The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/all/20101004140223/http://smart421.wordpress.com/

Smart421 are one of the sponsors for an O2 charity golf event today on the new course at Burhill. Here’s my four at the tastefully decorated Smart421 9th hole – Adam Murphy from Global Knowledge, Derek McManus from O2, and David Signorelli from Sentaca.

The motley crew...

An update – During the day we collectively raised over £22,000 for O2′s Think Big charity. It was great to be part of an event that took us out of our day jobs for for the benefit of others. Shame about my golf though…although I can say that I didn’t come last. Not quite…

logo awsJeff Barr has posted some info here on the AWS blog which provides links to other AWS pages describing how some core Oracle Applications products are now certified and supported on Amazon EC2, including eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and Fusion Middleware. It feels like Oracle have joined the party at last, and not before time. The key barriers to sticking Oracle Applications on AWS before were that:

  • You had to create/customise/maintain your own AMIs (a hassle but doable)
  • More importantly, when you ring Oracle with a support issue, they might not play ball

The removal of the second barrier is the key thing. Some barriers still exist – customers still have to be happy with the data security aspects of public IaaS hosting, so that’s still a barrier, maybe mainly an emotional rather than real one. Also, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) deployments are not currently supported – so that’ll put most enterprises off for now I’d have thought though.

It’s been almost exactly a year since Larry Ellison’s infamous rant against cloud computing. And clearly a year is a long time in the world of cloud computing…

DataPowerStackedIf you are interested in finding out about best practices and what is involved in managing an IBM WebSphere DataPower deployment, day in, day out, then my colleague Alan Philpott will be presenting on this subject at the WebSphere User Group meeting in Edinburgh on Tuesday 28th September. For details of the venue etc, see here.

Alan has spent the last 18 months industrialising a huge business-critical DataPower estate, and will be using Subversion etc to walk through some examples & lessons learned, what kind if support processes you need in place etc.

The head of our WebSphere practice, David Taylor, will also be in attendance – manning the stand. Quiz him about his experiences using Amazon Web Services (AWS) – he’ll love it.

Continuing on from my previous post….the second session I attended at Cloudforce 2010 covered Force.com. Being familiar with the PaaS offering already, I was more interested in drilling into some of the uses to which it was being put, pros/cons etc.

The sweet spot for Force.com was described as relational data “heavy”, process centric applications. This includes the classic Lotus Notes app replacement problem that many organisations suffer from, and also replacement for (typically business-built) Excel and Access applications. Afterwards I had a chat with one of the presenters and asked the obvious counter question – for what would it not be a good fit? The sour spot (!?) for Force.com would be an application that has very few users, performs heavy computational processing and manipulates large unstructured data (PDFs, images etc). For these latter requirements you are better going down the AWS EC2/S3-style IaaS route, although potentially Force.com could still be used for any relational data management aspects and combined with AWS services (for example). I find the idea of this ‘architectural mashup’ (my words, not theirs) quite appealing – it feels like the next logical evolutionary step after “integration at the glass”, but at the same time it also feels like the increase in moving parts and dependencies in your architecture is heading in the wrong direction, i.e. more complex.

From a competitive positioning point of view, what was interesting was that Salesforce.com focused their arguments on tackling Java and .NET development, rather than discussing how they were or were not better than other PaaS providers – so to a large extent they feel they are still in the “educating the market” phase and of course as market leaders I guess they don’t feel they need to defend their offering against more direct competitors. Quite a bit of time was spent discussing industry analysis reports comparing development speed and cost between Force.com and Java/.NET – which really reminded me of the same debates between Java and .NET in years gone by. The claim made was that in general Force.com is 5x faster, and half the cost. The flip side of that argument was not really discussed, i.e. as Force.com abstracts you away more from the underlying code (80% of the work is supposed to be “point and click”) then there must be some inherent restrictions that you could avoid in Java/.NET – it’s the classic 3GL vs 4GL debate all over again but with a cloud deployment model thrown in. My conclusion is use the right tool for the right job, it’s not either/or, and Salesforce.com’s answer would be to mix and match.

Finally, I discussed lock-in and governance concerns with the presenter afterwards. Salesforce.com are evolving and enhancing their product offerings at an amazing rate and clearly expanding out to target more and more of the enterprise IT footprint. As the post-Internet world continues to centre around fewer and fewer mega-brands, there has to be a concern with committing more and more of your IT estate to any one vendor. In addition, I have real concerns about the governance of internal Force.co implementations. Whilst there is no reason that good development lifecycle processes cannot be applied to a Force.co development, the whole point is that more of the “point and click” can be performed by users closer to the business etc, and so organisations will need to be very vigilant to prevent utter change management chaos occurring, e.g. changes to apps on the fly, redundant/duplicate data being created and never tidied up etc. Are we at the new dawn of a fresh wave of data quality and integration nightmares? I regularly see how difficult our customer’s find it to control change in “classic” software developments on mainframes etc, with the stronger more vocal change agents causing the introduction of architecturally suspect changes due to insufficient or ineffective governance controls. The lowered barriers to entry from a PaaS offering such as Force.co is like pouring petrol on this fire I suspect. We’ll see if I’m right…although I accept that predicting train wrecks in the software development world is not exactly a genius insight!

Mark Benioff?Yesterday I attended Cloudforce 2010: London – which had been moved from Tuesday to Wednesday to avoid the tube strike. This meant I could only make it for two of the afternoon sessions due to a prior customer engagement, and I must admit when I got there about 2pm I was a little bit grumpy about it all. I’d missed the Mark Benioff keynote earlier in the day, but all was not lost as I caught up with him later on as he walked around the exhibition – see the photo attached. At least I think it was him…

I’ve been a lazy blogger recently due to some client pressures, so I just wanted to capture some of the key interesting points from the two sessions I attended about Chatter and Force.com – not so much about the technologies themselves but more about what they mean for the industry.

Having heard about Chatter at a previous industry cloud event when it was in beta, I must admit to seeing it as a bit of “fluff” at the time – as it was positioned as “Facebook for the enterprise”. Having now had some demos, a few things struck me. First of all, this is really an attempt by Salesforce.com to break out of existing limited user communities in a single customer. If an organisation with 10,000 employees only has 1,000 Salesforce.com seats (e.g. access is given to Sales, Marketing and Customer Services only), then Chatter is the thin end of the wedge to grow the number of licensed seats – because if the power is that everyone can collaborate, then only having 10% of your organisation able to contribute doesn’t make much sense. They do offer a Chatter-only license model also to allow greater organisational coverage, and it’ll be interesting to see what the take-up of this model is.

Secondly, for existing Salesforce.com seats, there is no additional license cost, which is a bit of genius to support my first point. In fact, it is heading towards being just part of the base functionality of the platform and enabled by default in the future it seems, so in some ways if it had been part of the platform all along there would have been less fanfare about it.

Also, it struck me that Chatter is a potential SharePoint competitor (and similar products). I felt there was a significant overlap in their functional footprints – with either approach you can log personal info/activity and also track changes on objects – be they people, documents, discussion groups etc – and receive email alerts or see a summary on a web page. But with SharePoint this requires some effort to configure – putting an alerts summary widget on your home page for example. With Salesforce.com this is all “out of the box” which may be great or annoying depending on your point of view. But as Chatter is tightly integrated with the business process that the user is following, e.g. working on a sales opportunity, it is natural to want to track its progress – whereas in SharePoint this is all possible but again would require some configuration effort, e.g. to build a custom sales workflow process. It is a bit of an unfair comparison in some ways as they are different products, but it made we wonder how Chatter was viewed in Redmond.

And finally, whilst both the customer’s who spoke on stage said that this was not a problem for their deployments, I can see that in some organisations the “noise” generated by Chatter would be really annoying and distracting. I do not agree with the presenter’s view that the “chattiest” person is therefore the most productive and should be recognised as such in an organisation. We live in an increasingly interrupt-driven world and it is very easy to suffer from productivity sinks and this can be another one. I guess it is just a tool and like all tools, they need to be used appropriately.

Kelly Slater

Kelly Slater

Remember, the IT industry is rife with hype and talks of the next big thing. Most fads come and go. Few stick, fewer live on. Why then should Cloud Computing be any different?

Well, looking at historic examples of technical innovation crossing into the mainstream, three key characteristics are clear:  multiple applications [for the technology], falling price and universal availability (Freeman and Soete, 1997, p.63). Cloud computing certainly possesses all three. This might mean that Cloud is positioned favourably to make significant headway.

Successive waves of technical innovation, culminating in what we are enjoying in the present information and communication age, could be the very springboard for the next successive wave. Those who are conversant with industrial economics will recognise these successive industrial revolutions as Long Waves, or Kondratieffs (Freeman and Soete, 1997, pp. 65-70; Schumpeter, 1939, p. 164, p. 397; Landes, 1969, p. 233).

Visionaries in the computing sector like to preach step-change innovation, transformation and new ways of working. Whether Cloud Computing proves transformative remains to be seen. What we do know is that IBM and Microsoft have already thrown their hats in the ring on Cloud Computing. Customers loyal to those vendors’ technologies are likely to follow. Others are perhaps less radical, preferring hybrid models or blended solutions based on a mix of the ‘old’ [on-premise] and the new [Cloud]. Still others have gone on record as wanting nothing to do with the hype of Cloud, most notably and surprisingly Mr. Larry Ellison, the charismatic chief executive of Oracle with his now infamous anti-cloud rant (McLaughlin, 2008; Saor, 2008; Techpulse360, 2009).

Information security continues to be the key barrier, and not just with the early adopters. Countless times we encounter the valid objection “where exactly is my data?” and the response “it’s in the cloud” frankly doesn’t resonate. No surprise then that they walk away and back to on-premise exclusively. No blame, no shame. The IT industry really must find a better way to articulate the benefits and the drawbacks of Cloud Computing and what it might mean for organisations of all sizes and all sensitivities towards security issues.

That’s what we’ve been doing. Progress has been good but frankly we’ve not gone out with all guns blazing because we haven’t had all the answers. We agree in part with Mr. Ellison, insofar as you can’t gamble a good reputation on fluffy notions with no substance, just because it’s the latest fad and you want to be ‘seen’ to be in with the ‘in’ crowd.  Yet, we can now see the case in favour of Cloud is indisputable and not to be ignored.

Cloud is a serious contender, not just with small and medium size businesses but also with large enterprises and complex organisations. And if Cloud is really to be the innovation that drives the sixth Kondratieff wave, then it’s to those enterprises we feel we must now turn our attentions on meeting their objectives with relevant Cloud-based solutions where appropriate as part of their enterprise architecture.

One could argue, perhaps using an analogy from sports such as sea surfing, that one wave necessarily will follow another. In other words, each wave matters little: if you miss this wave don’t worry because another will be along in a minute. Whilst this may be true, accomplished experts such as Kelly Slater, nine times ASP world champion, know to pick their wave carefully because being on the right one is often the difference between beating the competition, and not winning at all. 

References

Association of Surfing Professionals (2010) [Online]. Available at <http://www.aspworldtour.com/> [accessed 28 Aug 2010].

Farber, D. (2008) ‘Oracle’s Ellison nails cloud computing’ CNET News. 26 September. [Online]. Available at <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-10052188-80.html> [accessed 28 August 2010].

Freeman, C. and Soete, L. (2000) Economics of industrial innovation. 3rd edn. London: Continuum.

Kelly Slater Official Site (2010) [Online]. Available at <http://www.kellyslater.com/> [accessed 28 Aug 2010].

‘Kondratiev wave’ (2010) Wikipedia. Available at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave > [accessed 29 August 2010].

Landes, D. S. (1969) The Unbound Prometheus: Technological change and industrial development in Western Europe from 1750 to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McLaughlin, K. (2008) ‘Larry Ellison Is Sick Of ‘Cloud Computing’ Hype’ CRN. 26 September. [Online]. Available at <http://www.crn.com/blogs-op-ed/the-channel-wire/210604266/larry-ellison-is-sick-of-cloud-computing-hype.htm> [accessed 28 August 2010].

Saor, G. (2008) ‘Why Larry hates the Cloud , and my data trinity’ Gobán Saor’s blog. 04 October. Available at <http://blog.gobansaor.com/category/cloud/> [accessed 28 August 2010].

Schumpeter, J. A. (1939) Business Cycles: A theoretical, historical, and statistical analysis of the capitalist process. (2 vols.) London: McGraw-Hill.

Techpulse360 (2009) Why Larry Ellison hates Cloud computing. Available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14o> [accessed 28 August 2010].

Whiting, R. (2008) ‘Oracle’s Cloud Computing Strategy Gets Clearer’ CRN. 23 September. [Online] Available at <http://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/210603480/oracles-cloud-computing-strategy-gets-clearer.htm> [accessed 28 August 2010].

Photo:  Image used sourced from http://www.prosurfing.com

I had my first experience of the WebSphere Integration User Group at IBM

IBM Hursley

Hursley on the 29th June 2010 (despite the best efforts of the traffic on the M25 trying to thwart my plans) with another colleague from Smart421. The event was held in the original house at Hursley which is amazing venue and very impressive, regardless of the number of times I have visited the site before.

After loading up on coffee after the early start and to calm the nerves from the drive in and then a brief chance to network with the many other people attending the event from a variety of companies, such as Visa, BSkyB, UBS, RBS, Lloyds Banking Group, JP Morgan to name but a few, it was straight down to business with the key note speech “WebSphere Technologies in a Smarter Planet” delivered by Kevin Turner (who was quite a captivating speaker). The subject itself touched on how IBM are trying to align the WebSphere product suite with the what they see to be future for a Smarter plant were we are more interconnected, instrumented and intelligent. This was linked to the developments that has been made to the WebSphere products such as enhancements of Low Latency Messaging (LLM – targeting trading platforms using multicast as the underlying technology) and MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT), plus the strategic acquisitions that IBM have made such as Cast Iron, CoreMetrics, Lombardi and iLog.

This was then quickly followed by “Scenarios for Message and Event Monitoring from an Architectural perspective” and “Message and Event monitoring implementation and demonstration”. Richard White was the presenter, someone who worked with some of us “Smarties” at Marsh a few years back. The presentation was very good, and gave some real insight into reaping more rewards from Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). In this day and age most of the applications we deal with are integrated with many different platforms, but most BAM is focussed on specific applications (so it’s not really BAM, more …er… AM J)”, whereas looking at a greater scope can improve the usefulness of the monitoring as having too low level monitoring can hide the real issues. He also touched on thinking about the event models and what information we want to get better return on investment from our BAM and key points to consider are:

  • Summarisation – reduce the BAM traffic
  • Correlation – construct high value information from disparate events
  • Temporal – Present the events in an expected order
  • Interpretation – conversion of domain knowledge to a canonical representation

To be fair a lot of this is what we already know but is something that often takes a back seat and can be a last minute consideration, but adds real benefit to business for supporting their applications, maximising their potential and achieving what they are capable of. BAM is definitely becoming an increasingly higher priority to business, especially in these times of austerity as by watching our processes and systems activity, small tweaks can bring huge returns on efficiency and even profit!!!

The afternoon sessions were equally as good with two sessions covering, “WebSphere Lombardi Edition” and “Solutions to Enabling business to manage Business Rules within your ESB” which I will write a separate blog about shortly…

…is governance of it.

Why is that? Well…

  • It’s where the organisational tensions come out – where the “rubber hits the road” of time scale and functional/non-functional compromises, i.e. normal ‘change’ life-cycle tensions
  • The main value is long term not short term (there are tactical opportunities though)
  • The value is opaque also, and difficult to define. We know it’s the right thing to do, but it’s tricky to keep that in mind when your latest project “pants are on fire”. Partially it is the opportunity cost of not making mistakes and so it intangible (i.e. when it is working well it might feel like you don’t need it and it adds little value)
  • It’s a cost centre, so easily attacked when there is a budget challenge, i.e. you need new skills/teams to deliver and manage that ESB, perform governance, service definitions, canonical model, transforms etc
  • SOA tends to be attached to one or two evangelists in an organisation, so when they move on or change role it can wither on the vine
  • It’s dull – not sexy. Organisations lose interest in governance.

It’s all about sustainability really…and the vibrancy of the governance process is a good leading indicator of the health of SOA in your organisation…so the success or otherwise of SOA in an organisation is intimately linked with the health of the processes driving business strategy, EA, etc.

I also attended the IBM Impact 2010 event, but did not go to quite the same talks as Paul Russel. I have not got around to making a few notes until now, which for once is not a bad thing, as it has given me the opportunity to see how IBM have followed up since the event. For one thing they have made a quite comprehensive set of slide sets available for download here. I shall no doubt bone up on a couple of the sessions that I was interested in, but could not make, as I could not be in two places at one time.

Although the event centred on the WebSphere product set, it was different in flavour to the WebSphere User Group, and the WebSphere Integration User Group events in that it was explicitly targeting IT decision makers (architects and upwards), whereas the user groups – apart from being independant – tend to target the people involved in the implementation a bit more.

- As a quick aside, I notice that the WebSphere User Group website has had a bit of a refresh recently, to include at least some downloads from its March event, if not the information about its September event in Edinburgh this year – encouraging news after the hiatus resulting from leadership changes for the user group.

Back at the Impact event, there were separate streams for business areas (smarter work in Financial Services and Retail respectively), as well as the usual streams that are more centred on technology.

The financial services stream kicked off with a very intersting presentation by Nigel Solkhon, which provided a really interesting view of the business environment around banking, especially post credit crunch. For example, if you look at the fourth slide of his presentation, there is a graph of various banks’ loan/deposit ratios, andwhat happened next. 

Richard Brown did an interesting presentation on the use of WebSphere business monitor to instrument an existing technical process that was working inconsistently before – and still derive value in the form of both reduced errors/inconsistencies and then using the monitoring to document the ‘real’ business process – instead of what people think was happening.

I did also attend a session on ’solving the business case challenge’ by Andy Martin. I never knew that there were experts within IBM whose main job is helping clients come up with a business case, especially for horizontal investmnts (which are often a challenge to IT shops in large organisations) this could provide value. I think that it is a resource that we could/should follow up on. 

According to the blurb on the Impact microsite: ‘The first [my emphasis] UK Impact 2010 was a resounding success’, which leads me to think that there will be more. I shall be recommending my practice members to attend, as it is a useful and informative event.

It’s been a while since Oracle’s spending spree – including Sun and BEA – something that i’m still in shock about.  To get some clarity on the SOA offerings from Oracle a colleague and I recently attended an Oracle partner day in Reading. As the day was ran by 2 presales guys we got an interesting incite into what they were picking out as the differentiators to the other main player IBM – some of their opinions are reflected below – all of which i take with a pinch of salt.

Fusion Middleware

Oracle Fusion Overview

After everybody nodded to the question “does everybody know what SOA is?” the instructors continued on to tell us about SOA for a couple of hours. Nevertheless there was an interesting slide in this period with the average project cost and staff size for SOA projects; Basically, the message was ‘too big’ and doomed and ‘too small’ and it’ll just fade away. Also, they noted that the audience and the questions asked were testament to how the market has matured: their presentations have moved more from ‘how it works’ to ‘how to roll it out and support it’.

One contradiction I noted was how often they talked about the importance of interoperability and the use of industry standards but at the same time were really playing up how well integrated the Oracle SOA Suite 11g is. Perhaps this itself isn’t a contradiction – it’s more the incongruity of vendors on the one hand sell you the standardisation but at the same time tut-tut and teeth-sucking at the idea of using open source in some instances.

From a product perspective the day was a really useful insight in to how the suite has evolved and into what’s new and exciting about Oracle SOA Suite 11g (r1 patchset 2 – the 3rd big release in a year). Here are some specific notes I made which may or may not make sense:

  • No prizes that the winner in the application server shoot out between Oracle App Server and WebLogic was… WLS. The current version of SOA Suite won’t support running on WebSphere or JBOSS AS but this is on the roadmap.
  • One important piece of consolidation with the release is that SOA Suite and Oracle Service Bus can now run on the same application server platform (previously in 10G you needed different versions/instances).
  • Aqualogic ESB is called Oracle Service Bus (OSB) and now fulfils the ESB function. The product formerly known as Oracle ESB is actually still part of the product set – but is called Mediator. There is clearly some overlap between the products but mediator should be used only for the basic routing and transformation tasks.
  • BPM Suite for 11g is the completely re-written Aqualogic BPM which is for business modelling, supplied as part of the Dev Suite and includes some coding ability and allowing closed loop development (BPM is not as powerful or feature rich as the BPA Suite and not intended as a competitive product). The BPA Suite is pure modelling.
  • BPA Suite is targeted at analysts and contains 3 licensed modules of the ARIS product from IDS Scheer. The message was clearly made that Oracle don’t feel it is their business to create business process design software. I think this was a poke at IBM.. who recently bought Lombardi. BPA is much cheaper then the pureplays, example he gave was Pega PRPC but delivers on the promise of being able to integrate this rather then run it is as a homogeneous blob.
  • List of what’s included in SOA suite: OSB, Adapters, B2B, BPEL, BAM, EM, WSM, Service Reg, JDeveloper, CEP. –maybe missed a couple – all running on top of WebLogic with AQ/JMS and JRockit
  • BPM, BPA Suite and Enterprise Repository (ER) are licensed separately, the later under the ‘governance suite’. The ER assists governance from an assets perspective and provides the repository to store all artefacts.
  • The process server now supports BPMN 2.0 as well as the existing BPEL. There is an aim to provde BPMN round-tripping
  • Oracle have invested a lot in the adapters – making them all JCA compliant again (BEA had focussed on making them fast and not standardised). Lots of them, and there are lot’s of partners providing even more (Attunity and iWay were mentioned)
  • Event Driven Architecture  aka Event Delivery Network is JMS based of course, thankfully on weblogic JMS and not Oracle AQ. Apparently, you can use another JMS provider if you want, there is a JMS bridge (though I’m not sure that is really the accurate answer to my question)
  • The B2B product is really just an endpoint and not B2B network provider software
  • Oracle business rules (OBR) is a basic product – again the distinction was drawn out between IBM buying ILOG JRules and the OBR. No desire to create BPMS software which they say can hide implicit process within complex business rule structures. However, they have added handling for the basics of decision tables. OBR is integrated into JDeveloper.
  • Oracle policy admin (OPA) provides a sophisticated tool for managing your internal policy related data, e.g. VAT.
  • Application Integration Architecture (AIA) are all about making the Oracle Applications harmonious with the SOA suite and providing reference and process integration packs (PIP) are about providing standard processes across these applications.. rather then developing your own ‘order to pay’. Another distinction was drawn to IBM – who “don’t do applications”. Although predominantly Oracle Applications currently, the architecture is intended to support any cross application integration (e.g. connectivity to SAP http://www.oracle.com/applications/aia-plm-to-sap-erp-data-sheet.pdf). A list of the currently released PIP is at http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/application-integration-architecture/054232.html
  • JDeveloper is the development tool and is very well integrated and includes Unit Test Framework in 10.1.3.

As I said before – if you have noticed the Oracle instructor references to IBM above – clearly the competition is fierce between the 2 application integration stacks. A couple of other points were made which I regurgitate for the reader to make up their own minds: IBM products aren’t well integrated like the Oracle suite now is, and rational are holding back BPMN development within the System Architect tool.

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