Andre Yee, a security specialist and president of NFR Security, joins ebizQ today as our newest blogger. I'd like to invite you to check out and bookmark Andre's blog here.

For those who don't know him, Andre is a noted author and conference speaker on topics related to security, middleware and enterprise architectures. He is listed as an inventor on two patents, and most recently, he was recognized as one of InfoWorld's "Innovators to Watch for 2006". Andre's experience includes playing key senior management roles in three private companies that successfully achieved IPOs - SAGA Software, Landmark Systems and Best Software.

ebizQ is very happy to welcome Andre to our blogosphere.

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I recently talked to Sandy Carter, Vice President for SOA and WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, and IBM, who gave a presentation on SOA entry points at InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum in New York City last week.

Sandy has been particularly influential as owner for cross IBM Channels, Strategy and Marketing for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), including messaging, content & presentations.

She counts as one her most notable accomplishments IBM’s promotion and support of SOA, IBM’s most significant software announcement in five years.

Take a listen to our talk about SOA entry points, IBM's overall SOA strategy, and related topics.

Download file!

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Beth Gold-Bernstein, ebizQ's VP of Strategic Services, signed copies of her new book, Integration and SOA: Concepts, Technologies and Best Practices (co-authored with webMethods' Gary So), today at the Integration Consortium's Global Integration Summit in Boston.

ebizQ blogger Brenda Michelson, who sent this photo and attended Beth's presentation, said “Beth's session raised the audience's awareness as to the importance of semantics and sound data management in an enterprise SOA.”

The book will be in wide release soon, and I'll provide a link for where you can get it as soon as I have it.

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Exciting news today out of Dublin:

John Randles, the former Chief Technology Officer at Siebel Retail Finance, has accepted the post of CEO at PolarLake, the company reports today. Randles has big shoes to fill after the departure of industry leader Ronan Bradley several months ago.

Read the raw press release here.

"...After speaking to many existing PolarLake customers, I am convinced that this technology will continue to deliver innovative solutions supporting the facilitation, management and control of business-to-business relationships. In this growing market PolarLake’s unique product offering will continue to deliver value to an increasing number of customers in the Financial Services and Government sectors," said Randles.

John joins PolarLake from Siebel Systems, where he was CTO Banking and responsible for the Retail Banking business across the Americas and EMEA. Prior to joining Siebel John was CTO of Eontec, a world leader in component-based banking systems, which was acquired by Siebel Systems in 2004. John also led Eontec’s business in North America and had previously led Product Development, Strategy, Product Marketing, and pre-Sales globally. John graduated from the University of Limerick with a degree in computer engineering.

"With his extensive experience in the delivery of customer-focused business solutions, John represented an ideal choice as CEO," said Philip Crawford, PolarLake chairman. "As a company we are ready to take a significant step forward. Our focus remains on the real-world business needs of our customers. John’s experience and expertise will help us address those needs, and enable our customers to create stronger, more profitable relationships with their own customers and partners."

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Steven Minsky, a recognized visionary in BPM and a risk expert, who has written a column called Executive Vision for ebizQ for the past year, has developed a following on his topic of enterprise risk management (ERM). Today, I'm pleased to welcome Steve to ebizQ's blog roll, where he will continue to provide executive-level analysis on the intersection between business, IT and risk. Bookmark Steve here: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/chief_risk_officer/

Steve's blog, entitled "New Era of Risk Management," will highlight the differences between traditional risk management and true enterprise risk management, which most importantly is about helping something happen - not preventing something from happening. Steven's blog helps you think about risk in a new way and how to benefit practically from this rapidly evolving new field.

In his recent columns, Steve 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.

Please join me in welcoming Steve to ebizQ's community, and if you've missed his columns over the past year, they're permanently available at: http://www.ebizq.net/executive_corner/exec_vision/

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A hearty, hearty welcome to Brenda Michelson, who today brings her new blog, Business-Driven Architect, to ebizQ.

ebizQ has been publishing Brenda's incisive analysis for almost a year, in the form of excerpts of work she's done with her employer, the , and also from her blog, Elemental Links.

Please check out her inaugural entry and leave a note to welcome Brenda to the ebizQ community of practitioners (her words!)

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Joining Linthicum on the standards panel at InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum was Steve Vinoski, CTO of IONA Technologies.

His thoughts on standards:

"Standards are basically a necessary evil. I can't stand working on standards myself, but I know that customers look to companies like IONA for standards, and it's important for us to help fill them out in an organized way.

"There are people whose whole job is to write standards. They're in meetings constantly, and if they're not in meetings, they're discussing the next meeting. These people never write a line of code. You really have to be in there doing it to understand it.

"The second problem is the vendors don't really take in user considerations. They see a space and rush to develop a spec for it. But the fact that they just taking something they've developed and try to develop standards to match it, without having it vetted by users.

"The users do really have to get involved in standards," Steve said.

An elected member of the board of directors of OASIS took exception to the prevailing beliefs of the panel members that standards bodies don't ever get involved with users. A great debate!

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David Linthicum, ebizQ blogger and CEO of BridgeWERX, joins a high-level panel here at InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum, discussing where we are in the different stacks and the status of standards and standards organizations in the integration space.

The panel sort of agreed that the trouble with standards right now is that there are now no base protocols, no fully developed programs that encompass all that standards could be. But Dave said, "Every SOA out there is different. So that this notion that we could have this stack, or one set of standards for SOA, is ABSURD. Understand that if you're going to get into this game you're going to have to spend a lot of time understanding your own requirements.

"The architectures have different needs, different specs, and there's no way to standardize this. This isn't really my opinion, it's fact," Dave said.

Dave was asked when he thinks the time will be right for standards. Here are some of his comments:

"I'm sort of the Wilford Brimley of the SOA world. I'm telling you it's hard when the marketing people are saying it's easy. The people who write to my blog and send me emails and call in to the podcast, they're confused.

"I'm very bullish on standards. But today there are standards being created for the selfish needs of the vendors. And the reality of it if you want to get into a space is that you develop the technology, then write the standard, and then try to get it adopted by a standards body. It's inhibiting the growth of the market.

"What needs to happen is that the user communities need to push back on the number and confusion of standards. Should probably have single instances of standards, come to an agreement of what needs to be in the stack.

"Going forward, I'm seeing another disturbing trend. There are standards that exist that are not yet fully developed. BPEL is an example of this. Using Oracle or IBM BPEL stacks, they are not going to have portability from stack to stack. It's very disturbing that the biggest companies are doing this."

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Hugh Taylor, VP of Marketing for SOA Software, is coming out with a new book called "The Joy of SOX," available at Amazon.com or through http://www.wiley.com.

I sat down with Hugh and he gave me the skinny on the book and why everyone who cares about compliance should read it. (He did add, however, that the book does NOT include graphic illustrations of hairy CIOs doing compliance).

"With regard to Sarbanes-Oxley, what we're seeing is that almost all major companies are doing SOA and they have to do Sarbanes-Oxley. Two issues come up here: SOA, because it's potentially completely open, can disrupt the accounting controls that you need to be compliant.

"As an example, SOX requires companies to document the segregation of roles in financial transactions. A sales person, generally, should not able to receive cash AND do the ledger entry. There's a potential for fraud.

"The problem with SOA is that it can break down the access controls that may be in effect. You need a governance solution to stay compliant. SOA Software helps with that."

"The other issue is that other companies approach compliance by tightening control over systems, which can inhibit business agility.

"Why this book is called 'The Joy of SOX,' is so you can be agile AND compliant at the same time," he said.

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At InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum, Sandy Carter, VP for SOA and WebSphere Strategy, Marketing and Channel at IBM, gave a presentation called "SOA from a Business Centric Perspective -- Enabling Innovation that Matters."

Carter indicated that IBM's SOA approach is both business-centric and IT focused. She encourages a people-centric approach, to improve people productivity by aggregating views that deliver information and interaction in the context of a business process.

Carter reported that she's taking information from 1,800 customers on how people are starting their SOA journey. She described several of IBM's clients' entry points.

Her first example of an SOA entry point: Broward School District in Florida has 55 different languages spoken and it is the sixth largest school district in the country with a multi-billion dollar budget. Broward County serves 174,000 students. Their biggest issue at the beginning was compliance with the Federal No Child Left Behind Act.

What they were able to do with their SOA was to leverage a portal as a front-end, and take down the time of compliance processing. Then they were able to duplicate the portal for other purposes. They have since built role-based portals for parents, for the teacher's association, for students to do their homework and the portals now exist in eight different languages.

IBM's experience with Harley-Davidson Financial Services in their entry point to SOA: Harley-Davidson's problem was needing flexibility for when to run their financial promotions. They needed to quickly create financial incentive programs with the dealerships having control over when to run sales, because the best time to run financial promotions for buying motorcycles was when the weather was beautiful, and in places like Australia, the weather is totally different and the process could not be run centrally.

The CIO of Harley decided to de-couple processes to allow individual countries, cities or regions to run their marketing promotions whenever they want. They were able to then duplicate their processes from there.

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From Michael Brody, CTO (Chief Scientist) of Verizon: "The essence of the SOA model is separate out all the stuff that the end user sees in the workplace. Don’t show them any IT. If the worker doesn’t understand something in the services layer, you’re not doing the right job."

Brody said Verizon's SOA is a portal that assists people in building service-oriented applications. Verizon sees SOA as a style of programming: a style of design, deployment and management of software infrastructure that is standards-based and loosely coupled.

The first stop for new IT architects at Verizon is to sit the down at IT Workplace and "get them to learn that you’re not here to build, you’re here to compose." The architect's job at Verizon is to publish, develop-compose, test, and certified for security, performance, service-level agreements, etc.

"By the way," Brody said. "Dynamic SOA does not exist in which services go out and find other services. That's very risky (at this point) in a corporate environment."

Regardless, "According to Gartner’s maturity levels in terms of SOA adoption, we’re way beyond," said Brody.

A complication of the current SOA landscape is that vendors, for a variety of reasons, have staked their future on SOA.

"There is competitive chaos: in the markets and in the expertise," Brody said. "The scale of SOA is so big that is is clear that we need standards, partners, coalitions and acquisitions to keep going on."

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At InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum here in sunny NYC today, there's a panel going on called SOA Reality Check, which has various top IT architects from a variety of different industries sharing their stories on their real-life experiences with SOA.

Eric Peebles, the chief application architect for the Windy City, said that Chicago's transition to SOA started about three years ago, when the CIO looked in consternation at the city's twelve different systems with about fifteen different business units and departments all over the city, all with their own IT shops.

Peebles said the CIO sat down and mapped all the different systems and business units, and "it looked like a bag of spiders. It was brittle, breaking constantly and hard to maintain."

The CIO then looked to the architecture team and asked them to find a better way. "We didn't know that was going to involve a move to SOA [at the time]," Peebles said. "We were just looking for a better way."

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Skyway Software, a provider of SOA design and delivery solutions, and GT Software, a provider of rapid SOA development tools for mainframes, today announced a formal partnership encompassing sales, marketing, and product integration.

The combination of Skyway SOA Platform and GT Software's Ivory product offers a new element to the SOA marketplace -- a solution that can build new services, assemble existing services, while managing and governing reuse across multiple platforms from any type of data source, including mainframes.

Read more here.

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I'm going to stop by InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum on Tuesday, May 16. If anyone's going and wants to "take a meeting," drop me a line!

I'm seeking articles on ESB for July as viewable on the July editorial calendar, and am working on some issues related to SOA Governance. Let's talk.

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After a bunch of analyst meetings last week, IBM today announced several new releases of software and initiatives that will seek to help companies handle the explosion of business processes and applications that are turning IBM System z mainframe into a hub of Internet-based computing.

IBM announced:

*Software tools that make the creation of "services-ready" mainframe applications by Java, VisualBasic, COBOL and PL/1 developers as easy as mastering an advanced video game after only a short time.

*An initiative to expand the base of independent software developers using the System z platform. IBM will encourage new ISVs to develop their applications for the System z through technical, sales and marketing support, no-cost access to IBM IT architects, advertising discounts and customer lead generation tools.

*New IBM middleware to secure and integrate the hundreds of applications and petabytes of data running through IBM System z and other computers in an IT infrastructure.

-- New university courseware and a global "Master the Mainframe" student contest to reach the next generation of mainframe developers around the world.

Read more here.

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OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, today announced a new standard for business-centric methodology. You can read the release here, but to provide a quick explanation, I'm told BCM "addresses interoperability through the semantic alignment of concepts and layering of constraints, as defined by reusable business templates."

OASIS said that plans are in the works to develop a business-centric framing language that will use 'service bridges' to ensure information used by one layer of SOA is accurately communicated to the other BCM layers. OASIS also intend to develop an ontology for eBusiness that resides in the concept layer to ensure semantic synchronicity across all BCM layers. OASIS invites interested parties to exchange information on implementing BCM via the bcm-dev mailing list).

If anyone is a 'BCM' expert around here, and would like to write an article on it for ebizQ, please let me know.

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A few notes on some new ebizQ features:

*ebizQ is now aggregating the most recent entries from ebizQ bloggers (in the order of newest to oldest), on our main site.

*We're also featuring one of our fantastic bloggers each day.

*ebizQ is aggregating podcasts (like this one!) from both our in-house sources and ones of interest around the Web. Check out the right side of our main site, a bit "below the fold."

*in addition to new ebizQ feature articles each week, we're also aggregating integration articles of particular interest around the Web in our "More Top Stories" section, and putting them on an RSS page for your easy reference.

*topic-based blog entries from outside ebizQ are also visible in our topic pages. Click on the red tabs from the main site: SOA, BPM, ESB, BAM, EII and Executive Corner.

I hope you enjoy the changes, and please let me know your feedback!

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