Oracle links business process analysis, SOA
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Closed-loop support allows for analyst and IT collaboration as Oracle pledges tighter alignment between development stages.
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(InfoWorld) - WebMethods on Monday will roll out the webMethods Fabric 7.0 suite for business process integration and SOA, adding a registry, metadata management and an AJAX developer tool. The suite keys in on business process management and productivity improvements, the company said. Included in Version 7.0 are component products such as webMethods Designer, which features an Eclipse-based development environment for modeling and managing business processes. WebMethods Designer offers a drag-and-drop composition tool for codeless development of AJAX-based composite applications. "[Designer] enables business analysts and developers to cooperatively design and build business process models from the services that are available within the SOA," said Marc Breissinger, webMethods chief technology officer. WebMethods Designer is part of webMethods for BPM, a business process management product that provides for the lifecycle of process development and management, the company said. In Version 7.0, webMethods for BPM features business rules management from Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor and a searchable metadata library derived from Cerebra assets. WebMethods bought Cerebra assets in August. The library utilizes Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language to establish relationships between IT assets, including services, process models, business rules and documents. This lets users find the right asset for a specific application. WebMethods Fabric 7.0 also adds webMethods Infravio X-Registry, serving as a service repository and offering governance capabilities for exposed services. Also featured is webMethods Infravio X-Broker, providing runtime monitoring, mediation and management of Web services in an SOA. Infravio was acquired by webMethods in September. Another highlight in the suite is webMethods Optimize, for business activity monitoring (BAM). It is being enhanced in Version 7.0 with richer business visualization, the company said. "[Optimize] allows you to analyze how well your processes are running in your production environment and also predict when those processes will behave abnormally," Breissinger said. With Fabric 7.0, webMethods unifies SOA, BPM and BAM, an analyst said. "Fabric 7.0 is impressive because the integration, SOA, BPM, and BAM tools seem to hang together as a usable suite," said analyst Bill Swanton, vice president of research at AMR Research, in an e-mail. "Most other vendors are either offering only part of this stack or are still in the process of integrating the various companies they acquired. There is a focus on the BPM capabilities, which is the real source of value in SOA." Enterprise service bus capabilities featured as part of webMethods Enterprise Services Platform will not be upgraded to the 7.0 release of Fabric until next summer. That product will offer extended support for specifications such as SOAP 1.2. In the meantime, users can deploy the new products in the suite with the existing Version 6.5 of Enterprise Services Platform. Prices for a single product in the suite begin at approximately $100,000.
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(InfoWorld) - Focusing on the global architecture of SOA, IBM on Tuesday is introducing IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform 7.0 for the desktop. The product unveiling features a multitude of integrated products tweaked to the needs of SOA. With the rollout, IBM reasons enterprises need tools to visualize an architecture that has composite applications residing in multiple locations, said Dave Locke, director of offerings marketing at IBM Rational. SOA testing also is a critical component. "We're empowering the A in SOA," Locke said. "We've added functionality to help line-of-business people communicate more effectively with the IT people, so that IT can understand what to implement, and help the implementers, if you will, be more efficient and work as a geographically distributed team," Locke said. IBM's SOA tool rollout addresses the process side of development, said analyst Bola Rotibi of Ovum. "It's about looking at the development process within the context of the business," she said. "It's not just bring tools out for the sake of tools." As part of the rollout, Rational Unified Process, which provides process guidance, now will cover SOA governance. IBM envisions governance as understanding what teams are doing in an SOA as well as assisting with regulatory compliance.Â  The 7.0 desktop tools, which are based on the Eclipse platform, complement previously released server-side products such as IBM Rational ClearQuest 7.0. Among the tools being upgraded, all bearing the name IBM Rational at the beginning, include: * Application Developer for WebSphere Software, featuring an IDE for developing SOA, Java and portal applications. * Software Architect, for model-driven development of SOA, J2EE and portal applications. New models are featured for SOA. * Software Modeler, a visual modeling tool for architects, systems analysts and designers to ensure that specifications, architectures and designs are clearly defined. It is based on Unified Modeling Language 2.1. * Systems Developer, a systems design and development tool for building hardware and software systems. This product adds SysML (Systems Modeling Language) support. * Functional Tester, for functional and regression testing. * Functional Tester Plus, for teams to test applications. * Manual Tester, for manual test authoring and execution. * Professional Bundle, featuring desktop tools for constructing and testing applications for Windows and Linux and testing of .Net applications. * Data and Application Modeling Bundle, featuring Data Architect and Software Modeler. Other elements of the rollout include integration between Rational team and desktop products to accommodate SOA. IBM Rational RequisitePro, for requirements management, has been integrated with WebSphere Business Modeler, enabling requirements to be captured within a model. RequisitePro also integrates with Software Architect, which visualizes an architecture including business workflow. Also, a Rational Method Composer Plug-in allows for integration with SOA governance infrastructure. IBM with the desktop tools is extending support for integrating components from SAP, Siebel, and Oracle applications as well. This support is being added to the Performance Tester and Functional Tester products in the IBM Rational line. As part of the rollout, IBM is announcing availability of IBM Rational Elite Support for Eclipse, a previously detailed program providing enterprise-level support for the Eclipse open source development framework. IBM's 7.0 tools are available now, except for Performance Tester, which ships in the first quarter of 2007.
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InfoWorld - Oracle is making the whole of its TopLink Java persistence framework freely available as part of the vendor&#39;s increased involvement in the open-source development tools Eclipse Foundation community, the company announced Tuesday.
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Part 2 in our series on business process execution In the last column in this series, we looked at the general concept of business process management with respect to SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) based systems. In particular, we reviewed BPEL (the Business Process Execution Language) and what it offers and at some of the extensions for BPEL.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - IBM showed off research efforts in a number of areas, including SOA, wikis, and mashups, at its IBM Silicon Valley Lab on Wednesday afternoon. Technologies on display leveraged concepts like social networking, collaboration, and Web 2.0. Security and healthcare systems also were on display. The 26 projects viewed were in various stages of development, ranging from incubation to actual availability. In the SOA area, IBM's Request Driven Provisioning technology provides a framework to offer business services in an SOA. It combines automated systems with business processes for the purpose of end-to-end IT service delivery. Services are provisioned based on user requirements, said Willy Chiu, IBM vice president for High Performance On Demand Solutions in the company's Software Group. "What we're doing is allowing a business unit to define its requirements for a complete SOA system that would have taken months to install and now it takes hours," said Chiu. The technology is available as a service offering that leverages IBM's WebSphere, Tivoli, Rational, and other product lines. DB2 provides for data storage. Also in SOA, IBM touted Sonoma, which is a Web-based capacity planning tool. To be offered through a Saas (software as a service) model, it will enable customers to size SOA-based workloads to meet future performance and scalability requirements. Sonoma is the latest version of the company's OPERA (On Demand Performance Advisor) tool for capacity planning. Sonoma serves a subset of RDP for SOA planning only and is configured as a Web service, Chiu said. He stressed that IBM was not in the application space. "Our job is to enable applications," said Chiu. IBM brought customer Jeremy King, eBay's vice president of engineering and application architecture, onstage to tout eBayâs collaboration with IBM. Noting eBay's 212,000,000 registered users and its massive infrastructure, King said that if eBay were a country, it would be the world's fifth largest, behind China, India, the United States, and Indonesia. King cited WebSphere as being of particular usefulness at eBay. "In the end, what really made the difference was IBM's understanding of the service that we would need," King said. After discussions by IBM executives, attendees were free to check out the various research efforts. Projects demonstrated under the umbrella of social networking, collaboration, and Web 2.0 included: Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Information Factory, a portal-based system for organizing feedback from customers. Wikis, blogs, social networking, and tagging tools are used to accelerate collaboration. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Koala, a social engineering effort allowing non-programmers to easily automate processes on the Web in a collaborative environment using wiki-like collaborative authoring and semantic Web annotation. Reusable procedures can be developed and reused by recording keystrokes and clicks as a user completes a task. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Fringe, transforming IBM's internal directory into a corporate social networking site. Activities and relationships can be organized around people and experiments with the application of social networking and tagging principles. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  QEDwiki (quick and easily done wiki), an enterprise mashup tool that makes it easy for non-technical persons to build Web-based applications that blend company data with outside Web services. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Mashups for the Enterprise, which are applications developed to solve a situational business problem by integrating Internet/intranet data and services using lightweight Web 2.0 technologies. IBM Travel Maps is an example of this concept. In the category of Information On-Demand, IBM showed the following technologies: Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Unified WebClient for IBM Content Management, leveraging technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), Dojo and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to provide a unified, visually appealing client for IBM Content Management offerings. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Omnifind Yahoo! Edition, an enterprise search product intended to help eliminate financial and technology barriers to intranet and Web search. It features Web search services powered by Yahoo. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Business Insights Workbench, identifying trends and patterns from a customer's internal and external content using advanced text analytics on structured and unstructured information. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Intelligent Document Gateway, providing customized business logic in support of document-centric business processes. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ShapeWriter, providing a new way of writing text and sending commands on computing and communications devices. It uses multi-channel pattern recognition and lexical information to interpret a user's hand drawing on a graphical keyboard. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, which uses autonomic policy-based protocols to manage heterogeneous storage infrastructures from a single point of control. In the security arena, IBM showed: Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Smart Surveillance System, for data analysis of video sequences. Benefits include real-time alarms to anticipate incidents by identifying suspicious behaviors as well as enhanced forensic capabilities and situational awareness of a location. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  IDemix, or IBM Identity Mixer, which masks information on the Web by making transactions anonymous. Digital identities are hidden, and an additional layer of protection is provided against identity theft. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Assured eXecution Environment, preserving the integrity of personal computers by ensuring that only approved programs are executed. Unwanted automated changes to system configurations also are prevented. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Cancelable Bometrics, which uses an algorithm to protect against theft of biometric data such as a fingerprint. The actual fingerprint is concealed by using a distorted version of it. Consumer technologies included: Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Virtual Worlds, enhancing the retail customer experience using virtual 3D technologies. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  FonePal, using cross-device integration to solve voice menu navigation problems. Instant messaging is used to deliver a visual version of a phone menu to a computer screen. A user could then scan choices and make a selection instead of sifting through menus. Â·Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  MASTOR, or Multilngual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator, providing bidirectional speech-to-speech translation for communication in different languages. Persons not speaking the same language could communicate.
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Integration is a key factor with any large ERP implementation and ongoing maintenance, and Oracle Corp. is catching on. At its London-based OpenWorld event this week Oracle announced better integration between
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Hosted CRM company introduces a new framework for linking analysis tools to its applications.Image: Salesforce dashboard
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InfoWorld - Oracle is announcing Wednesday an enhanced version of its business process analysis software that enhances collaboration between process modelers and implementers.
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BEA has entered the event-driven architecture market with a product geared for SOA in Java environments.
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BEA Systems on Thursday is unveiling a free Web-based tool to measure a customerâs âbaselineâ for pursuing an SOA (service-oriented architecture), and also is bolstering professional service offerings.
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(InfoWorld) - As Oracle executives patted themselves on the back for their company's reporting another strong financial quarter, they also couldn't resist having a go at prime applications rival SAP. "Oracle had another very strong quarter," Safra Catz, co-president and chief financial officer at Oracle, said Tuesday during a conference call with analysts to discuss the vendor's fiscal 2007Â first-quarter results. "We had our strongest first-quarter license growth in more than five years by gaining market share," she added. Charles Phillips, co-president of Oracle, said the company had won 88 deals going head-to-head with SAP during the quarter, including customer wins with Electrolux, Lockheed Martin, and U.S. Steel. Some of the business is what he termed "winbacks" of business Oracle had previously lost to SAP, including a strategic win at Wal-Mart Stores. In recent months, the bitterÂ competitive back-and-forthÂ between Oracle and SAP has reached a crescendo. Oracle jumped on SAP's July announcement ofÂ lower than expected salesÂ and cited it as proof that the applications vendor's growth had stalled. SAP retorted that the results were a slight blip and not indicative of a major issue with its performance, which it believes remains strong. Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive officer, cites two factors that he believes are working in Oracle's favor over SAP: its Java-based middleware and its aggressive focus on getting industry-specific expertise and products through acquisitions. Ellison claimed that Oracle's Fusion middleware is "years ahead" of SAP's NetWeaver integration platform. "NetWeaver is still relatively new and still incomplete," he said. Oracle's so-called "hot pluggable" or component-based Fusion middleware strategy is paying off, Phillips said. Typically, the company sells one or two of its middleware components into a customer account with the hope that over time that customer will expand their use of Oracle's middleware. Turning to applications, Ellison criticized SAP's recent decision toÂ retain the current versionÂ of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, mySAP ERP 2005, through 2010 and provide new functionality through regularly issued optional enhancement packages. "SAP has delayed the next release of its applications until 2010," he said. "They'll be two full years behind our Fusion release." Oracle is working on a new suite of enterprise applications, known as Project Fusion, which is due out in 2008. By contrast, SAP executives have positioned the company's move to a more modular approach to product upgrades as being driven by customers' demands to pick and choose functionality. This quarter will be the last time Oracle provides separate database and middleware growth figures, Catz said. In the first quarter, database revenue grew 10 percent, while middleware rose 56 percent. In future, Oracle will adopt the practice of IBM and Microsoft and not break out those sales, she said. Looking to the second quarter, Catz expects Oracle's net income to grow by between 13 percent and 17 percent as revenue increases by 22 to 24 percent. She forecast earnings per share (EPS) of $0.22. Those predictions don't take into account any specific charges likely to occur in the quarter.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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(InfoWorld) - BEA jumped ahead of the pack last week, announcing the industryâs first native SOA platform, SOA 360. But the company left enough unanswered questions about the new platform to prompt one analyst to say thereâs still much explaining to do. SOA 360 spans three BEA product families: Tuxedo, WebLogic, and AquaLogic and providesÂ  a âunifying methodologyâ for modeling, creating, developing, and deploying an SOA application using all of BEAâs SOA products, said Rob Levy, executive vice president and CTO of BEA. SOA 360 features a collaborative tooling environment, called WorkSpace 360, and a common software architecture, dubbed mSA (microServices Architecture), that is based on SOA and the concept of a services network. âI think the industry is looking for an approach to SOA that is different,âÂ  CEO Alfred Chuang said, noting that BEA wants to approach SOA with a process, not just a product. WorkSpace 360 allows users with different roles â such as business analyst, enterprise architect, and developer â to collaborate. mSA is an event-driven architecture that uses notification services to publish and discover modular components or âmicroServices.â mSA will use industry protocols and standards such as OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative), SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, WS-Security, and SAML and will deliver backplane components, application frameworks, as well as activity, presentation, and infrastructure services. BEA wants all its products to use mSA by the end of 2008. BEA revealed in March that it would make its WebLogic Server application server modular. The company now believes this approach can work for all its products, said Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA tools unit. âModularization will be a key design point for us, and ultimately [mSA] will have an effect across all of our products,â Roth said. But Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis, found BEAâs presentations âvagueâ about details such as what makes something mSA-enabled.Â  âThereâs just too many unanswered questions right now,â Willett 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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IBM has released a series of SOA products for integrating software applications and improving business processes, and said more customers now understand the SOA concept.
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InfoWorld - Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE.
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(InfoWorld) - AmberPoint on Tuesday will extend its Web services and SOA management system to SAP's NetWeaver business process platform and services based on the ABAP (Advanced Business Application Program) programming language. Through a Development Cooperation Agreement, AmberPoint SOA Management System will provide performance analysis and debugging in the application development stage, quality assurance during staging, and application-level visibility, said Ed Horst, vice president of marketing at AmberPoint. With SAP getting ready to release application components as Web services, AmberPoint is looking to offer management of SAP-based Web services and visibility into ABAP as well, Horst said. "This [arrangement] provides management for those services and a heterogeneous environment around it," Horst said. Organizations using Web services running on NetWeaver will have out-of-the-box integration capabilities with the AmberPoint management platform. Visibility and control will be provided across heterogeneous application networks, including Java and ABAP Web services on NetWeaver. "The major benefit [of the integration] is SOA has lots of pieces to it and SAP will be large part of the landscape, and our job -- our mandate -- is to provide out-of-the-box management for as much of the SOA environment as possible," Horst said. The company's AmberPoint for SAP package will provide an interface between AmberPoint and SAP. With the AmberPoint deal, SAP gets visibility into the larger SOA environment, said analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. The deal represents a big win for AmberPoint because SAP traditionally never makes deals with little companies, Manes said. SAP likely has been finding AmberPoint in accounts and is getting word from customers, she said. "Custom integration between AmberPoint and NetWeaver will ensure a turnkey SOA management solution for the SAP environment that seamlessly integrates with other SOA environments," Manes said. "I see no downside to this partnership for AmberPoint, SAP, or their respective customers," Manes said. AmberPoint can interface with NetWeaver now; an extension for ABAP is due by the end of 2006. AmberPoint's announcement is being made at the SAP TechEd '06 conference in Las Vegas. SAP officials could not be reached for comment on Monday. InfoWorldEditor-at-Large Eric Knorr contributed to this report
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Work hard for the money IBM today rolled out 23 updated product and 11 professional services offerings for service oriented architectures (SOAs). Some use technology from recent and recent-ish acquisitions, Webify, BuildForge and Bowstreet.â¦