If you haven't been keeping up with the Mumbo Gumbo comic strip check out the latest one with Hermoine trying to explain SOA to Harry using food as an analogy. It reminds me of the days I used to teach an edible networking course where different types of chocolate bars represented different types of NICs (token ring, ethernet), we used M&Ms for tokens to illustrate how token passing works as opposed to collision detection. Fun times. At least it kept everyone awake.

The Mumbo Gumbo comics tend to be more clever. The first SOA strip, called SOA, AOK does a good job capturing the frustration around trying to gain access to information silos and why SOA is necessary. It might strike a few familiar chords out there. Check it out.

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The last sound clip from the Gartner PBM conference is of Keith Sharp, Director Solutions Marketing, Ascentn. What is interesting about Ascentn is that it is uniquely architected to managed less predictable and ad hoc processes. I asked Keith why that is so. Please note that in this recording I mispronounced the company name (which I only learned about afterwards). Many apologies. The correct pronunciation should be ah-sen-tin.

Listen to the Ascention Podcast

Please let me know if you like these sound clips. It's a surprisingly large amount of work for our podcast production team, so I'd appreciate some feedback as to whether you think it's worth the effort.

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I caught up with Jim Sinur, Chief Strategy Officer at Global 360. Before joining Global 360 Jim was the leading BPM analyst at Gartner. He tells us he is having a lot of fun at Global 360 helping to shape the future of BPM. One area Jim is focusing on is Process Intelligence. I asked Jim exactly what that is. Frankly, I think he's on to something here. Right after the BPM conference Gartner held it's first Event Processing Summit. Providing business managers with real-time feedback and predictive capabilities on their business processes will provide the next level of business agility and intelligence. Listen to how Jim Sinur defines process intelligence and what it will do for organizations.

Listen to the Global360 Podcast

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At the Gartner BPM conference I spoke with Samir Gulati, VP marketing, Appian. who coincidentally is an alum of Pegasystems. Samir is pretty bullish on Appian. He cited the fact that a privately held company can be more innovative and forward looking when they don't need to perform to market expectations each quarter. Samir's examples of Appian's innovation were its content management capabilities and portal. It's always fun to talk to someone who is very excited about what they're doing, so I turned the mike on Samir as well.

Listen to or download the 3:22 min. podcast below:

Download file

Hope you enjoy the podcasts. Got to run to my next meeting. Will be back soon with more news from the conference.

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Today TIBCO announced the general availability of its master data management (MDM) solution - TIBCO Collaborative Information Manager™ 7.0. In 2005 TIBCO acquired Velosel, which had a Product Information Management (PIM) solution. TIBCO has used to technology to create a solution suitable for managing information in a distributed service oriented architecture.

Sid Suri, MDM Product Marketing Manager at TIBCO , says the task of master data management "is a process problem. Anyone can build a big database. But what is going to keep it current? The problem is how to keep it current over time." This requires managing processes around the flow of data, to ensure the information is correct. TIBCO's Collaborative Information Manager (sounds like a prime target for a new acronym - CIM) is an event-based application that combines data process automation and business rules.

In my opinion, TIBCO has the right vision here. Information management needs to be central to the enterprise SOA strategy. Creating an abstraction layer for data services is necessary to ensuring both the integrity of information as it moves across systems, as well as enabling the goal of quickly creating new business solutions from existing IT resources. Many some developers have expressed skepticism that such an abstraction layer will never perform. TIBCO has addressed the performance problem by including distributed caching, and asynchronous processing of large volumes of data.

Because SOA is an inherently distributed architecture, including process management for data is absolutely key. Data management is not just about a metadata repository. Data governance across distributed platforms is also a requirement. TIBCO's inclusion of a rules engine makes it a good solution for SOA data governance. I still think there is a need for semantic integration to automate the task of translation and transformation across systems, and this capability also needs to be part of the Information Server layer.

While in some large organizations information management is a separate group from the SOA team, it is clear that MDM has a major role to play as part of the SOA initiative and organizations should take a holistic view of how it fits into the overall IT architecture strategy.

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As you know from my previous post, I started recording snippets of my discussions at the Gartner conference. My idea was to bring you a more direct experience of what some of the leading BPM thinkers are saying these days.
One of these people is certainly Phil Gilbert, Executive Vice President and CTO of Lombardi Software. If you caught the panel discussion at our BPM in Action conference moderated by Sandy Kemsley. you know what a passionate and articulate speaker Phil Gilbert is. I caught up with Phil at the Lombardi party. Now, if anyone has ever been to a Gartner conference, you know that alcohol is served (rather liberally) at these parties, and I must admit to imbibing in a couple of glasses of wine. But Phil is just as articulate and passionate as ever so this clip is definitely worth a listen.

Listen to the Lombardi Podcast

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Greetings from not-so-sunny Orlando. Not that it matters. I can see the pool from my hotel window, but haven't made it out of the hotel yet. Too busy catching up with the BPM vendors down here.

Yesterday I spoke with Alan Trefler, CEO and founder of Pegasystems. Alan is ALWAYS very bullish about anything he speaks about. In the beginning Pegasystems had to explain why you should do BPM with rules. Now every BPM vendor has built, bought or OEMed a rules engine. But Alan says it's not the same. There are advantages in both performance and agility with it's a unified platform. When I asked him about Pegasystems and SOA, another hot topic at this conference. Alan told me that Pegasystems was built in a service oriented architecture. p>Listen to or download the 5:17 min. podcast below:

Download file

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ebizQ’s second SOA in Action Virtual Conference will again feature keynotes from industry leading analysts, and tips, tricks and best practices from practitioners.

But we’re also going to open up our stage and give our entire audience a chance to win two highly desirable prizes – and Apple iPhone and the acclaim of our 115,000-strong community of integration practitioners.

Here’s how it works. Submit your SOA solutions and innovations, and watch the votes role in as our members rate your solution. Can you compete with Peter Rhys Jenkins' SOA enabled doorbell and house? You have nothing to lose by trying, and it only takes a few minutes of your time to enter.

The Top 5 will receive an all expense paid trip to the SOA in Action conference, October 30 & 31, to present their solutions for the final vote. (OK, it’s virtual and just involves turning on your computer and picking up the phone – but you’ll be featured).

In truth, this contest came out of my sincere desire to accommodate those of you who either write me with stories of your clever implementations and those requesting speaking slots at our conferences. I WANT to include as many of you as possible - to get your stories out there. I think our audience wants to hear them. I plan to start doing podcasts with entrants so please submit your entry son.

Are you interested in become a SOA Idol and winning an iPhone? Submit your solution today. It only takes minutes. I'll be contacting you later to schedule a podcast.

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SOA Software announced a "closed loop" governance solution for MS BizTalk. By closed loop, they mean the SOA Software solution provides the ability to define, manage, and govern policies through a central registry/repository, enforce them through distributed service platforms including but not limited to BizTalk Server, and audit that the policies are being enforced.

BizTalk server now ships with the hooks ready to implement the SOA Software's Workbench for monitoring policies in run time. The solution also provides mediation between different standards and implementation of services, as well as interoperability between different ESBs. Workbench provides heterogeneous governance automation, which is an exciting story for organizations that have both BizTalk and other ESBs and services developed and deployed on other platforms.

Frank Martinez, Executive VP of SOA Software, believes that there is a huge opportunity to make BizTalk a platform of choice for SOA. He compared BizTalk to Excel and Word - providing a platform that is comparably inexpensive and easy to use. I have to agree that it's a very appealing story. The last time I spoke with Microsoft they stated that the SOA buzz was over and it wasn't really something they needed to pay attention to. Hopefully they are beginning to see beyond the buzz into the true potential. SOA Software certainly understands the potential, and governance is an essential requirement to making it enterprise ready. The SOA Software solution provides one platform for setting policies at design time, and monitoring and managing them during runtime - which is unique at this time. In the study ebizQ did last summer the majority of respondents realized the need to manage policies in runtime, but had not yet implemented solutions.

How many of you are considering BizTalk for your SOA solution?

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