Listen to the entire 17:40 podcast Download file

It's been a busy week over at Vitria Technology Inc., with not just one, but two interesting product releases that will enable faster and better SOA development.

Business Accelerator is an open, agnostic enterprise-class integration suite built from the ground up for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). Resolution Accelerator is designed to help process business exceptions and improve business processes in general. It seems to have, and -- the pun is intended here -- some exceptional capacities to ferret out and repair exceptions’ adverse effect across an entire enterprise.

“When we went out and surveyed customers, we saw that there were a few things that they were looking for in SOA technology,” Dr. Skeen said. These included portal-building ability, new was to incorporate business processes, business process management and integration-centric technology and the ability to leverage what they had done so far.

“So many times they go to vendors and they find that if they want to buy a component, they have to buy the entire SOA stack,” Dr. Skeen said, adding that many clients were caught between from what they saw two different types of tools. “One allowed to implement quickly and deploy quickly but maybe not be able to, if the project was successful, scale up to an enterprise scale,” Dr. Skeen added. “Other tools had the proven enterprise salability but were often hard to deploy to begin with, and again often came with proprietary SOA stacks,” he added.

Finding the Sweet Spot -- and Some Twists

To find the sweet spot between these desires, Vitria took decided to stay with its historical focus on providing strong integration technology and 12-year history building integration BPM tools.

“But we also decided to bring this technology to market with a twist,” Dr. Skeen said.

--Allow their technology to be used with other strong ecosystem partners that they have certified against.

--Make it agnostic by allowing it to be “once-click” deployment on top of other SOA platforms, specifically app servers and ESBs.

“This also allowed our customers to go to market quickly with current technology they have in place, even though they know over time they may have to evolve this technology,” Dr. Skeen notes.

“Also, Gartner, for example estimates, that typical SOA enterprise experiment with SOA will not have one SOA environment but anywhere from three to more, and these environments typically have to be maintained separately,” he noted.

“So, for example, if you have a JBoss environment in one geographic region, maybe a WebSphere environment in another geographic region and maybe a WebLogic environment in yet another region, still, instead of having developed three different integration solutions and deploy them into three different environments, what we allow you to develop it once and deploy it in those three environments,” Skeen said.

Vitria’s strong ecosystem of partners includes RedHat, for app server and middleware messaging services, AmberPoint for the management of Web services. Skeen noted that Vitria “was also working with IBM and BEA, companies which we have viewed traditionally been our competitors. But we think, in this new world, really we need to all be viewed as partners.”

Exceptional Exception Handling for Increased SOA

Skeen then turned to Vitria’s second upgraded product, Resolution Accelerator 3.0, which is designed to quickly and cost-effectively handle exceptions.

“Unfortunately, for many companies, exceptions are not that exceptional, i.e., they occur more frequently than what one would like,” said Skeen, who went on  to detail how they occur at all level of an IT stack, including:

• System exceptions, such as a database or an application going down.
•   Higher-level exceptions such as a Web service is not responding in time.

“Or even a higher level, a process for example, you submit an order. And that order needs to go through a number of steps. You need to check customer information, billing information, for example. Inventory -- do you have that in stock?” Skeen noted. “All those are likely to be different systems and any point in that long process, something could fail.”

And he added that SOA’s decentralization and multiple technology could even exacerbate the problem by making exceptions harder to locate or event.

Skeen describe how Resolution Accelerator’s solution is to uses the concept of “mass repair” to tap into all levels of exceptions by handling them it at a business-problem level and restarting all the processes that were involved in the effects of that root cause.

“So, for example, if your order stops, then what you really want to be able to do is find some way to continue that order, as quickly as possible, so you don't lose that customer,” noted Skeen added.

Mass Repair in Action

“We find that a lot of times, many problems that may occur, for example, orders being stopped, may be the result of a single problem happening at a lower level -- for example, an application goes down,” Skeen said.

“Or, if you're an energy company or a power company, your first sign of a transmission line going down may be a thousand customer calls coming in. Now clearly, those thousand calls, you need to be able to take care of, but there is one underlying cause, and once you've identified that root cause, you'd like to fix it and then be able to make sure that those customers can be taken of, or in the case of an application going down and orders being stopped, those orders can progress nicely,” Skeen said.

An added bonus is that Resolution Accelerator runs on top of Business Accelerator’s open and agnostic architecture, “which means that means that you can go into an environment with Resolution Accelerator and leverage your current SOA infrastructure. You don't have to rip and replace, you don't have to install a new stack. You can really leverage what's there,” Skeen noted.

Dr. Skeen also decribed how early adopters like telcos and financial services companies at a mature stage of SOA can use the compbination to solve key problems, such as automating their enterprise business processes by providing better insight through their governance and Web services tools into the effects of many exceptions.

“So we can really leverage the tools that really come into play and take it from just managing exceptions at the service level to really managing the exceptions at a business level,” he noted.

“In the agnostic side as well, these companies can take advantage of the fact that they probably do have multiple SOA environments, and they would like to rationalize them, perhaps reduce them to one or two,” Skeen said.

Other industries, such as healthcare services that are just at the beginning of SOA adoption “will get a complete ecosystem of partners that can out of the box provide a total SOA solution,” Skeen said.

“They can choose just to use the technology out of the box and focus only on the problem they have … later on if they need to make a different choice, they are still free to do so.”

To find out much more about the topics summarized above, listen to the entire 17:40 podcast.

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Listen to the entire 16:26 podcast Download file

Our series reacting to Professor Yvonne Antonucci’s survey of 146 companies that showed strong desire for -- but rampant confusion over -- BPM training continues with Terry Schurter, CIO of BPM Group.

Schurter, who co-developed the Group’s “Elements of BPM Practice” online course started by breaking training into three categories:

--Training in software tools, mostly provided by BPM software vendors

While tool-based training continues to draw IT staffers, Schurter notes that more business siders – particularly business analysts – are entering that sphere as well, especially as an increasing number of BPM tools are now focused more towards the business use than traditional programming IT type of use.

-- A second, very prescriptive approach to modeling or articulating the business processes by going through a step-by-step methodology and produce a business process.

“We’re looking at  is the prescriptive creation of business process that tends to be business analysts -- folks who have been doing business analysis for a very long time don’t really feel a need to change what they’re doing very significantly, just to add to that.

-- A third, even more adaptive type that in Schurter’s words, “allows people to unleash their innovation and creativity within the context of their own organization and the business problems or opportunities that they have in their world.

“We know that lots of change is going on and we know that one size doesn’t fit all, so we need to provide training that allows people to actually figure out, “Wow, this is the way I could go and create success in my organization,’” he added.

It also attracts a dramatically different mix of staffers. “We see folks always from the CEO or even the board level of organizations all the way down to the people participating in the process, getting involved in the training and they each have their own agenda. The board level or CEO level -- that’s a very strategic focus when you get down to specific process,” Schuter noted.

All of the training programs that the BPM Group has developed come from the perspective that there are strategy, people, process and systems that are intricately involved in doing business process management.

“And you can imagine that touches everyone, from guys doing strategic planning and visioning down to the folks who are actually in charge of operations and making sure that flows through the organization properly, all the way down to IT supporting services and software and, of course, the front-line folks who are actually doing work,” Schurter said. “And that gets everyone into a place where they can see, “Wow, I see the bigger picture but I also see exactly where I fit in business process management and how I can help my business achieve success.”

Online vs. Offline Training and Certification

Schurter went on to describe the advantages of online and in-person training. The former pluses includes access from anywhere, consumption on a structured basis.

 “In many cases, it’s hard to block out three, four, five days for an in-house or in-person training program,” Schuter notes. “In-person training program has greater depth, and a lot more interaction and tactile touchy-feely type stuff; with business process management it really gets you there. There’s no way that the virtual world and the online training kind of thing can take it to that level. However, the disadvantages are you have to be there in person, you have to be there for a specific length of time that is continuous.

Another key factor is certification, which Schurter feels is in many case a misnomer.

“It’s a very hot topic in this industry,” Schuter said. “You can claim certification on any training or from any organization for any reason, but the reality is, that real certification comes from a validating body that has the credibility and expertise to say, “Yes, this actually has a high-quality structure and content to it.”

“In the case of the BPM Group we took that latter route with our in-person training and we actually went through a two-year very rigorous and laborious process to have our in-person training certified from one of the largest accrediting organizations in the world. They accredit courses in 114 countries,” Schurter said. “So, we went through that process to make sure that we were providing a validated resource to the community at large.”

“In the case of The Elements of BPM Practice, what we did is that we took experience and we applied the certification concepts that we learned there to that training, so we felt that again validated the quality and value of the product to the end user,” Schurter said.

“When you get accreditation at what is effectively the master level at what is in effect the level of university study, that is a very high bar and it does tell us a lot about the quality of the product,” he added. “At least that proves that the organization offering the online training took the time and effort -- and it’s a lot -- to actually validate against a well-known authority that their training does meet quality and content standards.”

What certification doesn’t reveal relevance and ROI and Schurter cited companies’ desire for confidentiality as precluding an indepth discussion.

“What we find is that many organizations get this training. They go out, they put it to use; the success is so strong that they immediately move to an enterprise-wide and in many cases global rollout of this training because it’s making a huge difference… it goes in orders of magnitude from hundreds of thousands, to millions to hundreds of millions dollars in net result to the business,”  

A Moore’s Law of Training

“The rate of growth in training that we’re seeing right now is literally doubling every six months. And most of that growth, or I should say that half of that growth is from organizations wanting to train more people. You’ve got 50 percent of the growth coming in from folks that are just going into the BPM training paths and then 50 percent of that growth comes from folks that have had some training and now they want a lot more for a lot more of their people.

There’s also a next level of training that Schurter and his colleague, BPM Group CEO Steve Towers presented an introduction to at the Gartner BPM Summit and are will be doing a few seminars on in the U.S. and UK later this year.

For more information, readers can listen to the entire 17:06 podcast above or go to BPMG.org.

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IBM’s Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for WebSphere Application Integration Leif Davidsen sees five entry points that enable the IT infrastructure changes that lets organizations embark on the road to SOA.

“Three of them are business focused – people, process and information and how the business might reflect those parts of itself in SOA,” Davidsen says. “And then we have two more technical entry points, reuse and connectivity.

And the drawbacks of building point-to-point hard coupled links between and more and more interface logic into the applications themselves includes:

--Swamping  the actual business logic that the application is actually there to perform and increasing the cost of changing or maintaining that application.

-- Introducing the potential for errors or fragility.

--Rendering the applications almost completely unusable in an SOA environment.

“You want to then reuse them as services, where services are actually trying to get to the core business logic itself rather than be interested in the specific way in which they are invoked in terms of an application interface,” Davidsen says.

Untangling the Rat's Nest

He went on to detail IBM’s three-tiered approach to letting an ESB provide a completely decoupled infrastructure allowing a business to make use of the actual core business logic where all interface layers were defined and managed and maintained within the ESB layer and not in the applications themselves.

At the simplest level, an ESB can meet a company’s specific business needs by leveraging the decoupled connectivity that IBM’s WebSphere MQ transport layer has provided between applications for more than 12 years.

“It really provides much more intelligence in terms of routing the information between applications and services and also transforming and performing intelligent processing based on the content of the flow, based on awareness of each application that’s actually both sending and receiving the information," Davidsen noted.

"So there’s all sorts of different ways in which you can use ESBs throughout your business today," Davidsen said, before detailing actual case studies by a wide range of companies.

“What’s always been encouraging has been that these customers span both the globe in terms of where they’re running their businesses and in terms of the different industries that they exist and successfully perform in,” Davidsen said. They include:

--HypoVereinsbank:  “Their line of business, they were finding, they were stuck in a silo mentality in terms of only wanting to connect to their own applications, which obviously restricts their growth capability," Davidsen said. "So they wanted to implement an ESB to allow them to move to a much more component-based building block model for their business, allowing their services to be more widely used across their business.

--Auto Leaser Ubench: “They’re using very innovative technology -- wireless telemetry devices -- in their leased auto fleets that allow them to offer capabilities such as automatically detecting when services or maintenance is required and sending that back to the other value chain suppliers across their leasing business to arrange that," Davidsen said.

“And then there are other companies, like a media company, VRT, who wanted to put in place an ESB to connect their digital and tape-based media assets for both faster, efficient storage and retrieval of those assets," Davidsen said.

VRT, Davidsen noted, “is actually using one of our other ESB products, WebSphere ESB, that’s ideally designed for service-based integration. They had built an almost completely Web services based infrastructure and the data types, the metadata, were all easily describable in terms of XML and sort of more open data structures, so they could use WebSphere ESB to provide the intermediation between the different applications and data types.

DataPower: An Advanced Solution

Another company, digital rights manager Macrovision, was running WebSphere ESB at the heart of their process server and had an e-commerce front end to their business.

“We believe that it will be much more difficult to really meet our customer needs by building a single ESB that tried to do everything, because those customers that needed a simpler product would probably be overwhelmed,” Davidsen said. “And it’s like if you tried to cut these things back too much, you’re going lose some of the capability and flexibility and scalability that many of our really large enterprise customers find that they need.

“What we find in terms of the implementation model is that businesses would typically implement a particular ESB from our portfolio for a particular departmental or project needs as part of an overall ESB strategy, in the full knowledge that any combination of these ESBs would work together. So you can have WebSphere ESB connected to WebSphere Message Broker, or DataPower connecting to either of those two,” Davidsen said.

For much more on the topic – and more case studies – listen to the full podcast.

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