Software AG CTO looks ahead to new mainframe software
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The next version of Adabas is likely to focus on ways to handle unstructured data such as online information, according to Software AG's new chief technology officer.
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IBM has revealed additions to its Rational software development tool lineup and said its architecting and modeling tools will support Unified Modeling Language 2.0 by the end of the year.
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SAP&#160;is pushing ahead with two partnerships that aim to provide customers with better user interface options for its ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.SAP and Microsoft&#160;plan to announce an upgrade in the coming weeks to their Duet software, version 1.5, which will be generally available early next year, officials at SAP&#39;s Tech Ed conference said this week.At the same time, SAP is stepping up its efforts with Adobe Systems&#160;to let developers liven up SAP interfaces using Adobe&#39;s new AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology, for building rich Web applications that run outside of a browser.Both projects, on show at TechEd in Munich, Germany, aim to expand the number of employees who access SAP applications and data. The partnerships are also part of an industrywide trend to bring enterprise software to a wider range of business users.SAP&#39;s standard interfaces are often seen as functional, but not very imaginative or easy to use.&quot;Anything that improves SAP&#39;s interfaces, which are hideous and hard to use, is a good thing,&quot; said James Governor, an industry analyst with RedMonk.Duet allows workers to view &quot;contextual&quot; SAP data that might help them make business decisions from within Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Excel. In the current version, that contextual data is limited to what SAP and Microsoft chose to provide for a given task.&quot;It&#39;s really the information we think people want, based on our experience and best practices,&quot; said Yifat Ferber-Harel, a Duet product manager with SAP.Version 1.5 of the product will include tools that allow developers to choose the contextual data they want to present to end users.For example, a big company might set up a process for approving promotions using Microsoft Outlook. When a senior manager receives an e-mail from a department head suggesting a promotion, a developer will be able to provide related information from SAP&#39;s human-resources software, such as the employee&#39;s sales figures, absentee record or current pay scale.The capability should help to deliver on the original promise of Duet, Ferber-Harel said. &quot;Part of our original vision was to give you the information you need to make decisions, and you can&#39;t make decisions without the right information,&quot; she said.The update will also add more user scenarios, the business cases in which Duet can be used. Today they include areas such as leave management and budget planning.At the same time, SAP is working with Adobe on its&#160;AIR technology, a recent addition to Adobe&#39;s Flex development environment. AIR is seen as a rival to Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer because developers can use it to build applications with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash that can on a the desktop instead of in a Web browser.SAP has just developed its first application based entirely on Flex, called Spend Analytics, for aggregating and analyzing spend data, said Matthias Zeller, a senior Adobe product manager, in a presentation at Tech Ed.Spend Analytics includes a tool called Briefing Book, for capturing snapshots of data that can be shared with other managers. Briefing Book is already unusual for an SAP interface, appearing as an actual book rendered virtually on the screen. The tool is usually viewed in a browser, but Adobe has developed a proof-of-concept version with AIR.Zeller showed how users can drag and drop data-views from Briefing Book onto the desktop for offline use -- something not possible in Internet Explorer. And it lets a user work with spend data in Excel, to create a forecast, for example, and then drag that data into Briefing Book. The AIR interface can&#39;t be synchronized with the data in Excel, however.AIR is available today for the Windows and Mac operating systems and will &quot;very soon&quot; be available for Linux, Zeller said. Spend Analytics is available now to some SAP customers and should be generally available in the first quarter next year.Customers looking at the technologies should consider that AIR is still in beta, while Duet has been in the market since June 2006. That said, Adobe and SAP have been working together on interactive forms for SAP since 2002. IBM&#39;s Lotus Notes group also develops client interfaces for SAP.Microsoft and SAP are increasingly rivalrous in the business applications area, and for that reason SAP may find Adobe an easier partner to work with, Red Monk&#39;s Governor said. (RedMonk does consulting work for SAP and Adobe.) In addition, companies might not always find it easy to bring teams of SAP and Microsoft engineers together, said Alan Rickayzen, an SAP senior product manager.&quot;Culturally, the SAP people are totally different from those in the Microsoft Exchange world,&quot; he told Tech Ed attendees. &quot;You have to bring together two groups of people who would not normally talk to each other.&quot;
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Company looks to juice its application server business with a version tuned for smaller organizations.
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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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IBM&#39;s affections for service-oriented architectures deepened today when Big Blue offered details on the impending version 6 release of WebSphere Application Server.
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Vishal Sikka, SAP's chief software architect, describes the company's software-as-a-service approach.
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Blog: The open-source packaged application company, which is releasing the beta of a major product upgrade, is on track to go public, CEO says.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems this week offered a rare glimpse of its upcoming SOA (service-oriented architecture) tool set, called WorkSpace 360, with a demonstration of a prototype tool currently under development. "We're moving towards having the ability to do metadata-driven development," said Bill Roth, vice president of BEA's Workshop Business Unit, during an interview in Singapore. In the future, developers will spend most of their time creating metadata that describes the application and how it behaves, "rather than a bunch of sentences that end with semicolons," he said. "There will always be the need to write code, there will always be the need to do the lower-level stuff. But I think we can do better," Roth said. The heart of WorkSpace 360 is called WorkSpace Central, a set of tools designed for developing and managing applications built usingÂ BEA's upcoming SOA 360 platform. Scheduled to be introduced starting next year, WorkSpace 360 is designed to bring business analysts, architects, developers and IT operations executives together in a shared workspace. WorkSpace 360 will cover BEA's entire product lineup, including a mix of rich-client tools based on Eclipse and Web-based versions. "It starts potentially with AquaLogic and leveraging AquaLogic business-process management. There then will be a piece which we've previously called AquaLogic Composer, which will evolve into a bunch of tools, including a service assembly modeller," Roth said. The service assembly modeller, which is based on the SCA (Service Component Architecture) specification developed by BEA and IBM, gives users a view of how different services are connected and how they communicate, Roth said. The service assembly modeller can scan a set of services available from a registry or a data-services platform and display the connections that exist between them. The result, as demonstrated using a prototype of the tool on Roth's laptop, is a flow chart of available services, including SCA notations for each service. "What you'll be able to do ultimately is [click the] right mouse button on the links and annotate them," Roth said, noting these annotations will be saved to the metadata repository. Developers and other team members will then be able to access the annotations, he said. The service assembly modeller and other WorkSpace 360 tools are expected to be available during the first half of 2007. "Maybe sooner," Roth said.
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By Larry Rulison, Times Union, Albany, N.Y.  Dec. 13--EAST GREENBUSH -- Walking into the new offices of software  developer Autotask Corp. these days is a head-turning experience.
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SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA - The relationship between General Motors Corp. (GM) and the software industry is set for some major changes over the next few years as software becomes a more important component of the automobile, said Anthony Scott, the chief technology officer of GM's Information Systems and Services organization, at a conference of software industry executives Tuesday in Santa Clara, California.
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A preview of the two-way software is expected by mid-February, with a final version by mid-June.
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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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Document management company hopes license change will mean more outside programmer involvement.
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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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(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 software company reveals details of update to its flagship Java development tool, JBuilder 2005, available next month.