Publicly Speakingtag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//72007-07-17T20:39:54ZMovable Type 3.31The Proof is in the Journaltag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.5122007-07-17T20:17:03Z2007-07-17T20:39:54ZHow can you really tell that a technology trend or computing methodology has gone mainstream? You might think it’s when nearly every vendor is touting their own take on how customers can get in on the action, or when the...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
we have customers who have been using our technology to deploy service-oriented systems for more than a decade. But that’s a story for a different day, and one that, in all reality, has been told many times over, and not just by us. A quick search of Gartner.com will back up that claim – just look for a report on Credit Suisse from 2002.
The really powerful proof that a technology or computing methodology, such as SOA, has gone mainstream is when the conventional business press starts paying attention. Even more so than the enterprise IT publications written for IT executives, general interest business publications need to tell customer stories. I came across this great article (registration required) in today's Wall Street Journal by Christopher Lawton, one of the publication's Silicon Valley reporters. The story highlights several customers touting the business benefits they've achieved by deploying SOA.
Unfortunately, no IONA cusotmers were included in the piece -- I'll have to work on that. But that doesn't mean we don't have customers generating real business benefit from using our software in business critical SOA deployments. Click the links to see how Aepona, Trenitalia and DZ Bank are using Artix to their advantage.]]>
No need for Wedgestag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.5012007-06-25T19:49:28Z2007-06-25T20:00:10ZI really enjoy reading Joe McKendrick’s blog over at ZDNet. In fact, most of the bloggers over at ZDNet offer a lot of good insight on a lot of different topics. The site is well worth a regular visit or...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
blog over at ZDNet. In fact, most of the bloggers over at ZDNet offer a lot of good insight on a lot of different topics. The site is well worth a regular visit or an RSS subscription.
It’s Joe’s entry from June 22, “Time to drive a wedge between SOA and Web services?” that really caught my eye. Interestingly, the general idea of what he’s saying, along with several of the folks he quotes, is what IONA has been saying since we started talking about SOA. Granted, the headline is a little sensational – not too over the top – but a little bit, and I guess it worked because it got me to read the entry. The philosophy that SOA and Web services need not be intrinsically joined at the hip is one that we fully support. But do we really need to drive a wedge between the two?
I’m amused when people casually throw around terms such as “always.” You hear that word often in relation to SOA deployment, especially from the vendor community and especially if a vendor’s product grew up out of a specific industry segment. How often have we heard that SOA is always about integration…or reuse…or interoperability? Or heard arguments about Web services always being the best way to implement your SOA…or in some schools of thought never? I find it hard to believe that so many people believe the world of SOA is so black and white.
The real power of SOA is found ultimately in the flexibility of this computing methodology. And when choosing the underlying technology, it can't be an all or nothing argument. An ideal SOA environment should be able to evolve easily as the technology landscape changes. Remember, SOA isn’t new. The acronym may be, but the approach is well established. IONA customers were deploying SOA 10 years ago on CORBA, and many of those systems are still up and running and delivering value. Today, they’re taking those existing systems and making them a part of new systems that incorporate the latest Web services standards, and who knows what they’ll be doing tomorrow. To that end, IONA just added a bunch of new capabilities in the latest version of Artix that allows developers to take advantage of scripting languages and build REST-based services. Our technology is evolving at the same time as the needs of our audience.
The beauty of SOA is that there’s no need to choose sides or employ wedges. SOA isn’t a specific technology – or rely on a specific technology – and you should be wary of anybody that says or implies otherwise.
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Instant SOA?tag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.5002007-06-19T15:53:43Z2007-06-19T16:01:03ZI’m never thrilled when I come across an article that would have been perfect for comment or inclusion from IONA and we’re not in it. I feel a little better when none of the folks with whom we compete are...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
Three Ways to Avoid SOA Snafus published a couple of days ago at Datamation (I’m not afraid to date myself a bit and admit that I remember the days when Datamation was a slick, glossy monthly). The article is a pretty good primer on what companies need to think about as they evaluate how SOA may benefit the organization. In the first couple of paragraphs I felt like I was reading the words of our own CTO, Eric Newcomer when Forrester analyst Randy Heffner is quoted as saying:
“The biggest mistake people make is thinking that SOA is a technology. It’s not. It’s an architecture. And just because you know technology does not mean you know how to design an architecture.”
I can’t count the number of interviews and briefings I’ve facilitated where Eric begins the conversation just this way, and stresses that one of the biggest myths people fall for is believing that the can buy an “SOA in a box” add water and presto…instant SOA. It just doesn’t work that way and it’s too bad that so many vendors are still pushing that tired old claim in an effort to push their monolithic, centralized stacks.
There’s some other good advice in the article, including a reminder about governance and security – two areas we here at IONA also believe shouldn’t be SOA afterthoughts and are key pieces of our Artix advanced SOA infrastructure suite.
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It's so nice to be right...tag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.4942007-05-17T19:17:25Z2007-05-17T19:58:12ZAnybody that's paid any attention to IONA over the past 12-18 months has heard us say, in one form or another, that the company is well positioned at the forefront of two of the trends driving the IT industry --...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
Apache and others. This is key to why IONA is involved in open source, including our Celtix offering and the recent acquisition of LogicBlaze.
Granted, nearly every PR person I know will admit to having drunk the Kool-Aid at some point in their career. It's almost a prerequisite. That's why it's so satisfying when the stuff you've been selling has significantly more than a grain of truth to it. Recently, Joe McKendrick, who blogs over at ZDNet, called attention to a survey conducted by Forrester Research and underwritten by Unisys. The interview is based on interviews with more than 500 IT decision makers and the results bear out what we've been saying for quite a while. In fact,
57 percent of the respondents characterized open source as important or very important for facilitating the migration to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA can permit those enterprises both to deploy new generations of applications more efficiently and integrate new services with those provided by legacy applications, helping to preserve the value of their long-term investment in IT. According to Forrester, open source software's support for open standards noted as a key attribute by 78 percent of the respondents was a major factor driving their view of its value for SOA next-generation enterprise architectures.
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Getting the message righttag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.4842007-04-23T15:20:24Z2007-05-02T22:20:07ZAs a vendor, independent validation of your messages and positioning is always nice to see. That validation is even sweeter when it comes not from an analyst that you’ve briefed, or even your own customer, but rather from someone you’ve...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
customers that were building SOA on Orbix, our CORBA technology. We’ve also been strong proponents of a SOA strategy that calls for incremental adoption, from both a cost and technology perspective. We like to say that when implementing SOA, customers should be able to “Think big, start small and scale fast.”
I came across a very interesting opinion piece written by Galen Gruman, identified as a US CIO. The article, The Real Challenge of SOA: Four Steps to Making Your Business Transform, sounds like a page from the IONA playbook. Many of the examples called out show that organizations have been "doing SOA" since before the term was made popular and highlights that many organizations are not falling for the "Big Bang" hype.
The first challenge called out advises, “deploy in pieces but create a long-term plan.” I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere before. The second piece of advice is to take governance seriously. We recently launced Artix Registry/Repository to address that exact issue, and to do so in a much more “active” way then is currently available. The third piece of advice, about rethinking the talent pool, makes a lot of sense, but doesn’t have a direct correlation to IONA. However, the fourth item, about applying SOA principles to data, is a big part of our recent acquisition of C24.
Read the article and let me know what you think.
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The Joy of the Product Launchtag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.4772007-03-27T18:51:02Z2007-03-27T19:25:24ZWell, so much for blogging more regularly. It's not that potential topics don't come to mind or that items in the news don't set that little light bulb off over my head. In fact, I've got a backlog of stories,...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
Artix Registry/Repository and helped move the Artix product family from just an ESB to a more comprehensive suite of SOA infrastructure products.
I've written here about how great it is for PR people to have really solid spokespeople on whom they can rely. And this most recent launch provided even more evidence of that. I was able to leverage a few different folks for this particular announcement and all did a fantastic job communicating the message and getting some pretty good sound bites into print. Some folks reading this may also read Eric Newcomer's blog and know a little bit about him. His interview with Rich Seeley of SearchWebServices produced a great article that you can check out here. Rich is a fantastic reporter, really knows his stuff and is great to work with.
Our Chief Scientist and co-founder Sean Baker, being "stationed" in the Dublin, Ireland HQ, took the European leg of the tour. I sent him out into the wilds of Milan, Paris and Munich to talk up the product and why we believe that an active Registry/Repository product is crucial to effective SOA governance. By all accounts, he did a great job. I need to rely on our European PR agencies to tell me if the coverage is good or bad, since I don't speak French or Italian, and my schoolboy German is really only strong enough to order dinner. We did however set up some time when Sean was in Paris to talk with James Niccolai, who writes for IDG News. The resulting story is currently making its way across several IDG publications.
Stephanos Bacon, our vp of product development helped set the stage for this launch with a great Guest Commentary published earlier this month at SearchWebServices. He also handled the briefing with Tony Baer of Datamonitor's Computerwire. I'd link to the actual story, but you'd need to register and pay your $2 for access. Take it from me, Steph gave a great interview.
Hopefully, with this launch behind me, and the acquisition of C24 taken care of (which by the way added some really cool data services capabilities to Artix), I'll find (read make) the time to post here a little more consistently.]]>
Are there Really Angels & Devils in Open Source?tag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.4612007-02-22T16:28:46Z2007-04-23T14:33:35ZI get a lot of industry news across my desk on a daily and weekly basis. Some I read immediately, some I delete after looking at the headline and some I put aside for later when I have some time...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
Computerworld article, “Has open-source lost its halo.” It’s an interesting article, but I have to say that I’m not a fan of the overly sensationalistic headline, which unfortunately helps to reinforce the flawed argument that there are “good” and “bad” companies involved in open source -- and that the "bad" companies are those that are involved in open source for some kind of commercial gain.
There are a lot of reasons that both companies and individuals get involved in the open source community. And the reasons, whatever they are, are really not as important as how folks behave as part of the community. If IBM, or Oracle, or Terracotta, or IONA want to be involved in the open source community and are willing to play by the rules of open source, fantastic. If involvement in the open source community creates competitive advantage, why is that a problem? And how is this any different than an open source contributor that builds a consulting business around that project? Is he or she an angel or a devil?
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Taking a Look at Open Sourcetag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.4562007-02-07T15:33:36Z2007-02-08T16:47:20ZThere’s a fantastic article in this week’s issue of InformationWeek written by Charlie Babcock – somebody who seems to be able to cover nearly any high tech subject without skipping a beat. You just need to take a quick look...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/InformationWeek written by Charlie Babcock – somebody who seems to be able to cover nearly any high tech subject without skipping a beat. You just need to take a quick look at his bio page to see the diversity of what he reports on for the publication.
In “How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers”, Charlie tackles the issue of open source from a business perspective and does a very good job of providing corporate users with a set of criteria they should evaluate to make sure an open source technology is right for them. He also looks at why some open source projects are so successful and why so many languish. It’s a great read and very insightful, and will likely open some eyes and change some perceptions about open source.
I’d also like to think that the next time Charlie or InformationWeek visits this subject, readers will see Celtix Enterprise (IONA’s open source ESB distribution) or the CXF project at Apache (the project on which Celtix Enterprise is based) on the list of potential winners in the battle for the hearts and minds of developers and users. Seeing that Celtix was just announced in December of ’06 and that CXF has only been in the Apache community since August of ’06, it’s really hard to see this as snub.
That being said, we’re starting to see a lot of interest in the project and in our distribution as more folks out there realize that the open source community, and the technologies that are being developed there, may be an extremely efficient and cost-effective way to begin their SOA deployments.
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Spiritual SOAtag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.4522007-02-01T21:39:20Z2007-03-27T21:17:05ZI’ve always been a fan a Dana Gardner. I remember dealing with him (and now I’m dating myself) all the way back to his days at InfoWorld and IDG News and always remember him to be quite insightful about the...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
Dana Gardner. I remember dealing with him (and now I’m dating myself) all the way back to his days at InfoWorld and IDG News and always remember him to be quite insightful about the trends that are driving and shaping the industry.
We’ve had the opportunity to put a couple of our folks in front of Dana to talk about open source and its potential impact on the adoption of SOA. I think the podcast from back in December came out really well and is really worth a listen, but it’s one of Dana’a more recent entries that I found quite relevant to what IONA is all about.
Dana gathered a number of industry analysts – including Steve Garone, Tony Baer, Joe McKendrick and Jim Kobielus (in no particular order) – to talk about the Soul of SOA. The conversation, to my mind at least, naturally came around to what value does (or can) SOA bring to an organization. Each analyst has some pretty interesting views on the value of SOA and how you can measure things like ROI.
I don’t want to simply cut and paste quotes from Dana’s transcript of the conversation, because I believe they’re better, and more impactful, taken in context of the conversation. But after you spend some time with Dana and his cohorts, I’d welcome you to take a closer look at IONA and our distributed SOA infrastructure solutions including Artix and our open source offerings in the Celtix family. The kind of value these analysts are talking about is the kind of value IONA delivers to its customers every day.
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Mainframes and SOAtag:blogs.iona.com,2007:/publicly-speaking//7.4432007-01-17T17:46:50Z2007-01-17T18:52:48ZI 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...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/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.
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Looking Ahead to 2007tag:blogs.iona.com,2006:/publicly-speaking//7.4262006-12-19T16:46:04Z2006-12-19T16:50:15ZThere are two major trends shaping the high technology landscape in 2007. One is clearly Service-oriented Architecture, an emerging computing model that allows customers to make better use of their existing IT assets and investments to address changing business requirements,...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
There are two major trends shaping the high technology landscape in 2007. One is clearly Service-oriented Architecture, an emerging computing model that allows customers to make better use of their existing IT assets and investments to address changing business requirements, more rapidly introduce new products or services or simply lower the fixed cost of their IT operations. And while it can be difficult to separate the vendors’ hype from reality, it’s not just the vendors that are betting on SOA.
In fact, a recent Goldman Sachs research note indicated that the firm believed that SOA was going to go further mainstream in 2007, and be one of the major technology shifts that would destabilize the status quo landscape. The firm believes that, as with other shifts in computing models that have come before, this change is going to create opportunities for new companies, and force many existing companies to change their product roadmaps to cash in on the opportunity.
Interestingly, what many traditional vendors have done is merely changed their positioning – not their underlying technology – and are trying to attack new challenges with outmoded approaches that are counterintuitive to the very nature of SOA.
The other force driving significant change in the technology landscape is the continuing mainstream adoption of open source software. This is corroborated by industry analyst findings that indicate that by 2010, more than 80% of enterprise investment in infrastructure will be investments in open source derived technology. We’re all aware of the success of Linux and of open source technologies such as application servers and databases. But, this success came long after the maturity of their traditionally company developed counterparts. What we’re seeing with the convergence of open source and SOA is that the infrastructure required for companies to adopt this computing model is being developed in parallel in open source communities and vendor R&D facilities.
There is a convergence taking place that will change the fundamental nature of IT and IONA is at the center of it. Where many vendors are trying to offer warmed-over EAI or J2EE stacks as the answer to SOA, IONA has taken a differentiated approach that embraces the truly distributed nature of SOA. We’re also actively involved in the communities that are developing today’s open source alternatives for SOA infrastructure, giving customers real choice as to how best meet their SOA technology needs.
Through our approach to how customers can deploy SOA, we’re changing the game from that of “one size fits all” technology decisions to one where customers can deploy the technology they need, when they need it and easily adapt their technology choices as business requirements change. We’re offering customers a convenient way to bring open source into their SOA deployments, adding a new dimension of cost savings, flexibility and transparency.
The Open Road to SOAtag:blogs.iona.com,2006:/publicly-speaking//7.4222006-12-07T19:27:06Z2006-12-07T21:06:16ZWith that headline, I clearly have our tradeshow booth graphics on my mind as I sit down to write this. The headline also reminds me of that old saying “There’s a fine line between clever and stupid” and I believe...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
Celtix family of open source distributed SOA infrastructure. The past month, and in particular the past couple of weeks, have been pretty busy around here, but I think in the end it was well worth it. Monday’s launch of Celtix Enterprise, Celtix Advanced Service Engine and Celtix Advanced Messaging was a major milestone in the open source programs and initiatives IONA began more than 18 months ago. Today, we can not only say that IONA is an active participant in the open source communities developing SOA infrastructure, but also that we give customers an open source option for SOA backed by the company that has been doing distributed computing successfully for more than 15 years.
We’ve had some pretty good coverage from the launch, some of which I’ve linked to if you’d like to take a look. If you’re at all interested in open source and SOA, you should take a minute to check us out and maybe even download some code.
Now that the launch is over, I'll hopefully have a little more time to blog a little more regularly. Here's hoping.
SOA and midrange systemstag:blogs.iona.com,2006:/publicly-speaking//7.3992006-11-01T18:03:03Z2006-11-05T17:05:54ZI like coincidences. I came in this morning to an article in the November issue of Midrange Computing that had come in through one of my daily news searches. The article, FAQ on SOA is authored by Alex Nubla and...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/Midrange Computing that had come in through one of my daily news searches. The article, FAQ on SOA is authored by Alex Nubla and covers a ton of stuff on SOA in midrange environments and a ton of stuff about SOA in general. It’s a good read if you’re at all interested in SOA. I almost wish one of my regular authors had written it, but I guess you can’t win them all. If nothing else, it’s nice to see IONA get a quick shout out when Alex talks about the work being done on the Service Component Architecture or SCA specification. I’d also like to point out that when Alex says,
An ESB must eliminate the consumer's need to deal with upgrades and load balancing between instances of specific services (e.g., the consumer invokes a service, not realizing that there may be many instances). It is uncertain that today's ESB delivers all these capabilities.
– I can say with confidence that IONA’s Artix is at least one ESB that can.
But I digress, and have gotten away from the whole coincidence thing that begins the post. To get back on track, and to explain that whole coincidence thing, this morning we issued a press release talking about how we’re partnering with LANSA to help companies the are running mission-critical applications in midrange environments take advantage of SOA in multi-technology IT environments. SOA, done right, is a great way to achieve greater ROI on existing IT assets. Our work with LANSA helps customers achieve that goal for System i environments.
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IONA, SOA and Telcotag:blogs.iona.com,2006:/publicly-speaking//7.3892006-10-13T21:33:56Z2006-10-13T21:40:15ZA 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...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
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.
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Latest Version of Artix Availabletag:blogs.iona.com,2006:/publicly-speaking//7.3842006-10-10T21:54:52Z2006-10-11T01:38:16ZOn 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...Rob Mortonhttp://blogs.iona.com/publicly-speaking/
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.
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