James Taylor joins ebizQ's blogroll today with his new Weblog, Decision Management. James is an ebizQ feature contributor and a vice president of Fair Isaac with a blog here. We welcome James' well-presented commentary on business rules, decision automation, Business Activity Monitoring, business agility, compliance, and Business Process Management.

James reports that his ebizQ blog will provide perspective for planning, developing and integrating the technologies of today and for the next 10 years.

James is widely considered to be one of the leading experts and visionaries in the area of enterprise decision management. We're honored to bring his commentary to the ebizQ audience.

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Microsoft Chief Bill Gates provided a wide array of thoughts on SOA and integration issues at Microsoft Corp's Convergence user conference in Dallas on Monday. Computer Business Review has an article today that highlights Gates' views on the development of service-oriented applications.

Some key SOA points from the article:

"Gates warned of some dangers, cautioning that SOA in the consumer world, delivered over the internet, has been over-simplified and can be lacking in the areas of security, reliability and scalability, so it was important to design SOA for a business-class environment. Collaboration is also an important component and here Windows SharePoint Services will provide the foundation to enable a transparent organization where employees, partners and suppliers can access data at all times in a secure manner. [...] In practice Gates believes SOA and collaboration developments will be important in crossing the boundary between structured applications and human based communications, which is where business transactions go awry."

Joe McKendrick of ZdNet's SOA Blog comments on the speech here.

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This most recent edition of CIOaudio features my interview with Greg Smith, VP and CIO of the World Wildlife Fund. We didn't get to talk much about saving animals, because we spent most of the time discussing Greg's new book coming out shortly from John Wiley and Sons. It's called "Straight to the Top: Becoming a World Class CIO." The book is available for purchase at this link.

Click here to go straight to the podcast.

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Joe McKendrick of ZdNet's SOA Blog talks today about the perils of starting SOA projects small and potentially missing big picture items pivotal to the enterprise.

Joe says he's been interfacing lately with Infravio's Miko Matsumura, who is urging companies to start thinking about your SOA with an enterprise focus, not a pilot program approach.

Here's what Miko says:

"The shortcuts that seemed so expedient in the small picture are impossible to avoid when you take a serious corporate asset and put it up as a live service. If you don't have some reasonable architectureal guidance in place as you go to enterprise scale, even starting small wont get you there.

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Ronan Bradley, most recently the CEO of PolarLake and former vice president of product management for IONA, joins ebizQ today, with his brand new Roads to SOA blog.

One of our industry's top visionaries, Ronan continues to impress us with his clear thinking, ahead-of-the-curve sensibilities and accessible communications skills. A widely published writer and consultant, Ronan now focuses on addressing the key business and technology issues associated with the adoption of SOA, in addition to lecturing at The Dublin Institute of Technology.

We look forward to hosting Ronan on ebizQ as we continue to bring you daily postings from the best and brightest thought leaders in the integration industry.

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I'm shortly to do an interview on my CIOaudio web-streaming radio/podcast program with Greg Smith, VP and CIO of the World Wildlife Fund, who is author of the soon-to-be-published book,Straight to the Top: Becoming a World-Class CIO.

The book, which is being published by John Wiley and Sons, is "targeted toward information technology and business professionals with aspirations of landing a senior management position in information technology or who desire to become a top IT resource in their organization. The book aims to communicate an effective road map and share experiences from leading CIO experts toward becoming a first-time CIO."

If you have a question for Greg (other than where to get the book -- I'll get the Amazon link!), please provide it by 9am Tuesday, March 21st. We'll also be reviewing the book in future ebizQ publications, so stay tuned.

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Steven Minsky, a recognized visionary in BPM who has written a column called Executive Vision for ebizQ since March of last year, has developed a following on his topic of enterprise risk management (ERM). In his most recent column, he has highlighted what has become a huge market trend, the fact that large enterprises have started to think holistically about risk, to prioritize activities and allocate resources from the board room to the mail room. Standard and Poor's has even debuted an ERM component to their traditional credit score, and many companies are hiring Chief Risk Officers, or are developing teams to look at risk from an enterprise perspective.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Steve's work, Steve was formerly the CEO and Founder of RulesPower which was acquired by Fair Isaac in 2005. At Kodak's Eastman Software subsidiary, Minsky conceived and executed their enterprise workflow software solution for the banking, insurance, brokerage and health care industries that has become Global 360, a BPM industry leader. He is currently the CEO and Founder of LogicManager.

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Shel Israel, a co-writer of the book on every blogger's desk these days, said that the Web 2.0 term isn't appropriate, because it sounds like a product upgrade as opposed to what it actually is, the term "that we are using for a new generation of interactive, decentralized web-based services that promise to make the internet better for the users, if not for large companies."

In his post, Israel asks people to make suggestions for a name to replace Web 2.0 before it's too late. Comment here.

In relation to how the blogosphere relates to business, I'd call your attention to a post by Brenda Michelson today, who talks about StrikeIron's monitoring of the blogosphere and quick response to a post she made. She said that was a perfect example of how companies can utilize the blogosphere to their own increased success. She wrote a report about how companies can, and should, do this, available free here.

In related Web.whatever news, our blogger Sandy Kemsley, said it would be cool if a Webinar she'd just watched could be viewable as an iPod video. And Prakash, our web developer's comment on this was: "Are we ready for Web 3.0?"

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An interesting article I read today in Computer Weekly discusses calmly building an SOA while attempting to ignore the vendor excitement around it. Cliff Saran points out something that ebizQ's own Beth Gold-Bernstein has been saying for years, that SOA is not a new concept. Saran recommends ignoring the hype around SOA and notes that it is possible to build an SOA without Web Services.

He adds an interesting point about how companies got to considering SOA in the first place: that the IT community has built systems that cannot readily communicate with one another, and now is selling a solution to a problem it created.

Read more from Saran on SOA here.

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Ronan Bradley thinks more attention should be paid to iWay's Enterprise Integration Suite.

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James Taylor of Fair Isaac was blogging live from the Gartner BI show, and summarized his closing thoughts in a great read here.

Apart from indicating the Business Intelligence industry is in transition, and of course adding the oft-quoted comment from Gartner's Bill Hostmann ("This is not your father's BI"), James' takeaway thoughts seems to be developed most in the form of a question posed to Gartner:

"Is Business Intelligence about delivering information to people or about a broader range of activities including real-time decisioning and actionable-insight where the recipient might be a system not a person?"

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Claudia Imhoffe had a bright idea about taking the lessons learned by large corporations about controlling the flow of reference data, to the larger population.

The explanation of what we've learned from corporate MDM:

The idea is to somehow centrally store and manage that data making it available to all systems -- including BI systems -- with a need for it. Companies then have one place to enter, update, and even delete this data rather than having to do so in hundreds if not thousands of system databases. The various systems using the data would either get updates from the MDM function (via message brokering or other mechanisms) or use the MDM database itself as a direct source for this information.

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Welcome to David Ogren, who's brought his blog on the business and technology of Business Process Management to ebizQ. In recent weeks, David was blogging from Fuego as it was being acquired by BEA.

Read David's inaugural post here.

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Ronan Bradley, formerly of PolarLake, provides a well-reasoned debate on what people are thinking these days when they hear the term Enterprise Service Bus.

He mentions a recent blog posting of Dave Linthicum, who postulated that the term ESB will be dead in a year, and Jim Webber, who also seems to think ESB is not the wave of the future.

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Thanks to Eric Roch who just pointed me to an interesting article in Forbes about BEA's business strategy.

Forbes indicates a recent Lazard Capital Markets "buy" rating and $16 target price.

"BEA's new initiatives have ramped over the last 18 months and are beginning to "significantly" benefit the company's revenue stream," said Lazard analyst John Rizzuto.

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Gartner's Daryl Plummer came out with a piece in Optimize about SOA's users movement into two main camps:

"One group advocates using Web services to build complex internal systems known as enterprise service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The other seeks to use emerging Web technologies in tandem with Web services to create flexible external applications."

Plummer said that the split began in 2003, when companies started questioning "whether mission-critical systems were possible with Web services as originally defined. Over the next two years, the Web took on new significance as Google's use of advanced techniques and Web services began to get widespread notice," he wrote.

Here's another bit of Plummer's thesis:

Web-technologies groups are now forcing the acknowledgment that Web services will indeed use mechanisms other than SOAP, WSDL, or even Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI). Instead, standards such as Plain Old XML (POX) over HTTP and Representational State Transfer (REST) are asserting themselves as legitimate and very credible ways of delivering on the value proposition of Web services. As Web services assume more expansive definitions, we can represent them using a wide variety of formats and communications protocols.

The problem is, expanding on what's considered to be a real Web service could devalue the entire concept. When people get to thinking that anything delivered over the Web is a Web service, we run the risk of not delivering interoperability and programmability in a standard way. We could then see a proliferation of so-called Web services for use only in very specific circumstances—not exactly a step forward. Still, Web-technology advocates point out that the business ecosystems growing around the likes of Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo are the future of applications; Web services lie at the center of that future.

James Governor gives a standing ovation to Daryl's article. He said that "RedMonk has argued for a while that we need a broader view of what a service is."

I especially liked what James said about Daryl personally after reading his article: "Daryl Plummer is a really smart guy. Really smart."

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Today, it was announced that Google bought Writely, an online word processer collaboration tool and document manager.

Writely is the first product from a tiny Silicone-valley startup called Upstartle, a company comprised of three people. The product was open source and free during the Beta period.

Here are some details about Writely:

Writely allows you to edit documents online with whomever you choose, and then publish and blog them online.

You can:

*Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch).
*Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to format your documents, spell-check them, etc.
*Invite others to share your documents (by e-mail address).
*Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
*View your documents' revision history and roll back to any version.
*Publish documents online to the world, or to just who you choose.
*Download documents to your desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF*, HTML or zip.
*Post your documents to your blog.

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Because of Web 2.0's collaborative technology and the blogosphere's ability to provide a glimpse into what people are thinking as they're thinking it, you can almost hear the analysts formulating their views about the BEA-Fuego Acquisition. Little by little, blog entries are starting to consider the acquisition in its context.

Beth Gold-Bernstein, over here at ebizQ, has started thinking about what an SOA platform actually is, in light of comments by BEA Chairman Alfred Chuang saying that because of the buy, BEA is "now the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments."

Tony Baer of OnStrategies Perspectives has started discussing the acquisition as something to think about in terms of companies actually starting to acknowledge that they have to deliver on the kind of simplicity they promise.

BEA was filling in a blank in their product portfolio to keep pace with IBM and Oracle, snaring one of the most promising pure plays in the process. But most of all, it reveals that vendors must acknowledge the demand for the kind of simplicity they've been promising all these years. What might look robust to a software architect may appear positively intimidating to business analysts bent on avoiding programming-intensive solutions.

David Ogren, who had been blogging from inside Fuego, and who will soon move his blog to a new home here at ebizQ, has said some really interesting things about the acquisition here and here.

Our own Sandy Kemsley, of Column 2 fame, got into it a bit with David Ogren, and has been watching the deal with a close eye.

The 451 Group has written a market insight statement on the aquisition, and I'm going to ask for them to release it as a feature for ebizQ readers next week. 451 gives us a feature for ebizQ use once a month.

Demir Barlas of Line56 has made his comments here. Barlas highlighted comments made by ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg:

'While Fuego does address the BPM component of SOA, Bloomberg is concerned about how its Java-based approach will fit in with AquaLogic. "If you're neutral with respect to the underlying code rather than having a Java infrastructure, you have flexibility at runtime, you can make changes to business logic on the fly," he explains. "The power of the SOA view of BPM is that you don't need to get developers to generate Java code and recompile when you're making new processes, or changes to processes."'

Annrai O'Toole, CEO of BEA competitor Cape Clear Software, came out with a blog entry on Monday called BEA's Strategery. If you know the origin of the word "strategery," then you probably would guess that this commentary isn't too positive. Here's a taste:

BEA claims to be focused on the SOA market, but how exactly does this help them? Admittedly, disciplines within BPM are very relevant to SOA, but the BPM market is founded on legacy, proprietary technologies, and the success of SOA is dependant on open standards. How does the addition of more proprietary technologies get them closer to supporting SOA? How in the world are they going to rationalize two non-integrated portal products and two non-integrated proprietary process tools (lets not forget about WebLogic Integration!) into an integrated, standards-based SOA platform??

More as it comes.

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When I'm not developing and editing ebizQ features and news, I interview CIOs on a Web-streaming radio program called CIOaudio, which you can play right on your desktop or download to a mobile device and listen while you're on the run.

My latest CIOaudio interview went live this morning, with my recent chat with Will Weider, known in the blogosphere as The Candid CIO. Will is the CIO of Affinity Health System, but he's also an active blogger in the health care IT Space. Check out his site here.

Will's message on his blog is to share lessons learned, and to challenge the conventional wisdom of IT.

Listen or download the CIOaudio interview here, it's only about 6 minutes. You can also listen to and download all of my past interviews, including the CIOs of Intel, Cisco Systems, Circuit City, HP and many others.

Enjoy!

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Even though, he's been live for only about a week and a half, Keith Harrison Broninski's IT Directions Blog is long on impact. He's gotten eighteen comments so far on his third blog entry, titled BPMN will kill BPEL. Will it kill BPM too?

Keith is a Human-Centric BPM expert in his own right, and currently works at CTO of Role Modellers Ltd in the UK. Read more about Keith here.

Keith's blogging has evoked comments from not just your average reader, but cool people like Phil Gilbert, the CTO of Lombardi Software, and John Pyke, CEO of The Process Factory.

Considering that Keith's only been in the ebizQ blogosphere about five minutes, I'm looking to see a lot more exciting posts from him!

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This weekend, ebizQ upgraded its site to better highlight our key features, to make it more intuitive for you, the discerning integration executive. You'll still view our excellent Webinars, read our stellar White Papers, listen to CIOaudio, and read all sorts of interesting features (from inside and outside analysts) as well as breaking news items. You'll also see our training center growing by leaps and bounds.

But most exciting, you're going to see our fantastic ebizQ bloggers blogging in real-time in our six main subject areas, SOA, BPM, EII, BAM, ESB and Executive Corner.

Give us a little bit of time to iron out all the kinks, and email me with your comments at editor@ebizQ.net.

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ebizQ's fantastic forum of bloggers include decision-makers and analysts in the Integration space. Not only do our bloggers make news, they comment on it and incisively deliver the kind of messages that our readers need to understand the fast pace of technology strategy today.

Sandy Kemlsey's Column 2: Sandy, a successful BPM consultant and analyst in her own right, brought her popular blog to us in January, and focuses on business process management, enterprise architecture, business intelligence and technology in business. In the last few days alone, she's blogged about the BEA-Fuego acquisition, the Ovations BPM Framework, Mashup Camp, and Forrester's Wave of Human-Centric BPMS.

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Over the last year or so at ebizQ, we've been moving from a traditional Web and print publishing environment about the technologies that power business, to a more community-focused, interactive site about the next generation of technologies that will enable us all to power our businesses, collaboratively.

My current favorite tool at work is my RSS feed blog aggregator, part of the wonderful world of Web 2.0, where I've plugged in virtually every blogger in the integration space. At the touch of a button, I have a fantastic dashboard view of what's going on on the Web, integration-wise. And I'm ready to share the fruits of my labor with you.

For example, last week's annoucement of BEA's acquisition of Fuego hit fast and furious, and ebizQ was able to quickly get some news up on the Web, not just in our Vendor News section (sign up for our ebizQ news RSS feed here), but in our Industry Watch.

This weekend, ebizQ will get a facelift with the launch of our newly designed site, which will hopefully bring you even more exciting news on the integration space, faster. We'll still be offering you access to the best and most interesting Webinars and white papers, but our topic sections: SOA, BPM, ESB, Executive Corner, BAM and EII will be new and improved, with blog entries, podcasts, news and Webinars conveniently housed in each specific section. This blog will replace my other blog on the site, but I'll be doing essentially the same thing, highlighting and pointing you to blog entries of note around the Web in the Integration space.

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