VOSibilities

Copied below is the text of an email we sent today to more than 30,000 developers in the US. We are in a unique position to see what the rate of adoption of modern development tools is. And what we’ve seen is so strong a trend, we simply had to go public with what we’ve learned. As always, we welcome any comments or feedback, either here on our blog or via email to editor@activevos.com.

Attention US developers: Active Endpoints has a wake-up call for you

Dear Developer,

We are emailing you because we are concerned about you.  We’ve learned something about the state of middleware technology in the US, its impact on outsourcing and US business competitiveness that we felt strongly we should share with you.

Since early March, we have been offering downloads of our new ActiveVOS visual orchestration system at www.activevos.com. With ActiveVOS, you can automate, control, adapt and manage your services-based applications in ways you never dreamed were possible. And, you do it in a 100%-standards based environment, at breakthrough pricing.

As you might imagine, we watch our download statistics very carefully…sometime hourly. We expected to have downloads from all over the world, but the shocking truth is that a majority of our downloads are coming from outside the US, especially from India and China. A conversation I had with a marketing director at a major open-source ESB provider confirmed that company is seeing fully half of its downloads from India and China.

At first, we couldn’t believe it. And we were surprised, because the US market for app dev products is several orders of magnitude larger than in these developing markets. Then, we started asking ourselves questions like “Why is this so pronounced a trend?” And “what do these developers, business analysts and companies know that US enterprises don’t?”

The answers are clear. US companies have become too caught up in the complexity of their current systems…too content to be dictated to by proprietary middleware vendors…too comfortable with their status quo. Meanwhile, companies without legacy issues - and without the temptation to use those issues as an excuse for stasis - adopt the most effective and modern middleware technologies rapidly.

Is it any wonder, then, that US developers are increasingly frustrated by the slow pace of change, the threat to their jobs, and the technical and political paralysis created by so-called enterprise architectures?

Clearly, we hope you will be the agent for change in your company and download ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com. We hope you will take advantage of our education center to update your skills. We hope you will join the hundreds of developers who have watched the replay of webinar we hosted called “BPEL for Java Developers.” (You can find it on our blog at www.vosibilities.com or in our podcast feed in the iTunes Store; search for “VOSibilities.”)

But mostly, we hope you will carefully consider the fact that the status quo in application development in your company is a very dangerous proposition. No matter how daunting change may seem, it’s better than the alternative: a world in which your company and you personally have been eclipsed by external competitors.

 

Thank you.

 

Alex Neihaus
VP Marketing
Active Endpoints, Inc.
editor@activevos.com

Today, we are very excited to announce ActiveVOS 5.0, the industry’s first visual orchestration system. You can read the details in the press release below. (And starting Wednesday, March 5, 2008, you can actually request a trial.)

As they say in the TV commercials, this changes everything about SOA. From capabilities, to pricing, to performance, to support for standards, ActiveVOS changes it all…for the better.

We hope you will become part of the revolution.

 Active Endpoints ships ActiveVOS 5.0: Download (299)

Please forgive me. This post strains two metaphors and doesn’t do it very artfully. One, the camera obscura, represents, literally, the “dark room” in which many developers find themselves when working with a non-standards-based SOA development platform. The second, “through a glass darkly” represents the transition, indeed, the revolution, that developers need to accept in order to get SOA applications widely deployed.

Because this metaphor exists only in my head, I’ll spare you the rest of this post if you can’t figure out what I am talking about. Here’s the bottom line: ActiveVOS is the answer. Read no further, just download the product and see for yourself.

OK, back to my strained, mixed metaphors. The camera obsucra projects the application you’re trying to create from the other side of the wall. Building that application with proprietary tools is the equivalent of getting there “darkly.”

What I am trying to say is there are three things about building SOA applications you should always keep in mind:

• If it ain’t standards-based, just don’t do it. For those of you who have wedded yourselves to Oracle or whatever-your-favorite-proprietary-vendor-stack-is, you are trying to trace the image on the wall using doomed technology. (Now that was a good use of the camera obscura metaphor, don’t you think?)
• You need the complete package. Piecing stuff together yourself is the ultimate in getting there with muck all over you. It will take longer, cost more and be less flexible. Period, end of story, full stop.
• You gotta reuse what you already have. Nothing is worse than being told you can’t start with at least a trace of the image on the wall. Maybe you’ve got lots of what we used to call “legacy mainframe” stuff (which we all know is running the business). Maybe you want to use Java. Maybe you need to include human workflow. Whatever the situation, having to start over just isn’t an option.

Mercifully, I’m gonna stop here. It may be that you have no idea what I am talking about. But I don’t think that’s the case. More likely, you are mounting a defense in your head of why you cannot “abandon” the path to SOA-based applications you’re on.

C’mon, just between you and yourself, aren’t you willing to admit there’s a better way? Visual orchestration systems, and ActiveVOS in particular, are the digital camera to proprietary systems’ camera obscura.

Active Endpoints to Drive Mass Adoption of Services-based Applications

 Active Endpoints to Drive Mass Adoption of Services-based Applications: Download (242)