SOA filling the Gaps

--> I n a previous post in January I analyzed the SOA perspective of Oracle 's BEA acquisition. I predicted that Oracle's future SOA solutions will be dominated by BEA's SOA solutions. Some comments presented different predictions from mine. According to The Register article published on June 5 th Oracle is splitting the BEA AquaLogic products line between Web 2.0 (originated from the Plumtree acquisition) and BPM (based on the Fuego acquisition). The Register also has learned from individuals close to the company that BEA's new owner Oracle is merging the AquaLogic and WebLogic professional service teams. The AquaLogic Web 2.0 products probably will be overtook by Stellent Content Management which was acquired by Oracle on November 2006. As described in previous post titled SOA & BPM , SOA and BPM are strongly related. Another post tiled SOA and BPM: Too much Round Tripping? described an innovative product trying to extend this affinit...

     Arie Amit and Eyal Kot presented EDS Modernization with SOA approach and practices in the 21st meeting of the SOA Forum of the Israeli Association of Information Processing on May 14th. Arie is Business Development and Management Consulting of EDS Israel. This post describes Arye's presentation about Business aspects and EDS approach to Modernization.    The following bullets summarizes Arie's presentation.   Business Value of Modernization Current Legacy systems include valuable assets; however the architecture is too rigid. Modernization is a key for transforming these assets to Agile solutions enabling the enterprise to respond to business changes and needs. System Maintenance is about 80% of the IT Budget. Maintenance of old Legacy systems is expansive. After Modernization Maintenance costs will be reduced so higher percent could be allocated to Development and Innovation. Omitting redundant systems developed by different departm...

In The 7 th post of Web 2.0 for Dummies I described Wikipedia. This post is dedicated to collaborators types named according to Sergio Leone 's famous film from 1966 The Good the Bad and the Ugly . The Good Most of community collaborators are included in this type: people who are trying to contribute to community project. Wikipedia's assumption as well as other Web 2.0 project assumption is that community members will contribute to the shared project according to the policy, guidelines and processes which were defined. In many cases this assumption is true and the Good guys are enriching and improving Wikipedia's content. However, as the old proverb says: "The way to hell is paved with good intentions", sometimes despite of the good intentions the deliverables are not good enough. I will try to support my argument by examples. Example 1: despite of a respectable reference I had to clarify a specific Configuration Management aspect, as part...

This post is another post in the "Web 2.0 for dummies" posts, based on my Web 2.0 presentation in a conference and my experience. After tasting Web 2.0 ( part 2 ) and understanding what it is ( part 4 ) and understanding Mashups and Virtual Realities , I will look at the case of Wikipedia . What is Wikipedia? Wikipedia is an Open Source (mainly an Open Content) community based encyclopedia. Its model is different from the traditional encyclopedia model based on books and from the Web 1.0 model based on loading a traditional encyclopedia to a Web site. The difference between previous encyclopedia generations and Wikipedia could be summarized by the following bullets: · Participation and Collaboration - Written by community members instead of experts. Writing is not the only pattern of participation: voting, editing, discussing are examples of other activities for expanding and improving the content. · Multilingual – the community is composed of many sub-c...

Many years ago I listened to a presentation by an analyst (I do not remember his name). The presentation includes an analogy comparing IT products vendors to shops: big companies with multiple products lines – supermarkets, medium size companies with few products lines – groceries and small companies – kiosks. According to the analysis groceries compete directly with supermarkets and therefore their long term survival is questionable because of supermarkets advantages due to their size. In addition they are acquisition targets for supermarkets. Unlike groceries, kiosks are Niche Players and therefore are not acquisition targets and are positioned better than supermarkets in their special niche. For example, who will wait in a supermarket queue for buying bubblegum? It was easy to find example of small niche software vendors to illustrate this analogy. The only product distributed by Syncsort was a SORT utility. Syncsort competed successfully with vendors like IBM , HP an...

I n a previous post I asked the same question about Microsoft and predicted that the probability that at least three of the four leading SOA Echo Systems vendors, including Microsoft, will survive in the next ten years is high. I planed additional posts on other potential Long Term survival candidates. HP 's intend to acquire EDS changed my plan, so this post topic is HP's EDS acquisition. I would have predicted before the intended acquisition, that the probability that HP will survive until 2018 is high due to its dominance of the high volume Printer s market and its position in other hardware markets ( Servers , Storage , and PCs ) and Network and System Management (HP OpenView ). For a long time HP tried to expand its business lines beyond hardware. Acquisition of a J2EE Application Server company resulted in BEA WebLogic as the preferred Application Server used by HP. It failed to acquire Price Waterhouse Coopers and few years afterwards acquired Mercury and fe...

This post includes my Web 2.0 presentation which is the source for my Web 2.0 for Dummies posts. Web 2.0 Presentation