BPM-EAI

Some time back I talked about ‘repurposing of technology’ in one of my blogs. Intent there was really to explore the trends of different types of adoption of technology products and question the hypothesis of alignment of the technology usage with the product vendor roadmaps.  That’s more of ‘risk mitigation’ approach since there is considerable threat of lack of support from vendors or lack of future path of the technology if it is not aligned to product utility as lined up by the vendor. Now, that is not a technology issue, it’s business issue and issue of product vendors making good and sustainable business.

Continue reading "Can BPM take over the application development paradigm?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

 Part 1 of 3

Introduction
Industry analysts have repeatedly pointed out that technology is a beguiling proposition and businesses invest expecting to save money or increase revenue, but rarely realize either benefit. 
The rapid investment over the first half of the nervous nineties have placed the CIOs under enormous pressure to  become “Value Creators” and  produce or increase profit from existing company property rather than investing further.  This may be connecting the enterprise's data in new ways to give new insights and improve decisions. However, there is an added mandate to be thrifty and manage internal costs to free dollars to create innovation and value. With highly compressed decision cycles and the need for faster recovery of IT investment, consultants are increasingly being asked for recommendations with ROI cycles in months rather than years.
It is in such uncertain times, that the Enterprise mashup has presented itself as one of the promising technologies for the next decade. Let us take a look at what the mashup is and why do analysts think it will be the growth engine for Enterprise 2.0.

Continue reading "Enterprise Mashups – Recovering value from SOA Investments (Part 1 of 3)" »

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With recent acquisition in BPM and SOA space, it is clear that those vendors who positioned themselves SOA vendor is feeling the pinch without a solid BPM offering. Now that IBM has acquired Lombardi and Progress has acquired Savvion it will be of interest to see how both of these companies going to use these product to position themselves in BPM space. However it is better to leave the roadmap definition with IBM and Progress. However the discussion point out here is; are these vendors responding to market need...

Continue reading "The verdict is out - BPM wins over SOA" »

Posted by Manas Kumar Sarkar at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cloud computing today has become the buzz word in the IT industry and being seen as the big thing to address IT's ROI pain. However being involved with Integration, SOA and BPM for years I am constantly trying to see the value of Cloud in Integration or SOA or BPM space for the customers who already have invested heavily on a stack integration, SOA and BPM platform or on different individual platform to address all these areas.

Continue reading "Delivering Integration Platform as Private cloud - Part 1" »

Posted by Manas Kumar Sarkar at 01:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lately I have had multiple conversations and discussions on the topic of product selection. In such conversations,  again and again I have seen the emphasis on why a product should be used for a given intent because that is what the product vendors have built the product for. Interestingly in one such conversation that I recall, the chief architect wanted to use a product that was meant for complex event processing to actually implement a process management capability. At the same time, there are products actually that do the process flow management that could be used. However, given the requirement of the software capability, both the products can do what is needed to be done. So now question is, in such situation, how appropriate or inappropriate is to use a software (if that meets your requirements) that is not intended to do what you want it to do from product vendor’s perspective.

Straight forward answer just could have been “Don’t misuse the product capability, stick to what the products are designed for”….but is it really that way? How do we approach this situation and make a decision that is not going to lend itself to disaster? That’s when the “repurposing” ideas started taking shape in my mind. In simple terms, repurposing is defining new purpose/usage of the object. In our case, we are talking about inventing/discovering new ‘utility’ of the software. Now, such new utility becomes innovation or misuse will possibly depend on number of factors that we will shortly come to.

Continue reading "Smartly "repurposing" the technology - Innovation or misuse?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In last couple of weeks, I have been reading about virtualization and externalization view-points. While churning the ideas around it in my head, I’m also trying to clearly distinguish between externalization and virtualization. While some principles across these two could be same, I see them as two different design strategies, applicable with different strengths and needs. This blog I’m dedicating to my views on externalization design strategy that I believe represent the ‘deployment’ view of the SOA paradigm in some way.

Continue reading "Externalization based design strategies - another angle for SOA principles?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Trust me, I struggled hard to frame the title of this blog and could not make it any simpler. So you need to stay with me on this, read this blog little carefully so that you really know where I’m going with it. Most of this is based on my exposure to industry for EAI, BPM, SOA, SaaS, Cloud and all that can take you to cutting edge and leave your bleeding (if you are at the receiving end unfortunately) without any first aid. Before I get to core of my blog, I think it’s important that I explain the title of my blog so that we are on the same page. Here is the brief blueprint of the blog title.

Continue reading "Are we growing on a fundamentally doomed DNA for tomorrow's IT eco-system?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Service-oriented architecture (SOA), has become a familiar term for architecture community in the last few years. The paradigm of business users creating application functionality was too exciting to ignore. This was done through building and managing business processes, all hosted on an enterprise service bus – thus disentangling the integration spaghetti forever.

Continue reading "Agile SOA approach" »

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 02:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In this blog segment, we will explore the sourcing options that are available today to the enterprises for strengthening and scaling the ICC service capabilities. Many of the enterprises that might have the ICC organization/set up in some shape or form,  don't really leverage high-maturity sourcing models. Core thinking behind a strategic sourcing model is to find a sourcing arrangement that allows the enterprise to channel their investments and energies into driving business results while bulk of the ‘doing’ and ‘making it happen’ work is sourced from where it makes best sense.

Continue reading "What's next for Integration Competency Centers - Part 6" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another important shift that can be brought into ICC is the clear identification of the value added functions and 'operational' functions. This will help, one to automate, standardize and accelerate the operational functions; secondly, it will give opportunity to channel the investments into thought leadership and innovation effort more toward value added functions. One of the strongest feature of such ICC will be availability of 'self-service' capabilities in many facets of the ICC.

Continue reading ""What's Next" for Integration Competency Centers? - Part 5" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 05:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I believe, in the next-generation view of the ICC, a key area of focus will be  'adoption of lean methods to reduce eco-system fat'.  Let me talk about this ‘eco-system fat’. This is just a terminology that I use to represent the ‘undesired’ elements in the ecosystem of people, processes and technology fabric, similar to ‘undesired’ fat in our body. So even though organizations might have an ICC already in place and operating (in whatever capacity), over period of time processes tend to become difficult and ineffective, people seem to be getting stuck in a pattern of activities and hence become difficult to change etc etc. At the same time, context of what ICC does for the organization changes over period of time, need of the organization changes, environment changes. While all of that changes, things in ICC typically do not change in the same proportion and pace and hence what happens here that a layer of fat starts growing on various capabilities of the organization. By capabilities, I mean processes, knowledge, operations, contribution from staff, technology performance etc. Over a period of time, this fat makes the entire organizational system of the ICC  slower and less effective (in terms of delivering results) which basically means burning lot of dollars to improve anything in the eco-system.

With the current acute economical cost pressures, a shared system like ICC will need to reduce this fat significantly. One of the most successful ways to reduce this fat, (or better called non-performing elements of the ecosystem) is to adopt lean methods.

Continue reading ""What's next" for Integration Competency Centers? - Part 4" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 07:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that ESB has become the defacto standard for integration, all of us at some point of architecture definition experience faced situation where we had to make a choice on what will be the preferred strategy for ESB deployment.

Some of us who come with the baggage of older EAI technology tends to think we can make enterprise scalable & adaptable through distributed ESB. I guess the root cause of this lies in the way older EAI technologies worked where components within EAI layer were so interlinked that a small change within EAI layer meant considerable impacts to other components which lead to longer time to deploy changes.

Continue reading "Distributed ESB or Single ESB - The choice" »

Posted by Manas Kumar Sarkar at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Finally organizations are coming to the terms of reality of multiple-integration platforms in their landscape. There was a time in not so distant past when clients were thinking to have a single middleware, struggling to migrate all the legacy of their enterprise on the so called ‘middleware of strategic choice’ (whatever it would have been for them at that point in time) and spending great deal of time and money in this process. Some managed to do, others got stuck in the time warp of technology evolution. And equally for those who managed to do it as well as who got stuck, time did the trick and soon the definition of the ‘middleware of strategic choice’ changed. It meant, those in the good feeling of ‘done with it’ have to again break their head to move the new legacy to the future platform. Those who were stuck it changed the to-be picture from one middleware to other and they were still stuck in their mess. Now what is happening is slightly more realistic and practical I guess. There are two key trends I can see:

Continue reading "BPM and application eco-system based integration platforms" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past decade the enterprise application integration space has constantly evolved to embrace a very wide range of areas, beginning with various levels of application integration, business process management, web-services and now moving towards the higher echelons of service enablement of enterprise applications. This has made the business of what used to be a ‘middleware practitioner’ a few years ago all the more difficult. While, on the one hand it requires you to keep abreast of a slew of new trends, on the other it also requires you to bury theories that you have come to embrace over the years.

Continue reading "Composite Application Framework: Ready for the big leap" »

Posted by Srinivas Kamadi at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today SOA is the buzzword in the IT industry and organizations are grappling to have a grip on it. The confusion is – is SOA is all about ESB based infrastructure or is it all about approach or both? Organizations adopt all the three approaches and still feel that SOA is not delivering. We keep on breaking our head on getting around all WS-* standards in the name of SOA adoption or exposing application as service using adapters, and forget the true purpose of SOA. We analyzed some of our SOA implementation in our existing clientele, where client did realize the value of SOA. Interestingly, we could identify a common pattern, that reinstated our trust in SOA. The summary of findings follows:

Continue reading "Solving the SOA mystery" »

Posted by Manas Kumar Sarkar at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m not really surprised to see the love-hate relationship between senior executives who own the integration portfolio and the ‘strategy consultants’ in my observation. Its love-hate dynamics because on one side where senior IT leadership strongly believes that a ‘strategic’ view is needed for creating the reliable roadmap for their initiatives, at the same time, there is really no reliable methods today to evaluate the appropriateness of the so called ‘strategy’ deliverables that consultants deliver. From the observation of the legacy in the enterprises I worked with, I find something very fundamental missing in those mysterious and high-end strategy documents: ‘Life’. Lack of life means that these strategies are more or less used as ‘initial requirements’ for certain programs/initiatives and as time progresses, strategies are not updated/maintained in line with changing state of the organization.

Continue reading "Creating Sound and Credible Strategies for your Integration and SOA programs" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 04:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am writing another blog entry on SOA knowing very well the risk of triggering a yawn and ‘not again’ response from readers. In terms of sheer volume of debates and opinions generated, SOA will undoubtedly qualify as the most productive IT topics of recent times. However, the same can not be said about the true impact it had on the IT and business. Moving away from ‘Is SOA good or for real?’ debate, I wanted to touch upon the topic of how to deploy SOA for creating tangible benefits for organization. Offcourse I assume that debate around ‘Is SOA for real?’ has been settled (in favour of SOA. Now you know on which side of divide I belong to). 

Continue reading "Greek Mythology and Challenge of introducing SOA in an organization" »

Posted by Kapil Mishra at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)