In a new podcast, Dennis Byron of ebizQ talks with Active Endpoints CEO Mark Taber about visual orchestration systems in general and ActiveVOS in particular. There’s also an interesting discussion about the importance of standards like BPEL for creating service orchestrations.
Thanks to Dennis and Mark for a very interesting podcast, one that’s well worth your time.
In this audio podocast, Guerman Smirnov, systems development manager at Australian telecom AAPT, describes how his company has used ActiveVOS to extend complex internal DSL service assurance capabilities to AAPT’s resellers and partners. In doing so, AAPT has reaped the benefits of moving to the 100% standards-based BPEL capabilities included in ActiveVOS and has reduced the internal resources necessary to provide good customer service.
As always, thank you for listening and we look forward to your feedback.
VOSibilities podcast #15 for SOA, BPEL, BPMN, BPMS and CEP users: AAPT Orchestrates Service Assurance with ActiveVOS [12:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (105)
I am very pleased to be able to post the first public screenshot of the Designer in our upcoming ActiveVOS 6.0 product. Click on the thumbnail above to see the image full size.
Those of you who knew us for ActiveBPEL, the world’s leading Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine, will be delighted to discover that BPEL remains at the core of ActiveVOS 6.0. All of our BPEL execution engine’s virtues — a superior visual design environment, rigorous adherence to the BPEL 2.0 specification, process versioning, the world’s first implementation of BPEL4People, remote testing and debugging, dynamic switching of endpoints on failure, clustering and failover — remain as you’ve known them. And there are some truly magical new enhancements, like support for POJO’s that turns old Java applications into web services with a few clicks of a mouse. Clearly, on the BPEL engine feature list, what few competitive lights there were in the rear view mirror grow far dimmer in ActiveVOS 6.0. (Message to Oracle BPEL Process Manager users: it’s about time to get to a real implementation of BPEL 2.0, don’t you think?)
But ActiveVOS is no longer just a BPEL engine. We are, truly, a VOS or visual orchestration system. BPEL is, in part, how we accomplish services-based applications. But it’s no longer what ActiveVOS is. Consider this partial list of new capabilities that will be included in ActiveVOS 6.0 and you’ll see why nothing else — not “open source” arrivistes like Inalio or the stack oligarchy of SAP, IBM and Oracle can compete.
With these and other new features, we believe that the age of the visual orchestration system has begun. Now, when developers are considering how to do services-based applications, the choice couldn’t be more clear. You can do what the stack oligarchy wants: buy a bunch of indigestible piece parts and engineer the equivalent of a VOS in your shop before you can even hope to begin writing applications. Or, you can use the all-in-one, standards-based capabilities of ActiveVOS 6.0 and get done better and faster.
ActiveVOS 6.0 will be generally available in a few weeks.
We are very pleased to present a replay of a webinar that we presented jointly with the JBoss division of Red Hat entitled How to Achieve Your SOA Vision in the Real World.
Presenting along with me are Pierre Fricke of JBoss and Mike Moniz of Active Endpoints. The webinar details our companies’ joint vision and technology for how developers, managers, enterprise architects and business analysts can move beyond the debates, the complexity and the high costs that have torpedoed implementation of services-based applications for far too long.
And, Active Endpoints is very proud to show publicly for the first time the upcoming ActiveVOS 6.0 (slated to to generally available in August, 2008) which completely resets the standard for what an integrated, all-in-one development and deployment system can achieve. Be sure to check out Mike’s amazing demo. And I also recommend you stick around for the lively panel Q&A at the end of the webinar.
You may have also noticed that when we have a video podcast, I try to post both a higher resolution .avi and an iPod-formatted .m4v. The .avi is approximately 150MB; the .m4v is approximately 80MB.
There are three ways to watch the webinar replay. In ascending order of resolution they are: playing the .m4v file from the website, which results in a 320×240 image. If you download the .m4v file, it will play in iTunes or QuickTime at 640×480. Finally, if you download the .avi, the resolution is 775×582. The .avi file is DivX encoded, so most everyone should be able to view it.
As always, we’d love to know what you think of the webinar. Please email me comments at editor@activevos.com or post a comment here.
VOSibilities podcast #14: Webinar replay - Real World SOA [64:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (628)
VOSibilities podcast #14: Webinar replay - Real World SOA [64:34m]: Download (236)
For the last several weeks, there’s been a lot of blog discussion about a Burton Group report on SOA “success” or the apparent lack of it.
An interesting thread of commentary has broken out about the role of CIOs in the success or failure of next-generation application development in business. David Linthicum suggests that CIOs are “…very different animals from company to company.” And Scott Wilson thinks CIOs are in a “delicate position” when it comes to adopting new technologies, balancing needs to progress versus reliable service delivery.
For us, it’s simpler: it’s much more dangerous — bordering on suicidal — to let the fear of change become the rationale for continued stasis. That’s why Burton reports that companies get better results with newly hired CIOs. The new guy has a honeymoon period in which he or she can do the unthinkable. (Marketing execs in software companies are almost as perishable as CIOs. We are often brought in to “fix” the previous guy’s reluctance to change.)
But at the end of the day, a change in leadership doesn’t change the underlying reality that the whole IT organization — from the developer in his cube to the CIO — just isn’t scared enough.
Sure, they’re a little bit scared: “If we have to change, we run a risk.” But it’s the wrong thing they’re afraid of…the wrong fear.
What’s a fossil? Something that stood still long enough to get buried, then wedged into rock to be cooked by pressure over time until it disappears. That’s what developers, analysts, business owners and CIOs are doing: letting the small fear of change become comfortable enough to crowd out the large, more important fear of being fossilized.
And that’s a whole lot scarier. For the business…for individuals.
If this sounds like a wake-up call to developers to lose more sleep at night over why they keep finding reasons not to move to services-based apps, it is. If you think we are saying that enterprise architects should be put on a multi-step program to recovery from PowerPoint architectures, we are. If you think we are suggesting the CIO is more damned if he doesn’t implement today’s visual orchestration systems, you’ve got it.
Many readers will remember a couple of years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia was caught giving “an obscene gesture” to reporters after getting a question he didn’t like.
Today, a lot of SAP and Oracle customers have got to be feeling like they’ve just been given that very gesture by SAP and Oracle, who have both substantially raised prices (here and here).
I guess that with the very big increases in the cost of transporting those very heavy license keys and object code across the Internet, Oracle and SAP felt they were justified in nailing customers’ budgets to the wall yet again.
Here at Active Endpoints, we wonder how long corporate users will permit themselves to be abused like this. And from what we hear from customers on a daily basis, it’s not just the pricing that’s obscene, the products themselves are unusable.
Just this morning, one of our sales guys told me he’d just spoken to a customer that had completely failed with the obese, impenetrable middleware that had been inflicted on him and who had, in desperation, tried ActiveVOS. This customer said he’d succeed with ActiveVOS without any training.
Let us help you get on a two-step program to recovery. First, figure out what it’ll cost you to use ActiveVOS. We publish our prices — which anybody can understand — right on our website. Step two: download ActiveVOS, try it, and see how much you can achieve with a fraction of the effort or pain compared to anything — and I mean anything — else out there.
Go on…give the gesture back to Oracle, SAP and IBM. It’ll feel great. You’ll be 10 years younger, you’ll feel like a new man or woman…and your enterprise development capabilities will loose two tons of weight.
Yeah, baby! Ain’t nuthin’ like a good blog war-o-words. And a juicy one has just broken out between two influential voices: Nick Malik and Bruce Silver. And I suspect we haven’t seen the last of it. (At least I hope we haven’t. July is a slow month; we could use some American Gladiators-style trash talkin’ right about now.)
Apparently, Nick found the top dead center of the button you shouldn’t push in Bruce’s mind: he says BPM is never going to live up to expectations that non-developers will create applications.
In reply, Bruce — slappin’ Nick right upside the head – replies that Nick has to “prove” his assertion by showing that someone — anyone — in the “BPM community” has made a claim that modeling leads directly to completed applications.
While I hope the histrionics continue, this is really nothing more than two purists trying to keep their rivers from converging. (I gotta admit that I find these near-screaming matches to be more educational than so-called “polite debate” for the very simple reason that they strip out the fluff in favor of direct frontal attacks everyone can understand.)
We all know from long, bitter experience that the “third rail” in the Microsoft world (touch it and die) is developers. MSFT will do what it takes to keep developers tied to the Windows API. Anything that could loosen that death-grip is a danger, and that includes end users working in standards-based tools that could care less about the underlying OS.
And from what I’ve read about the “BPM community” there’s a fair bit of wishful thinking there, too. Bruce is probably correct that no responsible entity has claimed what he believes Nick is claiming. Yet, you don’t have to say the “E” (execution) word outright to lead people to the conclusion that your BPMS does it directly from pretty pictures. Go ahead, spend five minutes on Lombardi’s site and tell me you don’t see it there.
What do we care? Well, let me be the first to pre-announce our upcoming ActiveVOS release, scheduled for mid-August, in which we actually converge the rivers. We will have the most complete BPMN modeling capabilities and, of course, we have the world’s best and most complete BPEL deployment, execution and management system.
ActiveVOS will make it possible for business users to come very, very close to execution via BPMN. And we believe that developers will take that non-executable model and “finish” it in a 100%-standards-based environment that frees them and their businesses from .NetJail.
Forgive me the nested platitude, but the issue boils down to that old saw that says, “Get the right tool for the job.” Developers need modern, standards-based languages that execute on the metal; business analysts need modern, standards-based ways to describe what systems have to accomplish. Being doctrinaire about which is the “correct” way to serve business and IT is beside the point.
So, while it’s fun to see the purists bloody each other, we intend to deliver an implementable, cost-effective and complete way to achieve what neither side really seems to want. And that, dear readers, is what a visual orchestration system is all about.
In this podcast episode, I talk with Active Endpoints’ CEO, Mark Taber, about our company’s vision for how we intend to “democratize” complex event processing (CEP) and stream processing so that everyone can benefit from these technologies in their applications.
Mark describes the concepts and then talks about why we believe these technologies should be part of every visual orchestration system — and previews what we’ll be delivering in ActiveVOS in our upcoming release in August, 2008.
As always, we appreciate your support of our podcast, as demonstrated by the large number of people who are downloading and subscribing to this content, and we welcome all feedback. Just email us at editor@vosibilities.com.
VOSibilities podcast # 12: Complex event processing and visual orchestration systems [14:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (103)
Last week, David Linthicum’s SOA podcast continued a theme he’s been on lately, a discussion of BPEL’s “fallings” [sic]. I think he meant failings…but in any event, he mentions several times in the podcast that a post he’d previously written on this topic had generated quite a discussion (it did) and feedback from unnamed “BPEL vendors” (that’d be us; I can’t imagine why he didn’t name us. (-: )
Anyway, today after I heard the podcast, I asked Chris Keller, our founder and vp of development and one of the most knowledgeable people on BPEL in the world for his feedback. Chris has not only written the BPEL engine that’s at the core of our visual orchestration system (a VOS is a whole lot more than a BPEL engine), he’s active on the OASIS committees that are furthering the standards.
Chris gave me a lot of food for thought, and being in a playful mood, I thought it might be fun to that feedback into a Q&A. Sorta like a game show, with Mr. Linthicum as the contestant. The prize, for correct answers, is a free ActiveVOS license. Let’s see how Mr. Linthicum does…
Question 1: In the podcast, David says that a major problem with BPEL is that it’s synchronous.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out… Then click here to read the correct answer
Question 2: David says BPEL has a few programmer-level issues including limitations around request/reply exchanges in a heterogeneous architecture.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Question 3: David says BPEL has issues with failure recovery, exception handling and multi-programming model support.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Question 4: David says BPEL is not very good at adding a human as part of the process and as SOA moves forward, he’s finding that composites and workflows are more applicable than simple service binding and extending.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
We hope that you’ve enjoyed our little episode of The BPEL Game Show. And sorry, David, but you didn’t win our prize. However, anytime you’d like to be brought up-to-date on why BPEL is at the heart of SOA development, we’re happy to update you so you can win the next time.
We are pleased to post a recording of a webinar we presented this week. While the title of the webinar might make you think that this is only of interest to systems integrators, I think everyone will be interested in at least two sections of this podcast: the demo and the panel Q&A. The demo by our vp of marketing, Eric Egertson, begins at about 8:00 and the Q&A, with Eric, our systems engineer Victor Chan and me, begins at about 33:00 into the recording.
Many will find the entire webinar interesting as it contains an excellent overview of ActiveVOS and how it can allow users to create services-based applications, including BPM applications, all 100% based on open standards like BPEL.
We hope you enjoy this webinar and look forward to your feedback.
VOSibilities podcast #9: Webinar replay - An Introduction to ActiveVOS for Systems Integrators [49:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (387)
VOSibilities podcast #9: Webinar replay - An Introduction to ActiveVOS for Systems Integrators [49:12m]: Download (60)
Tomorrow and Wednesday, June 4 and 5, we are holding a webinar for systems integrators, consultants and custom application developers. We’ve had quite a lot of interest from SIs since we introduced ActiveVOS in early March, and this is the first time we have prepared content specifically to show SIs how they can use ActiveVOS in their custom application development efforts, accelerate their practices and increase client satisfaction.
Attendees will receive a special offer on ActiveVOS training.
Please register via this page on our website. We hope to see you at one of the webinars.
I checked Wikipedia to see what a “sapphire” really is because I wondered if SAP’s SAPPHIRE trade show was using it as a pun on its company name and the “clarity” of a sapphire. Turns out it might be, since Wikipedia defines it as a mineral that’s not red. Unfortunately, the recent SAPPHIRE I attended has me seeing red.
Check out this slide from their announcement of their “BPM” products:
Once past the initial hype, what SAP claims to be bringing to market seems to be more hope than code. What bothered me the most are their claims of an “executable” business process model and that “immediate execution” speeds time to value. Hold on there…even if you did execute the model directly, is that necessarily a good thing?
Surely SAP isn’t suggesting that all of a sudden, you’re going to stop following best practices and the SDLC that you have developed over the years: separation of concern from the model, its implementation, testing, and methodical deployment across development, sit/cit and pre-production environments before you put it in production.
Beyond the question of what the right thing to do is in terms of development process, what exactly did SAP announce? A beta of BPM/BRM that will be released this June with the actual product shipping — maybe — in March 2009. (We’re hearing it’s $4500 per seat. Get that special checkbook you use for SAP products ready…you know the one with eight zeros pre-printed in the amount field.)
When it ships next March, there will be no announced integration with BPEL and no means of import/export of the BPMN from the tool that SAP customers have largely adopted, ARIS.
We talked with ARIS customers who aren’t happy about the lack of integration. One we spoke with uses ARIS heavily to model processes and hand them over to development. Instead, SAP chose to generate executable code directly bypassing the developer. If you believe SAP, you’ve now empowered your business analysts with the means to build executable models.
The good news is that you now have 300 new developers; the bad news is that you have 300 new developers. Is there an IT group on the planet that would deploy such a model in production directly? Please let us know if you do…we want to see how you’ve managed to skip validation, testing, performance trials and all the rest of the standard things a real application has to have.
SAP indicated that interoperability with ARIS is not possible because of a lack of a standard for BPMN serialization. While that’s true — BPMN is a notation (i.e. not an executable process definition like BPEL) — not having import/export with ARIS only suggests SAP is more interested in account control than real BPM. If it was motivated in ensuring no lock-in, SAP would have worked more closely with ARIS in developing an import/export mechanism, maybe via XPDL or XMI. But they haven’t, and while we’re only speculating, it seems clear why they haven’t. So much for the claims by ARIS at SAPPHIRE that ARIS is the “Business Processing Arm of SAP”.
See why does this have us seeing red? We’re steaming for the SAP customers who actually buy this line…who’ll be waiting a year (at best) for capabilities they need today…who’ll end up even more locked-in than ever to proprietary, closed, non-standards-compliant applications.
In our latest podcast episode, Mark Taber, CEO of Active Endpoints, discusses the relationship between BPEL and BPMN and why BPEL is the standards-based environment of choice for executing services-based applications. Mark also describes how BPMN can free users from the tyranny of proprietarty BPMS execution and, best of all, previews what Active Endpoints will be doing shortly in ActiveVOS to unite these two useful standards. Mark also discusses at a high level how we see the relationship between BPEL and BPMN and what we believe a visual orchestration system should enable users interested in these technologies to accomplish.
We hope you enjoy this podcast. We welcome feedback as a comment on the blog or via email to editor@activevos.com.
VOSibilities podcast # 7: Mark Taber on BPMN and BPEL [9:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (117)
