The rocking virtual house on the Internet looks like a House of Blues to the major labels that have squeezed fans and artists for decades. Shed no tears for an industry that thought $18.99 and up was a brilliant price to charge for CDs.

Artists who are free from their contractual obligations to major labels can choose to experiment with how they want to distribute their music. Prince put a couple of million free CDs in a British newspaper, and sold out concert after concert in London.

The move by Radiohead to offer In Rainbows at a name your price rate has been followed by Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor hinting at distributing his music in a non-music label kind of way.

That crack in the music label’s wall of control shows signs of spreading. The Telegraph named Oasis and Jamiroquai as a couple of bands ready to emulate Radiohead’s example.

The story also cited Alan McGee, manager of The Charlatans, in suggesting that his band and acts like famed Manchester scenesters Happy Mondays may be positioned to follow the Radiohead example.

“How do you get them profile?” he asked, regarding these bands that were once big but simply do not get the exposure of other acts. “You give away the record.”

Oasis has been very big, definitely in the conversation when talking about Radiohead or NIN, and their next single will be a download-only track. They can offer an iTunes-like price, but instead of watching a label chow down on 70 percent of the sale, or more, Oasis keeps the money, less expenses.

We would be thrilled to see vociferous Napster critics, Metallica, follow this example. It would be a nice way to apologize for ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’.

It had been about a year since IBM’s Marc Andrews, director for strategy & business development for content discovery, chatted with WebProNews about UIMA. I talked with him while he was enjoying the always-cheerful environs of a busy airport somewhere about the latest news about UIMA.

The technology behind UIMA offers the promise of going beyond the typical search capabilities seen in search engines like Google and Ask today. UIMA understands unstructured information, stored in a multitude of formats, by its concept rather than just as keywords to match.

In January 2006, IBM placed UIMA on SourceForge, giving open source developers access to its framework.

The tech world and beyond have taken notice; two major projects, at the Mayo Clinic and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, have been implementing UIMA-based solutions to aid in finding and facilitating deeper and more encompassing medical research.

Andrews said IBM has seen adoption of UIMA throughout the academic, government, and business worlds over the past year since we’ve spoken.

IBM’s open source efforts continued with their recent steps into that community. Apache has launched a project, Apache UIMA, which should drive more community involvement with UIMA.

Ideally, Andrews would like to see what the free/open source software community can do with creating components that take advantage of UIMA to fulfill a given need. “Value comes from components that others can draw from,” he said.

The OASIS efforts at developing a standard for UIMA are at a very early stage. Andrews said the official call for participation will come from the OASIS UIMA Technical Committee, comprised of heavy hitters like Carnegie Mellon University and the Army Information and Intelligence Warfare Directorate.

Those who would like to experiment with UIMA at Apache’s project site will find IBM has contributed UIMA’s version 2.0 source code to the incubator. Carnegie Mellon created a UIMA Component Repository, and analytics tools from sources like the UK’s General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) and OpenNLP may be obtained freely.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

A major new feature, touted by the company as the future of CRM platforms, will be the integration of Ajax into aspects of the main Oasis CRM interface.

KnowTia is aiming its latest software upgrade “at corporate clients and those who have outgrown their small business applications.” With previous versions, they have tried to be competitive with corporations such as NetSuite and salesforce.com.

KnowTia has asserted in the past that these companies’ offsite hosted CRM models “act as a paid service instead of a true CRM investment.” KnowTia proudly proclaims their own products as “100% Web-based CRM.”

With Oasis CRM 2.0, KnowTia hopes to remain a contender. New features such as Ajax dashboards, blanket order management, and an enhanced user interface (as compared to the previous version) will be employed in conjunction with their existing real-time integration with BusinessVision 32 and QuickBooks Pro.

Other advertised features include contact-based (as opposed to account-based) CRM, complete order management (including fulfillment), “easy to use and customizable” web-based interface, and “comprehensive” contract and complete inventory management.

Ajax should allow users of the Oasis CRM software to pull data from the server to the interface without web page refreshing or any other disruption. This would permit for simultaneous and refreshing dashboard graphs in a web environment, which KnowTia believes will be a major selling point.

The integration with BusinessVision 32 and QuickBooks Pro (which the older versions of KnowTia software, KnowTia Professional & Corporate Editions, also featured) lets users access information about their clients’ finances without giving up their own company’s financial information.

According to Oasis officials, this will allow “for a constant loop of client data which is consistently flowing throughout Oasis CRM and their accounting system.”

Oasis 2.0 comes in the midst of a number of developments, both in terms of technology and news, in the CRM world. SAP recently made public the first on-demand/on-premise CRM suite, known as SAP CRM 2006s. But salesforce.com, which the KnowTia Corporation considers a direct competitor, just released some rather mediocre first-quarter financial numbers. Although the former tidbit presents itself as a huge obstacle for KnowTia, the latter could give the company a comparative advantage.

The Oasis CRM tagline is “your True Total Business Solution.” Their website reveals plans to make that become true, telling of product integrations with Sage PeachTree, Microsoft SB Financials, Microsoft Great Plains, QuickBooks Merchant Services, and Quickbooks POS 5.0 in the coming months.

The features afforded by Ajax, in addition to these impending integrations with popular accounting packages, should help KnowTia protect its corner of the market with Oasis 2.0 CRM.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Interoperability remains a buzz word in the tech business as many companies want to be able streamline how their products work and how they work in relation to other products. OASIS continually works on universal standards for such areas and they’ve been working on WSDM.

Employing a weather station scenario, the WSDM OASIS InterOp demonstrates how management applications can go beyond centralized monitoring in an agent-based environment to achieve truly distributed, collaborative management in a world composed of both smart and simple resources. In the demonstration, the client depended on weather station services to send reports. By using WSDM, the manager was able to dynamically discover available weather stations, receive notification when a station was taken down for maintenance, and automatically redirect the client application to the next best weather station available, based entirely on a response time performance policy, without the client ever experiencing slowdowns or failures.

“This InterOp clearly illustrates WSDM’s ability to enable client applications to remain unaffected by changes in the status of services they invoke-all within a heterogeneous environment,” said Heather Kreger of IBM, co-chair of the OASIS WSDM Technical Committee and participant in the InterOp. “WSDM can also be used to enrich business processes with management information and action, and to manage across organizational boundaries.”

WSDM was developed by members of the OASIS WSDM Technical Committee, which includes representatives of Actional, Amberpoint, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Computer Associates, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Novell, Oracle, SAP, SOA Software, TIBCO, and others. Participation remains open to all, and suppliers, end-users and system integrators are invited to join OASIS to advance the continued development and adoption of WSDM. OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment and the wsdm-dev mailing list for exchanging information on implementing the standard.

“HP is excited about the progress that this represents in the features that a standardized management protocol provides. In particular, WSDM provides management features that are critical for the management of SOAs,” said Judi Cowell, director of software standards at Hewlett-Packard Company.

This development helps to further the goals of OASIS, which are to develop standards in many areas of e-business and helping to get those standards adopted.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The OASIS Open Standards Day program will feature presentations on the latest eGovernment projects as well as on XML for tax-related information. It will provide updates on widely applicable specifications, such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL), Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) OASIS Standard, Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) and Web Services Notification (WSN) specifications. The Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 and its interaction with the related profile adapters in eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) and WS-Security will also be explored, as will the Product Life Cycle Support (PLCS) specification. A European Justice System’s use of the ebXML Messaging OASIS Standard will provide perspective on real-world deployment of standards.

“The OASIS Open Standards Day at XTech presents an exciting opportunity for the developers of today’s most influential standards to interface with implementers and government representatives in Europe,” noted Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. Gannon will provide the keynote address for the event, which will highlight the growing number of European e-Government and e-Health initiatives endorsing OASIS work. Attendance is open to all interested parties. Registrations will be accepted for the OASIS Open Standards Day alone or as part of a full XTech conference pass.

OASIS consists of many companies working together to develop standards to be used worldwide in order to make electronic commerce stronger and much easier for companies, countries, universities and home users to utilize.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

“The term SOA is used in an increasing number of contexts with differing-and even conflicting-meanings,” said Duane Nickull of Adobe Systems, chair of the OASIS SOA-RM Technical Committee. “If SOA is architecture, as the name implies, then we should define it as architecture. The reference model we create will be useful for the entire industry, offering a way to preserve a common layer of understanding across multiple service oriented environments and architectures.”

Specifically, the SOA reference model will offer an understanding of the core elements within a service oriented environment and the associations and relationships among those elements. The reference model itself will not be directly tied to any standards, technologies or other concrete implementation details. Rather, it will be an abstract, designed to be used as a tool by software and enterprise architects developing specific SOAs.

“In addition to vendors, there is a significant contingent of SOA end users from across the globe rallying around this work to define the basic, common elements of any service-oriented system,” noted James Bryce Clark, Director of Standards Development at OASIS. He cited participation from government agencies such as Japan’s Electronic Commerce Promotion Council, Canada’s Public Works and Government Services, and USA’s Department of Homeland Security, as well as users that include Boeing, General Motors, Lockheed-Martin, Mitre, and VISA.

The OASIS SOA-RM Technical Committee already has more than 45 members, and participation remains open to all organizations and individuals, especially those directly involved in the design, documentation, or implementation of SOAs. As with all OASIS projects, archives of the Committee’s work are accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment.

SOA Software
“As a leader in Service Oriented Architecture Infrastructure, we are focused on rapid implementation and adoption of emerging standards and are deeply committed to the standards process,” said Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software. “The SOA reference model will promote a deeper understanding of the value employing a correctly designed service-oriented architecture can bring to large enterprise and government organizations.”

There was an excellent column on SOAs on WebProNews back in October. I recommend checking it out for anyone who needs a good run down on what SOAs are and there pros and cons.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The specifications are made up of protocol and policy assertions, to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for further review and finalization as a Web services standard. Using feedback from across the industry, the co-authors proposed a technical committee and charter to enable further review and industry collaboration on the proposed standard.

WS-RM has received broad industry support with a number of implementations beyond the authoring companies stemming from a series of workshops for feedback, with the most recent workshop having been held April 13–14, 2005. Many other companies and organizations, including Actional, Adobe, Arjuna, Blue Titan, Choreology, Ericsson, IONA, OAGi, Reactivity, Sonic, Sun Microsystems, Systinet, webMethods, the U.K. government, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, support the launch of this effort in OASIS.

“Our customers will benefit from the functions that WS-RM provides as they develop more secure, reliable business applications based on Web services,” said Karla Norsworthy, vice president of software standards at IBM. “With this technology, delivery of messages between partners, suppliers and customers can be assured in an efficient and scalable way that will support both enterprise-level applications utilizing middleware and simpler point-to-point applications. With the submission to OASIS, we look forward to further industry contributions and adoption.”

The co-authors are committed to the development of open industry standards to help drive widespread adoption of Web services and will not charge royalties in conjunction with WS-RM. The co-authors are looking forward to future collaboration in helping to bring together a more cohesive and composable Web services architecture.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The new Electronic Procurement Standardization (EPS) Technical Committee will analyze requirements, identify gaps, and make recommendations for improving the interoperability of XML, internet based e-procurement systems.

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