regarding Barry Bonds' pursuit of Henry Aaron's career home run record.  As I write this blog post, Bonds has five home runs between him and outright leadership in this important category.

The discussion around the validity of Bonds' achievement is rich and emotional.  Fans in ballparks where Bonds plays bring poster boards with large asterisks on them, indicating support for a broadly held view that under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs (steroids and the like), this and other achievements in various categories should be considered dubious.

Sometimes business imitates baseball.  In recent market share research, a funny thing happened.  Like athletes on performance-enhancing drugs, vendors who were nowhere in the pursuit of leadership and market share in the Enterprise Service Bus category are now share leaders.  From zero in 2004 to 20+ percent market share in 2006.  Further evidence of how performance has been enhanced: the share positions of IBM, Oracle, TIBCO and BEA in 2005 suddenly changed -- that's right, the results for 2005 also went from zero to 20+ percent share -- during 2006!!  Miraculous!!  *******

SOA What? Sure, analyst firms like Gartner group can change their definitions and as a result numbers can shift.  But just like baseball fans need to look closely at Bonds' achievement and assess its relevance when considering the conditions under which it was achieved, so should enterprise infrastructure buyers look closely at the claims the bulked-up software giants are making.  You know the SOA opportunity is great when it causes this kind of behavior on the part of very large industry players.  Like baseball purists, SOA infrastructure purists need to stick to their principles.