Web 2.0 Data mashups are to SOA what NASCAR is to automobile production -- a much faster, more free-flowing, results-oriented way of combining complementary components into new applications that have an advantage over traditional months-long application development or production cycles.

And they seem to be rivaling NASCAR in popularity as large, medium and small software companies are all offering mashups. At the forefront of the movement is San Francisco-based software company ActiveGrid, which is offering free on-site "Build Days" to qualifying companies to deploy their mashups.

“The key advantage is the speed to which business-driving applications can be delivered to the end user base within the organization,” said Todd Hay, ActiveGrid’s Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. “Their customers and their salespeople can get the information they need immediately instead of waiting for the long term, long-run enterprise integration technologies to finish.”

Hay went on to describe how ActiveGrid:

--Leverages a firm’s existing techniques to ensure security, reliability and scalability while “still giving them the flexible, easy-to-use and fast-to-deliver front ends the Web 2.0 or mashup world has driven.”

--Provides the tools to allow developers to quickly build applications out of the services and out of capabilities being delivered by giants like IBM, Microsoft and eBay.

-- Disptaches their top engineers to a company to show them how ActiveGrid “can very quickly solve their business problems on their turf with their technologies. And that has been a very effective approach for us.”

--Enabled one manufacturing giant in the Midwest to pull marketing information out of a number of their field databases and create a marketing analytics application that allows them to create corporate-wide marketing campaigns across their global presence of retail manufacturing outlets.

For mashups, rapid delivery, rapid iteration and extendibility according to end users’ needs are the key requirements, Hay noted.

“I do see mashups as the logical evolution of where Web services were trying to go and where the Web was trying to go; service oriented architectures in general have been laying the groundwork for this for years,” Hay said. “We’ve now just advanced the technologies to the point where it is delivering on those promises.

Hay added his thoughts on the ideal, complimentary balance between an SOA and mashups:

“A large customer or ours was very excited that ActiveGrid can come in and start building Web 2.0 AJAX-enabled mashups based on their existing databases and some external Web Services. And as they build out a large SOA infrastructure from the back end with the governance and repositories they’re talking about; they can migrate and leverage those applications moving forward.”

For many more details, listen to the entire 7:29 podcast Download file

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Over the years, I’ve found that I’m listed in some data repositories as Gian Trotta, Gian G. Trotta, Trotta, Gian and as John Trotta and Gina Trotta to those who have opted to anglicize or feminize my name.

And that’s just one example of what makes it hard to integrate data from different databases in SOAs. But last week, Progress Software unveiled its DataXtend Semantic Integrator – and its model, mapping and schema creation-tools are potent aids to validating and transforming data access across SOA applications.

“Whether it’s a relational database, it’s in a Web service or it’s in a flat file,” noted Progress Software’s Vice President for Data Services Ken Rugg. “It’s very important that if these systems are going to cooperate, that they’re treating you as the same person every time you go to their systems,” said .

The next challenge is to go beyond format integrity and assure consistency with business requirements.
Data quality and data consistency is a big theme to both service customers appropriately, ensure regulatory compliance.

“The way we see it is is that there are number of tools that give you the ability to maintain the data consistency or cleansing the data,” Rugg added. “But with the DataXtend integator product, we’re dealing with data in motion that’s flowing between services and from one data source to another. And in those cases we present a way of creating rules that insure the constraints and consistency of the data is managed throughout its lifecycle while it is in motion, while you’re able to use it.

Rugg also detailed the advantages of allowing customers to both create and map between custom schemas and industry-standard ones.

“One of the largest scenarios where we see our customers using the technology is when they’re using an industry-standard schema, something like an HL7 or a SID from the telecommunications space,” he noted.

They have these very large models; they want to be able to have an informational model; a canonical model that represents their entire business," Rugg added. "For a significant enterprise, those models can be very large and very complex and they can be hard to manage over their lifecycle because they do certainly have to change to adapt to the business. When we talk to our clients, being able to handle that complexity and that ability to handle those large-scale schemas is really one the key things they’re finding useful in our tool."

An early case study included a major telecom provider using DataXtend to integrate their operational and business systems. “It may be information about you as a customer from their landline support, their cellular support and their broadband support and they want to make sure it’s Gian that they’re talking to, no matter what it is they’re talking to you about, Rugg noted.

“You might see upwards of 3000 individual point systems that are being use to bring this common data and information together. That’s a challenge that really requires a tool of the class and quality of DataXtend’s capabilities,” he concluded.

For many more details, listen to the entire 6:49 podcast Download file

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Are you one of the many companies that have built SOA applications that no one is using? Last month, NetManage announced SOA Planner, a new Java-Based planning tool that lets organizations create SOA services based on actual usage patterns.

It also enables what Archie Roboostoff, senior manager of product management at NetManage calls "Incremental SOA."

It’s a strategy for creating services around legacy-based assets that allows customers to incrementally plan, build, evolve and scale a service.

“Many business functions cross legacy applications, and this is something SOA Planner can expose,” Roboostoff notes. “For example, a customer lookup function might go four screens into a transaction, and an end user may copy content onto three screens on another system and then come back to that original system and complete that transaction.”

As a result, a non-developer can use SOA Planner with NetManage's OnWeb tool to export a script that will enable a service.

“So quite literally, by having my end users do their everyday business, I can literarily have them create their own services and I can deploy those to OnWeb,” Roboostoff said.

"This is something that is not available today and is resonating quickly throughout our industry," Roboostoff added. "While this is a new product, it still stays in line with our mission all along, when it comes to connectivity: a customer should not have to be an expert in the systems they’re integration with, and they should be able to deliver via any technology and any application server and any framework."

Roboostoff went on to detail a case study of a large financial institution that wanted to get a top-down look at how their users were using their legacy assets and legacy information.

“Using SOA planner, they’re able now to from their central location, track and tag specific business units, and now how they have quantifiable evidence that contradicted some of their early thoughts,” Roboostoff said.

“Now they have that quantifiable evidence as to what should be service-enabled and why and they can get this off the whiteboard for the first time and into a prototype environment so they can the impact of these services on everyday business,” he added.

For complete details, listen to the podcast (4:49 length) Download file

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Back in August, we profiled how companies could use Bluespring Software's BPM Suite 4.4 to work with popular Microsoft Office apps to involve a larger percentage of employees in BPM initiatives.

Last month, Bluespring announced an even more tightly integrated upgrade for the upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2007.

It will allow users to access much more data, such as ERP and CRM and legacy systems “in a format people can do something with – what Microsoft calls being ‘people ready’”, Bluespring's Vice President of Channel Development and Marketing Jeff Mills says.

“In layman's terms, what it means is that it's a really powerful capability to be able to take data our of all kinds of disparate systems and present it in Excel, Word, Infopath, Outlook -- the common desktop tools people already have and many cases they already know how to use -- to simplify people's jobs,” he said.

It also lets non-developers design, launch, manage and make changes to a process with limited to no IT involvement.

“There's no lost in translation from business trying to let IT know what they're trying to do, and from and IT standpoint, it lets them focus on and infrastructure, and keeping servers running that host these applications, as opposed to always making all the day-to-day changes to the business rules and business process that ultimately should reside the business folks,” Mills says.

The approach scales across numerous industry verticals:

“Our technology is vertical agonistic in that every industry where it's deployed, at a high level and at a process level they all have process problems and they all have a high variety of people who have Microsoft Office on their desktop.

Mills went on to detail a specific case studies and further describe BPM Suite’s actual workings with Office, InfoPath and Sharepoint. He also addressed how BPM software can still be improved.

“I don't think you can wave a magic wand and technology can get up and running, but we can make people’s lives much easier than it is today,” he notes.

For complete details, listen to the podcast. Download file

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A recent ebizQ survey showed organizations facing some formidable problems with SOA governance -- but some automated help is on the way.

SOA Software today announced Workbench, a comprehensive standalone, closed-loop SOA governance product that could simplify governance and speed service adoption and reuse.

“Governance is really about instilling consistency and accountability and encouraging desired behavior,” said Ian Goldsmith, SOA Software’s vice president of product marketing.

“You can’t just lay down a governance solution which set all sorts of onerous requirements and makes it difficult for people to begin to leverage the tools in place. You have to make sure that you make it easy -- and that’s what Workbench is all about,” he added.

Goldsmith went on to detail how deploying Workbench with SOA Software’s Service Manager product provides closed-loop governance.

“The alternative is distinct, separate products using a sort of ‘define and hope’ model of governance from a registry repository where you set up a policy and hope or pray that something’s out there randomly enforcing it,” he noted.

“And then the policy enforcement products, the run-time platforms end up in what I term a ‘fire-ready-aim’ model of policy enforcement where they simply randomly enforce things and no one really knows what it is they’re enforcing,” Goldsmith added.

The ebizQ governance survey also found that confidence in governance grew in direct proportion to its degree of automation.

“It’s very encouraging that the survey found that correlation because it gels very nicely with what we’ve seen and I think it also comes back to reflecting on the idea of ease of use being critical,” Goldsmith said.

Goldsmith described Workbench’s automated workflows, such as having Service Manager automatically detect a service in deployment and submit that process to a workflow process in Workbench. Workbench can also marshal a new service through a series of policy compliance checks for design-time compliance through a series of approvals to insure only appropriate services are published in the organization in the first place.

A second workflow can define “what we call and active contract -- an XML document that defines the contractual relationship between a consumer and a provider,” Goldsmith added. “So it specifies the policies the consumer has to the consumer has to comply with, it specifies the SLAs that will be monitored at both ends, it specifies the capabilities of the provider, it specifies the times the consumers can access it, it specifies the capacity they’re allowed to access and whole bunch of things; it can even specify mediation between incompatible standards and technologies.”

Goldsmith also described how Workbench can help strike a balance between controlling the proliferation of services and allowing non-developers to create services.

“For example, one of the things it allows you to do -- and this is really very innovative -- it allows a potential consumer of a service to specify their own service definition and submit that service definition to development process for execution,” Goldstein noted.

“So the development side can look at these submission an see which ones they want to submit and which ones they don’t and whether they want to enter into a formal contract with a consumer before they develop it,” Goldstein said.

For much more on Workbench -- and SOA Software’s explosive growth in the last two years -- listen to the entire podcast.

Download file

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