Excellus Blue Cross eyes enterprise mashups for call center
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Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield is looking into the use of enterprise mashups as a way of providing its customer service agents with quick access to data from disparate IT systems.
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IBM said Monday that it is partnering with ACI Worldwide, an electronic payment software vendor, to create a payments system based on service oriented architecture (SOA) principles.ACI&#39;s software will be combined with IBM&#39;s System z mainframe, DB2 database, WebSphere middleware, Tivoli IT management software and Crypto-chip technology, according to an IBM statement. ACI also intends to host its software in IBM&#39;s data centers, for customers who desire an on-demand payments system.IBM said the combination of ACI&#39;s technology and its own will result in an SOA foundation that allows payment information to be shared throughout enterprises, many of which see a tangle of legacy systems strewn across their IT environments.The partnership will first result in a version of ACI&#39;s BASE24-eps online payments software optimized for System z; a wholesale payments product aimed at the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), and real-time fraud detection technology. Later, the companies will focus on smart card management, dispute management, online banking and a payment hub implementing IBM&#39;s Payments Framework, they said.ACI&#39;s customers include more than 110 of the world&#39;s top 500 banks, according to IBM.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft is adding capabilities for RFID and EDI to its BizTalk Server business process management platform as well as making BizTalk friendlier for application developers.
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Observers say partnerships between vendors show they are hoping to ignite a spark toward adoption of unified communications infrastructures that some predict could peak in about three years within corporate environments.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will ship the three products featured in its social computing suite geared for Web 2.0 on Monday. The three products introduce modes of ad hoc collaboration and participation-driven experiences, said Jay Simons, BEA director of product marketing. Additionally, they take innovations spawned on the consumer Internet and apply them to the enterprise, adding security, governance, and management, he said. With the products, BEA is looking to empower users in the workplace, the company said. All bearing the AquaLogic nameplate, the three products include: * Pages, which is a mashup builder for business users to put together simple Web applications for business situations. * Ensemble, for Web application developers to build developer-oriented mashups featuring Web resources. * Pathways, featuring social bookmarking, tagging, and the ability to form social networks in an enterprise context. In touting its new products, BEA has been able to communicate how the suite can make a business become more efficient, said analyst Frank Kenney, research director at Gartner. BEA has been citing examples involving mashups and applications, he said. "Theyâre starting to tell stories and give credible examples of how those Web 2.0 [capabilities] can make your business agile," Kenney said. But BEA has been lacking in details on how governance and control are maintained over the applications built with the products, he said. "I think that I havenât seen enough detail about the mechanics of the technology. For instance, BEA hasn't given me a message or hasn't told me about how these technologies fit into their overall SOA governance initiatives," Kenney said. A Java application server is required to use the products but not necessarily BEA's application server, Simons said. Pricing for the products individually is either $40,000 per CPU or $64 per user.
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Computer Associates will install an SAP ERP system to replace a collection of homegrown accounting systems. Accenture will help with the implementation.
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Microsoft Corp. started testing on Monday a new computer server software that allows corporate customers to make Web-based phone calls through its Office suite of business software.
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IBM's global services organization is adding "health check" services to its repertoire of technical services for SOA deployments, looking to assist users dealing with issues resulting from poor planning or partnerships with inexperienced or so-called proprietary IT vendors.The company also is offering its "identity-aware ESB," which is an enterprise service bus that combines existing IBM products to provide identity management capabilities.Health-check services and software will be offered in two workshops to be held at customer sites, featuring specialized diagnostics and triage capabilities to help identify potentially unhealthy areas and recommend cures for problem areas."We try to bring a real breadth of capability from the best practices that we've learned into these workshops," said Marie Wieck, vice president of middleware services at IBM.With some clients, IBM has had to perform somewhat of a rescue mission after clients have done an initial application and then had problems with scalability or performance, Wieck said.Workshops, which are priced in the $50,000 range or less, include IBM SOA Applications and Services and Healthcheck Workshop and Infrastructure Healthcheck Workshop for SOA. Both are 2.5-day engagements intended for midmarket and large enterprises.The applications and services workshop is intended to provide assurance that an SOA can expand beyond pilot projects. Factors such as application reuse and service use will be assessed, as will identification of rogue services as part of a governance policy. Security also will be checked for service controls and identity management.The infrastructure workshop features an assessment of infrastructure supporting applications and services layers in an SOA. Elements examined include infrastructure flexibility, the ability to adapt to spikes in demand, and verifying SOA configurations for connectivity. A service management review ensures that services are being monitored.IBM's identity-aware ESB combines WebSphere ESB products with Tivoli security and identity management software to help ensure that access to information, services, and applications is protected. Auditing of identity and access activity is enabled."Identity management is very critical so that you can ensure that only the right people get access to these services," Wieck said.An analyst briefed on IBM's efforts lauded both the SOA and ESB programs."Customers who have started with a SOA need checkpoints to have an outside source assess what they are doing and how it compares to best practices," said Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz &amp; Associates. "Companies are investing a lot of money, resources, and political capital on SOA, and management wants to make sure they are on track and doing the right thing."Governance is a huge issue for customers in regards to SOA implementation. This is especially true since SOA is as much a business strategy as it is a technology strategy," Hurwitz said."In terms of ID-aware ESB ? clearly security and identity management are huge issues for companies because of governance issues related to security," she said.IBM offers information about its SOA programs at its Web site.Also on Monday, IBM is announcing an initiative to help business partners increase revenues and better serve customers. Grow Your Business (GYB) with IBM Software provides cross-brand sales scenarios across the IBM software group's product portfolio.The GYB tool recommends scenarios that utilize business partners' existing areas of expertise. Partners through the initiative can analyze software products, get descriptions of business value, and determine return on investment via an online tool. Information is aggregated into one place.An online guide to marketing and sales materials also is highlighted.
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(InfoWorld) - Raising the stakes in the burgeoning mashup development tools field, JackBe is unveiling Presto Wires, a visual enterprise mashup composer, at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Monday. The tool functions with the company's Presto Edge mashup server, which offers secure access to disparate data and services. Users of Presto Wires, who would be business analysts as well as developers, can integrate Web services via a drag-and-drop workflow. These could be services based on REST, WSDL, RSS, and SOAP as well as services produced from SOA infrastructure. Services can be gathered from such sources as RSS feeds, maps from Google, and research data. "[Presto Wires] gives enterprise users the ability to mash these different Web services together with minimal or no support from IT [and] with all the security and governance that larger enterprises expect," Chor-Ching Fan, vice president of product management at JackBe, said. JackBe defines mashups as applications integrating two or more data services and allowing users to specify how the data is mashed up, such as stipulating how columns of data are to be joined. "The main benefit [of mashups] is to allow business units to solve ad hoc business issues," said Fan. Presto Wires can access public Web services and integrate them with internal data sources to look for business opportunities. Presto Wires allows enterprises, including business units and non-technical people, to leverage SOA investments and combine data sets and business rules, according to JackBe. "Many enterprises have made major investments into SOA, and they cannot deliver the value and benefits of SOA without allowing the business units to do mashups on their own," Fan said. "Presto is providing the way that business users can take advantage of the SOA investments," made in the past five to 10 years, he said. An analyst compared Presto Wires to a Yahoo technology. "JackBe's Presto Wires resembles data mashup construction environments like Yahoo Pipes, which is focused on the consumer Web space," said analyst Vishwanath Venugopalan of The 451 Group. "Yahoo Pipes operates almost entirely on syndicated Internet data feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) Presto Wires offers business users a chance to expand the scope of these data mashups to traditional enterprise data sources such as spreadsheets and Web services." While JackBe leverages AJAX to provide for more intuitive, user-friendly mashup creation, no programming is required. Users can drag and drop objects. Presto Wires carries a list price of $40,000 per CPU.
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(InfoWorld) - As any developer can tell you, creating interoperability between SOA components and existing IT environments isnât trivial. It requires a lot of effort and coding. But IBM says it has the antidote for the IT headache: composite business services in the form of wrappers around existing IT applications. Big Blueâs strategy to create reusable SOA services is largely built around technologies and tools that the company received from its August acquisition of Webify Solutions, a vendor of SOA software and services. Webify provides hundreds of industry-specific, prebuilt standards-based accelerators, tools, and frameworks. Its offerings help solve business problems that are specific to a given industry, such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance for the health care industry and ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) standards in the insurance industry. Within IBM, Webifyâs technology provides the basis for WebSphere Business Services Fabric (IBMâs SOA platform for modeling, assembly, and deployment of business services), says Brett MacIntyre, vice president for composite services development at IBM.                                                     âWebify (software) has given us the fabric, the view across the industry of common services used within the industry, and the tools and the methods with which to build these composite business services,â MacIntyre says. Webify also brought relationships with customers in the health care and insurance industries, and a portfolio of about 12 composite business services in the insurance and health care industries, MacIntyre says. Composite business services built by IBM will interoperate through the standard framework from Webify, with ontologies and data models associated with an industry added on top of the WebSphere Business Services Fabric to create a particular component, MacIntyre says. âFor example, a core data model that the insurance companies in the U.S. work with is part of the overall business fabric,â he says. Webify tools, processes and methodologies will also play a key role at SOA Solutions Centers in Beijing and Pune, India, says Jeby Cherian, the head of IBMâs Global Business Solutions Center, one of three organizations IBM set up to create reusable software assets.
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Joint work with IBM is part of strategy to deliver apps that let customers use Web services to build adaptable service-oriented architectures.
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Company readies public beta test of latest Office Communications Server, which will let users make phone calls from other Office applications.
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(InfoWorld) - With an upgrade to its Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite being released Monday, Nexaweb will focus on visual capabilities for building mashups. Nexaweb is among a growing list of companies such as IBM, BEA Systems, and JackBe flying the flag for mashup technology. To be unveiled at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Nexaweb's upgraded suite makes it easier to build "developer-driven mashup" applications. "[Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite] allows you to mix together different data from different locations and easily combine them in an application," said Rob Gagne, vice president of engineering at Nexaweb. An example of a mashup application could be one that visualizes sales data on top of a map. Also, a composite application could be assembled where a call center is integrated with telephony capabilities and a customer database, Gagne said. The new release offers ease of use through the addition of tools such as a visual designer with drag-and-drop component building. Users also gain drag-and-drop capabilities to link to Web services and databases. "We provide visual design tools around taking different components and different data feeds and hooking them up through cross-component data-binding," said Gagne. An integrated event model also is featured; developers can visualize event workflows. Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite features a framework for deploying applications in a browser, a network tier to move data from the server to client, and clustering and failover capabilities. Enterprise connectivity is enabled through linkages to message buses such as Java Message Service systems or MQSeries. Developers can use technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) or Java. Also highlighted are integrated debugging, testing, and governance capabilities. Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite is "one of the more robust enterprise mashup suites that you'll find out there," said analyst Anthony Bradley, research director at Gartner. Users can access legacy systems and make them mashup-capable, he said. Nexaweb's user interface is very portal-like, which may make a lot of enterprises comfortable but could be limiting, said Bradley. Mashups themselves are about building applications that may have a shelf life of only a few hours, Bradley said. For example, an application could be built that brings together data to analyze an acquisition by Cisco Systems, he said. "You just built an application that may only live for a day," Bradley said. With the Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite, a developer could choose AJAX for building Web site enhancements or simple applications such as a mortgage calculator. For more complex systems, such as an end-to-end foreign exchange trading program with 500 screens, developers could use Java. There is no new version number for the new product. Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite costs $17,500 for the platform and support for three developers, who could build an application supporting hundreds of users. The product has been in use at 5,000 companies, according to Nexaweb.Â  Separately from the company's AJAXWorld unveiling, Nexaweb is continuing its Web2SOA Ecosystem Program, featuring partner companies integrating with applications built by Nexaweb's tools. Highlighted partners include Layer 7, which provides security around SOA components; HP Systinet, for governing SOA components; and Kapow Technologies, aggregating Web services used in applications. "[Kapow offers] a very convenient way to access information from other Web sites, effectively scraping information," said David McFarlande, chief operating officer at Nexaweb. For instance, a mashup could be developed that accesses public health information from EPA Web sites and combines it with information on school districts. Also at AJAXWorld, Backbase plans to introduce Enterprise Ajax 4, an AJAX framework for developing applications. The framework addresses issues such as browser incompatibilities, wiring of different widgets, and making widgets and components work together. Also described as a browser-based application server, Enterprise Ajax 4 features a framework and development tools. The runtime supports browsers including Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Firefox. With Enterprise Ajax 4, structure, performance, and productivity are brought to client-side AJAX logic, the company said. Also, a dual JavaScript/XML API lets developers build applications in a familiar programming language. Third-party components are supported, such as Yahoo UI components, Dojo Widgets, and Google Gadgets.
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Software applications company launches Mashup Composer, an exchange that allows its partners to build, buy and sell business mashups.
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A small, Silicon Valley-based start-up with an AT&T heritage is now working side-by-side big partners such as Salesforce.com and Adobe in an effort to revolutionize voice calls as we know them today.
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Software maker is ready with a test version of its server software for running business phone systems.
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(InfoWorld) - The announcement last week from Lombardi Software that it will add a SaaS (software as a service) component dubbed Blueprint to its on-premises BPM suite highlights both the continuing growth of the hosted model and its limitations. In offering Blueprint, Lombardi becomes one of the first vendors to offer a SaaS solution for BPM. However, Blueprint is not Lombardi's entire BPM suite. Rather it is one component, covering the preliminary process discovery portion of BPM during which people-to-people collaboration is essential. An end-to-end SaaS solution for BPM may still be a way off. The hosted solution uses a shared workspace within the browser that non-technical users can use, but it also supports the Business Process Modeling Notation standard for business analysts comfortable working with a standard industry tool. The underlying data model for the on-premises and SaaS components are identical so that once the processes that need improvement are defined the data is sent back and forth to the hosted solution behind the firewall through a feed similar to RSS. According to Phil Gilbert, Lombardi CTO, SaaS is the right delivery mechanism to tap the many different players who only understand their piece of the workflow puzzle. "No one understands big processes from end to end," Gilbert said, adding that he believes in order to assemble a cross-functional team of players, especially when that team is in many cases global and on different systems, SaaS can be used to lower the barrier of participation. The biggest roadblock to the deployment of an end-to-end SaaS solution for BPM or for any other core enterprise application remains access to the data, he said. For example, to deploy a full BPM SaaS solution a company would have to send proprietary data outside the firewall. "We are a long way off before major companies are willing to transmit their mission critical data across the Web," Gilbert said.