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.
Today, Active Endpoints announced that ActiveVOS was used to develop and deploy an important learning and training application for Toyota Motor Europe. You can read the details in the PDF attached to this post.
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.
I expect that by now most everyone has seen the amazing film Wall-E in which a corporation called BNL — for “Big and Large” literally destroys Earth and emasculates humanity of its ability to survive on the planet.
Ryan Bagnulo of Aspect-i and I were talking about enterprises and their surprising tendency to remain with the status quo even when they should know better. And how that’s just fine with the big three — IBM, Oracle and SAP. Suddenly, Ryan said, “That’s kind of what happened in Wall-E!” At that point, I had to record the conversation for our listeners because it was so compelling a comparison.
That lead to this podcast in which Ryan and I discuss how IBM, SAP and Oracle are almost exactly like BNL and are quite content to let enterprises get so porked up on closed, proprietary application development software that they can’t get out of their chairs…to mix metaphors.
We hope you like the podcast, and as always, welcome your responses.
[After I posted this, I came across this broadside of SAP's pricing policies on Cnet. Need any more proof that these companies will suck the life out of enterprise application development buyers?]
VOSibilities podcast #13: How IBM, SAP and Oracle could have been in "Wall-E" [7:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (71)
