US State Government Agency Chooses Software AG's Event Replicator for Adabas
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DARMSTADT, Germany, June 18  /PRNewswire/ -- Software AG, a global leader in business infrastructure software, today announced that the Washington State Department of Information Systems has chosen Software AG's Event Replicator for Adabas in support of the Labor and Industries agency (L&I).
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A top official with the U.S. White House&#39;s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) gave her strongest endorsement yet to SaaS (software as a service), saying Wednesday it can help federal agencies cut development costs.A speech on Wednesday at the SaaS/Gov conference in Washington, D.C., wasn&#39;t the first time Karen Evans, administrator of the OMB&#39;s Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology, endorsed SaaS. Despite Evans&#39; continuing advocacy of the concept, adoption has been slow among government agencies, according to one vendor.Asked whether the OMB should more strongly promote SaaS, Evans said U.S. agencies need to weigh cost, security, and other factors. But the U.S. government needs to move to a more service-oriented software model, she said.&quot;Our track record is clear -- we are not very good at delivering our own software in the time frame set,&quot; Evans said at the conference. &quot;We&#39;re also not very good at managing large projects.&quot;Some agencies haven&#39;t embraced the service approach, often because they want hands-on control of software development, Evans said. But government agencies can&#39;t afford to keep developing their own software without sharing with other agencies, she said.&quot;We can&#39;t continue to maintain all of the things we have,&quot; she added. &quot;We have to start shutting down some of our legacy systems. We really have to move to a ... service-oriented market.&quot;Although there&#39;s been no prohibition against U.S. agencies using SaaS models, many agencies have been reluctant to move to a service-based approach, partly because of concerns about the security of Web-based services, said Dan Burton, senior vice president of global public policy for Salesforce.com.Evans&#39; speech on Wednesday could create a &quot;tipping point&quot; for the use of SaaS models in the U.S. government, Burton said. Many agencies seem to believe that they don&#39;t have the authority to take a chance on the new model, he said.One step that service-based software vendors can take is to seek security certifications and map out how their services meet Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) requirements, Evans said. Some agencies are reluctant to move to SaaS without certifications, she said.However, some agencies are already using SaaS to cut down development times. Rezaur Rahman, enterprise architect and Web services manager for the U.S. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, said his agency began using Salesforce.com offerings in its information management systems in recent months. Budget constraints helped push the agency toward software as a service, he said.The agency is using services to take care of many functions it would have had to write its own code for in the past, including reading and writing to databases, Rahman said. The agency can often make tweaks to its information management systems in a day or less, he added.
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The U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is getting ready to do some serious number crunching at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The NNSA recently selected IBM to construct the world's first supercomputer using Cell Broadband Engine (B.E.) processors that can perform a mind-boggling 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop.
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At CUNA's Governmental Affairs Conference  (GAC), Source Technologies, a pioneer in transactional kiosks, will host  a demonstration area showcasing self-service technologies for the  financial services industry.
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In a follow-up to a previous blog post, Alexey Zakhlestin shares a few more thoughts on the project and the proper object hierarchy's going for.   actually, I changed it completely 3 times already in my thoughts. I finally "see the light"(tm) and will implement it on a weekend. I think about converting SCGI-part to a simple "driver" and move all http-related stuff to a separate driver-agnostic set of classes. This way, I would be able to implement FastCGI as anther driver without altering applications. If you have any better ideas - let me know.   He also includes a link to another sample application that uses the functionality to create a pie chart (including some benchmarks) with the help of the eZ components framework.
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(InfoWorld) - Fast Search & Transfer ASA has developed an enterprise desktop search tool that retrieves data from users' PCs, as well as from internal servers and the public Web. Fast Search, in Oslo, Norway, will unveil and begin shipping the application on Tuesday at a price of US$25 per seat. Discounts apply on purchases of over 1,000 seats. Fast Personal Search can be used on its own or in conjunction with server-based search platforms from Fast or other vendors. The ideal set-up is with the Fast Enterprise Search Platform, which lets users take advantage of all of its features, a spokesman said. The application is designed to let employees fetch data from multiple sources with a single query. Fast Personal Search also lets users act on files it retrieves. From within its search-results interface, the application lets users open, launch or print found files. It also offers a variety of ways to sort and cluster results. The application comes with security and administration tools to help IT departments configure, deploy and manage it. Fast Search is also making available a software development kit so that its partners can create services and products based on the new product. Matt Brown, a Forrester Research analyst, liked the product's user interface and set of features for end users and IT managers. It's clear that the application will add value to companies that already have Fast Search's server platform, he said. However, he questioned the decision to charge for the product. Considering that desktop search tools tend to be free, he wondered how willing companies will be to pay for it. "I haven't seen companies making huge investments specifically for desktop search," he said. Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. offer free enterprise desktop search tools. X1 Technologies Inc. recently joined them, making its enterprise desktop application, previously priced from $74.95, available free. And Microsoft has aggressive plans to make enterprise search pervasive in its operating systems. "Looking out five years, I'm not bullish that desktop search will live forever as a standalone category," Brown said. In the meantime, beta tester Kevin Madden is excited about Fast Personal Search. He is chief executive officer of Clooster Inc., a startup that makes software to improve the rendering and visualization of results from other desktop search tools. His company has partly integrated its Clooster Desktop with the Fast product and found the process to be simple and straightforward, using the Fast software development kit. Clooster is now completing the integration. "We're excited with its performance and features," Madden said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Network Appliance has brought out the latest version of its Data Ontap software, which imposes a grid storage architecture on NetApp devices by creating an abstraction layer between application servers, storage controllers and disc arrays.
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(InfoWorld) - Software AG has built a global customer base over 35 years by being an early mover in a couple of major technology trends. The company introduced one of the first databases, Adabas, in the 1970s, a platform-independent computer language, Natural, in the 1980s and an XML (Extensible Markup Language) server, Tamino, in the 1990s. In an interview with IDG News Service, Peter KÃ¼rpick, member of the Software AG executive board responsible for research and development, talked aboutÂ the company's evolutionary moveÂ from XML servers and integration to new products and services needed to build an SOA (service oriented architecture) infrastructure. IDGNS: How did Software AG enter the middleware market? KÃ¼rpick: In the early 90s, our founder Peter Schnell realized a need to connect various systems so that information flows would not be confined to one system. He started a project, the message broker, which is known today as our enterprise service bus. This technology allows you to connect systems of different kinds to exchange information. IDGNS: And then the Internet came along. What happened then? KÃ¼rpick: In the mid-1990s when Internet gained momentum, Software AG detected a need for companies to standardize application tools. The standard was XML and became a core business. We tagged ourselves The XML Company. But that tag is going to disappear soon as XML is now pretty much a given in the industry; it's nothing special anymore. IDGNS: So if you're not going to be The XML Company any longer, what do you want to be? KÃ¼rpick: What we're doing now with SOA is a natural extension of what we've done for the last several years. SOA is a concept of loosely coupling systems and generating new applications based on highly standardized technologies, such as Web services and business process management. We've decided to bring a technology stack to the table that covers all the basic components of SOA. This includes opening up and connecting any kind of system. We have a toolset to connect to those systems. And once you've connected to three or four systems, you'll want to orchestrate a new process that takes data from system "a" to system "b" and beyond. This is where our enterprise service bus comes into play. IDGNS: How does AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) fit into this? KÃ¼rpick: We use this technology to develop enterprise screens, or "mashups," that companies can deploy on top of their systems to have an integrated view of data being generated by a variety of applications. This is what our crossvision suite is all about. IDGNS: How do you make customers understand what SOA is all about? KÃ¼rpick: We tell customers they need one central place, an SOA registry/repository. Here they register all their metadata, or SOA "artifacts," which describe interfaces, business processes, Web services and more. The repository is a library of sorts where users store all the ways they connect systems, providing a map of their IT landscape. It allows them to govern and manage their SOA infrastructure. IDGNS: So this is your interpretation of SOA -- to work through this repository? KÃ¼rpick: We say that an SOA registry/ repository is a must. It allows businesses to govern the life-cyle of SOA components, such as services, processes and policies. IDGNS: Is this repository approach unique to you? KÃ¼rpick: There are only two companies in world doing this right now: Software AG and Hewlett-Packard, via an acquisition.Â HP acquired Mercury Interactive, which owned Systinet -- the only competitor with a similar approach. IDGNS: Are there other interpretations of SOA with the library? KÃ¼rpick: You really can't run a large scale SOA landscape without a central library. As with any library, you need to know where the books are. With SOA, you need to know where all the services are you want to link and how to link them. IDGNS: And you help with your own proprietary technology? KÃ¼rpick: Our technology is entirely based on open standards. We see ourselves as a neutral player in the integration space. We're not biased toward SAP or Oracle or any other vendor of business applications for that matter. Our mission is to integrate heterogenous IT landscapes. Businesses prefer to enable new processes on what they already have. They don't want to embark on huge conversion programs. IDGNS: When companies follow a SOA path, do they need to invest heavily in consultants? KÃ¼rpick: They need some level of consultancy. SOA is a learning process. We can guide businesses and help them avoid interruptions. Our technology is based on standard ways of doing things -- for instance Eclipse as a development environment or Java as a standard way of developing code. Large companies can do much in-house. So it's really a question of how large you are and how much you want to do in-house. IDGNS: So no more XLM -- SOA is the future. But SOA can go away too, right? KÃ¼rpick: SOA is an architectural concept and I expect it will be around for at least the next 10 years or longer. The concept is really only at the beginning.
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Software AG has bought the application modernization activities of Jacada, adding to its portfolio of tools for prolonging the life of mainframe applications by giving them a Web interface.The sale marks Jacada&#39;s move out of the application modernization and middleware software business in order to concentrate on development of call center systems.Software AG has bought the rights to Jacada&#39;s Terminal Emulator, Interface Server, and HostFuse products, among others. Jacada keeps its WorkSpace and WinFuse software, and rights to the Jacada brand.Eight of Jacada&#39;s research, development and support staff will join Software AG to maintain the application modernization products.Software AG will pay $26 million in cash for the business, which generates $12 million in annual revenue, it said Thursday.It will gain access to 200 of Jacada&#39;s 1,200 customers, mostly in the U.S., giving it a chance to expand its SOA (services-oriented architecture) work in an important market, it said.The deal is tiny compared to&#160;Software AG&#39;s purchase of U.S. software vendor webMethods: It paid $546 million for the SOA and business process management (BPM) company in June.Software AG is also looking to acquire other smaller companies or business units which could benefit from its global infrastructure. Earlier this year it paid $62 million for 80 percent of its Israeli distributor SPL Software.Also on Thursday, Jacada announced the appointment of a new CEO, Paul O&#39;Callaghan, from Jan. 1. President of the company since May 2006, he replaces Gideon Hollander, who will remain with the company as chairman.&#160;
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will enter the event-driven architecture space Monday with a product geared for SOA in Java environments. This unveiling of BEA WebLogic Event Server will be coupled with an upgrade to the company's real-time server. Together, they can be used as part of a solution for high-speed, high-volume transaction environments or XTP (extreme transaction processing). Event Server is a Java application server for handling large volumes of streaming data. It meets needs for predictable response times and complex event processing, the company said. High volumes of events are handled with the speed expected in C and C++ environments but with the lower total cost of ownership enabled by Java, according to BEA. With Event Server, information is aggregated from distributed systems in real time. Rules are applied to discern patterns and trends, giving users the ability to respond to opportunities and threats posed by seemingly unrelated events. "What people are trying to do is drive data to knowledge," said Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic Products at BEA. "As we come out of the gate, we're going to provide 50,000 complex events per second," putting the product on par with C and C++ offerings, he said. The product serves as an infrastructure for SOA aspects by enabling high-performance computing without modification of current or planned SOA infrastructure, BEA said. When used with BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition and the new BEA WebLogic Realtime Time 2.0 product, Event Server can work in XTP environments. Part of the company's microService Architecture for SOA, Event Server supports simple Java programming, or "plain old Java objects," and the Spring Framework as well as event processing language. A public beta for WebLogic Event Server begins on May 29 with general availability planned for this summer. BEA's entrance into the event-processing market is another sign that the market is going mainstream, said analyst Roy Schulte, vice president of Application Strategy and Governance at Gartner. "Oracle and Tibco are also already active in this market, and IBM, Microsoft, and SAP are expected to expand their event-processing offerings during the next 18 months," Schulte said. "The product is potentially applicable anywhere there are high-volume event streams and a need to detect threats or opportunities quickly [with sub-second latency]," Schulte said. "Until recently, this kind of scenario was only found in niche applications, such as financial trading, telco, and network management. During the past several years, however, many new types of stream processing applications have emerged in such areas as customer experience management, credit card security and fraud detection, transportation operations, and compliance." BEA also is announcing WebLogic Real Time 2.0, which provides guaranteed microsecond pause times for standard Java applications. Guaranteed worst-case pause times of 10 milliseconds are offered with average pause times in the sub-millisecond range. Previously, the product offered a 30-millisecond worst case. "The neat thing about WebLogic Real Time is it gives real-time, predictable behavior to an application without having to rewrite the application, so it's automatically inherited," Churchward said. Real Time 2.0 features a latency analyzer tool providing developers with the ability to analyze sources of latency in applications. General availability for Real Time 2.0 is slated for this summer.
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Company hopes to encourage more software vendors to build apps for the alternative OS.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the federal board that oversees elections technology, has approved a testing and certification program for electronic-voting systems. The three-member EAC voted unanimously to approve a manual for testing and certification of e-voting machines, the first testing program conducted by the U.S. government. The program, which allows the federal government to decertify voting machines that fail to meet security standards, will hold e-voting machine vendors accountable and help ensure accurate election results, said Brian Hancock, director of voting systems certification at the EAC. Although the testing program is voluntary, more than 35 states have passed laws requiring federal certification of voting machines. "We would hope that all states would realize the benefits of this," said Commissioner Gracia Hillman, during an EAC meeting Thursday. The testing and certification program includes a quality monitoring program to review voting machine manufacturing plants and testing in the field. Security requirements in the program will be outlined in voting system guidelines, with a new version to be delivered to the EAC by its Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) in July. EAC Chairman Paul DeGregorio called the adoption of the testing program guidelines a "landmark step in federal oversight of elections." Critics of e-voting machines have blasted them as "black boxes" that depend on internal software functioning correctly for accurate election results. Without independent audit mechanisms, direct record electronic (DRE) machines have no way of double-checking election results, critics say. But the testing program will help improve the quality of e-voting machines, Hancock said. "It's going to improve transparency" in the voting process, he said. Also on Thursday, the EAC heard a report from TGDC Chairman William Jeffrey, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), on the first steps it has taken toward the new voting system guidelines. The TGDC on Tuesday approved a proposal requiring future e-voting machines to include independent audit mechanisms, such as voter-verified paper trail printouts. The TGDC will also encourage new audit technologies that could replace printouts as independent audit mechanisms, Jeffrey said. Critics of paper trail audits say printers can jam or break, slowing the voting process. Much of the EAC discussion about the TGDC report centered around press reports that NIST had advocated independent audits in a November paper saying DREs without audit mechanisms "cannot be made secure or highly reliable." NIST as a whole did not agree on the draft paper but staff members wrote it to simulate discussion at the TGDC meeting earlier this week, Jeffrey said. DeGregorio questioned where the authors of the NIST paper got their information when there were relatively few reports of e-voting problems in November's general election. At last count, 102 of more than 6,700 U.S. voting jurisdictions experienced some kind of voting problem in the Nov. 7 election, according to the EAC. NIST gathered its information from a variety of sources, including local election officials, TGDC members and media reports, Jeffrey said. "Clearly, there were issues that popped up," he said. This week, e-voting machine vendors said they have no problem with the TGDC's proposal for independent audit mechanisms, said Michael Kerr, director of the Election Technology Council at the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a trade group representing e-voting machine vendors. E-voting machine vendors "will build voting machines that comply" with the wishes of their customers, Kerr said. The new version of the voluntary voting system guidelines being developed by the TGDC will not likely go into effect until 2010 or later.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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An advanced robotic arm beats a host of other machines to win a Japanese government competition
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SaaS (software as a service) platform vendor NetSuite&#160;has released SuiteBundler, a tool its partner ISVs and VARs can use to create reusable applications for verticals.&quot;It&#39;s more important for our partners than it is for NetSuite,&quot; NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson said of the release, which provides a wizard-like interface for combining assets built on the NetSuite platform. It also includes distribution and installation tools and access to a repository of these &quot;SuiteBundles.&quot;Software development firm EBS-RAD LLC, based in Tampa, Florida, created a custom NetSuite app, i-Seaports Management, for its customer, Harbour Mastery. That firm in turn will market the software to seaports and marinas around the world, said EBS-RAD CEO George Walters.&quot;We&#39;re effectively making it very easy for services companies to get into the software business,&quot; Nelson said.Bundles have been created for a number of other verticals, including agricultural equipment dealerships, retail point-of-sale, and wholesale electronics distribution, according to the company.NetSuite&#39;s announcement drew a cautious nod from one industry observer Wednesday. &quot;At a 60,000 foot view, it seems like a good thing,&quot; said Michael Speyer, a Forrester Research senior analyst covering SMB&#160;and IT distribution issues. &quot;Especially for the larger midmarket clients. They&#39;re going to resist adopting apps that aren&#39;t customizable to their own existing processes.&quot;That makes sense because NetSuite has specifically targeted such customers. &quot;We think the midmarket is the huge opportunity,&quot; Nelson said. &quot;We believe NetSuite will be the SAP of the midmarket.&quot;But Speyer sounded a note of skepticism against such a lofty goal. &quot;Well, SAP is pretty firmly in the midmarket now,&quot; he said, noting offerings like Business All-in-One and Business One. &quot;So they are running head-on into SAP.&quot;NetSuite&#39;s approach to extending its SaaS platform stands in contrast to competitor Salesforce.com, which has aggressively promoted its programming language and development platform for creating new enterprise apps.&quot;Our environment is all about extending our applications,&quot; Nelson said. &quot;The mid-market doesn&#39;t want to build applications. They want to run businesses. Enterprises? They&#39;ll build applications all day.&quot;Nelson said one possible enterprise use of SuiteBuilder lies in application testing. NetSuite customers could try out new custom combinations in sandboxes before deploying them, he said.NetSuite previously announced it intends to issue an IPO. Earlier this year, it provided access to its services through the Apple iPhone.
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(InfoWorld) - Software AG on Thursday plans to announce its Active Governance Framework (AGF), which features a policy editor for SOA. With AGF, developers can edit and enforce business and technical policies. Alerts are sent to business users when an application conflicts with an established policy. The policy editor plugs into the CentraSite SOA registry and repository, which keeps track of SOA artifacts, including Web services. CentraSite was developed by both Software AG and Fujitsu. "What's great about the pluggable architecture is that first of all, we can very, very quickly enhance the product without going through major release cycles," said Matt Durham, vice president of market development at Software AG. Through the policy editor, developers can take ad hoc or proprietary policies, such as policy written in a Word document, and copy and enforce them. An example of a business policy that could be enforced would be a policy on who is allowed to fly at a certain class. A technical policy could involve, for example, making one service usage contingent on another service. Wiki-based collaboration capabilities are featured in AGF. Also part of AGF is the ability to synchronize with policies managed within third-party tools such as a tool for security. Advanced federation in AGF allow for cross-registry communication and is based on the UDDI standard. The AGF plugin is slated to be available in the second quarter of this year. CentraSite is part of the Software AG crossvision SOA suite, but users do not need to purchase the whole suite.
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The nation's first state government portal  keeps getting better, thanks to an innovative new design unveiled last  week.
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ActiveMatrix reloaded Tibco last week announced the general availability of TIBCO ActiveMatrix for service-oriented architectures (SOA). This is the industry's first âservice virtualization platformâ for the deployment and governance of composite applications based on distributed, standards-based services".â¦