IT|Redux Feed Digest

When Technology Works

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:33 GMT

The problem with being an early adopter of new technologies is that leading edge can quickly turn into bleeding edge. In other words, brand new products are often buggy, and early adopters aren't much different form guinea pigs. Technology enthusiasts like to fancy themselves as explorers of new frontiers, not disposable lab animals. So when new technologies actually work, it's hard not to be excited about them.

Tonight, I'd like to share some of this excitement. Since I got my first iPhone on the first day of its release two years ago, I have been trying to use it as a universal remote control, either for my home theater (just because I could), or for my corporate presentations (I give a lot of those these days). I tried various applications, but none of them really worked, until now… Yesterday, I managed to make Keynote Remote work between my new MacBook Pro 13” (the best laptop ever for frequent travelers) and my iPhone 3GS. Here is how it works: you get both your MacBook and your iPhone on the same Wi-Fi network, you launch Keynote on your MacBook and Keynote Remote on your iPhone (after having paired them by following these instructions), and you're ready to go. You can start and stop the presentation from your iPhone, and go from slide to slide by sinply sliding a finger on your iPhone's touchscreen. Awesome!

Problem is, Keynote Remote requires that both devices are connected to the same Wi-Fi network, which can be a challenge when visiting customers or investors, either because no Wi-Fi network is available, or because you do not want to waste time trying to get two devices connected to it while your hosts are eagerly waiting for your presentation.

One solution to this problem is to carry your own Wi-Fi network, and the easiest way to do that so far was to get an Apple AirPort Express. While it's certainly one of the best portable Wi-Fi routers (no cables, easy to setup), it's still a bit bulky, and it requires an external power source. Also, plugging such a device into someone else's power outlet feels a bit awkward at times, as if you were about to mess with their network, or implant some spying aparatus that would be left on site after you'd leave. Definitely not the kind of feeling you want customers or partners to have about you during a meeting.

Recently, a better alternative became available, in the form of Novatel's amazingly small MiFi 2200 Mobile Hotspot. This device is essentially a 3G wireless modem paired to a Wi-Fi router, powered by a small cellphone battery, charged with a standard Micro USB cable, and packaged into a sleek brushed aluminum enclosure. I bought one from Sprint today, got it running in about 2 minutes (after charging the battery for a couple hours), and tested it with Keynote and Keynote Remote. Verdict? It works, and it's a thing of beauty.

What's the big deal about all this? Well, quite simply, mobile technology is really starting to work. With such a setup that fits into a tiny Incase 13” Nylon Sleeve Plus, I have a laptop with 6 hours of real battery life, a 3G smartphone that has a real web browser and works in pretty much any country (including Japan), and a personal mobile hotspot that turns on in about 15 seconds by pressing a single button. Even better, all I need to carry is a single power supply and two small cables (both available with retractable wires). In fact, this setup is so small and so lightweight that I can even add a LaCie Little Disk 500GB onto which I uploaded 371 movies, in case the in-flight entertainment system has nothing decent to offer. The later even comes with a built-in USB cable…

What more could I ask for?

Mashups and Single Points of Failure

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:05 GMT

Mashups are great, but the more components are integrated into a single mashup, the more single points of failure are created along the way. I experienced this recently with the piping of my blog feeds to Twitter. Blogs were written using WordPress, syndicated through FeedBurner (now owned by Google), harvested by TwitterFeed, and re-syndicated to Twitter. Somewhere in the process, delays would be created, one day long for posts on IT|Redux, and over a week long for posts on ghalimi.name. Since I control both the source (my WordPress account) and the target (my Twitter account), there wasn't much need for FeedBurner in the middle, so I recently got rid of it. Let's see if this fixes the problem.

Adopting Twitter

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:45 GMT

Over the past couple of weeks, I have started to use Twitter to push some updates on Intalio, my traveling, and some elements of my personal life. My Twitter feed is available at @ghalimi, and syndicates feeds for both IT|Redux (professional blog) and ghalimi.name (personal blog). This feed is also displayed on IT|Redux's right column. Moving forward, I will use IT|Redux for longer articles, mainly focused on Cloud Computing.

Tips for the Modern Traveler in Japan

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:43 GMT

It's 8pm local time, I just came back from a delicious teppanyaki dinner in Ebisu, and I am sitting on my hotel room's balcony, on the 11th floor of the Sheraton Miyako Hotel Tokyo. From my MacBook Pro's speakers, Gábor Szabó is playing The Sorcerer, and I am enjoying the cool breeze of an early rainy season. It's my 16th trip to Japan, and over the years, I have learned a few things that might be useful to people traveling there for the first time, especially when traveling for business purposes.

Best affordable hotel in Tokyo
One of the best places to stay in Tokyo is the Sheraton Miyako Hotel Tokyo. At $150 a night, it offers amenities that places twice as expensive cannot match. The hotel greets visitors with a stunning view on an exquisite zen garden, and features one of the best Chinese restaurants in town. It's also very conveniently located for easy access to most of Tokyo's business distrists, and just ¥980 away from Shinagawa station, which is served by the Narita Express line.

Most convenient place to get cash
While Japan is a giant showroom for many modern technologies, from bullet trains to robotics, it remains an island, and its banking infrastructure is as modern as it is isolated. As a result, most ATM's won't dispense cash to foreign travelers, while many shops and restaurants won't take any plastic as a form of payment. As a result, finding old-fashioned cash can quickly become a challenge. But don't fret, for 7-Eleven's local incarnation recently rolled-out a nationwide network of gaijin-friendly cash dispensers. Good news: a 7-Eleven convenience store is located just a block away from the aforementioned Sheraton Miyako Hotel Tokyo.

Best alternative to cash
If you want to avoid cash altogether, you might want to try the ubiquitous Suica, which mascot Linux geeks will love at first sight. Suica is an RFID card that can be used in very many stores and cabs, especially in the Tokyo area. It can be purchased in many train stations (including the aforementioned Shinagawa station), and can be refilled using cash (drawn from a 7-Eleven ATM) or foreign credit cards (if you're lucky).

Best 3G mobile Internet connection
Now that most Japanese mobile operators support 3G technology, your cellphone and 3G Internet access card should work in Japan, but be careful: one week of careless surfing might cost you a couple thousand dollars in roaming fees. If you're planning to visit Japan on a regular basis, a local Internet access card is de rigueur. In the Tokyo area, the best mobile Internet operator is EMOBILE. To open an account, just bring a Japanese friend with you as a translator, and enjoy broadband connectivity in the underground and on the long ride back to Narita (one hour away from Tokyo).

Most relaxing activity
If time permits, join a tea ceremony, you won't regret it.

Sayonara.

Who Is This Cloud For?

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:10 GMT

Following Intalio's presentation in London yesterday, Aditya Tuli wrote a critical yet constructive post commenting on the announcements we made recently. I have to agree with most of Aditya's points, and would like to take advantage of this opportunity to clarify a couple of items. First, Intalio|Cloud is indeed targetted at larger organizations, especially the Managed On-Premises option, mainly because this product was designed in partnership with our larger customers. That being said, Intalio|Cloud is also available to much smaller teams, with the On Demand option. Second, we said very little about Intalio|BPM Community Edition indeed, and I will make sure to cover it in more details today in Helsinki, tomorrow in Brussels, and later this week in Paris and Frankfurt. Furthermore, we remain fully committed to our community, and have just put the final touches on Intalio|BPM Developer Edition, which will be formally released on June 16. Aditya, many thanks for your feedback and support! I very much look forward to your comments on Intalio|BPM and Intalio|CRM once you find some time to play with them.

First Cloud Customers

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:41 GMT

We just signed our first two Intalio|Cloud Managed On-Premises customers. More soon…

Process Table

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:30 GMT

We just released a screencast showing how to model and execute a process from a spreadsheet! This is what we call a Process Table, and it's part of the new release of Intalio|CRM to be available on June 2nd. Congratulations to Antoine and his team for this amazing piece of work, direct result of our Dogfood Project, and first creation of what will soon be called Intalio Labs.

JavaOne

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:29 GMT

Keep an eye on JavaOne, for we might announce something cool then…

Intalio|Cloud Appliance Model C1 Mark I

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Thu, 28 May 2009 08:07 GMT

As many of my readers know, I love computers. At any given point in time I use a couple of desktops and three or four laptops. But I have a real fascination for larger systems, which is why I studied parallel computing in graduate school. Today, I fulfilled one my dreams: building a really large machine. We just published some more details about the Intalio|Cloud Appliance Model C1 Mark I, including a full list of components, and detailed specifications. This is a superlative computer in every possible way, with the most cutting edge hardware and software money can buy. Serial Number 00000001 is standing proud in our new data-center (the same as Facebook's), waiting for us to put some serious load onto it (our on-demand offering is currently hosted on Amazon EC2).

Here is what the Mark I gives you:

Standard 19″ Rack
16 Compute Blades
16 Storage Blades
32 Quad Core Intel Xeon X5570 2.93GHz CPUs
128 CPU Cores
2.3TB 1333MHz PC3-10600 DDR3 Memory
24.5TB Solid Stage Drive Database Storage
560TB Hard Disk Drive File Storage
InfiniBand QDR Networking Fabric
Gigabit Ethernet Networking Connectivity
Directly Attached SAS Storage Connectivity
1 Management Server
1 Screen, Keyboard, and Touchpad

We're now working on the Mark II model, which will break the Petabyte barrier.

You Got It!

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:53 GMT

When announcing a new product or a new strategy, some things usually get lost in translation, either because you did not get a chance to personally brief the journalist or analyst who wrote a piece on your announcement, or because the story just wasn't solid enough. To my surprise, none of that happened with the launch of Intalio|BPM, Intalio|CRM, and Intalio|Cloud last week. While we released four new products (including a hardware appliance) and laid out a fairly complex story, everybody got it, down to the most subtle details of our business model (managed on-premises). Some of the best articles came from Brenon Daly, James Taylor, and Phil Wainewright. It looks like we hit a chord…

Frequently Asked Questions

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:17 GMT

Everything you've ever wanted to know about Intalio and never dared to ask.

Intalio|Cloud Press Conference Webcast

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Sat, 23 May 2009 08:44 GMT

The webcast of last Tuesday's event is now online.

No Limits

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:34 GMT

Here comes Intalio's new tagline.

Intalio Foundation

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Thu, 21 May 2009 07:40 GMT

Over the years, Intalio has made numerous contributions to the developers community, through the creation of many Open Source projects, and the donation of code bases worth millions of dollars. After ten years, we feel that time has come for us to support other communities as well, and we are creating the Intalio Foundation to support this effort. As a first project, the Intalio Foundation will make our business applications available to communities of non-profit organizers, artists, and solo entrepreneurs. The Foundation's initial endowment will be one free user account for every ten accounts of Intalio|BPM and Intalio|CRM On-Demand sold between June 1st 2009 and May 30th 2010, with an initial grant of 100 seats worth over $100,000. If your organization qualifies for such a grant, or you know an organization that does, please send your application to foundation@intalio.com.

Utility Based Pricing for Private Cloud Computing

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:49 GMT

We just published our utility-based pricing for private cloud computing.

Rocking and Rolling

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:07 GMT

We did it! Today, Intalio successfully released Intalio|BPM Business Edition, Intalio|CRM, Intalio|Cloud, and the Intalio|Cloud Appliance, plus a working version of the ultra-cool Process Table built for the Dogfood Project, powered by a preview release of the brand-new Intalio|BPM Developer Edition and fully integrated with Intalio|CRM. Registrations for Intalio|BPM and Intalio|CRM On-Demand are now open, and everything seems to be working flawlessly. Of course, we're still in Beta for both products, so bugs are to be expected, but at least we're live. We also announced two acquisitions: ProcessSquare in Germany (we never formally announced it until now) and CodeGlide in Argentina. A short version of our big story is available on this press release, and the full story is on the updated Intalio website. Rock on!

Mad Rush

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:39 GMT

Tomorrow, Intalio will release four new products, two of which are available on-demand, and one is made of atoms rather than bits. We will also announce the closing of another acquisition that is taking the company to a whole new level. As a result, we had to make significant changes to our website, move to a much larger data-center, implement native multi-tenancy in many parts of our product stack, integrate our online applications with our marketing automation, salesforce automation, billing, and accounting systems, all while putting the final touch on Intalio|BPM 6.0. In other words, we've been pretty busy. If you want to know more about what's going on at Intalio, check our website tomorrow (Tuesday) at 10am PDT, or join us for the launch party.

Datacenter

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:31 GMT

While Facebook is moving out of Palo Alto downtown, Intalio|Cloud is moving into the same datacenter used by Facebook. We just received our first blade servers from HP this morning, and are working around the clock for the May 19 launch. If you want to know what this is all about, join us for the launch party.

MacBook Pro 17″

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 23:07 GMT

The new MacBook Pro 17″ is awesome!

Weather Forecast

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 23:04 GMT

On May 19, 2009, Intalio will change the forecast on cloud computing.

Meet us at the Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley at 10AM PST.

Please RSVP.

New Additions to the Families

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:30 GMT

Intalio is days away from closing an acquisition that will be quite a game changer. While we were working on this deal, the quarter shaped up pretty well from a bookings standpoint, and we decided to raise our target by 15% two months into it. Today, I am pleased to report that we not only made our original target, but we also exceeded our revised target by another 3%. Not bad in such challenging economic times… In the meantime, another family got a new addition yesterday: Tao Aidan Chang Ghalimi made his way out to the world, just in time to close this quarter in style. Exciting times…

March Haiku

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:44 GMT

Funds are being raised
Acquisitions are being closed
Bright, chilly morning

Stoicism Redux

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:24 GMT

Warning: what follows contains materials of philosophical nature that might offend religious readers. Such is not my intention, but reader care is advised. Also, the reason why such an article was published on a blog usually covering enterprise software and personal productivity is that it relates to a book that might be of interest to some readers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which itself was covered repeatedly on these pages. Subsequent writings on the subject will take place at ghalimi.name, which is a more appropriate venue for such topics.

Once in a while, one comes across an idea so profound that it has the power to change one’s life. So was the case for me yesterday on my way to Columbus, OH. Feeling like Christopher Columbus (re)discovering the Americas, I re-discovered the ancient Stoic philosophy through the reading of William B Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, thanks to a program I recently listened to on KPFA. I had never read the philosophy of Zeno of Citium, Epitectus, Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius, but I knew in my heart that such a liberating yet deceivingly simple way of living must have been devised before. I just did not know where to look for it. And much like the author, I had been recently intrigued by Zen Buddhism, but could not fully relate to its esoteric nature.

Classic Stoicism preaches a way of life that can bring tranquility and joy to anyone. Through simple psychological techniques such as negative visualization, dichotomy (/trichotomy) of control, or internalization of goals — all brilliantly described in Irivine’s book — one can suppress negative feelings such as anxiety, fear, or frustration, while learning how to better deal with insult or grief, and why fame and luxury should not be looked for (more on this later).

While reading through the 336 pages of Irivine’s book, I was amazed at how natural the overall philosophy felt to me. Its guiding principles were some of the very few absolute values that I could genuinely relate to, and many of its techniques I had discovered myself over time. In the author’s words, I must be a “congenital Stoic.” Nevertheless, I had never been able to spell out such a coherent system on my own, nor had I come across anyone who had until now.

Reading through the book’s last chapters, and especially Chapter Twenty-One — Stoicism Reconsidered — I experienced an exhilarating rush of wholesomeness, being confronted for the first time to a coherent philosophy of life. Religious minds would say I got a revelation. Being agnostic myself, I would call it an epiphany, and it came in the form of Irvine’s proof that Stoicism was a “correct philosophy of life,” not by referring to Zeus as the ancient Stoics did, but to evolutionary theory in general, and evolutionary psychology in particular. Not being a professional philosopher myself, I cannot adequately criticize Irvine’s argumentation, but it made sense to me. In fact, I would even go as far as challenging the author’s excessive modesty, and suggest that he actually delivered a modern proof for Stoicism’s overall correctness.

To say the book convinced me is an understatement. It converted me, not only to the doctrine, but to the scholastic approach of ancient philosophy. And as Seneca put it, “I do not bind myself to some particular one of the Stoic masters; I, too, have the right to form an opinion.” (Seneca, “On the Happy Life,” III.2). So let me offer some suggestions as to how Stoicism could be extended to benefit from more recent discoveries.

First, the notion of “duty,” which ancient Stoics justify by the mere fact that we are social creatures and that we all mutually benefit from virtuous social behavior, should be further developed. In order for it to become more acceptable, its justification should go beyond the benefits of harmonious inter-personal relationships, and include a notion best described as statistical Karma: if more people act benevolently with others in a pass-it-forward kind of way, the world at large will become a better place, and we will all benefit from it indirectly.

Second, the notion that fame after death should not be set as a goal, while advisable at first, is unnecessarily challenging for those who do not believe in life after death. Instead, I believe that one’s goal could (should) be to create a lasting legacy, either by passing the virtuous of a Stoic life to one’s descendants, or by making positive contributions to mankind, small or large. Such a legacy can reasonably be considered as some form of life after death by agnostic philosophers, or a component of life after death by their religious counterparts. Furthermore, because such a legacy will be judged by those who survive us after our passing, setting its creation as a primary life goal should not expose us to the usual traps of fame seeking. Last but not least, it should be obvious to anyone that such a legacy should be a positive one, as in one that will benefit those who survive us and for generations to come, as opposed to a free entry into history books for reason of crime against humanity.

Third, I believe that the Stoic reaction to insult (offense might even be a more appropriate term) should be extended in order to include what is possibly the most powerful discoveries of the past two millennia: Christian forgiveness. Before explaining what I mean by that, let me give some personal background: my mother was born in France and received a Catholic education. My father was born in Algeria and was raised as a Muslim. I was born in France thirty-five years ago and grew up in a perfectly agnostic environment, like many kids of this time in post-68, pre-socialist France. Nevertheless, I later developed a keen interest for Christianity and its principles, originally through the watching of movies from David Lynch. Fire Walk with Me gave me an intuitive understanding of the notion of the original sin and its repercussions on our collective psyche as members of a Judeo-Christian community, while The Straight Story offered a moving demonstration of the power of forgiveness. While I view the concept of original sin as fundamentally anti-Stoic, I consider the notion of forgiveness as the ultimate exercise of Stoic mastery. The reason for this is simple: on one hand, ignoring an insult or offense is neutral at best, even slightly negative as the author would admit, for it creates frustration on the side of the offender. On the other hand, genuine forgiveness, although tremendously challenging for the one who received the offense and arguably rare, has the power to deliver a transforming epiphany to the offender. In other words, forgiveness could be the ultimate act of Neostoicism, and is positively viral by nature, therefore should be practiced whenever possible.

I am now sitting on a plane on my way back home. Practicing negative visualization, I realize how fortunate I am that the previous three legs of my trip were completed without any incidents. And while I contemplate the prospect of the plane crashing before we make it back to SFO, I know in my heart that I am living a good life now, at this very moment (carpe diem). I realize that I shared through these lines more than I expected to, and that it does not make me a proper stealth Stoic as advocated in Irvine’s book, but I also know that many of the ideas he brought back to life were born through Socratic debate. I simply wish to contribute to the discussion, with as much innocence that my ignorance will afford me.

Tonight, I found my way (in a Taoist sense), and this brings me joy.

Introducing the Business Operating Platform

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:09 GMT

When I started Intalio ten years ago, I wanted to build a Transactional Workflow System. Intalio's CTO Assaf Arkin did not like the term “workflow,” which he felt carried too much legacy, hence we re-branded our product a Business Process Management System (BPMS). That was back in June 2000. Since then, the term BPM has been largely over-exposed, and failed to describe the completeness of our vision. Later on, Gartner came up with the concept of a Business Process Platform, and we adopted it, although quite reluctantly. More recently, Cordys started talking about a Business Operations Platform, and this terminology really resonated with me. To a large extent, what we're building is akin to a Business Operating System, but this term has been used to describe many different things (Cf. Wikipedia), and the word “System” fails to describe a platform that could be used across organizations' boundaries (for what used to be called B2B). Therefore, we shall call our product a Business Operating Platform.

The concept for a Business Operating Platform is close not only to the product developed by Cordys, but also Oracle's Fusion Middleware and SAP's NetWeaver. This should not come as a surprise: after all, Cordys was started by Jan Baan, founder of the company that developed the Baan ERP. Baan, Oracle, and SAP have developed the three most successful ERP systems in the world, and as such know a thing or two about enterprise architecture. Originally, all three ERP systems were built on top of an Operating System, a standards-based Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), and a proprietary Application Server. Today, next-generation enterprise applications should be built on top of a Business Operating Platform, which components will be discussed in this article.

In order to better understand what makes a Business Operating Platform, let's take a look at what makes a modern Operating System such as GNU/Linux. Such an Operating System is made of a Kernel Space and a User Space (libraries and applications). An excellent introduction to the Anatomy of the Linux Kernel was recently given by M. Tim Jones and published on IBM developerWorks. Here are the components of the Linux Kernel, and how they match the components of the Intalio Business Operating Platform (Intalio|BOP):

Process Management
A multi-threaded kernel like the Linux kernel is architected around a pretty advanced Process Management infrastructure. By “process” we do not mean the processes used by businesses to run their operations, but the “threads” of computing that keep a CPU busy most of the time. In a similar fashion, Intalio|BOP is architected around a process engine (Intalio|Server, itself based on Apache ODE), which is an implementation of the BPEL industry standard for process execution.

Memory Management
Next to the Process Management unit is a Memory Management unit responsible for managing the transient data used by execution threads. By transient, we mean data which life-cycle is bound to the life-cycle of processes they relate to, as opposed to persistent data, which is usually stored in files onto the File System (Cf. next component). Similarly, the Business Process Management component of a Business Operating Platform is responsible for storing the transient data used by business processes. But unlike an operating system, a BPM system usually stores transient process data in a persistent manner onto a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), for two main reasons: One, it allows the system to scale better by “passivating” idle process instances into the database. Two, it brings reliability to the system, by ensuring that no process instances are lost should the process engine go down or be turned off. Nevertheless, both concepts of transient data management are essentially the same. Intalio|Server can be deployed against virtually any relational database, using OpenJPA as persistence layer.

Virtual File System
The Virtual File System is responsible for managing the persistent data used by the operating system and the applications it runs. Similarly, a Business Operating Platform includes a Document Management System (DMS) responsible for managing the documents used by business processes. Documents can be either structured (using XML Schema) or unstructured (stored as plain files). Combined with a Content Management System (CMS), the DMS becomes a full-blown Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, which is a first-class component of the Business Operating Platform. In the case of Intalio|BOP, we are using Apache Sling as content repository and the JSR-170 as standard interface.

System Call Interface
An operating system's kernel provides a System Call Interface that allows processes running in the User Space to make calls to system services for starting a new process instance or reading a file for example. Similarly, a Business Operating Platform provides a set of interfaces for deploying new processes, accessing documents (JSR-170), or monitoring the overall platform (SNMP, JMX). While no standard API has been defined for process engines yet (one ought to develop one at some point…), Intalio|BOP provides platform interfaces using Java API's as well as REST and WSDL services.

Device Drivers
Device Drivers allow an operating system to make use of peripherals such as disk drives, a keyboard, or a mouse. Similarly, a Business Operating Platform provides a set of protocol adapters and application connectors allowing processes to be integrated with third-party systems and applications. While many attempts have been made at developing standards for application connectors (JCA, JBI), none ever really succeeded on the marketplace (even though SCA looks promising). Intalio|BPO provides a set of connectors based on the JBI and WSDL technologies, and is planned to support SCA by using Apache Tuscany.

Network Stack
While some resources (peripherals) are directly attached to the computer and can be accessed through a Device Driver, many (including other computers) are remote and can only be used through a Network Stack. Similarly, most third-party systems and applications used for the execution of business processes can only be accessed while crossing firewall boundaries. In such cases, integration happens through Web Service interfaces, using the WSDL industry standard. Intalio|Server is based on the BPEL process execution language, which itself relies on WSDL for Web Service invocation. Nevertheless, a RESTful version of BPEL is currently being developed by Intalio, and will be supported by Intalio|Server in some future release. In either case, Web Service interfaces are provided by an underlying Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). For this purpose, Intalio|BOP includes a component called Intalio|ESB, which itself is a combination of multiple open source projects, including Apache Axis2, Apache ServiceMix, and Apache Synapse. Intalio|ESB itself can be deployed on top of a Message Bus in order to support multi-site deployments.

These six primary components make the Linux Kernel. Interestingly, the Linux Kernel does not have any notion of registry, at least one similar to the Windows Registry. Instead, configuration files are stored in specific directories (/etc or /usr/local/etc), in a much more losely coupled manner. While many will argue that the absence of a registry is one of the design elements that make the GNU/Linux operating system more robust than many alternatives, businesses need some kind of registry where all processes and related artifacts can be stored and looked up. Such a registry is one of the services to be offered by Intalio|BOP alongside several others that are analogous to the services offered by the GNU/Linux operating system at the User Space level.

Registry
While many operating systems offer some kind of Registry, a Business Operating Platform should offer a Master Object Registry (MOR) that would record all artifacts, including data objects, processes, rules, services, user interfaces, etc. In order for it to scale and support the kind of queries that developers and users might need to perform, the registry should be based on strong Semantic Web technologies, namely RDF, RDFS, and SPARQL. For this purpose, Intalio|BOP will use the Jena Semantic Web Framework as underlying infrastructure for Intalio|MOR (to be made available in a future product release).

User and Security Management
Most operating systems provide a way to manage users and their entitlements. Nevertheless, such security services are usually fairly limited to coarse-grain resources (files and applications), and cannot scale to very large numbers of users and entitlements. A Business Operating Platform must overcome such limitations, and provide a way to define complex entitlements related to any resources or artifacts, for an unlimited number of users and groups. Furthermore, since a Business Operating Platform is responsible for orchestrating business processes which execution might span multiple applications, it must also provide Single Sign-On services (SSO). Intalio|BOP is currently based on the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS). Future releases will add support for OpenID and XACML.

Windowing Framework
Most operating systems developed since 1984 (year when Mac OS was first released) provide some kind of windowing framework offering a graphical interface to end users. Similarly, a Business Operating Platform must support the development of user interfaces, but these must be accessible over the Internet through a standard web browser, rather than being bound to a particular computer or client-side operating system. While many Rich Internet Application (RIA) frameworks have been released over the past few years (Flash, JavaFX, Silverlight, etc.), the most ubiquitous is AJAX, which uses a combination of asynchronous JavaScript and XML for providing interactive web applications. AJAX is more a programming style than an actual framework, and is supported by multiple implementations, such as Google Web Toolkit (GWT) or the Dojo Toolkit. For its part, Intalio|BPO makes extensive use of GWT, while providing a graphical IDE for the development of AJAX applications — Intalio|AJAX (based on TIBCO General Interface).

User Desktop
All graphical operating systems provide a desktop giving users access to their documents and applications. In a similar fashion, a Business Operating Platform must include an Enterprise Information Portal offering a single point of entry for all resources offered to end users, from task lists to document repositories and administration tools. Such a portal should also facilitate the collaboration among end users, allowing them to easily share resources such as processes, tasks, or documents. For this purpose, Intalio|BOP includes a component called Intalio|Portal based on the Liferay open source project, and supporting the JSR-168 industry standard. Intalio|Portal also includes Liferay Social Office for social collaboration inside the enterprise and across extended value chains.

Administration Tools
Most operating systems provide administration tools for configuration and tuning purposes. Similarly, a Business Operating Platform should provide tools for managing its various components, as well as the applications and processes it supports. While the various components of Intalio|BOP all provide some fairly advanced administration tools, each has its own interface, making it more difficult than it should be to have a complete view of the system. In order to remedy such a limitation, Intalio|BOP will soon provide a unified management interface, shared by all components of the platform. Furthermore, it will offer an implementation of ITIL V3 processes for Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement.

System Monitoring Tools
Most operating systems also provide monitoring tools tracking various metrics such as CPU utilization or memory allocation. In a similar fashion, a Business Operating Platform must provide a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) framework offering real-time information about the status of processes, activities, and transactions, through the definition of custom Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and the presentation of real-time dashboards. For this purpose, Intalio|BOP includes a component called Intalio|BAM, based on the Eclipse BIRT open source project.

Integrated Development Environment
Any operating system provides libraries and Integrated Development Environments allowing developers with various skillsets to build custom applications on top of it. Similarly, a Business Operating Platform must offer a set of development tools that can be used by business users, architects, and developers alike. For its part, Intalio|BOP offers 3 development environments, each targeted at a specific user: Intalio|Business Edition for business users, Intalio|Community Edition for process analysts and systems architects, and Intalio|Developer Edition for software developers. Each edition provides a specific view on the overall platform, while relying on a common runtime engine — Intalio|Server.

These are the components that make a Business Operating Platform, alongside others that do not have a close match within modern operating systems. Among them, we could mention a Business Rules Engine (BRE) or Business Rules Management System (BRMS), a Complex Event Process (CEP) or Event Stream Processing (ESP) engine, and a Data Integration engine. These components are either part of Intalio|BOP today (Intalio|BRE), or will be added to the platform in the near future.

From an architecture standpoint, a Business Operating Platform should respect the following principles if it is to be used for business-critical applications and deployed in a large-scale production environment:

Web-based User Interface
While web-based user interfaces cannot match the interactivity and richness of dedicated client applications yet, the gap is closing extremely fast, and all user interfaces of a Business Operating Platform should be web-based within 2 to 3 years. In the case of Intalio|BOP, the only rich client component of the platform is Intalio|Designer, which is based on the Eclipse workbench. Nevertheless, many components of Intalio|Designer are first packaged as web-based applications, then embedded within the Eclipse workbench. Such is the case for the IDE of Intalio|AJAX and the editor of Intalio|BRE (Intalio 6.1). Moving forward, the next generation of the Eclipse platform (e4) will enable the platform for use on emerging web-based runtime technologies, and the BPMN modeler of Intalio|Designer will be migrated to a web-based interface, possibly using the extremely promising Oryx platform.

On-demand and On-premise Deployment
In order to support the widest range of usage scenarios, a Business Operating Platform should support deployments both on-premise and on-demand. On-demand deployments should be based on a multi-tenant architecture making proper use of virtualization technologies (Cf. On Multi Tenancy) in order to offer virtually unlimited scalability both horizontally (many customers per data center) and vertically (many users per customer). Intalio|BOP is available for deployment both on-premise and on-demand.

Grid Architecture
A true Business Operating Platform should be considered as core building block for any Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. As such, it must support deployment on a grid infrastructure, allowing scalability to thousands of servers or more. In order to provide such a level of scalability, Intalio|Server is currently being packaged on top of Shoal and Apache Hadoop, while Intalio is working with an open source database vendor to support the collateral deployment of thousands of database servers on a single grid.

Open Source
Last but certainly not least, a Business Operating Platform should be made available under Open Source licenses. I write licenses (plural), because not one single license could be used to put such a massive platform together (as far as I can tell). But a combination of compatible licenses could. The primary reason why a Business Operating Platform should be made available under Open Source licenses is that it will support the development of business-critical applications that will be used for decades to come, and the risk of vendor locking or product discontinuation associated with the use of proprietary closed-source software is simply too great. For its part, the core components of Intalio|BOP are licensed under the Apache, BSD, Eclipse, GPL v3 (plus AGPL and LGPL), and MIT licenses, which are compatible with each other.

Developing the first Business Operating Platform is Intalio's mission, are we're working very hard to make it a reality as soon as possible. It will be made possible by a combination of smart acquisitions, collaborative product management, and self-empowerement. If this sounds like fun, join us for the ride!

Data Meet Process

ismael@itredux.com (Ismael Ghalimi) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:00 GMT

Intalio is currently experiencing very rapid growth in emerging markets, especially in Latin America. Yesterday, our Spanish-speaking webinar attracted 79 participants, the highest turnout to date. In this particular market, we're facing an interesting competitor: Aura Portal. We come across them more and more often in competitive situations, and I've been trying to understand why so many companies in Latin America were attracted to their proprietary product, which is a blend of BPM, ECM, Portal, and… CRM. After some more noodling, I think I finally came up with the answer: by integrating CRM into the mix, Aura Portal is blending Process and Data, which is the secret for a perfect recipe. It's not the first time I write about this, but I'm now ready to act upon it.

Whether analyst firms like it or not, BPM is not a business application, it's a business platform, and as such, it must support the development of enterprise applications in a process oriented way. For most new applications built against existing systems of records (ERP in particular), orchestration of services and support for human workflow is all you really need. But for more green-field environments (of which you'll find plenty in emerging markets), the development of custom data objects is necessary, and this is precisely what CRM systems are good for. To better understand this notion, forget about the content side of CRM (content as in business objects such as Customer or Opportunity). Instead, focus on the underlying infrastructure, which allows one to develop custom data objects through simple wizards. In other words, takes the Sales out of Salesforce.com, and focus on Force.com instead.

Much like BPM 2.0 tools let you build processes in a zero-code fashion, you'd like a true Business Process Platform (BPP) to let you build data objects without having to write code either. And not just that, but the platform should make these objects directly consumable by the process engine, through well-defined interfaces that could be generated automatically from the data model. Granted, there are many tools one could use to do that today, but they're either too complex to use for business analysts, or too limited in their ability to support the more complex object models. This is precisely what Salesforce.com did a great job at (I've never tried Aura Portal, but I must assume it does a good job at it too), and we definitely need to add such a capability to our product. Here is how we're approaching the problem.

First, we need to agree that we will use a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) as repository for our data objects. While object-oriented databases are out of fashion and XML databases never really materialized, relational databases are available from a variety of sources, both commercial and Open Source, and nothing beats them in terms of reliability and dependability. Document-oriented databases like Apache CouchDB are intriguing, but they're not optimized for structured data objects.

Second, we need to decide how to use the database itself. The first option is to store data objects in dedicated tables (one table per object). The second option is to create a set of generic tables (3 to 5 usually), and store all objects into it. The later is the option retained by Salesforce.com. When the Salesforce.com application was first designed ten years ago, virtualization did not really exist (at least in the way we understand it today), and the approach made perfect sense in order to support tens of thousands of customers in a multi-tenant environment. Unfortunately, the approach has its limits, for it forced Salesforce.com's engineers to essentially re-invent the database on top of a database (Oracle in that particular example), making it very difficult to support complex queries with multiple levels of joins, and creating some severe scalability issues. Today's virtualization technologies and low-cost databases (MySQL or PostgreSQL) dramatically change the equation, and deploying an off-the-shelf relational database on top of a grid of low-cost servers would give us scalability both horizontally (in terms of number of customers) and vertically (in terms of number of objects and users per customer).

Third, we need to select some kind of middleware to connect to the database. There are plenty of Java-based options there, from Hibernate to OpenJPA, but Java might not be the best language to start with. While we need to make it easy to create data objects without having to write code, we also need to support the ability to script data objects, without having to invent yet another language (like Salesforce.com did with APEX). When it comes to scripting, Ruby seems to get the most votes today, and Rails is exactly the kind of middleware we need to go from data model to database tables, without having to write much code, or any code at all for that matter.

Fourth, we need to develop a dead-simple user interface on top of the middleware. In this area, Salesforce.com should be used as ultimate benchmark. Its user interface makes it very easy to create new objects, define custom fields for them, set access control and visibility rules, and dynamically create forms and views for editing data objects. And when it comes to forms, simplicity should be the rule. Once you created a custom object with Salesforce.com, the application automatically creates a default “Page Layout” for it, which you can barely customize. All you can do is define sections which can have either one or two columns (of the same size), and move fields around with a drag-and-drop user interface. That's it, and that's all one should really need. And if you need something more custom, use a more advanced tool, such as Intalio|AJAX for example.

Fifth, we need to generate interfaces for these objects, and both REST and WSDL should be supported. REST because it's easy to use, and WSDL because it's all BPEL can natively consume (until we develop a RESTful version of BPEL that is). These interfaces should be totally canonical, and automatically generated by the database middleware. They should be registered into some kind of directory that could be looked-up through a dedicated REST interface (too bad UDDI never took off).

Sixth, we need to add some kind of service invocation tool to Intalio|BPP Business Edition, with a simple data mapping tool. This tool must be an order of magnitude simpler than the Data Mapper of Intalio|Designer, and should be built using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT, also used by the Business Edition). Nevertheless, the Data Object Builder described in this article should also be integrated with the other editions of Intalio's platform, the Community Edition, Developer Edition, and Enterprise Edition.

Once we get all that done, we'll get something pretty close to Coghead. At this point, it's unclear whether we should add any business content to the platform or not. But should we decide to, Apache OFBiz looks like a good place to start from.

We're currently kicking the tires with this project. If we decide to move forward with it, we will most likely develop it under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (AGPL v3). If this sounds like fun, feel free to drop us a line.

In the meantime, we'll create a D3 project for it.