Meeting Herbjörn

Herbjörn and I met up in Sala yesterday. What great fun exploring the cafes of town and eating some very authentic Swedish food called pytt-i-pannan and discussing ideas for our article and book authoring activities.

Herbjörn also recommended two books which I shall read soon:

• Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans
• Enterprise SOA Adoption Strategies by Steve Jones (CTO of Cap Gemini) -- this book is available online after registration on innoq.
  

New Gartner Magic Quadrants

Gartner has just published new magic quadrants for the SOA/integration application infrastructure. They divide them into three different markets - although some products by the big-name vendors fall into multiple categories:

• New Systematic SOA Application Projects - this market represents the grand, all-encompassing SOA suites, which - in a way - contradict the "best-of-breed" appraoch that most SOA advocates propagate. These products are positioned as overarching, complete SOA stacks. Integration is less of a requirement in this category than modeling and design, service implementation (from scratch), UI and orchestration/BPM.Gartner sees IBM WPS and Portal, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Microsoft .net/Azure as leaders -- with the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform a close call. SAP NetWeaver is considered too ABAP/SAP specific to serve as the basis for a corporate-wide SOA initiative.All the plus points that Oracle can gather (except for BPM) seem to come from the BEA acquisition.
  
  
• SOA Composite Application Projects - this market covers tools that can deal with a Brownfield situation, where most business logic is preexistent and independently deployed. Gartner defines a composite application as "a software assembly that implements a set of independent but related functions — each meant to be perceived by users as indivisible — and where the component parts are heterogeneous in their information architecture." Integration can occur either at the user-facing logic ("integration at the glass": mashup, (personal) portal and screen scraping, Web scraping) or in the backend (invoking services or the business logic of the backend app directly using a variety of communication protocols, while guaranteeing reliability, scalability, manageability and security). "A composite-application-oriented platform that is narrower in functionality, but also more deeply integrated and less-expensive than general-purpose suites". IBM, Oracle, Tibco, SAP, Software AG (webMethods) and Microsoft are in the leader's quadrant, whereas Red Hat is still considered a niche player here.
  
  
• Back-End Application Integration Projects - this market came about as the cross-fertilization between EAI, MOM and WS-platform/management products. Its most prominent product representative are ESB platforms. Gartner sees the following drivers in this market: "1) companies expanding their SOA initiatives, 2) the trend of creating services by using existing business logic and data assets and 3) an emerging recognition that there is a huge overlap in the features required to support the deployment of SOA-based applications and those required to support data consistency, multistep process and composite application integration styles". Minimum criteria for membership in this category are: integration services, SOA and BPM support, management, dev environment, B2B, CEP, BAM, data integration. MS, IBM, Oracle, Tibco, Sun and Software AG are in the leader's quadrant again; Progress, Red Hat and surprinsingly -- good old Fiorano -- are kicking around as visionaries.
  
  

The Power of Network Intelligence

Forbes CIO Magazine ran an interesting article recently titled "Networks aren't just Data Highways" - lamenting the tremendous untapped compute power of the Internet's underlying infrastructure of routers, switches, firewalls, LBs, etc. Since all enterprise relevant information (email, CRM and ERP entries, etc) flows through the network, this is the one place where all data meet

Dan Woods predicts a development of the network towards an integral part of the application with the following tasks:

• value added functionality (auditing, monitoring)
  
• policy compliance monitoring (products by SAP, Cisco)
• prevention of information leaks, intrusion detection
  
• event mining for business intelligence purpose
• devices with intelligence can act as event sources (GPS, RFID, WLAN hubs, user presence, smartcard readers, cameras, etc.)