SOA filling the Gaps

More than 10 years ago I was invited by Oracle Distributor or Oracle Israel (I do not remember if an Oracle's local branch was already established) to a dramatic announcement by Larry Ellison . Tel-Aviv was one of the cities in which you can watch it in real time. Oracle in cooperation with Sun announced the age of Network Computing. It was a good show. Larry Ellison broke a PC demonstrating that Microsoft 's Fat Client applications and data were lost. He also broke a cheaper Network Computer (NC) and demonstrated that nothing was lost after using another NC for connecting to the Web . Network Computing was immature. It took some years until Google 's applications as well as other Web 2.0 Services vendors' products were used and more than 10 years until S aaS is going Mainstream and Cloud Computing services are used for some enterprise applications. Oracle and Sun anti-Microsoft campaign continued with J2EE vs. .Net wars. However, few years afterwar...

After vacation of three weeks (without any posts in my blog), I read an interesting article in The Enterprise Architecture Online User Group site. The article is about Experience and Enterprise Architecture . The article's title is: Can Enterprise architects be young? The opinion of the article composer is: "So, every time that I see a young gentleman who claims to be an enterprise architect or enterprise architect expert, I simply don't believe him". SOA is a style of Enterprise Architecture (EA). In most cases, SOA is composing only a part of enterprise architecture, especially in the long journey of transformation from older architectures. Therefore EA considerations explained in the article are applicable to SOA too. I would paraphrase the article's conclusion and say: Every time that I see a young gentleman who claims to be a SOA architect or SOA architect expert, I simply don't believe him.

In a previous post I presented the opinion that Oracle 's Sun acquisition is questionable, mainly because of Sun's hardware products. The new Golden Gate proposed acquisition looks like a logical, straight forward acquisition. Golden Gate is a leader in Real Time heterogeneous database integration and therefore compliments Oracle's Fusion Middleware and database solutions. The product supports most of the Relational Databases in the market: Microsoft SQL Server , Oracle, Sybase , DB2 z/OS, DB2 LUW, HP NonStop and SQL/MX, Enscribe ,(hierarchical database) Ingres and MySQL . Golden Gate 's product enables Transactional integration. Version 9.5 (released in 2007) supports integration of non-data entities such as Stored Procedures and users definitions. It also supports Packaged Applications including Oracle—E-Business Suite , PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel , JD Edwards and SAP . The company is Oracle's partner for ten years. Few additional not...

This post is another post in the Vendors Survival series following posts on Microsoft , Google , HP , Sun and EMC . On July 14 th Software AG and IDS Scheer announced that Software AG is going to take over IDS Scheer . The intended acquisition is an opportunity to add another post in my Vendors Survival posts series. A brief history of Software AG Mainframe products Software AG is larger than any German software company except SAP . It was established in the Mainframe age (in 1969). I worked with many customers, who used and some of them are still using, its two flagship products Adabas and Natural . Although these products support many platforms, their main platform is IBM Mainframe. Adabas is a database and Natural is a development environment. Like other pairs of Database and Development Environment in the mainframe environment (e.g. Ideal and Datacom , Mantis and Supra) build by the same vendor, they are tied together. As a result, although it is possible t...

The title describes a Security approach. According to this approach the easiest and most plausible Security breach is by usage of the weakest link. Lessons learned from few Penetration Tests I conducted, support the cited above approach. It is true that there is no way to assure absolute Security (For deeper explanation why you can look at a well known security Guru, Bruce Schnirer's web site ). A ny Security mechanism is breakable by someone who has expertise and spends a lot of resources (including time). But it is also possible to breach Security without expertise and by spending only few resources for a very short time: just exploit the weakest link . As part of a Penetration Test, I always looked for simple unsophisticated methods to penetrate instead of penetrating by usage of very sophisticated methods. These methods could be used by anyone, unlike the sophisticated ones, which could be used only by a limited group of very talented experts. ...