SOA - Service Oriented Architecture

SAGE ERP Software Review - Expert Review

2012-04-05T17:27:00.001+07:00

SAGE is leading ERP software provider in small and medium sized category with SAP, Oracle and Infor quite behind in terms of number of users and revenue. SAGE ERP is a global solution with clients in 24 countries, it has 21% market share in mid size segment according to a survey conducted in 2006. SAGE Accpac extended enterprise business suite and SAGE ERP X3 are two major products providing ERP solutions targeting mid size companies.

SAGE ERP is built on soa architecture with common business logic interface providing interface with windows, devices like hand phones and mobile, spreadsheets, other interfaces and internet browser through API, XAPI and soaP. This interfacing is handled by common process server. SAGE ERP has connectivity with SQL, Oracle, PSQL, Ingres and DB2 through a common database services interface. The business logic section contains number of business logic processes which process, store, and transfer the data as specified in the program.

SAGE ERP software contains all the features to support working of small to large organizations from financial management to other advance activities like discrete manufacturing and improving customer, supplier and employee communication. SAGE ERP software are compact and easy to use flexible solutions which are most suitable for mid size companies as they more cost effective compared to other ERP solutions. Customization of SAGE ERP software's is easy and web enabled accounting features allows this ERP to be used through desktop and laptop with an internet connection.

SAGE ERP provides modules of its ERP in the form of mini application which can be chosen according to the requirement. Even the desktop computers in an office can be customized by giving access to those applications only, which are required by the person working on that desk, which makes this software very easy to operate and handle. Ease of use and capable and complete solutions are the reasons for its huge success in the small and mid size section of the market.

The flexibility, scalability and service oriented architecture of SAGE ERP software is its biggest strength, it is available as per 100, 200 and 500 users according to the size of the company and with options and facilities to upgrade. Available modules in the ERP cover activities like accounting and operations, wholesale distribution, manufacturing management, customer relationship management, E-commerce, electronic data transfer, service management and warehouse management. System manager of the ERP provide data access, manage security and data processing while alerts server enhances communication between back office, front office and e-commerce systems by monitoring data fields for specified activities.

The SAGE ERP software are considered as too much fabricated and incapable to handle complex and multi-faceted working of large organizations where there are profiles working with mixed responsibilities and changing roles. Work processes need to be defined regularly with every change in the work flow and data security within the organization is also questionable. But the ease of use, web enablement and customization of the ERP Solution puts it way ahead of its competition in the small and midsize market.

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Current Management Opportunities and Challenges in the Software Industry

2012-04-05T17:20:00.001+07:00

During the past 30 years the world went through a very dynamic technological transformation. In retrospective, it can be stated without exaggeration that the emergence of electronic devices and the Internet have greatly impacted daily life as well as managerial practice to an unforeseen extent. The computerization of multiple business processes and the creation of large scale databases, among many other radical technological advances, have lead to enormous cost savings and quality improvements over the years. The interconnection of financial markets through electronic means and the worldwide adoption of the Internet have greatly reduced transaction and communication costs and brought nations and cultures closer to one another than ever imaginable. Computers are now fundamental tools in almost all businesses around the world and their application and adaptation to specific business problems in the form of software development is a practice that many companies perform on their own. In the past, such computerization and automation efforts were very costly and therefore only practiced by large corporations. Over the years, however, the software industry emerged to offer off-the-shelf solutions and services to smaller companies. Today, having survived the massive dotcom crash of the year 2000, software development businesses established themselves as strong players in the technology industry.

The emergence of numerous computer standards and technologies has created many challenges and opportunities. One of the main opportunities provided by the software sector is relatively low entry barrier. Since the software business is not capital intensive, successful market entry largely depends on know-how and specific industry domain knowledge. Entrepreneurs with the right skills can relatively easily compete with large corporations and thereby pose a considerable threat to other, much larger organizations. Companies, on the other hand, need to find ways to reduce turnover and protect their intellectual property; hence, the strong knowledge dependence combined with the relatively short lifespan of computer technologies makes knowledge workers very important to the organization. Knowledge workers in this industry therefore enjoy stronger bargaining power and require a different management style and work environment than in other sectors, especially those industries that have higher market entry capital requirements. This relatively strong position of software personnel challenges human resource strategies in organizations and it also raises concerns about the protection of intellectual property.

The relatively young industry is blessed with sheer endless new opportunities, such as the ability of companies to cooperate with other organizations around the globe without interruption and incur practically no communication costs. In addition, no import tariffs exist making the transfer of software across borders very efficient; however, the industry with its craft-like professions suffers from lack of standards and quality problems. The successful management of such dynamic organizations challenges today's managers as well as contemporary management science because traditional management styles, such as Weberian bureaucracies, seem to be unable to cope with unstable environments.

Challenges in the Software Industry

Many studies indicate that present-day software development practices are highly inefficient and wasteful (Flitman, 2003). On average, projects are only 62% efficient, which translates to a waste of 37 %. The typical software development project has the following distribution of work effort: 12% planning, 10% specification, 42% quality control, 17% implementation, and 19% software building (2003). There are many possible interpretations of the nature of this distribution of resources. First, the extraordinarily high share of 42% for quality control purposes can indicate a lack of standards and standardized work practices. This large waste of effort may also be the result of inefficient planning and specification processes. Because the share of 19% for software building is a function of software complexity, hardware, and tools used, there is a chance to reduce it by carefully managing and standardizing internal work processes. The disappointing share of only 17% for implementation, however, should be alarming to business owners, since implementation activities are the main activity that results in revenue. The relatively low productivity level reported by Flitman (2003) seems to be also reflected in the fact that the average U.S. programmer produces approximately 7,700 lines of code per year, which translates to just 33 per workday (Slavova, 2000). Considering that a large software project, such as Microsoft Word, is reported by Microsoft to require 2 to 3 million lines of code, it becomes obvious how costly such projects can become and that productivity and quality management are major concerns to today's software businesses. The challenge for contemporary software managers is to find the root of the productivity problem and a remedy in the form of a management practice.

A plethora of recent studies addresses software development productivity and quality concerns. Elliott, Dawson, and Edwards (2007) conclude that there is a lack of quality skills in current organizations. Furthermore, the researchers put partial blame on prevailing organizational cultures, which can lead to counterproductive work habits. Of the main problems identified, project documentation was found to be lacking because documents are deficient in detail and not updated frequent enough. Quality control in the form of software testing is not practiced as often and there seems to be a lack of quality assurance processes to ensure that software is built with quality in mind from the beginning. Organizational culture was found to be deficient in companies were workers tend to avoid confrontation and therefore avoid product tests altogether (2007).

Since knowledge workers are the main drive in software organizations, creating a fruitful and efficient organizational culture constitutes a main challenge to today's managers. The relationship between organizational culture and quality and productivity in software businesses was recently investigated by Mathew (2007). Software organizations tend to be people-centered and their dependency on knowledge workers is also reflected by the enormous spending remuneration and benefits of more than 50% of revenue. As the industry matures and grows further, the challenge to organizations is that larger number of employees need to be managed which brings culture to the focus of management. Mathew (2007) found that the most important influence on productivity was achieved by creating an environment of mutual trust. Higher levels of trust lead to greater employee autonomy and empowerment, which strengthened the existing management view that trust and organizational effectiveness are highly related. Those companies with higher trust and empowerment levels benefitted from more intensive employee involvement and thereby achieved better quality products (2007).

Product quality, however, depends on other factors as well that reach beyond the discussion of work processes. Relatively high employee turnover was found to have a detrimental effect on product quality and organizational culture (Hamid & Tarek, 1992). Constant turnover and succession increase project completion costs, cause considerable delays, and expose organization to higher risks because their development processes can be severely disrupted. While human resources strategies should help find ways to retain key personnel in the company, organizations need to nevertheless be prepared for turnovers and minimize their risks. One of the greatest risks for people-centered, knowledge worker organizations is the loss of knowledge when employees leave.

Knowledge management has evolved into a relatively new discipline in the last two decades but is mostly practiced by large, global organizations only (Mehta, 2008). As corporations realized the importance of knowledge management activities to mitigate the risk of know-how loss within their organizations, they started employing chief knowledge officers and crews with the goal of collecting and organizing information. By building custom knowledge management platforms, companies can benefit from increased transfer, storage, and availability of critical business information. Such activities can help companies innovate and build knowledge capital over time (2008). The challenge remains, however, to set up such systems and to elicit employee support for knowledge management systems. In addition, these systems leave another critical question open. What happens when top performers take all the knowledge with them when they leave?

Another crucial variable affecting software product and service quality is top management involvement. Projects in the software industry commonly fail due to one or a combination of the following three major causes: poor project planning, a weak business case, and lack of top management support and involvement (Zwikael, 2008). Software projects are similar to projects in other industries by focusing on timely project completion, budget, and compliance to specifications, the industry requires specific support processes from top management to facilitate projects. These processes are summarized in Table 1. Key support processes, such as the appropriate assignment of project managers and the existence of project success measurement, indicate that successful companies demonstrate a higher level of project progress control than others; however, Zwikael acknowledges that top managers rarely focus on these key processes and instead prefer to deal with those processes that are easier for them to work on personally.

Table 1

The ten most critical top management support processes in the software sector (Zwikael, 2008). Those processes marked with an asterisk (*) were found to be the most important.

Support Process

Appropriate project manager assignment *

Refreshing project procedures

Involvement of the project manager during initiation stage

Communication between the project manager and the organization *

Existence of project success measurement *

Supportive project organizational structure

Existence of interactive interdepartmental project groups *

Organizational projects resource planning

Project management office involvement

Use of standard project management software *

Opportunities in the Software Industry

The advent of low cost communication via the Internet and the diversification of the software industry into many different branches brought a multitude of new market opportunities. Some of the main opportunities are rooted in the low costs of communication, while others originated from the possibility of geographic diversification and international collaboration.

One major opportunity which especially larger organizations seek to seize is geographic diversification in the form of globally distributed software development. Kotlarsky, Oshri, van Hillegersberg, and Kumar (2007) have researched this source of opportunities that is mainly practiced by multinational companies; however, an increasing number of small companies is also reported to be benefitting from dispersed software development across national boundaries. The study revealed that software companies can achieve significantly higher levels of productivity by creating reusable software components and reducing task interdependencies. By reducing interdependence, the produced modules are more likely to become useful in future projects on their own; furthermore, this reduction of intertwined computer code also has a positive effect on project teams. Teams in companies that globally distribute their developments benefit from increased autonomy and reduced communication requirements. The authors point out, however, that the prerequisites to distributing software development are not only good project planning but also the standardization of tools and development procedures. Without such prearrangements it may become almost impossible to manage and consolidate the various distributed team activities (2007). Especially for teams working across countries away from one another, it may pay off to deploy video or other Internet-based conferencing technologies and exploit huge savings potentials. But are these means of communication effective?

In the last decade a new form of organization has emerged that has taken the most advantage of the Internet. Virtual organizations exist entirely in cyberspace and their team members communicate mostly, if not exclusively, via the Internet using webcams and messaging software. The challenge for managers in virtual organizations is to exploit the new technology but also to find ways to motivate and direct the workforce and work processes. A study by Andres (2002) compared virtual software development teams with face-to-face teams and identified several challenges and opportunities for virtual managers. Managing work from a different time zone can be problematic due to the lack of physical presence. Communication will need to be asynchronous or can only occur at work hours that overlap in both time zones. Virtual teams facilitate this process by using email and voice/text messaging but more importantly by reducing the interdependency of tasks. Andres (2002) suggested that these types of communication have lower "social presence" meaning that humans have a need and ability to feel the presence of others in the group. The problem with many computerized communication channels is that visual clues, utterances, body language clues and clues from the person's voice are missing. When placed on a social presence continuum, the various communication types rank as follows from the lowest to the highest: email, phone, video conferencing, and face-to-face meetings. Andres' comparison between development teams using video-conferencing versus face-to-face meetings revealed that the latter group was far more efficient and productive, even though the video-conferencing team benefitted from reduced travel costs and time.

The study conducted in 2002, however, has several shortcomings. First, it is already seven years old and Internet costs have dropped and speeds have improved significantly since then. Considering the improvements in video quality and availability and computer speeds, this form of communication became more feasible recently. In addition, today's managers are just now starting to learn how to use these means of communication efficiently. For example, even though email technology has been around for two decades now, many managers still find that emails can create a lot of ambiguity. The challenge to future generations of managers will be to change their writing style to match the limitations of email and other text messaging technologies. Another important factor to consider is that written communication may be stored indefinitely and have legal consequences; hence, more often than not, managers may intentionally prefer to avoid such communication channels for political or legal reasons. The study by Andres (2002), however, resulted in a negative view of video conferencing probably because the technology was not yet matured and the team members were not yet comfortable with it.

For video conferencing to work well, all participants need to be knowledgeable of the peculiar characteristics of that technology and adjust their communication style and speech accordingly. Regardless of meeting type, another important factor is preparation. What could be researched in conjunction with Andres' study in the future is the degree of preparation of the group. Do team members invest enough time in preparing questions and answers for their teammates before coming to the meeting? Video conferences may require more preparation than face-to-face meetings in some circumstances.

Another opportunity for software businesses and challenge for managers worldwide is outsourcing. In the year 2007, $70 billion were spent globally for outsourced software development (Scott, 2007). Given the extreme shortage of IT skills in the U.S. and Europe, many companies take advantage of globalization by choosing international suppliers for their software development tasks. Outsourcing, however, requires elaborate coordination between the organization and its many supplier groups. The idea is that in total, coordination costs and problems are less costly than in-house development; however, this goal is not always achieved. While outsourcing, when it is deployed and coordinated correctly, can result in 24 hour development worldwide and thereby provide continuous services to the organization around the clock, it may result in the loss of intellectual property. While mechanic parts are patentable in most countries that support intellectual property rights, software is not patentable in most countries outside North America.

In addition to the challenge of managing outsourcing, software organizations exploit technologies in various ways to save costs, for example by offering remote access, telecommuting, and service-oriented architectures (soa) (Scott, 2007). Remote access and telecommuting has increased six-fold between 1997 and 2005 and resulted in $300 million annual savings due to a reduction of office space (2007). soa is a similar concept and involves a software rental for customers. Instead of buying, installing, and maintaining software and servers, customers can rent a service online and reduce the total cost of ownership because these activities are no longer required on the customer side. Gradually the virtualization of the software business opens new horizons and provides further opportunities but it also presents managers with endless challenges.

Some of the strengths and weaknesses of offshore and virtual team development were studied by Slavova (2000). In the year 2000, India and Ireland were the largest offshore software development locations. Offshore companies can offer up to 60% cost reduction, a faster completion of development tasks by distributing them around the globe, and specific domain knowledge which they acquired over the years providing similar services to other customers. The integration of work from external sources, however, constitutes a major hurdle. Furthermore, language and cultural issues can cause serious communication problems that put the project at risk, especially when misunderstandings cause misinterpretations of project specification documents. Slavova (2000) found that the most common remedy and strategy avoiding problems with offshore suppliers is to visit them frequently face-to-face; however, this tactic results in higher travel costs and disruptions of the managers' workflows and hence may offset the benefits gained for outsourcing altogether. Managers in the software business need therefore to balance the risks and opportunity potentials before engaging in outsourcing because for many companies this strategy failed to pay off in the end.

A huge opportunity that emerged in the last decade is online innovation. The collective innovation effort of many individuals and companies is generally known as open-source on the Internet and it has lead to many advances in the computer technology, such as the free Linux operating system. At first businesses felt threatened by this wave of developments on the market because the businesses perceived that open-source solutions were in competition with their products. In many cases this was and still is in fact true; however, a couple of companies, including IBM, are exploiting this new way of innovation for their own and for a common benefit (Vujovic & Ulhøi, 2008). Because software companies operate in an increasingly instable environment, they struggle to create continuously new and better products. By exposing the computer code to the public on the Internet, companies can benefit from ideas submitted by the public, especially other companies. Furthermore, companies benefit from free bug finding and testing by external users but one of the primary reasons for "going open-source" is the quick adoption and spread of the company's technology at a relatively little or no cost. The spread of IBM's open-source technology, for example, is also free marketing for the company. But how can companies make money by offering something for free?

The closed innovation model (the traditional model of providing software without revealing the software code) can be combined with open-source, so the company can charge for the product. In other cases, the company can reveal the technological platform on the Internet for free and then sell specialized tools which utilize the new platform. The big money savers are obviously the shared development, testing, and maintenance costs since many interested parties work on the same project.

The knowledge-sharing model of open-source is nothing new, however. The philosophy and the benefits of open innovation models have been already realized in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Back then, open innovation was practiced in the UK iron and

US steel industry. The cooperation of many industry players ended the domination of proprietary technologies for which costly royalties were due (Vujovic & Ulhøi, 2008). Given the dynamic environment of the IT industry and the short lifespan of computer technologies, the adoption of open innovation models gained much more popularity. By analyzing the largest open-source players in the market, Vujovic and Ulhøi put together a list of supportive strategies, which is shown in Table 2. Several of these strategies are quite relevant from a top management perspective as well, such as deploying open-source to block a competitor and using the open model as a gateway for greater market share.

Table 2

Strategies for adopting the open-source approach (Vujovic & Ulhøi, 2008).

Business Strategy

Obtaining higher market share

Obtaining market power

Better adoption of a product and thereby establishing standards

Shifting competitive advantage to another architectural layer

Making the product more ubiquitous

Delivering faster time-to-market

Spurring innovation

Complementing a revenue core stream

Blocking a competitor

Conclusion

Reviewing the rather recent emergence of the IT industry and the software industry in particular, several parallels can be drawn to management history. While Taylor's scientific management was a highlight in the evolution of management science (Wren, 2005), the software industry seems to be lagging behind such great advancement. Due to its high level of complexity, the software development discipline is still plagued with quality problems stemming from a lack of standardization. Similar to Taylor's efforts, managers need to analyze software development processes and develop industry-wide standards and measures. Once such measures and procedures exist, this will help make software projects much more predictable.

Much of today's software industry practices would have been a déjà vu for Taylor, if he was still alive. In addition, the anomie and social disorganization concerns during the social person era apply today more dramatically than in the past. Mayo described in the 1940s how managers overemphasized on technical problems in the hope of raising efficiency ignoring the human social element (p. 296). The same situation is now evident to a larger degree in the computer industry. The rapid technological advances have created many opportunities and changed the work environment drastically. At the same time, however, management was unable to prepare for these dramatic shifts technology would bring to the workplace. At best, managers are simply reacting to technological advances because the consequences are mostly unpredictable given the complexity of human nature. For example, email brought several benefits such as low cost and simple asynchronous communication; however, many email messages are misunderstood because they are not written appropriately. Moreover, IT knowledge workers are struggling to keep up with the vast number of messages received per day as they constitute a severe disruption of the daily workflow.

As knowledge workers are becoming more and more essential to an organization's survival and as organizations in this industry mature and require greater headcounts, the span of control is becoming an issue for managers to handle correctly. As discussed in Wren (2005), as the team size increases, the number of interrelations to be managed rises astronomically (p. 353). Managing larger teams poses a great problem because the sheer number of interrelations makes it also more difficult to develop trust within the team. Motivating large groups of knowledge workers can hence be tricky, especially because creative tasks can require a large degree of collaboration. Work design is hence a major hurdle for future managers to overcome. Much emphasis has been on hygiene factors and not on motivators of the workforce. Flexible hours, telecommuting, empowerment, and increased responsibility may help in the short-term but for the long-term management will need to find new strategies for retaining knowledge workers.

Product quality remains a big issue. Deming's ideas are good but quality assurance in the software world is difficult to implement due to the lack of standards and measures. The open-source innovation model may provide some relief in this respect because the greater involvement of external developers can help improve overall quality. On the other hand, however, open-source projects are hard to manage for the same reason. Since open-source projects are self-directed and not owned by anyone in particular, those projects sometimes suffer from uncontrolled, tumorlike growth.

Several of Deming's deadly sins (Wren, 2005, p. 463) apply directly to the software industry. Most products are made from scratch rather than from components and there is little standardization in software organizations. Since software developers have a tendency to see their job as a craft they defy standards and procedures. In addition, the rather complex environment with its dynamic requirements and the push for meeting deadlines make it easy for practitioners to lose sight of quality improvements through the preparation of organizational standards. High turnover and individual performance measures continue to be industry practice, even though many scientists, such as Deming, have argued for long that such measures are counterproductive.

Future managers need to find ways to compensate for the high turnover, if they cannot find a way to avoid it. The division of labor might work well for the company but it is not well perceived by the workforce which tends to require constant challenge. Top performers disfavor mundane tasks and prefer to walk away with all their knowledge. IBM has successfully deployed job enlargement for some time to combat this phenomenon (Wren, 2005, p.332). Unfortunately, this strategy might not work for every company and it can only be used within certain boundaries of the organization. Given the developments of the last two decades, managers will need to confront the discipline of knowledge worker management and find a workable solution for their organization.

The integration of management science with the advances in psychology and sociology may provide a route towards the solution of the knowledge worker management problem. It is crucial for managers to have an accurate understanding of the motivational drives for this particular group of the workforce. These employees enjoy higher income, greater flexibility and freedom, and greater bargain power. This puts them in a gray zone between the traditional, lower skilled employee and an owner in the company because knowledge workers create intellectual capital in the company. Because most of this capital is lost and remains with the employees when they decide to leave the organization, turnover can be much more damaging than with traditional workers. Managers can therefore not simply apply conventional strategies to this dissimilar group of employees; rather, they need to seek for more creative incentives for motivating and retaining knowledge workers.

References

Andres, H. P. (2002). A comparison of face-to-face and virtual software development teams. Team Performance Management, 8, 39-49. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Elliott, M., Dawson, R., Edwards, J. (2007). An analysis of software quality management at AWE plc. Software Quality Journal, 15, 347-364. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Flitman, A. (2003). Towards meaningful benchmarking of software development team productivity. Benchmarking, 10, 382-350. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Hamid, A., Tarek, K. (1992). Investigating the impacts of managerial turnover/succession on software project performance. Journal of Management Information Systems, 9, 127-145. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Kotlarsky, J., Oshri, I., van Hillegersberg, J., Kumar, K. (2007). Globally distributed component-based software development: an exploratory study of knowledge management and work division. Journal of Information Technology, 22, 161-174. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Mathew, J. (2007). The relationship of organizational culture with productivity and quality; A study of Indian software organizations. Employee Relations, 29, 677-697. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Mehta, N. (2008). Successful knowledge management implementation in global software companies. Journal of Knowledge Management, 12, 42-57. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Scott, J. E. (2007). Mobility, business process management, software sourcing, and maturity model trends: Propositions for the IS organization of the future. Information Systems Management, 24, 139-146. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Slavova, S. (2000). Offshore software development: strengths and weaknesses. Academy of Information and Management Sciences, 4, 16-22. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Vujovic, S., Ulhøi, J. P. (2008). Online innovation: the case of open source software development. European Journal of Innovation Management, 11, 142-157. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

Wren, D.A. (2005). The history of management thought. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing

Zwikael, O. (2008). Top management involvement in project management; a cross country study of the software industry. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 1, 498-513. Retrieved March 15, 2009 from ProQuest.

SOA MUST Have Data Governance

2010-09-08T15:22:00.001+07:00

Service Oriented Architecture is the hot movement in IT right now, and rightly so. It leverages code in a way that makes it flexible and reusable, integrates legacy and one-off systems, and solves just about every other problem in the world.

So, if you're bringing this to your organization, good for you. A key piece to your soa roadmap should be an effective Data Management plan. Your Data Management plan should include Data Quality, Metadata, and Data Governance.

Lets face it, soa will integrate all your systems and allow for sharing across many lines of business and systems. But, what is shared? The Data. Let me reiterate that... The reason for soa is so that data and information are processed more efficiently and effectively.

So, doesn't it then make sense that your data needs to be well managed, controlled, clean, etc? Well... yes.

Metadata will level set everyone in the organization as to what the data actually means. Hopefully you have an enterprise data dictionary, but if you don't, write that down as task #1.

Data Governance will provide the proactive and reactive management needed to ensure everyone agrees on what a field is to be used for. The results of this end up in the metadata repository mentioned above.

Data Quality checks for data anomalies and procedures should kick-out any outliers to be manually or systematically corrected based on business rules.

So, be sure to integrate an effective Data Management plan in your SOA roadmap, otherwise it will be a bumpy road at best.

For the best information on Data Governance visit Michael's Data Governance Blog at http://datagovernanceblog.com

There are a wealth of resources on Data Governance Maturity Models, Conferences, Tips, Advice and even contests for prizes!

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Using SOA Consulting and Development to Improve Your Business Value

2010-07-30T09:26:00.000+07:00

The main function of SOA is to move company ITs from an outdated system architecture, based on autonomous applications tightly coupled together by custom integration processes, to a modern type of architecture, developed on independent services, which are loosely coupled, using standards-based messaging. SOA improves IT infrastructure by making it less expensive but much more efficient, flexible and easier to expand and reuse.
In SOA environments, companies can overcome the main gap in legacy systems between their business requirements and the capabilities of their IT systems.

However, SOA development is still considered an IT issue. One of the reasons is that IT managers are not successfully explaining SOA's business benefits to upper management. Also, upper management is not really interested in processes for better IT utilization or in recognizing SOA's potential.

To get support from upper management for the successful development of SOA, it is important to build a roadmap that illustrates an understanding of not only the technologies but also the business value, impact, technology capabilities, interactions between systems, robustness, lower development costs, and security factors. A number of business related issues are important for SOA strategy and technologies:

• Agility in changing systems to follow new and changing business processes.
• Solving problems of badly integrated systems, which requires a lot of development, time, and money to integrate.
• Problems of data and business logic spreading, which can cause unexpected difficulties
• High maintenance costs.
• User dissatisfaction with the current system.
• Possibility for step-by-step systems upgrading.

These are only some arguments that can be used by IT managers for presenting SOA advantages to management. Moreover, SOA consulting and development companies, whose analysts and architects are able to explain the advantages of SOA to an organization could also be very helpful. They can also assist your company in the development of SOA principles and best practices that guide planning, development, integration, and management of application infrastructures. In addition, they can be useful when preparing a business case that demonstrates the value of SOA to upper management.

It is crucial that SOA consultants and businesses work together in conducting an analysis. The most important factors for SOA strategy are the business analyst and the SOA architect; the former is responsible for representing the business requirements, while the latter is responsible for ensuring compliance with the IT strategy.

An analysis provided by a business analyst and an SOA architect can be used to justify investment in SOA. A clear and comprehensive analysis prepared through an open and constructive dialog, is the perfect way to demonstrate the value of SOA and IT synergy to upper management.

In this way, IT and SOA become a fundamental part of the business strategy and can provide significant improvements for your company.

More information: http://www.tridens.si/expertise/soa/

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Ensuring SOA Success with Effective, Automated Control throughout the Lifecycle

2010-05-27T10:34:00.002+07:00

Technology should always be an enabler, not an inhibitor, of achieving business goals. The inability of inflexible, tightly coupled legacy systems to respond quickly and effectively to business needs is a key reason companies have invested in flexible, loosely coupled SOA.

But without proper control, the flexibility of SOA can devolve into chaos. By definition, SOA brings a dramatic increase in the number of interdependent moving parts in the systems environment. In turn, an increase in the number of parts is accompanied by an exponential growth in the number and complexity of interdependencies.

Uncontrolled SOA allows services to be developed, invoked, and orchestrated at any time into complicated construction. Rather than creating a platform for effective reuse and responding rapidly to business goals and changing market conditions, it leads to redundancy in development and lack of visibility into systems that impact key processes.

Unfortunately, under this scenario not only do companies end up failing to achieve the return on investment they anticipate, they may even spend more time and money over the long haul than they would have under traditional development. IT may see more redundancy of services and greater infrastructure complexity as a result of poor SOA Governance and through the uncontrolled proliferation of services that are that are difficult to locate or inadequately constructed or understood.

Forward-looking IT organizations have recognized the need for Service Oriented Architecture Governance: a strategy where each service is an asset that has to be properly designed to be useful within a larger portfolio of business services - versioned, secured, managed, and monitored to ensure that it performs with the expected quality of service (QoS).

SOA governance begins with creating standards for designs and processes that must then be applied to assets as they are created, used, and changed. However, to enforce these standards, time- and resource-strapped architecture organizations need powerful, automated SOA governance solutions. These solutions must also enable companies to efficiently and effectively apply and enforce governance throughout the entire lifecycle-from design time, to run-time, to change time. By making governance an up-front part of SOA implementation strategy, you will greatly enhance your chances of success and achieving a lasting return on your investments.

About the Author
Software AG deliver software for improving business processes and its software portfolio helps foster new levels of IT agility through Service Oriented Architecture and allows the rapid creation of new business processes with BPM.

Cutting Bureaucratic Red Tape with a Flexible and Managed SOA

2010-05-27T10:33:00.002+07:00

To make doing business easier in Denmark, the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency (DCCA) needed to streamline their business registration processes, ease reporting procedures and improve service levels. At the same time, DCCA needed to meet annual budget reduction targets, manage growth and maintain quality. They also wanted to gain visibility over their many systems and projects without increasing their staff.
DCCA implemented a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to manage, govern and communicate services and relationships. Using CentraSite™ and webMethods Tamino, they transformed their system silos into a modern SOA that supports open source and provides high-performance XML document management capabilities. Now DCCA can manage service and application lifecycles, promote service reuse, maintain quality and improve communication.

Benefits include: * Effective governance across their heterogeneous IT landscape and external partner interactions * Increased business agility and ability to respond to legislation changes * Achieved 90% reuse of functionality using SOA Governance * Almost 70% of all business registrations are now handled electronically
Realizing business flexibility with SOA

To gain transparency and control, DCCA's "New Architecture" was designed with a standard, services-based approach using an SOA infrastructure. In this way they could easily manage, govern and communicate available services and service-to-application relationships, and maximize their re-use potential.
Together with their trusted partners Capgemini, and Sirius IT, DCCA selected CentraSite™ combined with webMethods Tamino to transform their systems into a modern SOA with high-performance XML document management capabilities.

As Rasmus Knippel, architect on DCCA's SOA Governance Project and Capgemini Denmark consultant related, "With DCCA we looked for a practical solution that could be implemented rather painlessly while still fulfilling the need to maintain a complete overview of the architecture - and CentraSite™ was the right solution."

The "New Architecture" is a multi-year project that implements SOA step-by-step across DCCA's core applications. CentraSite™ and webMethods Tamino are integrated seamlessly in the open source-based environment along with JBoss components, JBoss Portal and the Mule ESB.

CentraSite™ for SOA Architecture Governance stores all their XML schemas, business rules, Web services and WSDL. And because CentraSite™ was implemented in the initial phase, DCCA has been able to take advantage of powerful governance capabilities, policy enforcement, rules management and service reuse right from the project start.

About the Author
Software AG's software portfolio helps foster new levels of IT agility through Service Oriented Architecture and allows the rapid creation of new business processes with BPM.

Check Out ZapNote: DataMirror ZapNote: Leading the Charge in Data Integration for $9.95

2010-03-20T02:10:00.001+07:00

ZapNote: DataMirror ZapNote: Leading the Charge in Data Integration Overview

Data integration solutions focus on connecting data storage and information representation systems for the purpose of unifying data sources and providing an environment for integrated data access. XML offers a better way for enterprises to capture, transform and flow data in real-time across multi-platform computing environments.

No one understands this power of XML better than DataMirror, which has been focused on data integration, resiliency, and monitoring solutions for almost a decade. The latest addition to their product line is a suite of XML tools for providing open data integration solutions.

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Check Out Wilshire EDF: Service-Oriented Integration and Process Presentation for $9.95

2010-03-18T04:10:00.001+07:00

Wilshire EDF: Service-Oriented Integration and Process Presentation Overview

Integration is not about simply plugging two systems or organizations into each other. The vision of "plug and play" application and system integration is a pipe dream that may be appropriate for in the distant future, but right now enterprises face the more immediate challenge of connecting arbitrary systems in a manner that is cost effective, manageable, efficient and secure. Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst, ZapThink, gives you soup-to-nuts expertise for Web services and the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), as they represent an approach for integrating systems using an abstracted methodology called Service-Oriented Integration (SOI). Discover how Web services is becoming a key element to simplify and enable integration between legacy, heterogeneous and disparate systems. Gain real-world advice on:

The use of Web services for integration

How EAI and B2B integration are merging and what this means to you

Web services integration with mainframe and legacy applications

How SOI technologies and approaches solve lingering integration issues

Basic elements of SOI

Drivers and motivators for SOI adoption

Market segmentation

Key vendors and technologies in the SOI space

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Best Price The Definitive Guide to SOA: BEA AquaLogic Service Bus for $1.25

2010-03-16T06:15:00.001+07:00

An ESB is in the core of most enterprise SOA implementations and AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB) is one of the leading ESB. This book covers all the features expected from a moderen ESB using realistic use cases and samples that run on ALSB. Once you downloaded the samples you will have a library of solutions that may be applied to your own projects or may be used to explore ALSB features. In addition the book covers the service design, specially the design of composite and orchestrated services deployed on the bus. Although the book is written particularly for ALSB, the topics covered in it will give you very good idea on any modern ESB. I found this book very useful for my projects; applied many of the solutions included in this book. I recommend it for new beginners as well as experienced service developers, SOA architects, and managers overseeing SOA projects.

The Definitive Guide to SOA: BEA AquaLogic Service Bus Overview

The Definitive Guide to SOA: BEA AquaLogic Service Bus targets professional software developers and architects who know enterprise development, but are new to enterprise service buses (ESBs) and service–oriented architecture (SOA) development. This is the first book to cover a practical approach to SOA using the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus tool. And its written from the “source” BEA Systems AquaLogic product lead Jeff Davies.

This book provides hands–on information to developing SOA–driven applications with ESBs as central components. It also gives strategic guidance on SOA planning, web service life–cycle management, administration of an ESB, and security considerations. Author Jeff Davies is careful to cut through theory and get straight to demonstrating successful use of the product where SOA really counts.

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Customer Reviews

I am disappointed - V. Singh -
This book started really good, but I could see 3 distinct style of writing. I was really impressed until I reached chapter 9 which is about security. The security chapter doesn't keeps the theme of the book which was depicted in earlier chapters. I am so disappointed with this security chapter. I am just wondering if it is because of too many cooks...... BTW who was the author for chapters before Chapter 9? You were good :-)

Great book - Magnus Lassi -
What I like the most about this book is that the book explains more about HOW to use ALSB to create and manage web services than just how to use ALSB which you can learn by reading the documentation.

I had played around with ALSB a few weeks before getting this book but had difficulty understanding some of the concepts and best practices. This book does a great job of explaining both the high-level concepts such as how to map your web services to your internal services/applications and low-level concepts like when to use a pipeline pair instead of a route. It also explains best practices for some issues which I have not been able to find anywhere else.

Expensive guide to unavailable BEA software - Michael O'Connor -
It may be the definitive guide to Aqualogic but since BEA is having a problem making the software available I wouldn't know. So I didn't get past chapter 1 which reads like marketing literature for BEA's software.

Personally, I think having "SOA:" in the title is misleading.

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Business Intelligence BI Software

Six Sigma And Service Oriented Architecture - The Better Pair

2010-03-14T08:05:00.001+07:00

At the came time, soa also takes care that both of these factors that are responsible for better productivity are available within the organization itself. However, one aspect that business must not miss out on is that by advocating soa alone, nothing can be achieved. This means that simply a standalone technique is not going to do any good to the company.

Therefore, it is important that SOA is combined with an improvement tool so that the company can get the maximum benefits. The Six Sigma methodology is probably the best option available in this respect.

The Consolidation Method

In order to understand how the consolidation process works, it is important to understand SOA. SOA is in charge of handling planning, analyzing and coming up with new concept based services which work according to the goals and other mission objectives that have been defined during the implementation stage. This is one of the main reasons why Service Oriented Architecture largely is influenced by the management decisions, especially during the implementation process.

This clearly points out towards the fact that SOA alone is not all that sufficient when it comes to performing quality checks. This also means that SOA clearly needs to be combined with a quality improvement technique, which in this case would by the implementation of Six Sigma. Using a Six Sigma methodology like DFSS (i.e., Design For Six Sigma), although somewhat untraditional to use along with Service Oriented Architecture, could still help since it takes care of decisions related to the formulation of the plan for introducing new services in the market.

This is achieved with the help of a more practical approach and the available statistics and other relevant data.

Below are the five phases of Service Oriented Architecture:

Definition stage: This is where the Design For Six Sigma comes in, with respect to defining the objectives of the Service Oriented Architecture - especially during the implementation stage of the project. By adopting the DFSS methodology, it becomes relatively easier to curb any chance of project redundancies.

Developing the Concept: During this stage, DFSS simply helps the developers with regards to formulating and coming up with a design as a part of their innovation strategy. This is obviously achieved due to the financial as well as the human resources available at hand. If DFSS is absent in this stage, the developers will surely delay the implementation of the project.

Design Stage: This is an important stage, since it helps staff in realizing the reason and the importance of the redesigning of the company's processes so that the business can assure better productivity - and of course, overall customer satisfaction.

Validation stage: In order to gain complete control over the feasibility of the entire project, it is important that companies comply with the validation stage, which is already designed by the Design For Six Sigma methodology. Once the test proves to be a success, the implementation stage can be carried on in the different processes of the organization.

Control Stage: This is a stage where DFSS steps into the picture, in order to ensure that everything is going according to plan with the help of SOA.

There is no doubt that SOA can be beneficial, but only if combined with the Six Sigma methodology. Once both of them are paired up, organizations will become much more effective and consistent in their business activities.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for six sigma professionals including, lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

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Check Out SOA Modeling Patterns for Service Oriented Discovery and Analysis for $36.89

2010-03-12T09:48:00.001+07:00

I heard about this book when i was searching for software development material for my company; my background is pretty diverse since i worked for a banking institute as a programmer and then i held a position as a product developer for a credit card business division. then i did application architecture and very recently i moved to our enterprise archtitecture group. Because of my diversified background i must say that this book adds a enormous value to my work. In the beginning i thought that these are patterns in the traditional way. I thought that these are design pattens only. But i was surprised that these are not only design or what the author calls them modeling patterns, these are also process patterns. It may sound strange but this is awesome. I found it very easy to understand and implement. another issue that i run against was the way that a service is presented - very universal,; so a service can be any software component. very interesting. i was also searching for a tool to implement the language that is in the last eight chapters - this is the structural and contextual modeling of the service. I was surprised to find that the enterprise architect product - the next version probably is going to have a good coverage of the language. Excellent material in my opinion;- you really do not need to know any particular language such as java or whatever;- you just need to use the simple notation to link services or aggregated them. see this link: [...] - in this link i found some pdf documents and i discovered that this book can be used for a bunch of softwar projects including development of regular applications or SOA or even clouds. ----- very impressive and useful book -----

SOA Modeling Patterns for Service Oriented Discovery and Analysis Feature

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SOA Modeling Patterns for Service Oriented Discovery and Analysis Overview

Learn the essential tools for developing a sound service-oriented architecture

SOA Modeling Patterns for Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis introduces a universal, easy-to-use, and nimble SOA modeling language to facilitate the service identification and examination life cycle stage. This business and technological vocabulary will benefit your service development endeavors and foster organizational software asset reuse and consolidation, and reduction of expenditure.

Whether you are a developer, business architect, technical architect, modeler, business analyst, team leader, or manager, this essential guide-introducing an elaborate set of more than 100 patterns and anti-patterns-will help you successfully discover and analyze services, and model a superior solution for your project,.

Explores how to discover services
Explains how to analyze services for construction and production
How to assess service feasibility for deployment
How to employ the SOA modeling language during the service identification and examination process
How to utilize the SOA modeling patterns and anti-patterns for service discovery and analysis

Focusing on the Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis Life Cycle Stage, this book will help you acquire a broad SOA Modeling knowledge base and leverage that to increase efficiency and productivity in the workplace.

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Customer Reviews

Service-Oriented Modeling Patterns (SOMP) - S. Muir - Washington, DC
The Service-Oriented Modeling Patterns (SOMP) represented in this book offer hands on approach to SOA and Cloud Computing modeling and to enterprise architecture modeling as well. Not only developers can use these patterns, architects and project managers are also the practitioners that should be utilize this methodology to design an application or an enterprise solution.

I strongly recommend the Contextual and Structural modeling and analysis approach. These patterns are state-of-the-art guidelines for software development, design and architecture. Consider these features of the service-oriented modeling framework features:

A. Contextual Modeling: Generalization, Expansion, Specification, and Contraction
B. Structural Modeling: Generalization, Expansion, Specification, and Contraction

Strong Enterprise Architecture Modeling & Patterns - Hormazd M. Pochara -
I strongly recommend this book for people that are seeking to enhance their knowledge in the space of enterprise architecture development, analysis, and design.

The book introduces modeling practices, language, and patterns to address discovery and analysis of software entities.

The organization of the book is also impressive and easy to understand. The major patterns that are discussed are:

1) Roadmap patterns for service discovery and analysis

2) Service discovery patterns

3) Service categorization patterns

4) Service contextual analysis patterns and modeling

5) Service structural analysis patterns and modeling

The book is highly recommended for business and IT professionals!

Recommended for all SOA Business and Software Architects (and IT Mgmt) - Robert Hathaway - NJ
This book by Michael Bell (on SOMF) provides strong principles and processes that should be understood by all business and software architects prior to developing and implementing an SOA initiative and will be helpful in elucidating and elaborating on the principles of analysis and discovery to those already practicing. The book provides a hands-on perspective advocating incremental analysis and discovery based on a decade of SOA experience. SOMF calls for strong service governance standards and process to direct efforts and achieve success. These standards and processes will fit perfectly into any RUP/SOMA style process (among others). Based on my 20+ years in software development, 15+ years as an architect with 8 years architecting with SOA and defining enterprise standards across many diverse projects, this book is a must read with quality brimming on every page.

By making the importance of developing good early processes for problem understanding and solutions clear, projects are more likely to avoid issues later on. Michael Bell underscores the need for analytical approaches of service discovery and analysis thoughout the service lifecycle, as an iterative and fractal process and provides a strong foundation and breakdown.

SOMF provides a key part of the SOA roadmap working towards a production-line service delivery process to achieve an efficient delivery mechanism and the elusive IT ROI so desperately sought after in business.

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2010-03-12T09:38:00.001+07:00

Service-Oriented Architecture: SOA Strategy, Methodology, and Technology Review

Service-Oriented Architecture: SOA Strategy, Methodology, and Technology Overview

Aggressively being adopted by organizations in all markets, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a framework enabling business process improvement for gaining competitive advantage. Service-Oriented Architecture: SOA Strategy, Methodology, and Technology guides you through the challenges of deploying SOA. It demonstrates conclusively that strategy and methodology are the keys to implementing SOA and provides the methodology needed for SOA success.

The book examines the role of both non-agile and agile project management techniques for deploying SOA. Its methodology applies frameworks of governance, communications, product realization, project management, architecture, data management, service management, human resource management and post implementation processes. Filled with case studies, the book shows the methodology in action.

This reference benefits business managers, business analysts, and technology project managers who are serious about adopting SOA as a long-term strategy. It is also benefits those new to business process management, enterprise architecture, and information systems and need to understand SOA, its business drivers, and its methodology.

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2010-03-12T09:33:00.001+07:00

Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation Review

Being a student of business and information management, I had heard about SOA before, both from a technical perspective (XML, Web services) and from a business standpoint (shiny visions of flexible processes). This book is like the missing link between the two areas! It does not only tell you that SOA will change organizations but it also shows *how* exactly this is going to happen. The authors describe all relevenat aspects, starting from organizational change down to the SAP tools that can be used to model processes and to create your own service-oriented applications.
What surprised me most was that ESA - SAP's flavour of SOA - is business-ready today! This is illustrated with numerous real-world examples from a wide range of corporations. The case studies give a good idea of useful ESA applications and show how the transition to a service-oriented infrastructure could take place.
"Enterprise SOA" is suited for everybody interested in information management, even without any previous knowledge in the SOA field. After reading through the book, you'll finally know how SOA is changing the business environment and how SAP is bringing the concepts to life based on open standards. Although you won't know every technical detail, you'll have learned enough to plan your organization's future in a service-oriented world.

Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation Overview

Information Technology professionals can use this book to move beyond the excitement of web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) and begin the process of finding actionable ideas to innovate and create business value. In Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation, SAP's blueprint for putting SOA to work is analyzed from top to bottom. In addition to design, development, and architecture, vital contextual issues such as governance, security, change management, and culture are also explored. This comprehensive perspective reduces risk as IT departments implement ESA, a sound, flexible architecture for adapting business processes in response to changing market conditions.

This book answers the following questions:

What forces created the need for Enterprise Services Architecture?
How does ESA enable business process innovation?
How is model-driven development used at all levels of design, configuration, and deployment?
How do all the layers of technology that support ESA work together?
How will composite applications extend business process automation?
How does ESA create new models for IT governance?
How can companies manage disruptive change?
How can enterprise services be discovered and designed?
How will the process of adapting applications be simplified?

Based on extensive research with experts from the German software company SAP, this definitive book is ideal for architects, developers, and other IT professionals who want to understand the technology and business relevance of ESA in a detailed way--especially those who want to move on the technology now, rather than in the next year or two.

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Customer Reviews

Very Helpful Book on SOA - Marie H. Goodell -
This is a very helpful book on SOA because it provides the business case for SOA, an excellent technical overview, and real-life examples of how to use it.

While it is written from an SAP perspective, any IT group that is investigating SOA will find value in this book -- as it describes how SOA impacts different layers of the IT stack (from persistence to business objects, to process orchestration, and uesr interfaces). It also provides actual case studies.

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2010-03-11T19:55:00.001+07:00

Software-Architekturen für das E-Business: Enterprise-Application-Integration mit verteilten Systemen (eXamen.press) (German Edition) Review

Software-Architekturen für das E-Business: Enterprise-Application-Integration mit verteilten Systemen (eXamen.press) (German Edition) Overview

Dieses Lehrbuch gibt eine umfassende Einführung in alle relevanten Grundlagen, Methoden und Technologien von Software-Architekturen für das E-Business aus Sicht der Enterprise-Application-Integration mit verteilten Systemen. Im Gegensatz zur aktuellen Literatur zu diesem Thema, werden in diesem Buch Software-Architekturen aus den betriebswirtschaftlichen Anforderungen hergeleitet und als Lehrbuch für die Systementwicklung zusammengefasst. Dafür werden die Ideen der Pattern, Patternsprachen, Fachkomponenten und Web-Services in einem Vorgehensmodell zur Systementwicklung vereint. Ziel ist es, dem Benutzer situationsabhängige, personalisierte und ortsbezogene Dienste zur Verfügung zu stellen. Einfluss in den Prozess der Systementwicklung nimmt somit das Lebenslagenmodell, das aus betriebswirtschaftlicher Sicht hergeleitet wird.

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Business Intelligence BI Software

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2010-03-09T21:40:00.001+07:00

Business Process Management Workshops: BPM 2008 International Workshops, Milano, Italy, September 1-4, 2008, Revised Papers (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing) Review

Business Process Management Workshops: BPM 2008 International Workshops, Milano, Italy, September 1-4, 2008, Revised Papers (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing) Overview

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of nine international workshops held in Milan, Italy, in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2008, in September 2008.

The 63 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions.

In addition to the well-established workshops on

Business Process Design (BPD 2008),
Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2008),
Collaborative Business Processes (CBP 2008),
Process-Oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth 2008),
and Advances in Semantics for Web Services (semantics4ws 2008),

there were four new 4 workshops on emerging areas:

Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2 2008),
Model-Driven Engineering for Business Process Management (MDE4BPM 2008),
Process Management for Highly Dynamic and Pervasive Scenarios (PM4HDPS 2008),
and QoS of Self-Healing Web Services (QSWS 2008).

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Business Intelligence BI Software WP - Samsung N135 Netbook

Great Price for $63.13

2010-03-07T23:29:00.001+07:00

Service-Oriented Architecture: SOA Strategy, Methodology, and Technology Review

Service-Oriented Architecture: SOA Strategy, Methodology, and Technology Overview

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Enterprise Service Bus Features and Advantages

2010-03-07T23:19:00.001+07:00

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a flexible connectivity infrastructure for integrating applications and services.

The Enterprise Service Bus(ESB) can help you achieve the goal of soa. It is flexible connectivity infrastructure for integrating applications and services. It is at the heart of an soa powering it by reducing the number, size, and complexity of interfaces.

An ESB powers your soa by reducing the size, number and complexity of interface.

An ESB will performs the following things between requestor and service

1) ROUTING the messages between services
2) CONVERTING the transport protocols between requestor and service
3) TRANSFORMING the message formats between requestor and service
4) HANDLING the business events from disparate sources

The Enterprise Service Bus allows us focus on our core business.

The following Advantages

1) Add new services faster
2) Change services with minimal impact to existing services

The following two requirements for an Enterprise Service BUS

a) If all your applications confirm to Web Service standards then all you may require is an ESB focused on standards based service integration.
b) If not all your applications conform to the web services standards then you may require a more advanced ESB focused on the integration of services with existing non-services assets.

The four points i would like to highlight the products

1) Provides Web services connectivity, JMS Messaging and service oriented integration, WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus delivers smart integration to connect your assets through service oriented interface.
2) Ease of use. The tools are easy to use and require minimal programming skills. You don't have to know Java in order to use this tool it is integrated, interactive and provides a visual development experience. Mediation is simply the term used to describe the in-flight processing of information. It is simple to develop, build, test, deploy and manage services components. Easy to understand samples are also included.
3) Improved time to value. This cost effective solution has support for over hundreds of ISV solution such as SAP, Siebel, peoplesoft, JD Edwards, and Oracle. Save time and development costs by utilizing prebuilt mediations such as XML transformation, content based routing and message logging.
4) Seamless integration with the Websphere platform-unlike some of our competition, we have the ability to easily move up the stack to solve more complex business problems with process server, which is built on WebSphere ESB. So you can easily extend to leverage WebSphere Process Server as needs dictate. WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus is built on the WebSphere Application Server; A world -class J2EE foundation providing industry -leading levels of availability, scalability and performance.

Provides Web Services connectivity, messaging and service oriented integration

- Improves flexibility through the adaption of service oriented interfaces
- Gain support for a variety of messaging protocols including JMS 1.1 to exploit a variety of transports and interoperate with the WebSphere family
- Utilize a broad range of interaction models to meet your requirements
- Leverage advanced Web service support to incorporate leading edge capabilities
- Take advantage of a comprehensive clients package to extend your environment
- Leverage UDDI 3.0 for a secure description and description and discovery of web services in an open standards based way.
- reduce sharing by using WebSphere ESB to handle integration logic
- Customized routing -Transport/protocol specific routing and content based routing
- Protocol conversation between a variety of protocols: HTTP, IIOP, JMS
- Format transformation between standards: XML, SOAP, JMS messages and when used with adapters, many more
- Supplied mediation function for database interaction
- Allow the flow of business events and add needed intelligence to that flow
- Leverage WebSphere Adapters for capture and dissemination of business events

Delivering an Enterprise Service Bus that's easy to use
Websphere Integration Developer provides an integrated, interactive and visual development environment for rapid development of integration logic, simple to develop, build, test, deploy and manage services components. Get up and running quickly with comprehensive documentation, easy to understand samples. Provides a simplified and visual development experience for standards based artifacts like XML schema, WSDL, XSLT, etc. Supports the declaration of services and connectivity through a visual composition model. Allows easy orchestration of mediation functions with first-class support for intelligent message routing, enrichment and transformation. Offers a seamless integrated tooling approach to connect between service-oriented and messaging-oriented services. True role-based support provides a simplified administration experience.

WebSphere ESB is designed to be easy to use from both a tools and runtime perspective. Websphere Integration Developer, the tools that works with WebSphere ESB, is built for an integration developer-someone who understands IT systems and architectures but who is not a Java developer.

Both WESB and WID are designed to help customers get up and running quickly and easily, with comprehensive out of the box documentation and a simplified and visual development environment. A visual composition model allows easy orchestration of mediation functions. The fact that tool is role based makes administration much easier.

WebSphere ESB Improving time to value.

Gain a cost effective solution for services integration Leverage your SOA IT investments by quickly building a flexible integration infrastructure to extend the value of your existing investments, regardless of vendor. Modular approach supports ability to start small and grow as fast as the business requires. Extensive business and IT standards support facilities greater interoperability & portability. Utilize first class support for hundreds of ISV solutions. Extensive WebSphere Adapter support, including new JCA-based adapters. Support for numerous ISVs within the WebSphere Platform partner ecosystem.

Save time and development costs by utilizing pre-built mediation functions. Mediations operate in messages/events as they are passed between service requesters and service providers. Operate on both One-Way and Request-Response interactions. Pre-built mediation functions allow mediations to be visually composed and include XML transformation, message logging, message routing, and database lookup, Customers can augment the function provided by the supplied primitives by programming their own 'custom primitives'. Dynamically re-configure to meet changing business needs. WebSphere ESB runtime provides the administrator with the ability to reconfigure service interactions. Avoid system downtime by adding or replacing integration logic dynamically.

WebSphere ESB Seamless integration with the WebSphere platform

Leverages WebSphere qualities of service. Inherits the WebSphere runtime for world class scalability, clustering, and fail-over. Utilizes the common WebSphere Administrative Console to enable system management across WebSphere Application Server. WebSphere ESB, and WebSphere Process Server. Addresses end-to-end security requirements on authentication, resource access control, data integrity, confidentiality, privacy, and secure interoperability.

Easily extends to leverage WebSphere Platform as needs dictate. Customers with the right skills can take full advantage of the underlying capabilities of WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment. Extend your existing WebSphere MQ messaging foundation to integrate new environments in an open, standards-based way. Common tooling and administration means the move from WebSphere ESB to WebSphere Process Server is painless.

Integrates with IBM Tivoli security, directory, and systems management offerings. Includes Tivoli Access Manager, for optional use, to deliver a secure, unified and personalized experience that will help manage growth and complexity. Integrates with IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA for added monitoring and management capabilities

Service Oriented Architecture: Triangle of Truth

The triangle of truth is a simple way to look at the important architectural constructs that make up a service oriented architecture. As you begin thinking about what is needed to build a service oriented architecture, the triad that makes up the triangle of truth quickly emerges. Specifically, there needs to be a way to represent the data that is exchanged between services, there must be a mechanism for invoking services, and there should be a way to compose services into a larger integrated business application.

Today there are many different programming models for supporting each construct in the triangle of truth. This situation presents developers with the challenge of not only needing to solve a particular business problem, but they are also faced with choosing and understanding the appropriate implementation technology. One of the important goals of the WebSphere Process Server v6 SOA solution is to mitigate these complexities by converging the various programming models used for implementing service oriented business applications into a simplified programming model.

This presentation focuses specifically on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) introduced in WebSphere Process Server v6 as the service oriented component model for defining and invoking business services. In addition to the important role SCA plays in providing an invocation model for the SOA solution in WebSphere Process Server v6, you will also learn in this presentation that it also plays a role in composing business services into composite business applications.

SCA Basics:

Whenever you are beginning to learn a new technology or programming model, it is often useful to look at the pieces that compose the overall architecture of that technology. This slide lists some of the important features of SCA that you should be aware of as you begin learning about SCA.

First, the Service Component Definition Language(SCDL) provides the basis of SCA. SCDL is an XML based definition language, and is used to define all SCA artifacts in a project. The WebSphere Integration Developer V6.0 tools support of SCA takes care of generating the appropriate SCDL definitions when building an SCA-based applications, however a basic familiarity with SCDL can certainly help understanding the overall architecture and debugging applications.

The next important part of SCA to understand is different is the different types of artifacts that can be defined using SCDL. The various artifact types that exists in SCA were designed to support some of the basic requirements of this service oriented architecture. To start, the most basic building block in SCA is the service component definition. Once a service component is defined, it is important to have a mechanism for making that service available to clients inside and outside of the current.

Service Component Overview:

This is a common concept which will be familiar to those from a WPS background. SCA was first introduced in the concept of WPS V6 as an architecture and implementation to support the enablement of a Service Oriented Architecture approach to process Integration. SCA underpins the programming model in WPS and is also fundamental to WESB. Everything is a Service And a Component And has an interface which describes it.

SCA separates component interface from their implementation. The implementation of an SCA component may change without affecting the interface. It is possible for example, to replace the implementation of component, say with a Web Service invocation rather than invocation through an adapter. We invoke components, so one can regard SCA as perhaps as invocation model as much as anything.

This situation is kind of represented on this next foil - we can see that a Service Component provides an invocable Service Instance. In order to provide that, it must have an Implementation, an Interface, and Configuration properties. A critical point here is that the Implementation can be any of the programming constructs that we provide in WPS. So it could be a BSM, BPEL Process, Map, Adapter, POJO.

Interface can be of two types-Interfaces that this module exposes for consumption by others, and Interfaces exposed by other modules that we want to consume. This latter type of interface consumption is called a reference. We should also note that the interface can be described using either Java interfaces or WSDL. But if there are multiple interfaces specified then you cannot mix WSDL with Java. For reference type you do not have that restriction.

Service Module: Overview

Here we have got our Service Module, which we know is the SCA unit of packaging and deployment. We can see that this particular Module contains 2 Service Components- each containing an implementation, Interface and references where appropriate. This second Service Component does not contain a reference because it does not invoke any external Service.

Now in the Service Module we can see that we have a number of additional things, which are related to incoming and outgoing Interfaces at the Module Level. Remember that an Interface and reference describe incoming and outgoing interface at the Service Component level. Well we have a similar notation at the Service Module level, referred to as imports, Exports and Standalone references.

An Export is how the Service Module exposes its interface to the outside world for consumption by another Service Component within a different Service Module. A Standalone Reference is how the Service Module exposes its interfaces for consumption using a non-SCA client invocation mechanism. Clients using this invocation mode are either Other SCA components within the same SCA module, or non SCA clients such as a JSP. An Import is how a Service Component invokes an external Service. The relationship or potential invocation path between these artefacts is represented by wires.

SCA Basics and terminology

SCA is a runtime that facilitates the abstraction of a component's implementation
SCA separates infrastructure from Business Logic
Provide a programming model for invocation
Support a variety of the invocation models
Provide the runtime infrastructure suited for application consumption

Universal model for Business Services, Publish or operate on business data. Service Data Objects (SDO) provides the universal model for "business data". Components run on a SCA enabled run-time, Java interfaces (j-typed), WSDL port types9w-typed). Arguments and return are described using SDO's, Java classes, or simple Java types. SCA focus on business purpose.

Service data Objects and Business Objects
As introduced already in the triangle of truth, business objects play an important role in the WebSphere Process Server v6 SOA solution as the data abstraction. This is indeed an important goal of the business object framework, but in addition to this, the business object framework also provides some other important functions. Specifically, the business object framework was developed to provide functional capabilities similar to the business object construct found in WebSphere Interchange Server(ICS). The set of capabilities that have been adopted to support ICS style business object functions, are needed to provide a way to help developers mitigate the complexities related to developing applications that work with federated and disparate business data as is commonly the case with integrated enterprise applications.

SCA provides the ability for services to be called synchronously or asynchronously.
An asynchronous invocation model is also provided with the following semantics
One Way -Fire and Forget
Deferred Response-In this model the client makes a request, but does not bloc, but at some later point in time goes back and asks for the response. In this form of invocation takes a second parameter which specifies whether the invocation behaves when the response is not immediately available. (invoke Async() returns a ticket that identifies the invocation. invokeResponse() passes a ticket back in that is used to get the response that corresponds to the invocation identified by the ticket)

The semantics of the synchronous vs asynchronous invocations differ as summarized here. So synchronous invocations are pass-by-reference, whereas asynchronous invocations are pass-by-value. Note also that if you want type-safety you've got to be using Java interfaces definitions. However there is tooling to allow you to generate Java interfaces from WSDL definitions. Synchronous calls outside the JVM are pass-by-value invocations. We could use an extra column in this chart.

Enterprises service bus reference architecture
We are going to introduce all these elements later in the presentation. Lets look at the scope of WSEB and all the things the customer gets in the box. The product is named ESB not Enterprise Service Bus. The naming reflects the industry mindset. It allows an ESB to be built which brokers service requests and responses. It is primarily a Web Services focused platform specifically to support the service interactions that take place within a SOA. ESB is built on AS (ND) and therefore fundamentally a J2EE platform. It leverages and shares technology introduced with WAS V6 and WPS. Use of the additional products and capabilities shown ( for example, TAM) are optional.

Introduces the concept of "mediations" as a term for message (broker) processing. Service invocations are Service messages within the ESB. A new version of WID is released which supports the development of mediation flows. The ESB supports mediation flows and primitives with which to build mediation processing. Support for basic ESB processing is supplied. WESB leverages the messaging support delivered in WAS V6 (SIB) using the JMS 1.1 provider and the MQLink to interoperate with an MQ QM. The WS support again leverages base AS support SOAP/HTTP and SOAP/JMS as protocols and the various WS-* capability. SCA (define) is the programming model which is the technology first surfaced, and shared with WPS. It is the foundation for the composition of mediation and process logic. SDO (define) allows for the logical representation of business data. The SMO (define) is an extension of an SDO message which is the service message which flows through the ESB. XMS clients (C++ and .Net). JAX/RPC client invocations supported via WS C/C++ client. Connectivity to other endpoints is achieved using the WBI Adapters (either the original adapters or the variants which support JCA 1.5).

In a loosely coupled SOA architecture, Service requestors and providers connect with each other through an Enterprise Service Bus. Loosely coupled Services provide more flexibility and ability to introduce mediations and QOS that can then be applied uniformly to the services connecting through the bus. Mediation services intercept and modify messages that are passed between existing services(providers) and clients (requesters) that want to use those services. Mediation services are implemented using mediation modules that contain mediations flows. WebSphere ESB and Process Server provide the ESB capability through the use of Mediation Module deployed in the server. Mediation Module uses the same Service component architecture (SCA) introduced in WebSphere Integration Developer V6.0.0 and WebSphere Process Server V6.0.0

ESB concepts: Medition Module

WebSphere ESB and Process Server introduces a new type of module, called Mediation Module, that intercept and modify messages between service requester and the service provider. Mediation module provides the ESB functions of converting protocols, routing, transformation and other custom processing on the messages. Mediation Module is the unit of deployment and runs within the WebSphere ESB or Process Server. Interactions with external service requesters and providers defined by imports and exports, whose interfaces is defined using WSDL.

A new type of module is introduced in WebSphere ESB and Process Server, called Mediation Module, provides the ESB functionality by allowing the processing the messages between service requestors and providers. This enables loosely coupled connectivity and mediation services between different service requestors and provides connecting through the bus. The Mediation module allows converting protocols, routing, transformation and other custom processing on the messages, tpically needed in an ESB environment. The WebSphere Process Server supports business modules used for business processing and the new mediation modules, whereas WebSphere ESB supports mediation modules. Service requestors interact with the mediation module in the bus via the module exports, and the module interacts with the service providers via the module imports. These export and import interfaces are defined using the WSDL.

Mediation Module: Import and Export bindings

Different kinds of requester and provider types of interactions are made available via different bindings for the imports and exports. WebSphere ESB provides support for JMS bindings- JMS 1.1 provided by WebSphere platform Messaging can exploit a variety of transports TCP/IP, SSL, HTTP(S). Allows interaction with the WebSphere family WAS, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Message Broker. Web Services binding SOAP/ HTTP, SOAP/JMS, WSDL 1.1, Service Registry -UDDI 3.0, WS-Security, WS-Automatic Transactions. WebSphere Adapter bindings JCA Adapters -SAP, PeopleSoft, Sibel, Files, JDBC, WBI Adapters for all the rest. Built-in SCA (Default) binding Used for module to module communication-supports both synschronous and asynchronous communication. WebSphere ESB supports update this binding via the admin console allowing module to module connectivity to be changed.

Interactions with external service requesters and providers are defined by imports and exports. Import/export interfaces are defined using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), which may contain several service operations. Different kinds of requester and provider are made available via different bindings for the imports and exports. WebSphere ESB and Process Server v6.0.1 supports JMS binding, WebServices bindings, WebSphere Adapter bindings and the default built-in SCA binding. These different bindings allows maximum flexibility for the requestors and providers to use the protocol of their choice. Use of different bindings permits easy transformation of protocols between the service requestors and providers. The import and Export bindings are same as used for Business modules in WebSphere Process Server.

Mediation flow component and Request-Response interaction

Mediation module contains a new type of SCA component, called Mediation Flow Component. Mediation Flow Components act as 'service intermediaries' to pass a 9potentially modified) request from a service requester to a service provider, pass a (potentially modified) response from a service provider to a service requester. Processing of requests is separated from processing of responses in the mediation flow component. Request processing within a mediation flow component can send a response back to the requester without necessarily needing to contact a service provider.

Mediation Module contain a new SCA component called Mediation flow component which acts as a service intermediary for the processing of the message. The Mediation flow component provides a standard way of processing the message independent of the binding protocol used by the service requestors or providers. It supports one way model where no response is expected or 2 way request and response model. It supports synchronous or asynchronous invocation model, similar to other SCA components. Within the Mediation flow component, the processing of the request message is performed separately from the response message. This allows different processing of the request message is performed separately from the response message. This allows different processing to occur on the request and the response side by having different mediation primitives on the request and response flows.

The mediation application developer may choose to create and handle the response within the mediation flow component without actually calling the service provider. The Mediation Module developer will need to construct the response message based on the interface definition of the module export.

Mediation Module: Contents
Mediation Module can have the following: Exports, defined using WSDL that expose the mediation module to external service requesters. Imports, defined using WSDL, that identify external service providers and their interfaces. A new type of SCA component called, Mediation flow component- this provides the mediation function on the messages between these services requestors and the providers. In cases where the only need is to transform the message from one interaction protocol to another, there may not be any need for a mediation flow component in the module. Optional SCA Java components-this is used in conjunction with the custom mediation primitive or when there is a need to use Java interface.

Mediation module contain exports, imports, a new type of SCA component called the Mediation flow component and optionally other SCA components of type. Mediation Imports are like normal SCA imports with all the supported bindings, namely, Default SCA, JMS, Web Services. Imports are the entry points into the Bus. Similarly, Mediation Exports are like normal SCA exports with all the supported bindings, namely Default SCA, JMS, Web Services. Exports are the exit point from the Bus. A new type of SCA component, called the Mediation Flow component, contains logic of how the message is processed between the input and output of the flow. Functions like message routing, transformation, augmentation, logging or any other custom processing are performed on the message within the Mediation Flow component. Lastly, the module can optionally contain SCA Java components, used to implement custom mediation primitive. More on this later in the presentation.

Mediation Flow editior is used provide the implementation of the mediation components that are used to process the message flow as it flows from the service requestor to the provider through the Enterprise Service bus. The editor contains 3 sections. The top one is the Operation Mediation section used to define the mapping of the source input operation to one or more target output operation. The map is created by visually wiring the input operation to the appropriate target out operation. Once the connection is made between a source and target operation, the middle section called the Mediation Flow section is used to create the message processing flow. Mediation Primitives are added here and wired to create the message flow between input and output operation. The bottom most section of the editor is the mediation properties section to view or modify the properties of the connection, primitives that are highlighted in the mediation flow section.

Mediation flow component design methodologies.
Two types of design methodology

Top- down design
Developer creates with Mediation Flow component with the required interfaces and references. Developers generates an implement (empty) for the Flow component This will open the Mediation Flow component editor. Using the Mediation Flow Editor, the developer create mappings from a source operation to one or more target operations.

Bottom-up design
User starts with actual implementation of the flow component does not yet have the Mediation Flow component. The mediation flow component is then used to assemble the module. This approach can be used to modify any existing design and then merging the implementation of the flow component.

WebSphere ESB provides several built-in mediation primitives and allows the capability of adding your own custom mediation for cases that are note covered by the built-in mediation primitives. Following built-in mediation primitives are provided.

1. Message Logger used to log/store message information to a database.

2. Message Filter to filter messages selectively forwarding them on to output terminals, based on simple condition expression.

3. Database lookup to access information in a database and insert it in the message. The mediation primitive is supplied with key id to look for and where in the message is the value of the key. Using the two information, the value of the specified column for the matching key is inserted in the specified location within the message.

4.XSL Transformation mediation primitive is used to transform messages using XSL transformation. This is mainly used when the target provider has a different interface than the incoming message interface. Using the mapping within the XSLT, one can map the input values to the appropriate output fields.

5. Stop mediation primitive used to stop the flow execution.

6. Fail mediation primitive used for error conditions, where the flow execution is stopped and an exception is generated.

Custom mediation primitive is used to do message processing that is not covered by other ediation primitives by executing custom logic. Custom Mediation Primitive calls a SCA Java component that you create or provide. The SCA Java component must be within the same Mediation module.

Bommasani Hari Prasad

Business Intelligence BI Software WP - Samsung N135 Netbook

Centrally Manage All Data Integration Interfaces From Integration Software

2010-03-07T23:15:00.001+07:00

Data integration is the process of gathering, assembling and then supervising customer financial information that comes from multiple of resources available within the enterprise. Integration is generally very vital, particularly if business processes are automated. integration enables a business process fast through integration tools and allows customers to integrate disparate information sources, databases and software applications both within an enterprise and across customers.

The integration software provides the following solutions:

Connecting interfaces between a range of back-end systems and databases

Exchange data with external partners (B2Bi)

Connect Portals with back-end systems

SOA integration middle ware where all the services and data flows can be created managed and tracked from a single web-based interface

Integration software helps enterprise to completely mechanize their flows and application interfaces. The key benefits of software are:

Manage all the Connections, process designs, procedures, Mapping Rules, Triggers, Exception Handling and Flows for all the applications, customers and partners

Software should have 3-step integration process: Design the flow, manage the services, and deploy the solution.

Software should have pre built data flow templates for fast design and deployment

Software should have attractively priced and is offered on a subscription pricing model

Software should have process-centric and services-based approach to data integration

Integration basically transforms the way that information is accessed and integrated, making it simple for enterprises to expand usefulness of corporate data. Such software also provides the flexibility to facilitate enterprise application integration for many in-house applications that are not maintained by other message brokering software. Good software earned a strong status for being able to address the worlds most complex problem to automate the business process fast and effectively.

Author has more than 5 years of experience in data integration & application integration technology currently working for Adeptia. For more information about Integration Software please download free.

WP - Samsung N135 Netbook

Business as a Service. Software as a Service Billing and Business Models

2010-01-31T14:31:00.001+07:00

According to Gartner, Software as a Service (SaaS) is software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. This means that the application users are not licensed and charged for software availability in extended periods of time, but only billed for the amount they actually use. In most scenarios, the software is either available in the form of web applications or terminal services. In the first case, the entire application is hosted on the provider’s hardware and no client software except for a web browser is needed. In the latter case, the only difference is a requirement for the customers to download a client application, but the core of the system is also hosted by the provider.

Benefits from SaaS

These facts combined mean vast savings for the consumers. The lack of an initial license fee and hardware requirements can reduce the CAPEX significantly. It is also easier to plan the spending and adapt over time. The actual cost of ownership (TCO) depends on how much the applications are used at a particular time and not on future capacity. This flexibility and affordability of the model are especially vital for businesses in today’s economy.

As for the software vendors, the SaaS model offers equally valuable benefits. Initially lower, but recurring revenue streams are much more predictable and provide the ability to plan the budgets more effectively and precisely. Due to the centralized hosting, the software is also much easier to maintain and support. All upgrades are limited to one environment and have instant effect for all users. In addition, direct access to the application logs facilitates bug fixes. Finally, SaaS can help overcome sales difficulties in
a period when businesses reorganize and freeze their IT budgets, so they cannot afford the lack of flexibility and expenses of software based on EULA licensing models.

These advantages are clearly confirmed by good results of the market leaders and optimistic projections of its researchers. Contrary to mostly negative growth forecasts coming from all over the economy, the global SaaS market is expected to grow in 2009 by as much as 30% (Gartner) to 40% (IDC).

Billing and other challenges

The positive aspects of SaaS for software vendors are unquestionable. However, a number of topics need to be addressed before an application can be offered in this model.

The inevitable challenge faced by all Software as a Service providers is setting up the billing process. Whereas traditional IPR or EULA-based sales required simple license invoicing and handling of usually long-term maintenance contracts, the “pay-per-use” model and proper management of frequently recurring transactions impose a requirement for a rating and billing engine, as well as a set of procedures. This means additional analyses and investments need to be made in order to kick off the provision of SaaS.

The necessary infrastructure is offered by many vendors (e.g. Verax Systems with its OSS/BSS Billing). In order to achieve good results, software businesses are required to develop a profitable and competitive usage billing model. One of the first steps is defining the main billing units and UDRs (Usage Data Records) related with them or software license key limitations. The most commonly used aspects are:

Number of users and sessions per user
Number of concurrent sessions
Number of enabled modules / functionalities
Number of business artifacts generated by the application (e.g. reports, invoices etc.)
Number of objects created or stored in the application (e.g. articles, contacts etc.)
Number of emails sent

Obviously, the rating and billing must cater for the business value of the applications, service maintenance costs (like customer support and SLAs), as well as the hardware required to host it (e.g. CPU and storage capacity). The diversity of the parameters may be a difficulty alone. However, this is where another critical challenge occurs.

It is the scalability required to handle a varying number of customers and users. Obviously, a well-established business can make long-term customer base growth plans and set sales targets in order to adapt the infrastructure on time. However, the recent economic reality has made it increasingly difficult for companies to reach those targets. In addition, some of the services offered to customers have a very seasonal nature (e.g. consumer e-commerce usually booms in the Christmas season). This means businesses need to make upfront spending on hardware capacity which is likely to be redundant for extended periods of time. A related challenge is also the provisioning of the services, which also requires appropriate infrastructural solutions to be in place.

A conclusion from the above is that it is not easy for a specialized application provider to offer their software in the SaaS model on their own. Fortunately, the market is rich in solutions similar in the idea, but oriented on hardware infrastructure. It is usually referred to as Infrastructure (or Platform) as
a Service, and a combination of the services is commonly named Cloud Computing.

“Hardware as a Service”

The Infrastructure as a Service providers reduce most of the CAPEX required from software vendors in order to start offering SaaS. Their huge data centers cater for the flexibility allowing for instant multiplication of the hardware resources as the needs grow. The dynamic scalability and provisioning is achieved with the latest platform virtualization monitoring infrastructure (hypervisors), out of which the most commonly used are Cytrix Xen and VMWare (Information Week Analytics, Sept. 4, 2009). Costs are kept down to the minimum due to built-in load balancing mechanisms.

The dynamic growth of interest in SaaS had turned providing scalability, redundancy and provisioning for its purposes into a core business of many companies. Even though, as the concept is relatively new, the implementations and market offerings differ quite considerably. The most commonly listed three services – Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine and Microsoft’s Azure represent different philosophies, with hardly any platform restrictions and added services in the first case, very restrictive policies for a low price in the second, and single platform with value added services in the last example.

With specializations ranging from virtualized and scalable web hosting and disaster recovery through provision of SaaS and test environments for software vendors to leasing high-performance computing resources for research and industrial simulations, the leaders in the most common appliances include Amazon (EC2), Rackspace and GoGrid.

A majority of the providers impose a minimum service duration, although in most cases it is as low as monthly. The services are usually billed according to utility-based or availability models. The charges are commonly applied for the following parameters:

Hours of virtual machine availability (e.g. Amazon)
CPU cycles (e.g. Rackspace, Google)
RAM-hours (e.g. GoGrid)
Data transfer
Storage

Additional services, such as monitoring, load balancing, software license fees etc. are also offered and billed for as part of bundled plans or separately. Some providers offer pre-paid plans and monthly or annual subscriptions, although their practical aspect is a price discount or a fee for the “reservation” of
a machine (either virtual or physical) with additional per-use pricing on top of it.

One of the most frequently raised disadvantages of entrusting the hosting of applications to 3rd party companies is the aspect of data security and uptimes. This is addressed by most providers who offer suitable service level agreements (SLA) with uptime levels exceeding 99%. However, it is the small-print that matters. For example, Amazon’s SLA guarantee of 99.95% is calculated on an annual basis, which means a critical system may be down for a few hours within a week with no obligation from the provider. As another one, GoGrid’s 100% SLA level refers to availability as indicated by the operator’s proprietary monitoring tools.

Service separation model

In this model, the software vendor hosts its applications in a selected Data Center providing platform or infrastructure services. The software is offered and sold to end users directly by the application provider and the data center is not part of the process. The application provider is billed for the infrastructure usage. The application sends usage reports to the provider’s billing engine. The entire billing and invoicing process is also handled by the application provider.

The main advantage of this model for the application provider is that the scalability and provisioning is entirely taken care of by the data center. This means a significant cost reduction, as no hardware needs to be purchased and set up in order to provide the service. The sales is directly between the software vendor and the customers. Both the data center and the application provider offer their core business services only.

Despite offering undoubted advantages, this model is not without flaws from the software vendor’s perspective. The requirement of running dedicated sales & marketing departments has been enough of a struggle for many software engineering businesses. The billing and invoicing on top of that may be too much for some executives to handle in a short timeframe.

Revenue sharing model

This is why an alternative and less conservative model is proposed by Verax Systems. It is based on the assumption that it is easier for a large service provider (i.e. data center) with existing billing infrastructure and procedures in place to integrate additional application usage billing processes into it than setting up two separate engines.

The advantages of this model are clearly evident for both the data centers and the application providers. As the revenue is shared between the two parties, both of them have a common business goal, so there is an obvious synergy effect. Also the total cost of this model seems to be lower, so a more competitive and profitable offer can be directed to the customers.

Application providers without the need to handle billing, invoicing and collection processes can put more focus on what they do best. This should result in lower prices for the service, as well as in development of new features or applications. Many small and rather unheard of software companies can vastly benefit due to the service provider’s footprint and market recognition. It also means a safer business with less investments in expensive infrastructure and processes.

The data centers as service-as-a-whole providers gain an opportunity to increase their market share and recognition. First of all, they can expand their customer base by attracting more application providers due to a convenient business model. In a time of increasing competition among infrastructure providers, more of them aim to find market differentiators. This objective can be met by offering added value – clearly achieved by directly providing applications in the SaaS model. Value Added Services at a low expense combined with additional revenue from commission should provide a quick ROI and increase the company’s footprint.

Verax SaaS provisioning and billing infrastructure

Verax Systems positions itself as an infrastructure enabler for the provisioning and billing of SaaS applications supporting various business models, including the revenue sharing in particular. The Verax OSS/BSS Suite covers important areas of building SaaS infrastructure, including:

Defining new services (Product Catalogue)
Provisioning (Provisioning Service)
Customer self management (Self Care Portal)
Billing of both infrastructure and application usage (Billing)
Monitoring of the service infrastructure and measuring SLA compliance (NMS)

What is worth mentioning is that Verax Systems’ applications are not limited to the SaaS platform – all our products are oriented at carrier-grade services for IP-centered, convergent telecommunications.

Defining the services

In order to be able to efficiently handle the billing of any kind of services, they have to be precisely defined. What could be just a one-off exercise for a small business offering a limited number of rarely-changing services is usually not the case. Strong market competition enforces introducing new ways of attracting customers and thus, new services. This means that the configuration of new applications becomes a daily routine. The challenging economy is also a time when acquisitions or mergers become very common, resulting in an increase of the number and complexity of the product packages offered. In order to handle the product and service offerings in an efficient and error-free manner, a sophisticated product catalogue, capable of handing SaaS specifics is required.

The Verax Product Catalogue offers a flexible tool to define the SaaS services and means of their billing, such as:

Service name
Activation times
Eligibility criteria
Billing criteria:
- Platform usage, such as storage, CPU cycles, data transfers and others
- Additional application criteria, resembling more a classic license, such as the number of users, sessions, modules enabled, etc.

The Product Catalogue offers an easy, intuitive interface for not only defining the technical details of the services, but also allowing to categorize them for easier browsing, create service bundles (with mandatory and optional products), provide descriptions and photos for the customers and define multi-currency pricing.

Provisioning the services

Provisioning of individual applications is likely the most complex process of a scalable and flexible SaaS infrastructure. In order to attract customers, the offering must be tailored to the needs to the maximum extent. The resulting wide range of pricing and licensing models needs to be reflected in the provisioning mechanism. An indication of the potential challenges is that the provisioning of various SaaS applications may include the following:

Instantiating a virtual machine from a template
Setting platform parameters such as storage, database and others
Setting DNS names
Managing HTTPS certificates
Configuring a default administrative account
Configuring the application license, e.g. three modules for five concurrent users
Activating the service and billing notification

Verax Systems has been working on a Provisioning Service solution to meet all the challenges faced by our current and potential customers.

Managing the services

A wide range of applications and a large number of users make for an excellent business aspect, as they directly affect the revenue gained. However, the management of customer service becomes more difficult and expensive as the customer-base grows. It is not just a question of instantiating the particular applications, but also responding to the customers’ changing needs.

The easiest way of reducing the customer service costs and making it more manageable is providing the customers with a front-end, where they can manage the parameters of their services on their own. It not only helps to improve and reduce the call center costs, but also increases customer trust and loyalty.

The Verax Self Care Portal allows this and much more, by providing enhanced possibilities of customer communication (e.g. broadcasting news, events, new products), improving the service with a service rating feature and accelerating the cash flow by presenting outstanding payment information to the customers.

SLA compliance

The provider’s liability and proposed Service Level Agreements are one of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to managed services. Security concerns are the main argument against using SaaS for 30% of decision makers surveyed by Forrester in 2009. This is why it is essential for any SaaS provider to deploy the right tools and procedures to maintain the required level of availability and data security, as well as to demonstrate them to their current and potential customers.

It is not just the hardware infrastructure that matters. In order to avoid dropping below the SLA-declared parameters by reacting to problems before they become critical, the SaaS providers need to have
a proper monitoring system in place.

Verax Systems’ Network Management System is a perfect match to those needs, both for the platform as well as the applications. The Verax NMS provides proven SLA compliance and features full FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security) functionality to help maintain the highest level of availability and provide tools for fault prevention. Due to support of rules-based business logic and pluggable architecture, it can be integrated with any existing platforms and applications.

Integration challenges

SaaS applications are usually built on top of existing infrastructures and services. This means that there may likely already be some systems in place. Be it existing client databases, some forms of billing systems or other environments, Verax Systems can integrate with them via:

SOA-ready architecture with pluggable services – e.g. it is possible to replace the integrated Verax OSS/BSS database and modules with a custom plug-in connecting to an existing database
Verax mediation, which can be used to relay the UDRs to and from the existing billing system.

Verax Systems has broad experience as an integrator of applications for telecommunications (including Tier-1 operators) and financial markets.

Growing with the needs

It seems obvious that building a proper SaaS infrastructure is an investment. While some businesses can afford to create it within a short period of time, others may need to prioritize and get going with only the most essential parts in place in the start-up period.

Verax Systems understands this and offers delivery of a perfectly-suited solution over time. The suggested and most common order would be to first deploy the provisioning service, followed by automating the billing process, and finally improving SLAs with the NMS and the customer service with the Self Care Portal at a later stage. However, we are open to any needs and ideas.

Summary

Building a SaaS platform is undoubtedly a complex and demanding task. However, setting up the necessary infrastructure around it in order to provision and bill particular applications is also a challenge. Verax Systems with its OSS/BSS Suite offers a perfect set of applications to address these challenges.

For more information please visit our website www.veraxsystems.com or contact us.

About the Author

(ArticlesBase SC #1493451)

Article Source: SOA Service Oriented Architecture, SOA Web Services, SOA Software as a Service, SaaS. http://www.articlesbase.com/ - Business as a Service. Software as a Service Billing and Business Models

SOA: Where did we lose the way?

2010-01-31T14:29:00.000+07:00

During the past few years, one term has been touted a million times or more by analysts, by publications and, of course, by technology vendors. No prizes for guessing that the term is SOA or Service Oriented Architecture. Business soothsayers have only stopped short of prescribing SOA as the one magic potion that will solve all integration woes, and enable organizations to quickly change their underlying applications to match the agility of their business processes.

Barely a few months from its much-publicized ‘birth’, it seemed that every enterprise software vendor had an SOA strategy. While CIO’s were initially skeptical about SOA, they soon jumped on the bandwagon: some of these CIO’s knew exactly how SOA would help their organization, and the kind of investments, time and effort required to make SOA successful – but the majority had no clue. They simply went ahead because they did not want to be left behind.

Where’s my ROI?

As with any technology, after the initial hype has settled down, reality walks in with leaden feet. Five years of education, adoption and doubtful implementation have gone by now, and there are very few poster boys for SOA. While most organizations agree with the theoretical benefits of SOA, the situation ‘on the ground’ has been quite different. To their dismay, many of the eager initial adopters have realized that the promise of business agility through high reuse, interoperability by design, and loosely-coupled integration, and of course, cost savings – are elusive goals.

The Data Is In…

A 2007 InformationWeek web survey of IT professionals found that 32% of organizations using SOA said that the projects fell short of expectations. Of this, 58% said their SOA projects introduced more complexity into their IT environments, and 30% said they cost more than expected.

A study by Nucleus Research last year, found out that only 37% of companies have achieved a positive return on their SOA investments. The study also highlighted that while SOA drove developer productivity, it often ended up being the responsibility of the project or department. The result – SOA was deployed in silos, thereby impacting the return on investment. This is ironic when you consider that the concept of SOA came about to fuse integration between applications effortlessly, and reduce islands or silos of information.

Common factors for SOA failures

Business drives technology, not the other way around
One common mistake many organizations make is that they approach SOA from a technology perspective. They go on to choose the best vendor in terms of features, and spend a lot of time in designing the best architecture – without involving the people who will benefit from this architecture. The result – no business buy-in, near-total disinterest and even, in some cases, opposition.

CIO’s must remember that business drives technology – and not the other way around. Till this realization dawns, disillusionment will be inevitable. Hence, strategy must drive business, business must drive applications, and applications must drive technology. IT must work closely with business, and support it with technology for implementing the strategy. Hence, organizations must start changing their business processes first, and look at how SOA can solve real business problems. The technology problems will then be relatively simpler to handle.
Improper assessment of IT landscape
Unless organizations identify and take a detailed inventory of applications, processes and their supporting personnel, and classify which services can be service-enabled – no SOA implementation exercise is going to be beneficial. The inventory of applications combined with the business processes supported is key to identifying the Business Services – the primary basis for delivering the benefits promised by SOA. Reusing (business) services helps in saving development time, and improves business responsiveness and agility. Hence, unless organizations have a proper assessment & understanding of their IT applications and how they support business/operations, SOA implementations are bound to end up on the ‘junk’ pile.
Lack of governance framework
SOA encourages the concept of loosely coupled and reusable services. This means that services from one process can be abstracted and reused by another business process or application. However, left ungoverned, SOA can allow any service to be invoked or deployed by any application – which in turn can lead to an unholy mess. Think of a traffic situation on a busy highway – with cars being allowed to go unhindered in different directions, with little automated (traffic signals) or manual (a traffic policeman) controls.

The lack of a governance framework can be the critical success factor of an organization’s SOA strategy. Paolo Malinverno from the Gartner Group believes that “Through 2010, the lack of working governance arrangements will be the most common reason for the failure of SOA projects.”

To successfully implement SOA, organizations must create/adopt a robust governance framework which establishes tools and practices for enforcing a common set of security, performance and other policies for every service. In short, the governance framework should govern the lifecycle of services from creation to deployment.
Vendor lock-in
Despite the promise of plug-and-play services and a world of interoperability, we have seen every product vendor use a different roadmap with different technological approaches for implementing SOA. It is ironical that the purpose of SOA is independence from vendor lock-in, so that you can choose to add, remove or plug in components or services from different vendors, as you want. If your organization is trapped with a single vendor, it is obvious that your SOA strategy is not working, as the cost of upgrade or integration with a third party application will be as expensive and time-consuming as it was earlier. The bottom line is simple – don’t let the vendor drive your architecture.

Making your SOA implementation a success

A successful SOA implementation can significantly improve operational effectiveness and deliver considerable ROI. However, implementing SOA requires commitment and buy-in from top leadership. High-level management must articulate the common vision that promotes and explains the business case for using SOA, and effectively tackle any cultural or change management issues that are caused due to the implementation.

The architecture must be planned with a vision for the future, with detailed linkages between IT and business, and how the solutions will change if the strategy changes. Organizations must also have a leadership team to oversee implementation. This team would govern the implementation and provide direction through decision making, training, and resolving issues related to culture or skills.

SOA is not a magic potion or a silver bullet that will wipe away all integration woes. As with any technology, SOA first needs business process re-engineering, and then the technology that supports it. The bottom line - if you do not have a clear business case and a roadmap, then don’t expect too much from your SOA implementation!

About the Author

Swati Parashar

(ArticlesBase SC #1171963)

Article Source: SOA Service Oriented Architecture. http://www.articlesbase.com/ - SOA: Where did we lose the way?

Software as a Service (saas) - Change is Imminent

2010-01-31T14:27:00.001+07:00

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is receiving a lot of attention in analysts’ briefings and technology trade press articles. In the past year, SaaS has emerged from its pioneering group of start-ups and medium-sized vendors to be embraced, albeit awkwardly, by software giants including Oracle and SAP. Much of the attention SaaS has garnered in recent months has focused on the new business model that on-demand software enables. However, some veteran technologists who’ve adopted SaaS for their own livelihood, and analysts as well, say that the phenomenon might well be the catalyst for a far wider-ranging discussion on software development for the next generation. The highly interactive Web 2.0 model and iterative development have dovetailed to force even the most traditional programmers to at least consider the end of lengthy development cycles. Software as a Service develpment companies are now perfectly positioned to provide all business software applications delivered via the clooud - no software to download, no risk of piracy, and no risk of hard drive failures.

Technology and culture driving business One major technological factor in advancing the new development models might be the rise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services standards. The ASP model, championed in the late 1990s and early years of this decade, never took off because its one-to-one architecture was inherently difficult to scale. SaaS technology, however, takes advantage of a one-to-many SOA-enabled architecture that can offer customized services to different customers, and even different branches of the same enterprise. One example is a customer relationship management application offered on a SaaS basis by LiveCRM LiveCRM enables companies to drive sales productivity, increase visibility, and expand revenues with an affordable, easy-to-deploy service that delivers success to companies of all sizes. The beauty of a product like LiveCRM lies in its ability to adapt to different business practices and provide a unique customised solution to each without rebuilding the interface each time - This is where SaaS becomes so powerful. Deploying a SaaS application means a major culture change within the organisation. The change comes not just in how things are seen and reported on through aq software product, but also how the product itself is used. Many large organisations (predominantly the older ones) have spent a significant amount on training personnel and getting them used to the current systems and software products used. In my experience, many of these personnel are not as skilled as some of the younger counterparts which presents a very steep learning curve for businesses. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. SaaS can be deployed in bite sizes; module by module and as people get more used to it, a full scale deployment can be considered. Also, a carefully managed implementation including change management, workshops and solution recipes are also a great way to minimise this learning curve. So a change in technology, in this case, also demands a change in culture. But a change in culture is already happening The technological advancements underpinning the new methodologies are being complemented by a new “ground up” ethos that will force academic program leaders and enterprise strategists to retool their own thinking. In fact, the shift is a generational shift. Just as the young technologists of the late 1980s created both ad hoc and formal transitions of enterprise data from mainframes to PCs and client-server architectures, the next-gen architectures of on-demand software are being pioneered by those who have grown up working with instantly available Web-based applications. From an executive perspective, SaaS is less about how software is going on-demand, and more about how the generation of users who have grown up with the Web as a technology are coming into the workforce. And this crowd expects the tools that allow things they’re used to—collaboration, immediate ubiquitous access, and so on—SaaS will make sure they get what they want. Web 2.0 and socially-oriented computing, as most people think of it, is about Facebook and mashups and things like that. While that’s a big component of the overall discussion, what I try to do is take those concepts and say, ‘How do I take those ideas, which are incubated in the Internet kiddies’ domain, and put that in real business terms—enterprise quality of service, or levels of security, compliance, audit, control and so forth—that are enterprise-worthy or government-worthy, and still keep all the beauty and openness and free-flowing nature of the Web 2.0 world? Uneasy transition Gartner’s Norton says the transition to SaaS-based architectures is still in its early phase. “By 2010, 15 percent of large companies will start projects replacing their ERP backbone with a SaaS offering,” he says. “A little later, Tier 1 consultancies will offer SaaS services, and 30 to 40 percent of vendors offering SaaS service by 2012.” Norton estimates about half of the Web 2.0 projects visible to end users are still developed using noniterative development methods, but he sees that changing. However, Norton says he has seen the promise of some flexible projects run aground just as they might become more useful in a cross-enterprise manner, because corporate executives lose their nerve and fall back on old development methods as projects get larger. “They don’t know what they’ve got, and it’s easier to say, ‘If we put the standard controls in place, we can control this beast.’ They only have the illusion of control.” In all but the most daring organizations, it will take time to realize that the illusion of control might best be modified in favor of a collaborative, nonhierarchical approach. Vandervoort says the next generation of developers is coming out of universities well-informed of these technologies, but are receiving little to no formal training in how to use them in enterprise settings. “The shift that has to occur, both in academic training and in enterprise thinking, is to move away from the idea that IT builds the answer for the user,” he says. He sees Web 2.0 enabling IT to shift its thinking toward enabling users to build their own solutions. In doing that, he says users will find their own answer via the path of least resistance, or POLR. What do you think?

About the Author

Manas is CEO of Genesis Interactive, an Auckland based SaaS vendor and technology innovator.

(ArticlesBase SC #712170)

Article Source: Software as a Service (SaaS), SOA Service Oriented Architecture, SOA Web Services, SOA 2010. http://www.articlesbase.com/ - Software as a Service (saas) - Change is Imminent

Gain Deep Visibility, Minimize Disruptions and ensure Compliance with SOA Management

2010-01-05T15:15:00.000+07:00

* Extensive real-time metrics and alerts

* Snapshot problem transactions in real-time

* Detect and contain rogue service deployments

Coca-Cola is saving millions of dollars thanks to its implementation of SOA Management and Governance by using Software AG's solution called webMethods Insight. webMethods Insight extends operational visibility beyond the edge of your Integration Server into all systems in your heterogeneous infrastructure and helps minimize outages/failures, and ensures quick resolution when outages/failures do occur.

Service-Oriented Architecture is fast-growing in popularity, however it does present changes to typical application accountability structures. No longer can IT simply point to one application as the root cause of a disruption. A critical challenge confronting any SOA implementation is the need to manage services within a distributed environment for optimal performance and reliability. Lacking real-time visibility and control over the run-time environment, enterprises often struggle to anticipate operational changes, minimize subsequent disruptions, and ensure full compliance with SOA processes, policies and contracts. The first step in SOA Governance is to create a repository that catalogs your organization's web services and policies. The next step is SOA Management: the active monitoring of those processes and policies including alerts when failures occur to ensure a quick resolution. Establishing SOA Governance processes that your developers, project managers and architects are asked to follow might not be enough to control your distributed and heterogeneous architecture. By implementing SOA Management, you gain infrastructure-wide visibility that discovers services and their dependencies automatically. This requires monitoring your SOA infrastructure, giving you the ability to quickly troubleshoot the root cause of any disruption. A successful SOA Management solution will identify and send you a snapshot of individual transactions that violate policies to easily isolate the root cause of problems with no added overhead. The ability to know who is using services and how much service capacity is consumed by specific clients and users is critical to your overall success. The SOA Management capabilities are:

About the Author

Software AG's customers provide testimony to its ability to deliver software for improving business processes and its software portfolio helps foster new levels of IT agility through SOA and allows the rapid creation of new business processes with BPM.

Topoics : SOA Management, Service Oriented Architecture. Source: goarticles.com

Green Computing: What lies beneath?

2010-01-03T15:14:00.000+07:00

Consumption of energy sources has a negative reaction on the environment. Datacenters, PCs, printers and other IT gadgets use a large amount of power and consequently cooling energy is needed to counteract the power usage, which will be an endless circle of energy waste and also increased expenses.

Green IT via Green computing

Green computing is the technology where organizations adopt environmentally responsible use of computers and other related resources like central processing units (CPUs), servers and peripherals. Further, to maximize energy efficiency and sustainable development, the firms implement use of non-toxic materials, or making investments in future green concepts such as alternative materials. Green practices include the implementation of energy-efficient consumption of resources and proper disposal of e-waste.

In 1992, the green-computing movement was started with the Energy Star program so that the IT industry can pick up various environmentally sustainable practices. With the reduction of IT costs in mind, various companies wants to change their older machines especially datacenters because they consume more energy. Hence, various companies can minimize energy waste and carbon footprinting, various Green Computing Solutions can be incorporated like:

Server Consolidation: Companies can consolidate their server usage, which reduces the amount of servers needed by optimizing the available capacity, thus saving energy resources.

Virtualization: Virtualization is the technology, which allows companies' business application to be managed by independent host's hardware. It allows companies of all sizes to cut costs, improve IT services and manage risk.

On-Demand Computing: By adopting this solution, companies can demand computing resources like CPU, applications bandwidth and storage on-demand basis that decrease the amount of wasted energy.

Utility computing: It is a type of service that works on pay-as-per-usage basis. It provides flexible plans for computing usage and improves productivity. Through these services, firms can check their energy expenditures and bring their costs down.

Grid computing: It is a cost effective way to acquire computer resources. The apps can combine geographically dispersed resources to process a large amount of data, without consuming large amounts of energy.

Service Oriented Architecture (SAO): It consolidates business processes, combining business management services. Various firms adopt SOA to lower their costs and increase efficiency via speed and security for web applications.

Bad Eco-Design

Recently, an effort to save energy bills with controlling carbon dioxide emissions to save the entire planet was introduced, called USB Eco Button, but fails on both accounts.

The device is a USB-powered plastic button that can be used on any Windows based machine, except those running Windows 7. It puts the machine into a low-power energy saving mode. The USB Eco Button has software that monitors users' PC power usage and also records how much CO2 the Eco Button has saved.

However, various analysts said that the Eco Button is largely unnecessary, since such low-power modes can be applied through software-only fixes. Therefore, the material and energy used to manufacture it, the Eco Button could be doing more harm than good. Further, the price tag of $14 for such device could be more painful for the buyer.

Recent Trends

Various companies like HP, Wipro, IBM, HCL etc are pioneer in using and adopting green initiatives. Recently, Microsoft and Samsung Electronics had joined hands to promote the green IT benefits by combining Samsung's memory chips with Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 7. Samsung said that with 4GB RAM and Windows 7, user

Topics : Geeen IT, Green Computing, SOA, Service Oriented Architecture. Source: goarticles.com

SOA Adoption for Dummies

2010-01-02T15:12:00.000+07:00

Learn the project-oriented way to achieve your SOA vision. SOA Adoption for Dummies provides concrete and practical methods you can use to turn your SOA plans into SOA reality. The book covers how to:

Use SOA to solve business problems
Go from an SOA blueprint to SOA adoption
Learn how to use SOA Governance to set up policies to guide the growth and usage of your service portfolio
Deal with IT "tribal warfare" that impedes SOA
Connect your SOA plans with your integration platform

Using SOA, enterprise architects create plans called SOA blueprints that guide the redesign of IT systems and organizations. Realizing these plans involves a process called SOA adoption. This book describes our approach to SOA adoption, which we call SOA rocket science. SOA adoption, like a real-world rocket, experiences a danger zone between blast-off and the weightlessness of orbit. When fully realized, SOA can transform your business. But until firmly established, your SOA dreams can plummet back to earth.

This book is focused on SOA adoption: concrete and practical methods SOA builders use to make SOA plans into SOA reality. SOA Adoption for Dummies shows you specifically what's important in SOA adoption and how to stay focused on it.

No time to read? Listen to our SOA Made Simple podcast series. Based on the book, the series features short podcasts on each chapter.

Discover the best way for your organization to adopt a Service Oriented Architecture! SOA Adoption for Dummies makes your journey to SOA as easy as possible. Written for people both new and familiar with SOA, the book tells in 'plain English' what's important in an SOA adoption and how to stay focused on it!

About the Author

Software AG's 4,000 global customers provide testimony to its ability to deliver software for improving business processes and drive an agile IT infrastructure. Software AG's leading software portfolio helps foster new levels of IT agility through SOA and allows the rapid creation of new business processes with BPM.

Topics : SOA Adoption, Service Oriented Architecture. Source: goarticles.com

What About The Web Services?

2009-12-31T15:11:00.000+07:00

RPC is basically a method call interface that many developers understand. The basic unit of these types of services is the WSDL operation. It is not loosely coupled, though, it is used by mapping services directly to specific method calls. THis is not the easiest one to understand, though, and not very reliable.

SOA, or service oriented architecture is where the message is the basic unit of communication, not the operation. It is also called "message oriented" services. Most big software companies and industry analysts use SOA. It uses loose coupling because it focuses on the contract that the WSDL provides and not the implementation details that are underlying.

REST, or representational state transfer is using HTTP by stopping the interface to a set of well known, normal operations. It focuses on interaction with stateful resources instead of messages and operations. It uses WSDL. You can use SOAP with REST or not, it is really up to you.

Most web services that are not REST are often complicated and hard to use. Most SOAP toolkits have made it very easy to define new interface for interaction remotely and also use introspection to get WSDL. It can often be brittle because of this. There are also concerns with the performance because web service uses XML as a message format and HTTP and SOAP are used with sending but XML technologies are becoming better every day.

Any company that wants to succeed uses business and technology to satisfy their customers. It will help the business operate better when they want to use the latest technology, like the internet and mobile. It has really helped new business models become designed. The main business is the e commerce or e business. These businesses do their business solely on the internet.

Because most businesses do their selling on the internet primarily, web services are now very important. Basically, it sets up how the transaction is handled when a customer wants to buy your product. It tells the website how to process the payment and transaction. It is actually hugely important to most businesses because it sets up how easy it will be for the customer to buy your products.

If you have your own company on the internet then you may want to think about getting some advice before you decide which web service to use. You will really want to pick one that is easy for you and the customer but is also very reliable and fast.

Web services are tools that you can use several different ways. The most popular styles are SOA, REST and RPC. They are architectural elements. The type of web service that you choose will make or break your internet company. It will make it easier or harder for your clients to purchase items from you over the internet. It is a good idea for you to understand and know what each type of web service can do before you can really make up your mind.

About the Author

Tampa SEO provides search engine optimization services for small and large businesses. For a free Tampa Search Engine Optimization Audit contact Big U Media today at 813-984-2800.

Topics : Web Services, SOA, Service Oriented Architecture. Source: goarticles.com

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