Billy Newport, IBM's senior technical staff member and chief architect for WebSphere XD ObjectGrid, feels that conventional applications built in multiple tiers, such as data tiers and application tiers, have served the IT industry well.

However, the growth of data-intensive have both raised the implementation challenges and heightened the application benefits of data grid architecture.

“In some kinds of environments with the kind of work loads, and the way they have been increasing -- those application architectures have kind of been showing their age,” Newport said.

One solution includes transitioning to data grid-type architectures where “instead of pulling the application data from the database, the data is co-resident with the application,” Newport observed. 

Other Ways To Increased Performance

In the Middleware

Usually the role of middleware is to do all the hard stuff so customers can just work on their business logic, and middleware is a very important part of any data grade architecture.

“The Middleware handles things like fault tolerance, data replication, where the data gets placed on the grid, and other technical details,” Newport said.

Challenges Still Exist

Customers are getting tired of dealing with middleware that requires them to tell it how to do everything. They are saying that they want a much smarter middleware that can configure the data grid at runtime. And this middleware needs to figure how it's going to place the data on that grid, and how it's going to repair faults.

Large-Scale Applications Can Benefit Most

As an example, Newport points to the telco space where the requirements include extremely high availability and millisecond response times. “So when a customer wants to send a text message, it’s necessary to find out if they have text messaging enabled on their plan and to do that extremely quickly, with very high availability. And a data grid-type architecture to store what services are enabled for what customer is much more scalable a big box.”

If grids get larger, like 10,000 servers, that kind of architecture is absolutely essential because a leading requirement from customers is to lower the TCO. And, adds Newport, “They want to be able to have the same number of administrators with 1,000 servers, as with 2,000, 5,000 or 10,000. They need to keep the cost down. And that means you've got to automate as much as possible, to make a data grid economical to deploy.”

Industry-Specific Approaches

The telecom industry is one space with mixed architectures. It is now moving to voice-over IP. The voice sessions work well in a data grid architecture, where you route the calls to where the data is and we can maintain back-up copies for fail-over. The systems can be scaled up by adding more and more boxes. “Another important aspect for Telco is service provisioning. Where you want to know what given services a customer has when he makes a call. And you want to be able to look up the services very quickly. And you want to add and remove those services very quickly,” Newport explained.

The idea here is that as the telco company grows it can just add more boxes to the grid. The data grid middleware, like ObjectGrid from IBM will scale out the data across the new boxes. “So as you add more boxes, you're adding more CPUs, more network, and more memory. So that it's just going to become faster and faster and faster more servers are added,” Newport pointed out.

He concluded by noting that more information is available on the IBM extended deployment website. A trial version of ObjectGrid is available there for customers to download and to try out these features.

“The product addresses a lot of the problems in the middleware, and we're starting to see a lot of customers pick it up now, and move from the conventional architectures to these new data grid-type architectures,” Newport said.

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Listen to the entire 9:53 podcast Download file 

Don't miss Wednesday's 'A Two-Step Process That Will Simplify Software Delivery' Webinar with Skyway Expert Mike Evans!

In addition to the Visual Workspace tool itself, Skyway offers a set of processes that go around it, says Rodriguez. These processes “enable an organization to be more accurate in what it delivers, so as to ensure that the solutions that are built really match up to what business is looking for,” he said. “That process, combined with our workspace, enables it to be done much, much faster than can be coded today.

What's New in Version 5.0

Rodriguez feels that a disconnect between customers and IT is one of the biggest problems in the software development lifecycle today.

“The way that a customer is queried upfront and use cases are generated and these long requirements-gathering processes go on, while often very handy in trying to understand what the customer wants, never really fully addresses the problem,” he said.

Rodriguez cites estimates from analysts that as many as 80 percent of solutions delivered may not match with what businesses want, so the latest iteration of Skyway Visual Workspace gives customers the ability to have an interactive demo to see what they’re getting in advance.

“The prototype is 100 percent leveraged into the code and the models that end up being deployed long-term,” he said.

Version 5.0 of the software also includes a model-driven AJAX environment inside of Skyway that enables the building of applications with graphical models. This means users can build rich user interfaces that look at act like rich clients, but without a lot of XML and JavaScript.

The new version also includes the ability to integrate with Adobe DreamWeaver and added support for distributed transaction models.

Comparison to Typical SOA Offerings

Although many SOA offerings revolve around the runtime side of things, Rodriguez points out that Skyway plays in a different space, focusing on delivery and deployment.

“Skyway tools are really all about how do you build these things and then deploy them out into the environment and not about how do they run after the fact,” he explains. “What comes out of the Skyway Skyway platform is industry-standard J2EE code that's all packaged up and ready to deploy to an application server and enabled as Web services."

Compatibility with Legacy Applications

What if a company has an antiquated ERP or CRM system? Rodriguez feels that Skyway has great offerings for how to extend legacy systems without actually having to replace them. He cites the example of Southern States, which had a perfectly functioning JD Edwards system that worked for every area except customer pricing. The Skyway Workspace helped Southern States to extend their current system but to build out new logic and new UIs to manage custom pricing.

“That's actually a common thread,” he said. “We see that in most of our customers. They're not building Greenfield applications; they're extending what they've got that's inside their enterprise."

To find out much more about the topics summarized above, including which Skyway customers are already using the 5.0 release, listen to the entire 9:54 podcast.

--executive summary by Krissi Danielsson

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BPM has busted the buzzword meter to become a driving force behind integration -- and the question now is how to effectively extend its use it to enable corporate agility.

“We envision a world in which people can reroute work or escalate tasks via voice commands from their cell phones or even kick off processes from their iPods,” said Phil Larson, Appian Corporation’s Director of Product management.

 While iPod control has yet to arrive, Larson did detail a wide array of business imperatives, specific customer requests, emerging standards and Web 2.0 technologies that were built into Appian’s January release of Appian Enterprise 5.5.

“It provides a modern tool that’s easy to use, and we provide a 100% Web-based platform that’s using the latest AJAX and Web 2.0 technologies,” Larson noted. “So everything from process and task management to the design and modification of processes and policies can be done by a business user rather than strictly IT, and it can be done entirely through a Web browser.”

Some of the 230 customer feature requests incorporated into 5.5 included enhancements to Appian’s patent-pending in-flight modification technology that allows organizations to adjust their applications and processes while they run.

 “This enables a level of corporate agility vastly greater than when the world was dominated by kind of older, rigid applications like CRM and ERP that really kind of just hard-wired logic into application code itself,” Larson said. “Now, problems no longer need to be handled manually; the visibility into process performance is increasing and becoming the norm, not the exception. “

The SOA Link
 “From an SOA perspective, more and more as organizations are trying to expose more and more of their underlying systems as reusable services and this becomes an opportunity for us as a BPM company,” noted Larson, who added that Appian has had a lot of success as a platform for tying these services together into composite applications by combining the services – oftentimes Web Services -- with rules, procedures, monitoring capabilities, and human workflow.

And that has made it easier for organizations to get value out of their SOA by incorporating these services into enterprise processes,” Larson noted.

Spanning the Globe
Appian’s web-based design facilitates follow-the-sun models of development and customer support as organizations’ processes extend beyond the borders of the firm and home nations to suppliers, to their partners and their customers.

 “BPM tools need to be Web-based to manage these external processes; they must extend as far as these processes do,” Larson noted. “Language and time zone support are essential to complex, global processes. So we’ve incorporated things like Unicode, support for Asian languages and multiple calendars. At the click of a button I can convert the entire product to a mirror image so people can read from right to left for languages like such as Arabic for instance. So these internationalization capabilities are key decision criteria for companies that are, or would like to be, players in the emerging global economy.  

Web 2.0's Role
Finally, Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking sites, wikis, and RSS are entering the business world, and Larson detailed how enhanced collaboration and knowledge sharing can help companies sense and adapt to change.

 “We intend to continue to evolve new and better ways for users to seamlessly interact with the process engine through mediums like e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for instance,” Larson said.

 “Basically, any medium people are currently using to communicate with others is ripe with opportunity for creating seamless inroads into tools like Business Process Management,” he added.

Standards and More
Standards, however, “are very important but are in varying levels of maturity. Business Process Modeling Notation, for instance – BPMN -- is fairly well accepted, and Appian has fully embraced it,” Larson said.

 “For instance, business analysts don't simply throw requirements over the wall for IT to translate into automated solutions -- they define abstract process flows by linking together tasks and activities. But unlike a static diagram like Visio, these same models actually govern the execution of the process,” Larson added.

“So the business analysts are actually building the application themselves. And moreover, when it’s appropriate, the business analysts can even retain the ability to modify and optimize these processes directly. This is fundamentally changing the way the business is managed and how operational processes are executed and it’s really helping bridge the business-IT divide," Larson noted.

For many companies, competition has never been more fierce. So using standards like BPMN to put business users back in the driver's seat of corporate strategy is an incredibly good thing.

Larson also detailed how other technologies relevant to BPM such as  rules engines, content management and portal technologies were handled – along with the role of  WS-*, or Web service standards, WSDL, UDDI and XML.

 “They’re slightly less mature than some others, so our approach has been to support these standards but not be limited or constrained by their immaturity when providing solutions for our customers,” he said.

Larson went on to describe many more ways  BPM can enable corporate agility – and more ideal attributes of a BPM system.

"This gives enterprise applications built on BPM the best of both worlds: first, the ability to encapsulate best practices and ensure things are working the way they’re supposed to, and second, the flexibility to adapt these models and changing requirements and unforeseen or unexpected exceptions,” he concluded.

To hear a more detailed context – and many more concepts – you can listen to the entire 16:08 podcast or read the full text transcript.

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The Power of Community

The Integration Consortium (IC) is encouraging its membership base to embrace the community approach.  Many vendors including SAP have created large communities where both employees and clients interact through wikis, blogs, forums, and surveys.

Schmidt points out, “The power of community - is how communities on the global scale can create economy... it's almost like enabling outsourcing at the individual level.”

Web 2.0’s emphasis on user created content allows global communities to form quickly.

IT practitioners are, “leveraging things like wikis, blogs, and other events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals... to extend their network of peers outside the four walls of their company, so really, there are no walls -- anybody in the world could be interacting. And they're taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

One of the IC’s main goals is to encourage and facilitate the continued development of the integration community.

The Community Around SOA

Schmidt went on to describe the specific community around SOA.  The Integration Consortium is fostering the community surrounding SOA by enabling sharing of best practices via papers, conferences, and webinars.

Any SOA solution is dependent on best practices and a community approach is the most efficient means of sharing and developing best practices.

The IC is not only facilitating individual community involvement, but also helping community organizations develop.  The IC is one of the founding organizations that helped launch the SOA consortium, which was a spin-off from what was previously known as the SOA Alliance.

The IC also works collaboratively with many groups.  One example is the Synergy Project, a joint project of the OMG, the Open Group and the Integration Consortium.  Schmidt says, “It’s really trying to rationalize our model, to figure out how MDA, model-driven architecture, which is an OMG practice, aligns with and performs with TOGAF which is The Open Group’s architecture framework.” 

The IC brings end-user perspective to the project facilitating a true community wide approach.

Architecture is an Important Aspect of Integration

The IC is also emphasizing architecture’s role in integration.  In the past, architecture was not viewed as an important aspect of integration.  Today, the IC encourages its members to consider architecture as an integral aspect of integration.

Schmidt says, “Integration and architecture have always been two sides of the same coin. Architecture is a lot more about structure, frameworks and standards, while integration is more about the implementation and execution side of the challenges and how can large organizations effectively share information in processes in a consistent fashion.”

Schmidt continues,  “Integration at a business level is really just about getting people to communicate, sharing information across functional areas, serving customers consistently across channels and, in that context, architecture is just as important as the actual Middleware components or software tool they might use to implement it.”

Taking a Holistic View of the Enterprise

While integration projects have a historically high rate of failure, Smith believes there are ways to simplify the process.

“We need to look at our enterprises as a system of systems... while a specific organization may have 1000 or 2000 application systems, they're all connected. They all run in the same network. They're all sharing information. They're all serving the same customer.”

This holistic view enables truly effective modeling, Schmidt says, “We take this incredible high complexity that exists in today's IT world, break it up into manageable functional components through a disciplined process and through standard architectures, define how those components can come back together and play in an end-to-end business process world.”

The IC believes proper modeling based on a holistic view of an organization coupled with community based best practice development will increase the success rates of integration projects.

The Annual Global Integration Summit takes place May 14-15 in Banff,

This event covers a wide range of topics and draws exceptional practitioners from around the world.  The summit is unique in its academic based peer-review process.

Schmidt says, “The peer-review process has generated a very high-quality event. The Conference proceedings book is probably one of the only, if not the only, peer-reviewed business-oriented journal that is published on an annual basis in the integration and architecture space.”

The conference offers a variety of content.  For example, collaborative work analysis, partnering, case studies of real-life implementations, emerging architectures, etc.

The IC will continue its work after the Global Summit.  Schmidt says, “We're taking portions, or kind of a lighter-weight version of the Global Summit, out on the road. Some of the cities that it will be in include Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, New York, Atlanta and this year we're also doing one in Brussels, in combination with the OMG.”

For more information visit:  www.integrationconsortium.org

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