SOA filling the Gaps

After lecturing on SOA  concepts, Architecture and Technology, I present Case Studies . While presenting Case Studies , I ask my students: "Why many Case Studies and Success Stories are from the Telco industry?"  Usually they do not provide a good answer to the good question. It is a good question because the answer is based upon Business dimension, Technology dimension and the relationship between the two dimensions.  Why SOA implementation is necessary for Traditional Telco Service Companies? For many years, Traditional Telco companies revenues were based upon telephone calls billing. In USA Bell Labs was split to Baby Bells. In other countries these companies were Monopolies or Duopolies .   Due to lack of competition, their revenues were high. When Voice over IP matured they found a lot cheaper competition such as Skype .  When someone traveled to other countries, he called his family in his home country. The Telco service providers earn...

Few months ago I wrote a post titled:  Information Technology: Are you out of business if your age is above 50? If you will read a post in Koshka's Blog titled:   Recession kills! Literally!  , you may find that in some cases the result of Ageism could be more fatal than unemployment. N.B 50 is just a number describing the age of people, who are no longer young. In this tragic case, as well in other Ageism based unemployment, it is above 40 and not above 50. 

In previous posts I described Customers Types such as: The Customer Who Knows Everything , The Self-Deprecating , The Captive , The  Paralyzed Analyzer ,  The Good , The Bad and  The Ugly . In this post I am going to describe The Social Customer. The Social Customer is not necessarily a heavy user of Facebook , Twitter or Linkedin . He is deeply involved in the Professional Community.  He knows exactly what his colleagues are doing.  His decisions are based on popularity: He will do exactly what the majority of his Professional Community members do. His decision is based on localization of the saying: "One Billion Chinese People Can't be Wrong". For example, if he will have to select a Software Product, he will select the one which the biggest number of organizations decided to buy and implement. What are the advantages of Social Customer Approach? 1. Sometimes not only billion Chinese are not wrong. Million Israelis or ten millions Americans...

I  wrote many posts about Vendors Survival. In most cases it is more interesting to write about leading vendors and not about Vendors that for surely will not Survive.  So I wrote about: Apple , Google , Microsoft , HP , EMC , Software AG , Nokia etc.  All these companies are vulnerable, so their is probability that they will not survive in 2023 (Nokia will not Survive).  I think that the probability is low (except Nokia). However, it is higher then zero and the probability that one company will survive, could differ from the probability that another company will survive. I thought of writing about Facebook as well. I did not do it till now due to lack of knowledge about the company and lack of information about the Company's Culture. Today I read an article by Vivek Badhwa. Its title is: Facebook is Doomed . Badhwa was asked to write an article comparing Google and Facebook.   His conclusion is that Facebook is doomed unless it will acquire anothe...

Shadow IT is growing and growing. In this post I explain what Shadow IT is and how it is related to the Business-IT Gap.  What is Shadow IT? Shadow IT is Information Technology   Applications , Systems and Infrastructure, which are developed and/or used without decisions and without approval of the Enterprise Management Team and the CIO .  Sometimes the Enterprise Management don't even know that these "Shadows" are executed as part of the Enterprise Information Technology. Shadow IT Trends and Directions Shadow IT is almost as old as Information Technology. When I worked on Y2K Bug , IT assets mapping was a necessary step.  We discovered Shadow IT applications such as Microsoft Excel applications, Reports using orphan tools (The company which built the tool was out of Business), Microsoft Access Applications and Data (The End User who developed them was no longer an employee of that Enterprise) etc.  If you read Alex Salazar's article: A little L...

This post is the last of trilogy of posts named after Sergo Leone 's movie The Good The Bad and The Ugly . In previous posts I described The Good Customer and The Bad Customer I start by describing the challenges of a Freelance Consultant, before dwelling on The Ugly Customer. You will soon discover that the two topics are related.  The World of a Freelance Consultant I refer to a Consultant with no Long Term full time employing customer. Unlike a Salaried Employee, he has to take care of many administrative tasks such as paying VAT , paying Income Tax and Paying National Insurance fees. One of his challenges is income instability and the number of work hours instability.  Sometimes his working hours are similar to working hours of typical salaried employee. During these periods his income is reasonable or good. Periods of too much work to do Periods of too much potential assignments are relatively easy to take care of: The Freelance Consultant could pick ...

When I begun posting about Vendors Survival, I had to explain why I doubt that even the strongest vendors, e.g. Microsoft , Apple , Google , will surely survive for at least 10 years. The easiest way to explain it was by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) ill fated history. The IT leaders of the 80ths were IBM , HP and DEC. However, they had to adapt to a new model inspired by Microsoft and other Software vendors. The Hardware Centric Model was changed to Software Centric Model. IBM, HP and DEC could no longer rely on Hardware sells high profit margins and Software as Hardware complementary low priced product line.  IBM and HP adapted successfully. DEC failed. DEC Strategy relied on Alpha chips based Servers . After unsuccessful quarters DEC sold product lines (e.g. System Management software to CA , Communication Hardware to Cabletron ).   Finally, DEC sold their Alpha chips patents to Intel . I immediately notified my DEC based clients that they c...

Less than a year ago I wrote a post titled: BPMS Next Generation:  IBPMS . The post is about Gartner 's new Magic Quadrant of IBPMS, which is very different from previous Gartner's BPMS Magic Quadrants. Only three Leaders left in the IBPMS Magic Quadrant ( IBM , PegaSystems and Appian ) due to a new Use Case: Intelligent Business Process Operation (IBPO).  In the MyTake section of the post I wrote: "Expect changes in Immature markets like IBPMS". Vendors which are no longer Leaders will try to improve their position in this emerging market.  Tibco acquired StreamBase Systems .  StreamBase Systems is  a Complex Event Processing and Real Time Analytics company. This post is about Software AG a former BPMS Leader. a brief history of Software AG BPM History 2006 - The company released a SOA and BPM suite. The suite was developed together with Fujitsu .  As far as BPM is concerned, Software AG used, Fujitsu Interstage branded as Software Ag pro...

Image Source: Wikipedia Steve Ballmer is stepping down as the CEO of Microsoft. You can read Wired article titled: Balmer's Department From Microsoft 10 years Too Late , in order to understand that the last 10 years were not a great success for Microsoft. It is a good opportunity to go back to posts I wrote many years ago, when many people viewed Microsoft as non-vulnerable company. For example, a post I wrote in 2008 was titled: Vendors Survival: Will Microsoft Survive until 2018? .  The post included Reality Check of my 1995 presentation titled: Will Microsoft Survive until 2005?, as well as analyzing new Risk factors.  Read other related posts appearing in the following list: Will Microsoft Survive until 2021? Will Microsoft Survive until 2021? - Revisited Microsoft's Skype acquisition: Warning Signs ahead Read also a less related post titled: Bug 2000 (Y2K) is back in Microsoft's Azure The next step is deciding for yourself: Will Microsoft S...