I know that it's a couple weeks late, but Happy New Year to anybody that's reading this.
Conventional wisdom always seems to say that the period around the holidays is a little less hectic from a work perspective...but I'm just not seeing it. It seems that something is always cropping up, and that could partly explain why I only end up writing here about once a month. But, one of my goals for 2007 is to try and make it here a little more often. I'm not promising anything, but it's a goal I'm working toward.
I tend to draw inspiration for my blog entries from things that are going on at the company or the bits of information that cross my desk on a daily basis. These items aren't always a direct hit to what we're doing in the realm of SOA or open source, but they often help create a spark that hopefully leads to some mildly interesting on these pages. I came across one such item at the end of last week. Sharon Gaudin of InformationWeek wrote a piece "Analyst: Long Live The Mainframe" that highlighted a recent Butler Group report about current and future mainframe use. A brief mention of advances in SOA prompted me to think about how IONA is helping its customers utilize their mainframe assets as part of a comprehensive SOA strategy.
Since its introduction, Artix has been able to run natively in mainframe environments, ensuring that these valuable assets, and the mission-critical applications that run on them, were readily available for use as the enterprise adopted SOA. You can read more about that here and also in this press release issued last year about how we're prepared to add value to BEA deployments in this particular area.
Mainframes aren't going away anytime soon and to paraphrase Mark Twain, the report of their death is an exaggeration. The trick will be finding the right technology to ensure they can participate as equal citizens in SOA.