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.
Mark Hall of Computerworld previews ActiveVOS 6.0 and points out one of its major benefits: collaboration among developers, end users and business analysts.
We are pleased to present a recording of a joint webinar we presented on June 12, 2008 with XAware entitled How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications.
Despite the imposing title, I think you will find the content — especially the lively Q&A at the end of the webinar — very interesting.
VOSibilities podcast #10: Webinar replay - How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications [80:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (507)
VOSibilities podcast #10: Webinar replay - How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications [80:19m]: Download (151)
Anne Thomas Mannes of the Burton Group has recently written a post that sums up what I believe is the missing in the discussion of SOA and BPM: the enormous challenge in getting line-of-business developer teams to use these techniques.
Anne writes:
I’ve talked to many companies that have implemented stunningly beautiful SOA infrastructures that support managed communications using virtualized proxies and dynamic bindings. They’ve deployed the best technology the industry has to offer — including registries, repositories, SOA management, XML gateways, and even the occasional ESB. Many have set up knowledge bases, best practices, guidance frameworks, and governance processes. And yet these SOA initiatives invariably stall out. The techies just can’t sell SOA to the business. They have yet to demonstrate how all this infrastructure yields any business value.
More to the point, the techies have not been able to explain to the business units why they should adopt a better attitude about sharing and collaboration–which is the fundamental cultural shift required for SOA to succeed. The pervasive attitude is “What’s in it for me?” As one of my interviewees said, “Altruism is not an enterprise strategy”.
Many Americans will remember former President Clinton’s famous prescription for political success in the 1992 presidential campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” In a single sound bite, Clinton moved beyond technical discussions of monetary and fiscal policy to the heart of the matter: people cared then, as now in a period of economic turmoil, about bread-and-butter issues.
The challenge of SOA and BPM in business today is that it’s all been high-falutin’ theory. And lots — lots — of money spent on piece parts that look good on architecture diagrams but which are unimplementable by mere mortals in line of business development project teams.
It’s no wonder these “stunningly beautiful SOA infrastructures” cannot be “sold” to the business. By themselves, they do do nothing. Squat, nichts, nada. It takes developers to make these investments pay back for the business and those guys are too smart to sign up for science projects when they get paid to do business applications.
Those who care about SOA and BPM and making it real should take Anne’s advice and stop navel-gazing at their lovely accomplishments. The discussion needs to turn to how to enable real developers to use SOA effectively.
To anyone reading this blog, it’ll come as no surprise that we are quite sure we have the answer. That’s why we created a new category, the visual orchestration system, and a new product, ActiveVOS, specifically for line of business application developers.
It’s a tall claim, but we have the stuff to prove it. (It’s also why we took the unusual step of putting a top-level menu on our new website called “Proof“.) ActiveVOS is all about the application, stupid. And it’s about ending the habit of peeling money off the roll simply to build beautiful architectures nobody can use.
I’ve been saving this episode’s video for the release of ActiveVOS 5.0. In this podcast, Mike Pellegrini, our chief architect, white boards the revolutionary concepts behind the new scenario testing and remote debugging capabilities in ActiveVOS 5.0.
Now that we have shipped ActiveVOS 5.0, I think episode becomes much more powerful because you can actually request an evaluation and try this for yourself. I’ve seen demonstrations of these new capabilities and I can tell you that if I were working in a SOA or BPM environment, this is precisely what I would want. Testing message-based, loosely coupled applications made of up black boxes isn’t an easy thing to even think about, much less achieve.
Or at least it wasn’t until we shipped ActiveVOS 5.0. (Those of you reading this post on our blog can click the image above to see a screenshot of some of these amazing new features.)
We hope you enjoy Mike’s chalk-talk.
VOSibilities podcast #2: Mike Pelligrini on scenario testing in SOA applications [4:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (422)
This is a big moment for me…if not for you. This is the first post on our brand-spankin’ new blog. And I’m all excited about the possibilities.
I’ve been involved with a number of blogs for other companies over the last year or two. And I’ve discovered that a surprising number of people come back to read the first post. A first post therefore needs a little of the mixture of celebration and relief people feel when that new ocean liner actually launches when the woman (always a female for some reason) breaks the bottle of champagne over its bow. Or maybe it’s just me being traditional, but it seems all new blogs that are any good start with a bit of …ahem… manifesto.
So, herewith our objectives. We hope this blog will be informative and in the words of some people I recently worked with, cheeky. We already are showing a little cheek (sorry, it starts right away) by naming this blog "VOSibilities." The pun on visual orchestration systems and the word "possibilities" is courtesy of our own Victor Chan.
Let me say for the first time something we’ll be saying repeatedly: we believe strongly that visual orchestration systems will revolutionize the way project teams design, develop, test, deploy and maintain composite applications. We seek nothing less than mass adoption of services-based applications, all done in an open, standards-based way. So, VOS is the category, VOS is the means, VOS is the objective…VOS is the answer.
But it’s the answer to what, exactly? It’s the answer to app dev miasma. That big, dark, noxious cloud of proprietary this and that, the uncertainty of being able to leverage skills and the inability to effectively absorb technology in a way that makes developing composite applications not just fast and efficient, but fun.
And because good technology is always fun, we’re gonna have a lot of it here. We’re going to get loud, we’re going to get visceral and we’re going to say what we think.
So, if you found this post before there was anything else on the blog, thank you. If you are reading it to wonder who the heck these loudmouths are, thank you. If you are one of the competitors I intend to skewer regularly here, a special thank you. And remember…it’s all in the name of open, direct debate.
This is just the first of many times we’ll get to talk to each other.
Active Endpoints to Drive Mass Adoption of Services-based Applications
