Publicly Speaking

Any PR pro will tell you that one of the most powerful tools you can have to support a good PR program is a credible, articulate spokesperson. I’m pretty lucky in that I don’t just have one, or even two people like I’ve just described. IONA is made up of really talented, really smart people, several of whom I can rely on to speak to the media (sometimes at a moments notice), tell our story and explain why the activities and technologies in which IONA is involved is relevant to the “real world.” I’m also lucky that I have access to spokespeople who are often times sought out by the media to simply provide comment and insight into what’s going on in the world of SOA, Web services and other related topics. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of requesting that Eric Newcomer’s or Steve Vinoski’s blogs be posted and linked to from other sites. Sometimes it’s a request for comment about industry news and events. And sometimes IONA’s active involvement and leadership role in the development and advancement of new computing standards prompts a request for updates. Recently, Eric posted to his blog some thoughts about progress being made in the OASIS Transaction Technical Committee. This prompted an email exchange between Eric and Stefan Tilkov of InfoQ (a very cool site if you haven’t visited). The result of the exchange and the subsequent interview is this great Q&A on what’s happening in the world of Web services transactions.

On October 10, we announced availability of the latest version of Artix. As with any new release (or at least as it should be with a new release), there are some pretty cool new features added to the mix.

We’ve expanded its standards support, added new management capabilities and included some new enhancements to Artix Orchestration – all designed to meet the needs of Global 2000 companies that are deploying SOA in multi-technology, mission-critical IT environments. We’ve had a pretty good response to the latest version of Artix from folks such as Paul Krill of InfoWorld and Rich Seeley of SearchWebServices. It’s also nice to see that analysts including Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group and Tom Rhinelander of New Rowley had good things to say about Artix when asked.

What may be even more interesting about Artix is that from its inception (the first release of Artix was almost three years ago), the product has been designed for incremental adoption. There’s been a lot of noise lately about how customers don’t want to be tied down by a monolithic stack and how some vendors are responding with plans to componentize their SOA infrastructure offerings.

We agree that customers want something different – and they don’t necessarily want to wait. From day one Artix has been component based, relying on a distributed architecture that truly enables customers to deploy only the service endpoints they need, when they need them and to easily modify those endpoints as business and technology requirements evolve.

A colleague of mine, William Henry , brought a very interesting InfoWorld article to my attention earlier this week. I’d recommend that anyone interested in how SOA is playing out in the telco space take a moment to read it – there’s some great information in the piece.

And while Leon Erlanger, the freelancer who wrote the article specifically focused on SOA and VoIP, and didn’t explore too deeply the underlying technology that is enabling SOA (his focus was on a couple of device manufacturers and a couple of software providers) it got me thinking about IONA’s role in helping telco’s evolve their infrastructure to support SOA.

Anybody that knows anything about IONA knows that we’ve been in the telco space since our beginnings. CORBA is all over the telco space and a lot of that CORBA is ours. What we also have is 15 + years of domain expertise that we’ve applied to Artix.

For example, we’re helping Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe SOA enable their devices and we’re active in the organizations driving today’s telco standards and incorporating those standards into Artix. We’re working with telco ISVs to help make their products SOA ready and are helping telco providers like O2 take advantage of SOA.

If you're interested in Telco and SOA, you should check us out.