Webmethods set to buy Infravio

WebMethods is all set to buy Infravio, a company specializing in Web Services platform, for $38mn. Infravio a 65 member team with 50 members in Chennai, India has moved closer to WebMethods due to its tireless work on SOA.

WebMethods plans to use infravio's flagship product X-Registry, a leading registry/repository platform for governance of SOA products & incorporate into WebMethods fabric.

Off late, WebMethods is picking up various small companies to consolidate its position in SOA based product delivery. The CEO has clearly mentioned this desire while picking up Cerebra & not Infravio.

Will this make WebMethods a leader among the SOA space?? Lets see...

webMethods buys Cerebra Inc

On its course to release v7 of the popular product webMehtods Fabric, webMethods Inc took over a small startup Cerebra Inc. This way wM is moving from its application integration roots to SOA.

Webmethods Fabric's new version will incorporate the semantic metadata management technology with automated discovery capabilities of Cerebra. This way Webmethods is evolving from an enterprise application integration(EAI) vendor to being a provider for SOA & BPM services, according to Marc Breissinger, CTO at Webmethods.

More on it at, SearchWebServices and Computer Business Review.

SOA

Nice definition of SOA by IBM

Service: a repeatable business task.

Service Orientation: Integration those service which are linked & their outputs

Service Oriented Architecture: An architectural design that provides support to service orientation.

India: The IT Destination

As reported in International Herald Tribune:

The IT industry has created the maximum number of career oppurtunities this year, more than any other sector in India. India has harnessed the power of low-cost educated labor to build the off-shoring oppurtunities.

According to one of the reports nearly 42% of the new jobs advertised in the 2 months of this year were by the information technology sector. This survey was done by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India Eco Pulse, or Assocham Eco Pulse, which tracked job insertions in January and February.

India accounted for 44 percent of the $39.6 billion in work that was sent abroad mainly by U.S. and European companies in the year ending March 31, 2005, according to industry lobby-group National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom. Canada got $12.6 billion and China $1.9 billion.

According to a December report by Nasscom and McKinsey, with routine back-office work which is performed from remote locations, India has the potential to get at least half of the $110 billion worth of global outsourcing contracts by 2010.

Also, according to one of the surveys by Assocham, the software sector is supposed to become a $60 billion industry by 2010, providing employment to nearly 2.2 mn people directly & about 6 mn indirectly.

Web 2.0 Hurrah !! or Hype !!

Indeed, Web 2.0 is a buzzword now. But what in the world is it & why do we need it ??

First thing first, its not just a one-off technology available of the shelf or downloadable, its just a tech movement.

Who is the world is running this movement?Run by massive participation of free minded people. It just exploded on its own & there was no one telling you about it. Its just exciting + free + accessible.

It was termed by few Open Source guys & it just became popular.

It doesn't have a business model & that is a business-mdel. Its just an innovation & so it does not have to have a business model.

Web 2.0 features Google AdSense, Flickr, BitTorrent, Napster, Wikipedia, blogging, services, syndication & much more. And Google has become a standard bearer for Web 2.0 as Netscape was a standard for Web 1.0.

Great work guys..

Coding vs. Configuring

Coding or configuring !! Am I coding ?? No, now its not coding but configuring. This has been a huge concept to sell, explaining people that in the integration tools, what matters is configuring, we are not coding now.

Probably for the development folks, configuring seems like working on hardware tools, but for the middleware folks, its all about, how good do they configure & not how good that code !! Just that its difficult to assimilate the information that is needed to configure.

Integration Architecture

Popularity of integrations owes largely to the current focus by companies on corporate cost control. So the integration efforts is driven by the need to automate various business process that could be within or outside the enterprise. Just as we need some sort of architecture to build a house, machinery, the same way there comes the need to formulate better architecture to realise their objective for the enterprise as well. Integration Architecture broadly defined as disciplined approach to relate models of complex business processes within/outside the enterprise. Couple of integration architecture have been presented below:

Bus Architecture


1. A de-centralised architecture.
2. Network BUS acts as a message carrier.
3. Communication pattern is peer-peer.
4. Messages queued up by publisher.





This particular architecture is used in TIBCO.

Hubble-Spoke Architecture

1. It’s a centralised architecture.
2. Hub acts as a server & all messages flow through hub.
3. Communication pattern is Pubslish-Server & Server-Subscriber..
4. Messages queued up in the server.











This architecture is used by Webmethods.

Every integration solutions in someway or the other needs to make optimal use of the basic technologies like messaging, routing, translation, transformation, but architecture enables enterprises to implement it strategically & tactically. This helps in minimizing costs by reusing the components as well.

Good architecture will enable the solutions to be plugged in to the infrastructure flexibly. So building an overall architecture is an investment in itself.

Integration Career Basics

Aiming for career in Integration Tech.

If you are planning a career shift to Integration Technology, make sure you have these in place. Some handy tips that might make your move smooth.

1. First make sure you have a solid understanding in the tool set. You cannot make it to the next level without understanding the tools for EAI.

2. Study OOA/OOD and UML and be able to understand/produce design deliverables with UML.

3. Collect a library of design patterns from books and past projects in other technologies. Better to have some understanding of patterns@work.

4. Develop your written and verbal skills by looking for opportunities to produce design deliverables. This might help you in the long run.

5. Look for opportunities to act as a technical lead always seeking to lead bigger efforts to the point where you can lead large projects (from a technical perspective). People skills, negotiation and communication are critical at any step.

There are some good reading, try to have a look at those books.

Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions by Gregor Hohpe, Bobby Woolf.

Enterprise Service Bus by David Chappell.

Next Generation Application Integration: From Simple Information to Web Services by David S. Linthicum.

Enterprise SOA : Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices by Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke, Dirk Slama.

Web Services by Gustavo Alonso, Fabio Casati, Harumi Kuno, Vijay Machiraj.

What am I doing offlate ??

Well, I have been into reading in the recent weeks & the book I delved into was 'The Other Side of Me" by Sidney Sheldon.

The book covers Sidney's journey from the day he was to commit suicide & how things changed after his talks with his father as they went out for a walk.

Like the words, “You don’t know what can happen tomorrow. Life is like a novel, isn’t it? It’s filled with suspense. You have no idea what’s going to happen until you turn the page.”

Then it talked about his life then on & how he struggled working during the pre & post WWII, as a barker to a script reader to a writer & then producer/director in Hollywood & his journey from the Broadway plays to MGM, Paramount.

He has written about his encounters with the greats like Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatara & likes & then his transition to writing those great novels.

Pretty good reading.

Next I have started with 'The monk who sold his Ferrari' by Robin Sharma.

Reading this.

Sun unveils new SOA platform, ESB

Everyone's just kind of putting the ESB label on everything these days, so what's new about Sun...

Sun Microsystems Inc. officially entered the enterprise service bus (ESB) space today, rolling out its first upgrade of the former SeeBeyond Inc. messaging middleware, which it acquired sometime ago and tying it together with Sun's portal, application server, Web server and development studio offerings as part of a single platform.

The platform, called the Composite Application Platform, will be available at the end of March, with $100 per employee per year subscription for those companies that wish to add services and support and free for you.

Business process management, workflow and data transformation are also part of the ESB suite.

Sun has already launched what it calls the Open ESB community. That group so far has concentrated on working with the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification, but Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for SOA and integration platforms at Sun, noted that the Business Process Execution Language engine will be the first component of the Java ESB Suite to submit its code to Open ESB, probably around the time that the JavaOne conference in May. He added that the SeeBeyond product, now called the Sun Java ESB Suite, offers Java Messaging Service-based distributed agents that can operate with no communications hub required.

Per Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Sterling, Va.-based Current Analysis Inc. "It depends on what you define as an ESB, everyone's just kind of putting the ESB label on everything these days."

He noted that Sun's pricing has given the SeeBeyond product a chance to gain traction outside the "high-end" niche it used to target.

But at this time its too early to say that this ESB will have more impact on others already into business. But the part to note is Sun is behind this and it is free, that might propel few enterprises to atleast have a look at it.

So still not sure how it might impact the businesses.

10 Golden Powerpoint Rules

A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.
Came across this interesting piece of information on Rajesh Jain's weblog


If you are approaching a venture capitalist, your 10 slides could have the following points:
1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

Guess What !!!

Oracle has launched its own middleware. Initially it was launched as Oralce Middleware & now re-christened to Oracle Fusion.

Oracle defines the product as 'hot-pluggable'.
Launch of this product will defnitely affect the Integration world of today, which boast of few big players. Webmethods & Tibco for an instance.

Will keep posted on the developments of this new product & the diff. vis-a-vis to other players.