It’s always great when a company is willing to talk publicly about your products and services, even when the public statement incorporates a bad pun. In this case, Alphameric Solutions Ltd., the leading technology provider to the bookmaking marketplace in the UK and Ireland, wasn’t holding their cards close to their chest when they decided to collaborate with us on a press release. Alphameric selected the Progress® Sonic® ESB to revolutionize the way they handle content and messages across their network because they couldn’t roll the dice with unreliable infrastructure. Sonic’s continuous availability architecture made this a sure bet.

With new virtual games such as poker and fantasy football being released every day, Alphameric was struggling to manually keep all the feeds and databases up to date. The new SOA-based approach makes accomplishing those tasks a lead pipe lock. Alphameric can now change data more quickly, easily bring new feeds online, without gambling with the accuracy through automation.

Using Progress, Alphameric is achieving operational responsiveness, increasing revenue and improving customer service to finish in the money. You can’t beat that. I’d add that this decision puts them clearly ahead of the game, but Matt Smith, our Senior Enterprise Architect quoted in the press release, beat me to the finish on that one.

OK, I think I got that out of my system now. Sorry about that...

This is really cool, and I can finally speak about it. Wow, gag orders just don't work very well for me. I mean, I can keep a secret, it's just that the really juicy ones are harder to keep than the others! And, this one's juicy. Ready...

Today we will release Orbix 6.3.4 with support for Actional.

Whoa! I bet at this point a lot of you are like SOA What? (yeah, remember that blog-ism we did here back when SOA was cool?)

Well, let me give you end-to-end visibility into the import of that sentence above.

As with all the other technologies we cover, including the recently announced SAP ABAP integration, Actional integration with Orbix gives customers:

1. End-to-end message flow visibility across an entire CORBA environment, in run-time, without any impact on performance or scalability. That same visibility extends beyond CORBA, and does so consistently to provide a unified view of message flows and business transactions in their environment.
2. The ability to centralize run-time policy creation, allow for distributed enforcement across multiple environments, and to ensure compliance with corporate and regulatory policies across the entire messaging infrastructure.
3. The same tools our current customers have that help them achieve an 80% reduction in time to resolving critical production incidents and a 20% reduction in major production incidents per year by simplifying root-cause analysis and problem resolution.

Now, you might think with all these great benefits, there would be a high cost. Nuh uh!!!

• No additional coding changes to get this up and running. Instrumentation of all CORBA services is automatic.
• No architecture changes, Actional won't impact scalability.
• No extra capacity required, Actional won't impact performance.
• No additional staff are required, dependencies are dynamically discovered and maintained to help keep the cost of ownership low. In fact, case studies independently verified by Forrester Research of our customers who are in production showed a rather quick payback of the investment due, in part, to the low cost of ownership.

Of course, if you follow Actional and Progress at all, awesome technology is old news. Actional has been working on non-SOA distributed applications since early in the development of our product and anytime we add a new technology, protocol, or platform, we've always added the same rich features, while maintaining the enterprise-class performance. Let me say that again, because I've accidentally brought up a very important point.

The single Actional Agent adds all of the functionality, across all of the protocols and platforms, and provides the same outstanding performance you've come to expect from us. In contrast, many other vendors can support all the platforms/protocols, and all the business-transaction-management features, and do so non-intrusively... but THEY CAN'T DO IT ALL AT THE SAME TIME!

Back on track, sorry for the diversion. I'm almost done here, I promise.

There are other equally interesting implications from this release that I'd like to share (in no particular order).

1. This helps to, in part, validate the strategy that lead us to acquire IONA in the first place. There are a lot of cross-product synergies.
2. This continues to prove the applicability of our technology far beyond the common understanding of SOA infrastructure (SOA and HTTP/JMS). We have successfully broken out of the "SOA management" niche, and are providing real value to customers across the entire breadth of business transaction management needs.
3. In this "recovering" economy, Progress can help customers gain more value from their legacy technology investments by upgrading the capabilities in mission critical platforms like Orbix/CORBA. Whether it's from the operational perspective of lowering their operating costs while providing higher-levels of service, or from the business perspective of preventing "revenue leakage", Actional solves real-world problems without impacting the architecture or requiring coding changes to existing applications.

In closing, I wish I could share some of the early adopter customer quotes here. I can't, but the feedback from the (former) IONA field was equally funny. The IONA field is (relatively) new to Progress and hasn't necessarily developed the instant-automatic love for each-and-every Progress product because we all share a logo color scheme. We actually had to prove ourselves to these guys and gals (a very capable team I might add). Once the engineering team was finished, they took the early software and implemented it at some rather large (and equally skeptical) customers. After running it through it's paces, people were actually smiling. When was the last time you saw beta users smiling at performance results? To quote one guy working at a large airline... "it simply worked the way it should."

Beat that!

Progress Software is pleased to report two of our customers were named to Insurance and Technology’s Elite 8 for 2009. To paraphrase the editor-in-chief of Insurance and Technology, this annual award identifies outstanding insurance technology leaders, who are managing IT in the new highly scrutinized world of financial services, with enthusiasm and determination.

In this article and video Keith Sievers from Unitrin describes how they improved their operational responsiveness by implementing an ACORD-Standards based architecture “for reduced costs, better quality, faster time to market and greater reliability and performance." Unitrin is using Progress Sonic ESB with Progress DataXtend SI to “federate and share technology across the three Unitrin companies through shared services.”  One interesting fact is that Keith Sievers and his team recognized early on that including ACORD standards in their “enterprise philosophy” would contribute to their success by reducing risk in their implementation.

Unitrin’s successful application of ACORD standards is interesting in light of fellow honoree John Kellington from ACORD. John is another Progress customer, and another of Insurance and Technology’s Elite 8 (article). John was honored for his leadership in advancing the ACORD Framework and Enterprise Architecture. It’s ACORD’s belief (and ours too) that an enterprise architecture which will enable insurance IT organizations to simplify their system portfolios, reducing maintenance burdens and improving development capabilities. John points out that reducing IT ecosystem complexity (often represented by those infamous “Spaghetti charts” or “New York City sewer maps”) eases that “resource strain that seems never-ending.”

Progress is proud to be playing a role in ACORD’s efforts to develop these critical assets for every insurance IT organization. Progress was selected to support the ACORD Standards Framework with unambiguous maps between the new ACORD Information Model and its existing Property/Casualty/Surety, Life/Health/Annuities, and Reinsurance/Large Commercial XML standards. And we have worked closely with ACORD to release the DataXtend Browsers for ACORD with the aim of enabling the ACORD-membership to become even more familiar the XML standards.

You can always learn more by emailing us at sales@progress.com. But, if you have the time, you should also consider attending the ACORD Implementation Forum in Fort Lauderdale, FL Nov 3-6, 2009. it’s a great opportunity to learn and network. This year AIF promises to be an exciting event this year with many interesting programs including:

• Frank Neugabauer (ACORD) and Boris Bulanov (Progress) introducing the ACORD Framework and semantic mapping from 4:00pm-5:00pm on 3 Nov
  
  
• Demonstrations of the DataXtend Browser for ACORD at the “You Drive” Sessions from 12:30-2:30pm on 5 Nov
  
  
• Conversations and networking with experts, like Boris Bulanov, at the Expert Café and Lunch from 12:30 – 1:30pm on 4 Nov
  
  
• And finally, the opportunity to receive your own copy of the ACORD Information Model: A Primer just by visiting Booth #3 at AIF.

One of the articles I read on this was titled Don't Blame Cloud Computing for the T-Mobile Mess.  While the author's heart is in the right place (he really likes cloud computing), I can't agree: Cloud computing is absolutely to blame for this fiasco.

Let me explain by starting with an analogy.  Recently we had a little event that some people call the "great market crash of 2008".  The root cause of this is pretty well known now:  A lack of transparency into different financial instruments (e.g. CDOs) made it impossible to accurately assess risk.  And, in the absence of an accurate risk assessment, people assume things will be ok and focus on their short term gain.

It seems to me that we have the exact same situation with cloud computing.  There's essentially no transparency into any cloud provider's integration infrastructure, processes, or planning.   As a result no user can accurately assess the risk of using one cloud provider over another.  Do you think that if sidekick users had know "Danger doesn't do backups" they would have trusted the service with their data?  Of course not, most users assumed everything was OK.  They assume their cloud provider is doing the right thing.  It was only a matter of time before a crash would happen (and this won't be the last one).  In the immortal words of Otter from Animal House, "You f*cked up - you trusted us".

Cloud providers, unfortunately, think that it's not in their best interest to be transparent because, frankly, customers are conditioned to just assume everything is OK so why rock the boat.  When was the last time you walked into a grocery store to buy apples and said, "Can you cut this one open so I can see whether it's OK on the inside?"  No, you probably look at the shiny skin of the apple and assume everything is OK with the inside.

Before cloud computing can become mainstream, users of cloud services must have the ability to accurately assess risk for themselves.  In order to do this, cloud providers must provide transparency. if not users must demand it by speaking with their wallets.  Don't let the cool, shiny UI fool you into assuming everything is OK under the skin.

Those of us who have been entrenched in middleware and SOA infrastructure technologies over the years know the importance of having a smart integration infrastructure. Well, today we released a press release announcing that West Bend Mutual Insurance, a property and casualty insurance carrier, chose Progress Sonic ESB and Progress Actional as core applications for their service-oriented architecture. West Bend Mutual Insurance will use Sonic ESB and Actional to supplement its existing policy administration system, so its insurance agents can conduct business more easily and effectively via a single integrated portal. The insurance portal will also be a critical tool to help them improve their customer retention and acquisition. The best part is that West Bend Mutual will finally be able to enjoy operational responsiveness by being able to respond to changing conditions and react more quickly to business opportunities.

For industries like insurance that need to constantly offer new products and services to remain competitive, creating an infrastructure that is agile and scalable, and one that delivers end-to-end visibility of back-end systems, is essential. SOA is a great fit. Read the complete release.

This guest post comes courtesy of Larry Fulton. Larry is an independent consultant who spent 14 years as a solutions and enterprise architect at UPS and 3 years consulting on, among other things, strategic integration infrastructure issues and enterprise service bus (ESB) technology as a senior analyst at Forrester  research.

The enterprise architecture community is always surprising to me for its enthusiastic optimism - remember that this is a field where the majority of us spend a lot of our time explaining what we do and why it is valuable, often to our own management. Attendees were very clearly engaged in the session topics, there were plenty of insightful questions, and the attendees I spoke with personally saw a lot of value in the material presented. The focus was on the practice of EA rather than specific technical aspects of modern enterprise architecture, which of course begs the question what EAs are doing to stay on top of the technology landscape.

Gartner sees the influence of EA growing over time, especially in those organizations where EA is successfully involving itself in the business and its processes. Aside from the expected pro-EA and how-to-improve-credibility messages, I heard a number of new and refreshing perspectives on EA and its future:

Gartner's Anne Lapkin confronted the "Is EA an art or a science?" dilemma head-on, and clearly stated that many aspects of EA are in fact an art. She was referring specifically to the real work of fitting and re-fitting EA's mission to the current and evolving needs of real businesses. There may be a lot of well-defined process around the tools of the trade - modeling various aspects of current and future architecture, establishing effective governance processes, and so forth - but it takes real insight based on experience to assess what EA can and should be doing to help the business succeed, and to know when that needs to change as the business itself evolves. This is an area where many experts, have been reluctant to come right out and say, "Look, you need to have the right leaders, and you can't necessarily just pick someone who is skilled in another area and expect to train them to this level of EA perspective". Another way to say this is that skilled solutions architects need to be part of EA's activities, but solutions architects don't necessarily have the perspective to define the EA agenda.

Betsy Burton's sessions illuminated the reality that enterprise architects often must fill the role of counselors - working with disparate teams with different perspectives to find common ground and move forward. On the broader business front, this same theme emerged in her recommendation that enterprise business architectures need to include a model of how people actually work together in an organization.

She also mentioned that EAs need to spend at least five per cent of their time playing so they can remain aware of current technologies. My own opinion is that this is not enough - unless you can commit at least half a day each week to some kind of research, which is to say at least ten per cent of your time, it is very difficult to stay on top of important developments.

I particularly enjoyed Bruce Robertson's session on "architecting for emergence". He talked about "EA light", or ways that EA groups should focus on what matters the most and promote application team innovation elsewhere. The idea of establishing policy and technology "guard rails" that essentially say you can do what you like as long as you conform to these particular things and as long as you don't do these other things is not new. But, looking at an organization in a methodical way to identify exactly those rules that really matter and promoting choice elsewhere is where many EA groups need to be headed. Certainly his advice to EA groups to understand local influences and priorities and their relationship to enterprise influences and priorities is a good idea for any EA group, and especially those operating in large organizations.

One of the keynote speakers, Mark Rashino, represented in my opinion the central message to EAs - IT needs to ask itself, "What new strategic capabilities can I offer?" When CIO's are asking themselves that question but don't have an answer, where will they turn? EA needs to be ready to answer that question, whenever it is asked.

If you follow Actional, you may have seen that we announced Actional 8.1 today.  The most interesting part of the release is our new support for SAP.  Yes, we already supported SAP NetWeaver (like most of the other people in our space) so unless you're an SAP aficionado, you probably won't recognize the importance of natively supporting SAP ABAP - which is what we've announced.

SAP supports two main application server environments: one based on Java and one based on ABAP, SAP's own programming language (you might also hear the term "basis" which is another name for the ABAP application server stack).  OK, with me so far?  While SAP support both, almost all of the SAP packaged applications are written using the ABAP stack - Java is primarily used for infrastructure services (things like their portal).

With this new version, we've added the ability to trace business transactions into and through ABAP - so we can detect problems even within the ABAP portion of a business transaction.  This is critical for many SAP customers because - without the ability to do this - SAP packaged application logic is seen as a black box silo.  And, with 100's of millions of lines of code in the SAP packaged applications, that a pretty big area to have a blind spot.

While there are a lot of business transaction management vendors out there that support SAP, they are usually referring to the Java side of SAP. As a result, once a transaction hits ABAP (and almost all of them do) it enters the black box and can't be seen again until it leaves ABAP.

As you might have guessed, we're really excited to extend Actional's patented transaction tracing to SAP's core platform.  If you're an SAP user, and need to ensure the success of business transactions that span SAP and other applications, platforms, and middleware then hopefully you'll get a chance to see whether this unique Actional capability can help you.