What follows is my podcast with Andrew Brown, the Director of Product Strategy for AmberPoint. Andrew works closely with hundreds of enterprise customers, which helps him set the company’s road map for SOA Security Solutions. Also, Andrew will be one of the featured speakers at AmberPoint’s upcoming webinar with ebizQ on July 15th, called Changing Tires on a Moving Car, which will cover solutions for governing the continuous evolution of complex SOA systems. This podcast provides a quick introduction to what will be covered in more depth and detail in the webinar.

Listen to or download the 5:57 minute podcast below:

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Now, first of all, many companies today are turning to SOA in search of agility. But isn’t it the same agility and rapid change that is causing a lot of problems in these companies?

Well, in fact, it is and the main issue is that this agility comes from moving away from what we think of as traditional monolithic applications, and more waterfall approaches towards componentized architectures, and really more iterative development practices. And that means that usually different teams are going to own the atomic pieces of functionality that’s associated with these larger composite applications that are usually associated with SOA.

And those components are also going to be involved in end-to-end transactions that span the whole service network. They may even call out to external services that are beyond the direct control of internal teams responsible for development for testing, for deployment, and even operations. And so what this boils down to is the fact that applications are going to be updated piecemeal.

They are going to be updated in small kind of bite-sized chunks rather than getting pushed out all at once. And what this means is that a new component is not really going to be battle tested until its running in the context of the runtime environment. And the issues are functional changes that may break applications and also performance issues that can't really be forecast using traditional tools.

And then on top of this, you have the fact that a lot of the functional aspects of a service are prone to change even after its been deployed and you can chalk that up to loose coupling, and unintended reuse, and other aspects of SOA applications. And if you are successful with SOA, consumers are going to find new uses for your services even after you’ve relinquished control of them.

And then on top of that, you can add governance as an issue. The center of excellence or whomever is responsible for governance is going to be applying policies to your services even after you’ve pushed them out into the runtime environments and these are policies such as authentications, such as access control, logging, and various types of quality of service policies.

Interesting. So what exactly is the best approach for making sure change services and policies will work then?

Well, the best approach would be to fully replicate the production environment in an operational acceptance environment where all the components could be tested as a whole with all the firewalls and the load balancers and all the routers that makeup the production environment. But, of course, that’s prohibitively expensive.

The degree to which the difference between your operational acceptance and your production environment is really one of the major factors that feed into your deployment risk. If your staging environment nothing’s like your production environment, you’re going to have a lot of risk. And so the basic challenge for validation is to reduce that risk.

So first, you need to be able to baseline the production environment, or whatever runtime environment you have to be working with. And by baseline, what we mean is really kind of a snapshot in time. What are the dependences between the services? How are services being consumed? What are the traffic volumes, message types, and so on?

And then you need to be able to replay those baselines against your service network at some point in the future such as after you’ve made a change to the system, like updating component, changing its functionality, or applying a policy to a service. And so really the more realistic the baselines you work with, the lower your risk is going to be when you finally deploy your services.

And you need to be able to baseline and replay complex end-to-end transactions. And that’s a real challenge and that’s something that AmberPoint SOA Validation System can help you with.

Can you give me a quick overview of how quality assurance and validation can work together?

Well, that’s actually -- there’s a very simple answer to that question that has really lots of implications. And basically, the answer is that validation in the runtime environment building these baselines can feed various quality processes with operationally realistic snapshots.

So in other words, real data, real traffic flows, real service behavior can be modeled throughout the service devolvement lifecycle, which means that, for example, developers can work with more complete simulations of composite applications, QA teams can work with more realistic traffic patterns for doing load and capacity testing. And finally, operations teams can run really what we think of as a preflight check for applications before they actually get turned on the production environment.

So using these various baselines and snapshots, the operations team can go ahead and rerun these before turning the applications on with a much higher-level confidence of the integrity, the continuing interoperability, the capacity that’s been deployed in support of these different applications, and in support of these end-to-end complex transactions.

PS: Excellent information, Andrew. And I want everyone to know listening to this it’s just a preview and you should definitely signup for AmberPoint’s Webinar Changing Tires on a Moving Car. Also, if you have any questions, feel free to log onto ebizQ and submit them right here. Thank you so very much for joining me today, Andrew.

Joe McKendrick has a blog on it right here, and Mindreef has also published a FAQ for their customers. Read that right here, and make sure to check back to ebizQ for more news as it develops.

"This is another step in the winnowing of the ESB market, if there still is such a creature. Last year, which was a good one for the software industry, saw Iona’s revenues go flat and margins sink into the red. Although Iona’s ESB businesses were growing, undoubtedly the prime attraction for Progress is the legacy base of Orbix customers whose transaction-heavy loads provide a good complement for its DataDirect business. For the ESB business, Iona brings a modest stable of customers who might be attractive converts for the more mature Sonic product set. Otherwise, in the long run, there won't be such a thing as an ESB business per se, as customers will buy them as part of larger solutions."

Listen to or download the 9:38 minute podcast below:

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What follows is a transcript of my podcast with Michael Lees, Senior Director at Software AG. Michael is a core member of Software AG’s BPM Leadership Team, and in this podcast we take a quick look at all the changes going on in process management as a quick preview to this Wednesday's virtual conference, Process Management and the Bottom Line.

First of all, how has the BPM market evolved over the last 12 months?

So we’ve seen quite a lot of maturity in the market over the last 12 months, actually, probably more in the last 12 months than we’ve seen in the previous two years. We’ve seen a lot of our customers and prospects moving from what I would call tactical BPM towards what I would call enterprise or strategic BPM. So a lot of customers have been doing fairly low level, single process projects within departments using BPM tools, often fairly light on the technical, often just using business process analysis tools, or business modeling tools.

And we’ve had a lot of success, which is great. And a lot of these companies now have had success with multiple processes and multiple departments. And what they’re tending to do is, is tending to get the notice of senior management and board level within some of these organizations who are now looking at what BPM can do from more of an enterprise perspective and more from a cross department and cross functional perspective.

So that’s creating quite a lot of interest in BPM from a much broader perspective. And when you look at it at that perspective, it suddenly becomes more than just sort of modeling as is processes, optimizing them and deploying new processes. The demands on the infrastructure becomes significantly heavier.

The integration requirements become significant heavier so we’re seeing more and more customers looking at the SOA infrastructure and strategies hand-in-hand with BPM to support that more enterprise level approach. We’re also seeing more and more customers looking at the methodology side of the equation and focusing on things like process governance.

And we’ve had a lot of interest in setting up BPM Centers of Excellence, it’s something that we’re specializing in now as a company and supporting our customers as they move along the maturity curve. And we’re seeing that BPM run more and more on the desk of the CIO as well. CIOs now are talking about processes, they’re seeing it as common language where they can meet the business halfway and getting better communication and collaboration around the work that they’re doing.

And they’re also seeing it as a way of taking IT off the critical path. CIOs are increasingly frustrated by having conversations with the business based purely on cost, they want to add value. And BPM is a way of them really shifting the age-old problem of spending 80% of their time on maintenance, and 20% on innovation on new capability development, and they’re switching that equation around and actually having a conversation with the business based on value.

What impact does BPM have on existing package applications and on the package application’s market?

So it’s definitely complimentary. One of the things that we promote fairly heavily as an organization is that BPM and SOA give you the opportunity as we say to leave and layer your existing architecture. We’re certainly not talking about rip and replace here.

Your existing applications whether they be sort of more traditional legacy applications or recently purchased packaged applications all do their job reasonably well and all address functional elements of fend-to-end processes effectively. The real need that we’re hearing from the market is that CIOs have made this investment over the last 20 years in their legacy systems, and their ERP systems, in their packaged applications, and they now want to fill in the white spaces they say or as I would put it, taking them the last mile.

And many of these packaged applications aren’t really built to recognize end-to-end processes; they’re stove piped functions so they’re not built for process. Many of them aren’t really built for people. The people who are actually doing the process work often have to learn the intricacies of multiple backend systems to get their job done so they’re definitely not built for people.

And they’re definitely not built for this new generation of workers that are coming into the workforce that demand a much simpler user interface, a much more collaborative approach to the way that they do work. And finally, they’re not really built for change. Delving into multiple packaged applications to implement a change in response to a business requirement is what has led IT to be in the problem that it is in at the moment with this ball and chain of maintenance.

So if you look at those three things, you end up with an application environment where your existing application – packaged applications and legacy applications form the foundation of your BPM infrastructure and now you have this abstract layer, which is built for process. It recognizes the end-to-end value chain.

It is built for people because you can now build these user interfaces that abstract from the complexity of the underlying environment in a more – recognize more the context to the individual worker what they’re trying to do, where in the value chain they’re to do it. And finally, they’re much easier to change.

You’re exposing these flex points from the underlying architecture be it business rules, be it the actual process logic, or be it the UIs themselves. You’re exposing these flex points which are much easier to change whether its IT changing them, or the business changing them, they’re easy to change them than they were before so building for process, building for people, building for change.

We’re not replacing applications, we’re leveraging them and extending them and a lot of vendors are starting to look at things like process frameworks. And these packages of assets, which as organizations are looking at new applications they can now look towards BPMS, more as an application development environment, seeding that environment with some core assets that are relevant to their industry or their process, and helping them build out these new capabilities.

How is Software AG taking advantage of BPM, and by that I mean within the company?

You have the great question and one that we get all the time. We’re out there evangelizing BPM and talking about the benefits. And if we weren’t actually taking advantage of that internally, then we’d look fairly hypocritical. But we do have a significant effort underway and have done for some time and we’re very strong believers across our product groups and solutions if eating our own dog food.

So probably, if I could highlight sort of three or four that we’re involved in at the moment for the most significant one is around Global Sourcing. This is actually part of a big initiative to develop a global purchasing organization within Software AG across the various regions strongly supported by a common set of processes and a strong technology enablement.

So establishing a worldwide purchasing organization, getting transparency over various commodity purchasing groups across those regions, and ultimately having a very strong impact on our margins and we’ve been doing this now for awhile. We’re close to achieving our goals on this and it’s looking to have a very significant impact on the bottom line through those standardized purchasing processes.

The second one is a project we call Deal Desk Approval. One of the challenges we have an organization that does a lot of sales and has a large sales organization across the world is that the actual approval process for deals, especially large deals, is fairly manual. And what we find was that the sales representatives were spending a lot of their time managing the approval process rather than doing what they’re good at which is going out and making sales.

So we’ve automated the workflow of the approval process to get a consistent approval process across all the regions globally. It gives us increased transparency as to where various deals are up to. It speeds the process along, frees up the sales guy to go and make sales. And overall, it’s having a big impact on our visibility and management of the sales cycle once the customer has actually decided to move forwards.

The third one is in our HR group on new hire process. We’re using BPM to standardize the new hire approval process, part of a bigger on boarding process within our HR organization. And again, managing what was a fairly manual and ad hoc approval process, making sure that it’s paperless, automating as many steps as possible, and getting it compliant with the standard internal process.

And then finally, one significant project is around our Solution Center. So we have a fairly significant Solution Center within the company where our sales engineers and our professional services organization check in and checkout demonstration environments, proof of concept environments, various assets to support the sales cycle and support the solutions they’re working on with customers.

There’s a core team of about four or five people who manage that Solution Center. Again, it’s very manual the way that they manage new demos that are built, new assets that are created and checked into the environment. They have to be approved, they have to be cleaned, they have to go through various processes.

We’re automating that and also automating the reservation process when sales engineers want to checkout various demos or get them hosted on their environment using VMware, or burned to a DVD and shipped out. At the moment, that’s taking a significant amount of that team’s time managing that overall process so we’re automating the workflow around that and automating as many of the steps as possible and getting visibility into which demos are being used more regularly, which SE are using which demos so its transparency and compliance.

So those are the four, Global Sourcing, Deal Desk Approval, New Hire Onboarding and Solution Center Management. Those are the four sort of – they’re at the top of listing in terms of our current efforts.

Even with a powerful summer squall blowing the doors open again and again, I was able to record an excellent podcast with David Codelli, the group marketing manager of Sun. David discusses the two big new releases from Sun, then focuses on their open source Master Data Management suite, and how it promises to not only deliver integrated data for companies, but just as important, also delivers complete data. Give it a listen below.

Listen to or download the 2:02 minute podcast below:

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Listen to or download the 2:58 minute podcast below:

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Listen to or download the 2:38 minute podcast below:

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Listen to or download the 2:01 minute podcast below:

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So I'm down in Orlando at the Application Architecture Development and Integration summit taking meetings, chasing the buzz, and just trying to see where all the integration and agility is headed for the next bit.

So far, I've had meetings with Parasoft and Axway (check back later for the live podcasts), and tomorrow I'm scheduled to see Software AG, Sun, ITKO, Progress Software, Sterling Commerce, and Denodo, and SOA Software. If you're down in Orlando and you've got something newsworthy, or if you feel live podcast ready, then hey, drop me an email and I'd love to hear about it or set something up.

And keep checking back here for all the breaking Gartner AADI news.

Listen to or download the 3:14 minute podcast below:

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What follows is the transcript of my podcast with Keith Swenson, Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation for the Interstage family of products, discusses what’s new with business processes development, what Fujitsu has coming up in the BPM space, and finally, Keith's thoughts on the BPM Center of Excellence.

First of all, tell me what new developments in the BPM space should companies be looking out for in the next 12 months?

Well, BPM technology is fairly mature at this point. It’s well accepted in providing benefit across the organization. I think there’s two areas where we’ll see some changes in the next 12 months. First, is in cross product interoperability. It’s no longer a single vendor per organization world. Products will have to play with each other more than they have in the past. The second area is going to be in capabilities around the edges of BPM technology and one area is such as process discovery.

Many of our customers are finding a significant barrier to their initial BPM implementations because it was a tremendous effort to find out what their existing process was in sufficient detail. So Fujitsu’s offering a new service, which will help them do precisely that by mining their existing database logs, and in a very short amount of time presenting them what their existing business process is so they can use that as the starting point for a BPM initiative.

Increasingly, I’ve been hearing the words BPM and SOA used together a lot. How come?

Its interesting; they are very different things but they seem to be two sides of the same coin. SOA is about reuse of existing technology and leveraging existing assets. So SOA is primarily about avoiding change. BPM on the other hand, is about continuingly improving your business processes and thereby continuingly changing. So it’s kind of interesting they go hand-in-hand, SOA being a technique for reuse and BPM itself is a management philosophy. But BPM technology is to help support management in improving of their organization.

What are your thoughts on BPM Centers of Excellence? Do they or can they make a difference?

They do. We’ve seen that BPM technology is now considered fairly mainstream so we’re seeing organizations deploying BPM technology widespread. And having a Center of Excellence helps to gather expertise on this relatively new technology and to help train the rest of the organization. In the ‘90s, implementation was on a department-by-department basis.

But now, bigger benefits can be realized by stretching across departments and that’s where Center of Excellence really helps those different organizations work together. We’ve been working with customers over the year and one of the strong feedbacks we’ve received is the desire to host multiple applications in a single BPM server while keeping those applications sufficiently isolated so that’s one of the new features in the latest release of Interstage BPM.

Join the connectivity revolution and you can still catch the keynote right here!

The articles are presented for you here below:

The Engine for Event-Driven SOA
by Jeff Wooten, Aleri
We’re on the verge of a new era for SOA, with the integration of Complex Event Processing technology, which can enable the gathering of data from and about any services running in the enterprise.

Federated Event Systems: The Event Web
by By Dr. K. Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science, California Institute of Technology and Michael Olson, California Institute of Technology
Event-driven applications that are constructed as compositions of Web applications can offer considerable benefits to your enterprise.

2008: The Year of CEP
by By John Morrell, Coral8
Complex event processing software is powering a new generation of applications that enables companies to make faster decisions and execute more effective actions.

ebizQ has launched a new virtual environment for online conferences, which will premier on May 7th with a conference on Event Processing. What are the benefits of a virtual conference environment? Without leaving their desk, attendees can interact with presenters, including Gartner and Forrester analysts, and network with their peers. They can visit virtual booths to chat live with vendors about requirements and solutions And most importantly, business professionals can get their questions answered by industry experts, without taking too much time out of their busy schedules.

Event processing, the subject of the May 7th conference, is an exciting technology being used in conjunction with several technological disciplines such as SOA architecture and process monitoring to increase business agility. Event Processing can improve decision making, reduce costs, and help companies respond quickly to competitive threats and opportunities in the marketplace.

ebizQ's May 7th conference will address burning questions such as: What makes event processing different from conventional application design? What are the different styles of event processing? And how can mainstream companies realize the benefits of event processing?

Registration for ebizQ's Event Processing conference is free to attendees, thanks to sponsors IBM, BEA, IWay Software and Aleri.

For more information, visit http://www.ebizq.net/events/event_processing or visit www.ebizq.net/events/ for a complete schedule of ebizQ's virtual events.

I recently had the opportunity to have a short conversation with Keith Bexell of Prudential Financial, after we ran this news about their work. If this kind of industry vertical conversation is interesting to you, I recemmend you join us on Wednesday for this panel discussion, called "Visibility, Control and Evolution: Building on SOA to Meet Today's Financial Services Industry Challenges." Sign up for the free event right here.

Below is the full transcript of this podcast:

Announcer: Welcome to another ebizQ podcast.

EB: Hi, this is Elizabeth Book Kratz and this is another ebizQ podcast. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking of with Keith Bexell, who is Vice President of New Business for the Domestic and Individual Life Insurance Business at Prudential Financial. Thanks for being with me today, Keith.

KB: Thank you, Elizabeth. Glad to be here.

EB: Great. So Prudential Financial just for those who might not know, is a financial services leader with approximately $648 billion of assets under management as of last December. Their primary goal is to help the more than 50 million individual and intuitional customers they have grow and protect their wealth. So again, I appreciate your time today. And basically, I understand from a recent Prudential and Skywire Software News Release that two-way messaging is an industry first, something that you’ve done together and you this is a real-time messaging system that allows agencies to communicate directly with the carrier. Can you give a little background on this and explain what function it serves and why this might be relevant to your clients?

KB: Sure. Elizabeth, in our fast-paced world, we find that prompt and accurate communication between carriers and their broker’s general agency partners is vital to an efficient new business process. The introduction of real-time messaging via Skywire’s Agency Management System, it’ll allow BGA staff to communicate with their carriers without having to leave their primary case management application.

Prudential, like many other carriers, currently, offers real-time messaging from their proprietary website. However, this requires the case management staff at the BGA to jump from one application to another to support their case load. This is inefficient and causes extra work. Putting this functionality into Skywire application, allows them to manage their case communication through a single uniform application, which enhances both the efficiency and quality of the correspondence with carriers.

EB: Wonderful. So here at ebizQ, which in the process of studying, analyzing, and reporting news on enterprise software and middleware, we’ve been definitely delving more into industry verticals like insurance. It appears that Prudential is building a top notch IT system to respond faster to clients and colleagues needs. So it would be wonderful if you could share some general thoughts about how IT is important in the insurance and finance industries, and if you could share your thoughts on the nature of the insurance industry, and industry specific needs to adequately document events, for example, and to have responsive and reliable integrated tools.

KB: Sure. Now, I believe that the shift from proprietary distribution systems to independent third party distributions systems. And it really has increased the life insurance reliance on technology to remain productive and really to enable and support growth. Today, roughly two-thirds of all Life New Business is written through independent distributors versus traditional career agency systems.

The level and sophistication and technology infrastructure across these independent relationships really varies greatly. And as carrier manufacturers being able to make IT investments that support as many of your distributions relationships as possible, with as much flexibility as possible, is really critical to our success. IT platforms that allow us to link document images, data feeds for case status, for example, commissions, and appointments, as well as real-time communication with our new business platform, are the kind of robust and integrated solutions we’re looking to support currently and into the future.

EB: Great. So that kind of gives us a good picture of how you’re doing business at Prudential Financial and we appreciate your time today. Keith Bexell, who is Vice President of New Business for the Domestic and Individual Life Insurance Business at Prudential Financial; thank you for your time today. And this has been an ebizQ podcast.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to a podcast presented by Elizabeth Book Editor in Chief of ebizQ. For comments or questions, please send an e-mail to editor@ebizQ.net or visit Elizabeth’s blog at ebizQ.net/blogs.

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