SOA filling the Gaps

On June, 17 th I participated in an interesting oracle event: Oracle Day. The event took place near Tel-Aviv airport and its theme was: Building the Future. Oracle's president Mrs. Safra Catz presented the company's vision. . Two other senior Oracle managers presented Oracle G11 database and the company's CRM Software Strategy, (presented by a Senior Vice President who was a Siebel employee prior to its acquisition by Oracle). Afterwards concurrent tracks on various technological and applicative topics took place. I participated in the Fusion Middleware track. Oracle's Vision Mrs. Safra Catz used an analogy of buying a car vs. buying car parts and building it. As most of car consumers will not be able to build the cars the roads will be almost empty. Oracle's view is that building and integrating IT systems is similar to building a car by a consumer. It takes a lot of time and resources. The weakest link is integration. The Oracle alternative i...

I n a previous post I used the analogy of an iceberg to describe processes in an enterprise. In this post I will illustrate it by a simple example. The example is not about Enterprise processes. It describes a simpler single actor processes set: Writing a blog post such as this post. As far as this post is concerned the scope is limited to professional blogging. Analyzing personal blogs or generalizing the analysis to all blogs types is beyond the scope of this post. Blog Posting Process simplified It looks like a very simple process composed of two steps: Writing a blog post Publishing a blog post The writing step is composed of few activities: titling, writing, spell checking, adding hyperlinks and images etc. Publishing looks like a one click activity. Even in the simplistic description above, we missed one important activity: choosing a topic to write about. It is less formulated activity than the other activities, so it is easy to ignore it while an...

The analogy between an iceberg and IT domains is a common analogy. It describes an IT domain in which a little part is visible (above the water) and a bigger part is hidden (under the water). This analogy may be useful for describing Enterprise Data. Databases are clearly visible. Some Directories or Libraries as well as some stand alone disk files are also visible. The part behind the water mark is usually unstructured data, such as Web Pages, e-mail messages and attachments. The Iceberg analogy was also used by SOA Software 's CTO Brent Carlson for describing SOA: The actual projects are above the water, but more abstract architectural levels could be ignored because they are not visible. This analogy came to my mind while reading an interesting Oracle White Paper titled: Business Process Management, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Web 2.0: Business Transformation or Train Wreck? The White Paper included an article by Oralce's BPM specialist Jo...

The results of my first taste of Wolfram Alpha prior to its launching support my view in a previous pos t: It is relatively good in mathematics, Physics and other sciences. However, even in these fields it is far less good than expected. Some people who glorify it were deeply disappointed. I tried in vain to find answers to very basic non-scientific questions. For example, Games is one of the categories (Sport &Games) cited in Wolfram Alpha's Web site examples . The games of Chess and the game of Bridge are unknown to its Answers Engine. It is unfair to judge a product even prior to its launch; therefore I am not going to analyze its ability to answer different type of questions. I will wait about half a year before analyzing it deeply.

A new killer in town: Wolfram Alpha is the Google Killer. Is it really a Google Killer as dubbed by some people? Although, my knowledge of Wolfram Alpha is less than limited, I am sure it is not. Some arguments supporting my view: 1. Wolfram Alpha is not available yet for public use even as a Beta. People impressions are based on previous achievements of Stephen   Wolfram , Demos, an empty Web site and a blog. As far as marketing is concerned, it is a huge success: so many references in the Web before it was released. 2. Is it a Search Engine? A Knowledge Base? An encyclopedia? If it is not a search engine it is not competing directly with Google. 3. Frequently IT application Killers or Infrastructure Killers were doomed to death before their competitors they tried to kill. For examples, IBM's 9370 computers described in the nineties as VAX killers fade away about 10 or 15 years before VAX computers end of life. An article I read many years ago was titles: R...