Brij Singh's Random Musings

More BPM support from BEA

More business process management support coming from BEA. Its a natural strategy for them to move away from increasingly commoditized plumbing business -

"Project Sierra will include "patterns and best practices," or technical guidelines on how to build services oriented applications. The company will also be enhancing its WebLogic Workshop development tool with more so-called business process management capabilities, Willis said.

Business process management systems provide business analysts with visualization tools to model a business process and to monitor a business work flow. BEA currently sells some business process management tools as part of its WebLogic Integration product line. "

Peoplesoft cutting TCO by 75%

Craig Conway, CEO of Peoplesoft at CeBIT -

"PeopleSoft would reduce the total cost of ownership of its software by 75 percent, admitting enterprise software is still too complicated to install and too expensive to maintain "

How did he come up with this number ?

Pramod Haque on services model

Pramod Haque on the emerging services model and its link to India -

“Customers no longer want to pay high licensing fees upfront, they want a pay-as-you-use payment model. This application service provider model will come to the software services sector, too,

We are looking at leveraging the offshore model for our portfolio companies. As it is, we don’t fund any company now which does not have an offshore or outsourcing component in them”

This will form the basis for next generation of innovation in the services sector - building ASP type variable costing with tightly matched SLA metrics to drive short-cycle services projects.

The future is bright for complexity

"The future is bright for complexity." - David Seuss

From the same presentation -

"The ultimate future - Personal Search Engine
- Setup your personal content set from all the sources you know about as a result of your professional life
- Searches that contentset just for you !"

Thinking about it this definitely makes, Google will have tough time adapting the result set to the unique user context (there's a model of generalization) and thats where specialized/personalized search engines will be more effective.

I would love to see a personalized search engine which builds out a private Google based on three user inputs -
resume (professional associations and meta-data for skill/technology proficiency)
bookmarks (professional and personal interest destinations)
and blog (professional and personal interest discussions)

Oblix buying Confluent

Looselycoupled on reasons why Oblix choose Confluent :

Oblix says enterprises get control of identity management before they begin managing web services. It bought Confluent so it can offer both:

-Customers invariably have ID management installed before they look at managing services
-Oblix is gambling that its 130+ customers will be happy to buy Confluent's offering
-Confluent has just 4 live customers. Two-thirds of its staff are to leave

This is continuation of the web services management vendors consolidation. Next in line should be WestGlobal, Infravio and Amberpoint

Integration that defies EAI convention

EAI versus Enterprise Service Bus

"..the emergence of service-oriented integration has introduced a far more efficient, flexible and low-cost approach. It obviates the need for complex integration adapters and a proprietary messaging hub through the use of web services standards such as SOAP for document recognition; XML standards such as XSLT for transformation; and asynchronous messaging standards such as JMS (Java Message Service). It allows applications to participate in processes without having to be tightly coupled together, enhancing agility and reusability. And it is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper to implement than EAI. "

Though it would be interesting to analyze what is the range of "order of magnitude" advantage we are anticipating with ESB. As the building blocks for integration are increasingly reaching zero cost from the development side, total integration cost will eventually come to match the labor cost involved in actually tying the systems together. Open source apis such as Apache Axis will make the integration projects much cheaper to execute if not that easier.