BEA Systems' Guardian Offers Pre-emptive Support -- eChannelLine.com
December 22, 2006 -- BEA Systems Inc. plans to release its BEA Guardian evaluation version followed by a general availability release. Guardian represents a departure from the traditional support model employed by the enterprise software industry and is designed to reduce the cost of reactive and proactive support services for organizations, officials said. Stuart Charlton, head enterprise architect for BEA Systems Canada, said his company is offering pre-emptive support as a means of analyzing the customer's computing environment and comparing it to BEA's knowledge base. The end result is Guardian is designed to detect problems before they occur and in turn help lower daily IT operational costs.

BEA Systems' Guardian Offers Pre-Emptive Support -- eChannelLine.ca
December 22, 2006 -- BEA Systems Inc. plans to release its BEA Guardian evaluation version followed by a general availability release. Guardian takes support services from a traditional break-fix model to a pre-emptive model, designed to help customers running business critical applications, given high availability is no longer a strategic goal but a tactical necessity in the modern world. "We're seeing a drive to reduce the diagnosis and time to resolution costs in the enterprise data centre," said Stuart Charlton, head enterprise architect for BEA Systems Canada. "This is another way of capturing knowledge in a machine-readable form and help resolve issues before they become problems."
 

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JBoss News

Red Hat 3Q Profit Drops But Beats Wall Street Expectations -- San Jose Mercury News.com
December 22, 2006 -- Stock-compensation expenses cut into profits for the second consecutive quarter for Red Hat Inc., but the company again exceeded analysts' expectations. The company's second-quarter profit dropped 34 percent on stock-compensation expenses. But company shares surged nearly 14 percent in after-hours trading Thursday. "Our brand and our reputation is world-recognized," Red Hat Chairman Matthew Szulik said after markets closed. "The continued innovation in the next quarter will allow us to compete successfully."

Red Hat Earnings Shrug Off Oracle Threat -- ZDNet.com
December 21, 2006 -- Red Hat's net income subsided in its most recent quarter, but revenue increased as the Linux seller shrugged off the arrival of Oracle as a direct competitor. For the quarter ended November 30, the company's net income was $15.5 million, down 37 percent compared with the same period a year ago. But its revenue increased 45 percent to $105.8 million. The net income of 14 cents per share, excluding various charges like stock option expenses, beat the average expectation of 12 cents per share predicted by analysts surveyed by First Call. "It looks like the world is not coming to an end for you guys after all," said Merrill Lynch analyst Kash Rangan shortly afterward.

Customer Backlash Against Oracle's Buggy Linux Product? -- SeekingAlpha.com
December 22, 2006 -- Mark Murphy, an analyst for First Albany, asked "So, I guess the question is, is it realistic to think that Oracle is just going to ride this experiment into the ground, or would you expect them to possibly withdraw their offering from the marketplace?" Matthew Szulik, CEO Red Hat, responded "we're focused on the success of our customers. We are focused on expanding the opportunity for open source software through initiatives like OLPC with RHEL 5, RHN 2.0, the expanding JBoss middleware stack, and I have to be frank with you, I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about the operational issues and the Oracle operating system product."
 

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IBM News

Building The SOA Assembly Line -- RedOrbit.com
December 22, 2006 -- RQI is just one of a hundred such reusable SOA components that IBM has built and that are now being used to build new solutions from the ground up for each client. The components are part of a larger effort at IBM to leverage the company's deep application development and IT services expertise to create a storehouse of reusable assets that can be used with customers of all stripes. "What we are really doing by building reusable assets is allowing customers to build their solutions that much quicker and become very flexible," says Brett MacIntyre, IBM's vice president for Composite Services Development.

 
SAP News

SAP Fills Out 2007 Agenda -- InternetNews.com
December 22, 2006 -- At the top of SAP's agenda is the SOA initiative, its new Duet software for Microsoft Office users, and an enterprise search service still in development. SAP's answer is to provide a standard platform based on its NetWeaver software on which to allow customers, ISVs, and others innovate. While most platform vendors let customers innovate to some degree, analyst Joshua Greenbaum credits SAP for running more forcefully with the idea. "Some of SAP's competitors are known for predatory partnerships, where you also have to compete with them, and I think SAP used to be more like that too," Greenbaum, who is with Enterprise Applications Consulting, told internetnews.com.
 

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Microsoft News

Key Developer Quits Novell Over Microsoft Patent Pact -- eWeek.com
December 21, 2006 -- Jeremy Allison, a leading Samba developer and well-known open-source speaker, has decided to leave Novell because of his objections to the Microsoft/Novell patent agreement. In his public letter of resignation, Allison said, "This has been a very difficult decision, but one I feel I have no choice but to make. My main issue with this deal is I believe that even if it does not violate the letter of the license it violates the intent of the GPL license the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally."
 

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Industry News

Wall Street Beat: The Year Ahead -- InfoWorld.com
December 22, 2006 -- Get set for some surprises. With 12 months of moderate expansion expected in the global IT arena, vendors will have to get creative in 2007 to maintain the kind of growth investors want. Tech companies, however, are under pressure. Worldwide IT spending will increase by 6.6 percent in 2007, according to IDC. This is slightly better than the 2006 increase of 6.3 percent but nowhere near the double-digit levels of the dot-com boom. "You will see major vendors performing unnatural acts," quipped Frank Gens, senior vice president of research at IDC.
 

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Blog Monitoring

LEGO Blocks And SOA: Is The Singularity Near? -- ZDNet.com
December 21, 2006 -- Joe McKendrick questions whether LEGOs are becoming more like our IT systems, versus the other way around.

Auto-Generated Services Okay In Model-Driven SOA -- ZDNet.com
December 21, 2006 -- Joe McKendrick writes about how auto-generating service does not invalidate reuse or SOA: the secret sauce and key IP for businesses is the data/business models.

C With NetBeans On Linux ... Check It Out! -- Weblogs.Java.net
December 21, 2006 -- Joerg Plewe writes about how JDK6, NetBeans 5.5 and the new C/C++ development pack is smooth and very user friendly.

BEA Systems Maintains High Ranking In Application Server Software Platform Market In Asia Pacific -- Egoboss.com
December 21, 2006 -- (BEA MENTION) -- Carl Griffith writes about how BEA is a leader in the Application Server Software Platform market in Asia-Pacific region and its SOA has risen to the forefront.

 

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Feature Story

The Traditional ESB Gets Weaved Into An SOA Fabric -- SearchWebServices.com
December 21, 2006 -- In a sign of how quickly things change, the "traditional" enterprise service bus is undergoing an evolution to stay current with the demands of the service-oriented architecture, morphing from an integration/messaging tool to an infrastructure offering that includes tools for business process management (BPM) and governance, analysts say.

The introduction this week of webMethods Fabric 7.0 indicates how much the ESB product category has grown from its original integration backbone role.

"The thing that we see in webMethods Fabric 7.0 is a really straightforward development environment for building composite applications in an SOA fashion," said Bill Swanton, vice president of research for AMR Research, Inc. He said the new product integrates all the tools historically linked to integration including the original enterprise application integration (EAI) technology as well as ESB, but now includes BPM, business activity monitoring (BAM), registry/repository and governance capabilities.

Outmoded as EAI may appear to be in an SOA world, it is still important to support the legacy technology, which is still in place in many corporations, said Peter S. Kastner, vice president enterprise integration for the Aberdeen Group.

"We found almost nobody who is willing to abandon their investments in EAI just to buy an ESB to say that they own one," he said. He cited webMethods as an original EAI company that has successfully made the transition into the SOA world while providing a bridge back to old integration technology. His research of IT departments this year disproved his own belief that the old integration vendors were doomed.

"My hypothesis going into the year was that the EAI companies would take it on the chin," Kastner said. "The reality is the vast majority of their customers are fairly easily connecting SOA via adapters to their EAI fabric or infrastructure."

Kastner and Swanton agree that adding the newer technology, especially BPM, is important to the evolution of the ESB technology webMethods is packaging under its Fabric brand.

Swanton said many of the other ESB vendors are still trying to put together a comprehensive toolset that will serve the needs of both business analysts and developers. The overall ESB technology is moving to include BPM so that developers can work with business analysts on the applications for the business processes, he said.

The BPM technology is important, Kastner said, because based on his research big business is embracing it in a big way. "We're seeing at this point that roughly 50 percent of the Global 5000 are actively engaged in business process management development." He noted that webMethods is not alone in integrating BPM into its ESB technology.

"You should note that Tibco has invested heavily in BPM over the last several years," he said. "Fiorano also beefed up their ESB product significantly in the BPM space in the last six months."

ESB evolution requires a new definition and perhaps even a new name, said Marc Breissinger, CTO at webMethods Inc., noting that the industry is beginning to embrace the term "fabric," which his company and some others use in their product branding.

From webMethod's point of view, the CTO said, the definition of ESB has expanded from a set of categorical definitions of features and functionality to a general category of technology that solves business problems.

"The focus of webMethods Fabric 7.0 coming out this week has to do with the evolution of business process management systems in the context of SOA and classic integration scenarios," Breissinger said. "What we have seen is a convergence of the straight-through processing style automated BPM along with the more human-centric approaches to business process management, or what is commonly referred to as workflow, into a coherent whole, along with business activity monitoring that also needs to be delivered by the BPMS, as well as UI development."

The term fabric has become the umbrella for all the added tools and technologies. It is also used by the Burton Group, which uses terms such as middleware fabric and Web services fabric in discussing application integration using the service-oriented approach.

Breissinger said he isn't wild about the fabric terminology, but it appears to be the best way to describe the holistic approach to combining ESB with BPM and other technology for measuring, modeling and implementing SOA.

"In the past before we got into the BPM space, we were talking about integration backbones," the webMethods' CTO said in providing a brief history of terms. "Then we talked about services buses. In a sense the fabric is the same concept taken one step further to include the business process management and the analytics and the composite application development capabilities to give you that full system building infrastructure versus a pure bus or backbone."