I recently spoke with Reactivity about their 4.4 release, which includes a new high performance model with a dual-processor, auto-discovery, offloading services, and an expanded OEM program. They are definietly pumped about this announcement. What is fueling their excitement is the fact that customers are starting to see full ROI within 3 months of deployment. Have to agree that’s a pretty compelling case.

For those of you who are not familiar with Reactivity, they produce integration appliances for XML messaging. The point being that XML messages are huge and the network needs help. They have 3 products in the line. The Reactivity Secure XML Router provides authentication and authorization, routing, translation and transformation of XML messages. XML Security Gateway is used for B2B integration, and includes message inspection and virus control. As part of the OEM program, top tier participants are embedding core libraries for virus protection. The XML Accelerator delivers high performance messaging in a configurable network device.

Their message is that when you push XML processing to the network and you’ll save lots of time and money, and improve performance. They claim customers are deploying solutions in 1/10th the time it takes to do with an, ESB or EAI platform: 10-15 days rather than months, cutting development time and costs. In B2B solutions new partner get connected in a matter of hours. The 4.4 release includes new ease of use features as well as expanded standards support for WS-Policy and UDP. Reactivity can pull in services from application servers and registries, apply global policies, and be up and running quickly. Reactivity appliances can be used as co-processors to perform cycle consuming XML schema validation, providing better performance and visibility. Because Reactivity uses a RAID disk to handle messaging, and time stamps messages, it captures message flow information which can be used for compliance solutions. The entry level price point for the 1000 XML Accelerator is $15k. The XML Router 1000 lists for $30k.

If you want to learn more about Reactivity check out the upcoming ebizQ webinar on June 22nd. Definitely worth a look-see.

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0)

Governance is a hot topic these days - a must have for SOA. However, corporate governance involves much more than just Web services. OpenPages provides a unified governance platform to manage the larger scope of corporate governance, including: Financial Controls Management, Operational Risk Management, IT Governance, and Strategic Performance Management (available Q4 2006). The platform includes a registry what defines business processes and policies defining how the organization should operate. This enables companies to operationalize policies, monitor the process in real time, and manage both compliance and risk.

Recently announced, the Financial Controls Management module provides a solution for worldwide governance of financial controls. After the corporate scandals in the US and implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley act, other countries adopted similar regulatory requirements for financial controls and reporting. The Open Pages solution is a multi-lingual solution that supports English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, and Japanese. The repository manages the relationship between different policies and how they are linked to the organizational structure. When a re-org happens, Open Pages can automatically support the change. It provides interactive dashboards what support drill down capabilities. Cognos is embedded into the product to support the drill down BI capabilities.

Open Pages has was founded in 1996 and began its product development in the compliance space in 2002. Headquartered in the US, it also has offices in the UK, France, Hong Kong and Japan. OpenPages is a profitable private company with 175 employees and 200 customers. Companies looking to manage compliance with financial controls regulations on a worldwide scale, or who are looking for a governance platform that will unify all aspects of corporate governance may want to take a closer look at OpenPages.

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jitterbit recently released their open source integration solution, targeted at small and medium sized businesses. Their focus is making integration, which is inherently complex, as simple as possible. They have all the ease of use features including dialog boxes, drag and drop, pointing to sources and targets etc., but also go one step beyond, by enabling the user to save the integration, export it into and XML document, and put the ntire integration project into Jitterpack which describes all aspects of an integration. Jitterpacks can be emailed or put on a website to be shared or sold.

A Jitterbit integration can be comprised of multiple point-to-point integrations that can span multiple systems, but no workflow capabilities are included. It is more geared toward point-to-point solutions.

You can download the client and server for free from their website. Jitterpacks are also free. Jitterbit also offers a fee version which includes support and consulting, for $10k per server per year. The company plans to seed the market by creating Jitterpacks, such as one that integrates Salesforce.com with QuickBooks and Great Plains, giving customers a fast and easy integration solution.

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0)

SOA makes some things easier, like making changes to business processes, and adding new functionality. And it makes some things harder, like QA. The problem is that it’s not longer sufficient to test all the user interfaces – you also have to test what happens once you push the submit button and the packet goes through all the underlying layers of the SOA.

The Solstice Integra Suite focuses testing all the layers, including orchestration, enterprise services, enterprise components, and message level transports, of an SOA. To accomplish all this requires the ability to support all the underlying protocols, and languages. This is something you don’t want to have to hand code. Solstice supports regression and unit level testing, web service testing, and end to end testing. It has the ability to validate the business processes. To validate the end-to-end process it includes recording technology to instrument processes as they execute. Solstice gives you the ability to view the message content itself as it passes through the distributed SOA infrastructure. Solstice also includes simulation capabilities so you can do proactive testing when not all systems are available.

Solstice also allows you to validate file and database updates, and run history and report. Solstice provides integration with Mercury, JUnit and ANT, just in case you need to enhance what you already have in-house for QA to deal with the complexities of SOA. According to Solstice, some customers, particularly those with complex environments, have seen 100% ROI within 6 months. Software that pays for itself is always impressive.

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Global Integration Summit has a unique feature called the Integration Solution Showcase. It’s essentially a bake off between the participating vendors. They are each given an SOA solution to implement. This year the Accenture created the specs for the solution which was a bank mortgage lending solution. The solution accepted applications, verified name and address, checked credit score, identified appropriate mortgage product based on credit score and then prepared the application for closing.

Having sat through many hundreds of vendor briefings, I found it interesting and refreshing to hear the vendor pitches through the lens of how they each solved the solution – and each did it differently. The winner, voted by attendees and a panel of judges, was Above All Software.

Above All takes a rather unique approach to creating composite applications. They create services from existing applications, then combine these into higher level business services which are independent from the underlying applications. These services can be re-used across different scenarios, which made it very easy for Above All to handle the required changes that were given Monday night. The services are also used to resolve semantic differences across systems. An Above all application can support multiple thin, rich, mobile, portal and embedded clients

Above All’s approach is to mine the Web services supplied, catalog them in the Above All repository, then create a new object type called AnyBank Mortgage Application. They then refined the four services to resolve the non-MISMO and MISMO semantic differences. Then assembled the services into the composite application, and deployed them to their server.

The approach of making the mortgage application a separate object has some interesting payoffs down the road. In the extra time they had, for “extra credit” they deployed the application as a self-service application which enabled customers to consume the services as a pdf. They did not have to reassemble or redeploy any part of the application to enable this service. Using the same approach they deployed a browser based application to enable real estate brokers to submit load applications through a Salesforce.com UI. This is due to Above All’s Salesforce.com Knowledge Pack which automates the process of utilizing new services from the Salesforce.com interface. Above All has a number of Knowledge Packs available. Check the website for the full list. When the change requirement came through to handle a new service for high risk product pricing, they were able to do it reassemble the application or redeploy the pdf or Salesforce.com application, thereby demonstrating true agility in their solution.

Recently Above All launched a downloadable evaluation version of their software. Check it out, then share your experience here.

Posted by bethgb in | Permalink | Comments (0)