VOSibilities

We are pleased to present the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights podcast with Dana Gardner and a distinguished panel of industry analysts who offer their suggestions to help IT reduce costs during the economic downturn we are experiencing today.

 

 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #38: Cutting IT Costs [49:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (330)
 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #38: Cutting IT Costs (transcript): Download (83)

Writing in eBizQ’s SOA in Action blog, Joe McKendrick discusses how Fastenal Corp. is using ActiveVOS in production to revamp to its sales order processing system.

Today, Active Endpoints announced that it has published a white paper authored by noted industry analyst David Linthicum which debunks the idea that SOA development of business process management applications is difficult and expensive. The press release describing the new white paper is attached to this post. You can download the white paper itself here or here. 

 A Call-to-Action for SOA Development: Download (221)

In this new white paper, titled Leveraging Process Configuration within the Context of SOA, noted industry analyst, blogger and podcaster David Linthicum tackles perceptions that developing BPM applications in a services-oriented architecture (SOA) environment has to be difficult and expensive.  

 Leveraging Process Configuration within the Context of SOA: Download (346)

Integration developer Adam Swift at Fastenal describes how his team uses ActiveVOS to quickly implement SOA-based applications for vital business processes, including an order management system. Read the article here.

Today, we are very pleased and excited to announce ActiveVOS 6.1. The press release with all the details is attached to this post.

To view selected content about the release, visit our What’s New page on our product website. And, don’t forget to listen to Michael Rowley and Luc Clément discuss the themes and objectives for ActiveVOS 6.1 in this podcast.

 Active Endpoints Announces ActiveVOS 6.1: Download (177)

Unlike other companies that want to keep everything a big secret until they ship a release, we can’t wait for you to discover the cool new things we’re shipping in the latest release of our BPM product, ActiveVOS.

We plan to have ActiveVOS 6.1 available on March 10, 2009. But for BPM developers and business analysts longing for a simpler, more intelligent, easier-to-use BPM system, there’s no need to keep our new release secret. ActiveVOS 6.1 is precisely what you have been waiting for. And, if the vicissitudes of QA testing cooperate, you can have it next week.

The PDF attached to this post, authored by our Director of Products, Luc Clément and our Director of Strategy and Technology, Michael Rowley, is a great overview of what’s in ActiveVOS 6.1.

Check out the very sophisticated control of in-flight processes via our new “process rewind” capability in ActiveVOS 6.1. And, for those of you who a) know that BPEL is the core language for SOA and b) have thought BPEL is too complex, be sure to read up on how ActiveVOS 6.1 automatically generate BPEL assigns and the WSDL’s necessary to create compelling BPM applications.

 What's New in ActiveVOS 6.1: Download (638)

Today, Active Endpoints announced the winners of the Bring SOA Home for the Holidays contest, where entrants were asked to submit something which shows how they used their free, 30-day supported trial of ActiveVOS in the development of their own BPM and SOA applications in exchange for a chance to win one of three Lenovo^® IdeaPad^® netbooks.

Selected from hundreds of entries, the three winners were chosen based on creativity, thoroughness and quality of work:

1st place: Brian Carey, President, Simple Empowerment of BPMS, Inc. (client project: Perot Systems)

2nd place: Ervin Nemesszeghy, Software Architect/Java EE Developer, Hardcomsoft

3rd place: Karl Geppert, CTO, Chemwatch

Wanna win some cool prizes?  Enter our current contest BPM in a Bottle for your chance to win either a T-Mobile® G1™ smart phone with Google™ or a Logitech® Squeezebox™ Boom network music player. Contest ends March 27 so don’t delay!

This week, WSO2 announced its “Carbon” technology, including a new “business process server.” Some have suggested that we should welcome another BPEL-based BPM server into the market as it demonstrates that the market for standards-based business process servers has grown large enough that new entrants see market-share opportunities.

Maybe another marketing guy might be happy to believe that..but not me. 

Two things bother me. First is the presumption that somehow “open source” solves the cost problem. Because IBM, Oracle and SAP cost millions, open source must be the answer, right?

Wrong. Consider that, in fact, WSO2’s announced pricing for their “BPM server” actually costs more than an ActiveVOS production server over three years. Nobody — and I mean nobody  – can build a business model on “free.”  Software companies have to pay people to survive and support customers. SOA middleware is complex stuff and whether you get a perpetual license and maintenance or open source with “subscription,” you have to pay somehow. The question is how much. And ActiveVOS has the best answer, bar none.

The second problem is the Achilles heel of the SOA and BPM world: the astonishingly misguided belief that customers want to build SOAs from piece parts. C’mon…let’s get past this. Java developers working on BPM want products — not little pieces of carbon-based coal they have to meld together into something resembling a development and deployment environment.

I’ve been at Active Endpoints for a year…and I am still astonished at the disconnect between vendors and customers over this. IBM’s, Oracle’s and, to a lesser extent, SAP’s strategy I understand. They bought and built stuff that was never designed to work together. They have to sell piece parts and make it seem like a virtue. But open source fans have transformed the mistakes of the monoliths into a purported benefit that delivers the same ultimate result: a dumping of middleware product engineering onto the end user developer who never gets to the real BPM application as a result.

What basis do I have to make this claim? It’s not me who says WSO2 Carbon isn’t a product. It’s none other than Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, who blogged that “Carbon isn’t a product.” Q.E.D.

So, in a spirit of fun — and as a public service to BPEL developers who might have open source stars in their eyes — here’s our top 10 list of frustrations with the WSO2 Carbon BPM server that “isn’t a product:”

10. No worklist support (Why would anyone need a worklist in a business process?)
9.   No clustering (Hey, it’s open source…why not just write it yourself? Clustering ain’t so complicated.)
8.   No reporting (Wanna know things about running business processes? Write it yourself…after you’ve engineered that clustering thing.) 
7.   No fixing of in-flight processes (Got a process that’s been running for a month and failed because the SMTP server was down? Go straight to BPM Jail, do not collect $200, lose your work and start again.)
6.   Rudimentary monitoring (Need to see what’s happened with a process? Check that log file and use mental gymnastics to match it up with the process definition.)
5.   Hand-editing WSDL’s to specify where the service is hosted (Miss Notepad very much? Haven’t used “localhost” enough? Wanna hard-code the hostname in the WSDL? This piece of Carbon’s for you…)
4.   Installation (Use Eclipse to check out BPEL designer plugins, then build it in one Eclipse workspace. From that workspace, kick off another copy of Eclipse, in a different workspace, that uses those plugins. And if something goes wrong? Rinse, lather, repeat.)
3.   Deployment (Have fun specifying how the services should be deployed by editing WSDL bindings directly. Of course, if you write something that isn’t supported by the engine, it will be valid WSDL…it just won’t deploy.)
2. BPMN modeling (Have some BPMN that you want to use to get started on that critical BPM app? Translate to BPEL by hand.)

And the number one thing you cannot do with the WSO2 Carbon BPM server-that-isn’t-a-product:

1. Include people (People in a business process…feh! Who needs ‘em anyway?)

Today, in the winter of our economic discontent, Active Endpoints has announced something fun: a contest in which the winners will take home some very cool prizes. Our “BPM in a bottle” contest embodies several important ideas about ActiveVOS. First, that BPM is best accomplished with an all-in-one, standards-based system. Second, that BPM system should be very affordably priced. Third, that it should be fun and easy to use that BPM system to automate business processes.

Read all the details in the press release attached to this post. Enter at www.absolutebpm.com — and good luck!

 Active Endpoints announces "BPM in a Bottle Contest": Download (196)

Ann Thomas Manes, vice president and research director for application platform strategies at Burton Group, has created quite a stir in her recent post where she says that although the term “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever. In this lively podcast, Dana Gardner interviews a panel of industry luminaries to help calibrate the life span of SOA and to expand on Ms. Manes’ position on SOA being under significant pressure, in particular due to today’s abysmal economic climate. Panelists include: Anne Thomas Manes; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger on ZDNet and ebizQ; Dave Linthicum, founder of Linthicum Group and; JP Morgenthal, senior analyst at Burton Group.

Have a listen to this podcast and determine for yourself whether SOA is dead or alive. Whichever camp you belong to, we hope you’ll agree that ActiveVOS is truly an affordable, 100% standards-based, all-in-one BPMS that delivers “architecturally correct” SOA-based applications easily and quickly, empowering you to achieve your services goals today.

 

 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #36: SOA - dead or alive? [58:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (234)
 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #36: SOA - dead or alive? (transcript): Download (145)

We are pleased to offer a recording of a webinar we delivered on January 21, 2009 in which we detailed some of the functionality included in a business process management (BPM) application that we have made available for Java developers as a learning tool. Written in ActiveVOS, the “Vintage Old Stock” application (get it….? The “VOS” BPM application?? (-: ) is available for developers who want to learn how to create BPM applications easily, afford ably and which are architecturally “correct” without additional effort.

We hope you enjoy the recordings and that you will take advantage of the fully-configured, supported trial version of ActiveVOS which includes the application for both learning and for use in your BPM applications. Many, many different techniques are demonstrated in this application, which we think makes it an excellent way to begin creating your own business process management applications.

There are many learning materials associated with the demo. This announcement gives you the best route through all off this exciting information and code. But, if you can’t wait to start, you begin with the customized ActiveVOS trial download.

There are two files enclosed in this post. The first, an iPod-formatted .m4v, which will be automatically provided to iTunes subscribers of our podcast feed, is about 144MB. The second, a DivX-encoded .avi, is about 476MB in size.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #26: Lifting the Hood on a BPM Application: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (628)
 VOSibilities podcast #26: Lifting the Hood on a BPM Application: Download (120)

Today, Active Endpoints announced that UK-based commodities trader Trafigura, Ltd. has implemented a BPM application written in ActiveVOS for its risk assessment function. This application was written by Brown Study, Ltd., an Active Endpoints partner.

The press release and accompanying white paper are attachments to this post.

 Commodities Trader Trafigura, Ltd. Redesigns Core Systems with ActiveVOS: Download (268)
 Brown Study White Paper: Download (157)

This Wednesday, January 21, at Wednesday, January 21 at 2pm ET, 11am PT, 18:00 GMT, we will be presenting a free webinar (register here) in which we will “open the hood” and take a detailed look at a reference BPM and SOA application we call “Vintage Old Stock.” This webinar promises to be an excellent way for you to learn some of the latest techniques for creating BPM applications in a services-based environment.

Our ActiveVOS product manager, Mike Moniz, will detail how this fully featured business process was built using the latest SOA techniques and open standards. At the end of the demo, Mike will be taking your questions.

We encourage you to download a fully-configured version of the application, complete with extensive documentation, as a way to cement the very exciting things you will learn in this webinar.

Once again, here’s the registration link. We hope you can join us.

Loraine Lawson recently did a great job of summarizing some of the predictions for 2009 for IT. Loraine noticed that there was one item that was common among the predictions by David Linthicum, Joe McKendrick and Eric Roch. Joe put it this way: “There will be fewer big-bang SOA projects rolled across the whole enterprise, and many more incremental, bottom-up efforts — many of which may be under the radar.” Although not mentioned in Loraine’s post, Dana Gardner also has this podcast interview with several pontificators who predict, among other things, that businesses in 2009 will emphasize projects that can reduce costs in the near term.

So, what technology do you want to use if you already have several services and you want to quickly and easily create a few new services, partly by building off of existing services and partly from scratch? Installing an ESB would be a mistake. If you already have one, that’s great, but a small project isn’t the right place to kick off the move to an enterprise-wide bus.

What about development technologies? Should you create your new services using JAX-WS and JAXB deployed using JavaEE deployment machinery? No. Why pay all of the complexity costs related to mapping XML and web services into Java in this case? The new business logic would be so dwarfed by all of the generated code and configuration files that it would be lost in the muck. Just the JAXB generated classes alone will usually be counted in dozens for any real XML document.

Why not use an orchestration language that is already designed to use XML and WSDL as the native type system for the variables and method signatures? In other words why not use BPEL? If the new service can’t be fully automated you can use BPEL4People to handle the involvement of people in the service.

Of course using the right language is not sufficient. For the project to be small and simple, it should also be easy to test and deploy. It should make it easy to manage running services. And just because you want high developer productivity doesn’t mean you can give up the need to develop truly high performance services. And if the project is really going to generate a quick ROI and operate “under the radar,” it has to be budget-friendly.

ActiveVOS anyone?