In fact, several of her songs (mostly covers) have been featured in episodes of the show, and not just because she’s married to the executive producer and writer, Kurt Sutter (who also plays Otto, the long-suffering one-eyed inmate); the lady has legit singing chops. Check out her stuff below and tune in to the new season tonight on FX.

“insane complexity of technology is leading companies to spend 75% to 80% of IT budgets simply maintaining the systems they have already.”

The 75%-80% figure is a little higher than the 60%-70% figure I’d seen in customer research we did a few years back. But the issue I have with the quote is the suggestion that spending on systems you have already is a waste of money or time.

Very few companies have the luxury of implementing greenfield applications.

Most of the time, your new app has to integrate with a large number of your old apps. And that may require some tweaks to your old apps. Or maybe your company changed or added a new business process, so you’ll need to make some modifications to your existing apps. That’s not waste, that’s a normal business expense.

The alternative would be to throw out the existing app that needs to be modified and start again; to me, that’s waste.

If you tell me that SOA or loosely coupled web services are the answer. I’ll agree, to a a certain degree. But now, instead of modifying existing app “XYZ”, you’re going to modify existing component/service “YZA”.

On the topic of innovation, here’s a good article from Business Review Online about customers using Open Source as a means to drive innovation. Interesting that OpenLogic is seeing customers that either want to save money or open up technical innovation. I’m surprised that customers don’t want to do both.

We found that customers that adopted Apache Geronimo (support from IBM) or WAS Community Edition (WAS CE) were seeking to save money and build a platform that allowed their developers to write and deploy applications faster and with more flexibility.

Often, they were using Apache Geronimo or WAS CE for a specific project that needed to get rolled out ASAP. But, these customers cared about how “this stuff will work with the stuff I already have“. They wanted to know what options they had if the app transformed from “a quick and dirty request to something that users relied on, would be less productive without and wanted more out of“. Cost savings, a platform for innovation and future flexibility and choice were all considerations.

Most IT folks know that applications seldom fade away quickly, they just get integrated and maintained with all the other “legacy stuff“.

The pic is from A.M. Kuchling over at Flickr

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

Environments have been built over time with diverse layers of applications. The development time and maintenance cost to manage these layers is driven down when integration components are built on standards. The most compelling standard in the integration space is Java Business Integration (JBI) which allows for the creation of a Service Oriented Architecture with interchangeable components that are vendor-independent.

Isn’t all development easier with a standard?

Not really. Don’t confuse the ease of using the standardized run-time components with the creation of those run-times. The creation of JBI run-time components is a whole new technology, with layered naming conventions and rules for each binding and service engine components. As with any new technology, JBI brings with it a sizable learning curve.

Plan time to learn JBI technology

Developers interested in JBI will need to reserve some time to learn. This type of exposure is mostly reviewing code snippets from existing open source JBI applications, like ServiceMix, and supplementing that learn-as-you-explore strategy with the 228 page JBI specification document publicly available from the Java Community Process organization. SOA integration experts, like Scott Ganyo with Moongate Technologies, agree that it can take a long time to learn the rules of the JBI spec nomenclature and nuances to code within the standard. While it is not brain surgery, even an experienced integration developer will need to devote targeted time to get up to speed.

The Holy Grail of Simplified Integration

So here is the hitch. Everybody is focused on SOA, and the push-point of that statement is everybody is everybody, from code crunchers to web designers.

The use of standards, like JBI, simplifies the combining of components but it is the ability to make those high-learning-curve standards accessible to all levels of coders that is the Holy Grail enterprises will be striving to acquire.

Less sophisticated audiences, one proven method

It is an early adopter assumption to think everyone using your product knows what they are doing. The first implementers of any new technology will cater to the most sophisticated users. But the SOA audience is as varied as the many applications they are trying to integrate, so this market will need a splay of products to cover different levels of expertise. A graphical interface, as we have seen successfully implemented in workflow and business process applications, is a proven method to simplify the design and implementation process. Just as BPEL maps out high-level business processes as a workflow, an intuitive graphical interface for the lower level integrations has a definite market for a technical user that wants to keep their distance from the detail specifications and simply drag and drop functionality.

Graphical Interfaces hide mundane details from developers

If vendors create graphical interfaces that generate standards-based code under the covers, a developer can avoid understanding the intimate details of the specification while still enjoying the benefits of developing a standards-based integration. A robust graphical interface allows each SOA developer to visualize the integration path and then simply click to define the properties in a fill-in-the-blank format. This expands the standards-based playing field to include a broader base of developers. The true beauty of the interface is to ultimately create standards based code so that the resulting run-time components integrate easily with other internally and externally developed components.

Graphical Interfaces are not always a priority

It is a certainty that more organizations will eventually go the graphical direction. First vendors develop the functionality and then they make it easier to reuse. While a couple of vendors have already started down a user-centric graphical path, an across-the-board improvement to robust graphical interfaces for integration will take a year or more.

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Kristen Puckett writes on Java Business Integration (JBI) and e-commerce integration for Bostech Corporation (http://www.bostechcorp.com). Kristen invites developers to download Bostech’s ChainBuilder ESB, a JBI-compliant solution with a graphical editor, at http://download.chainforge.net.

The company’s product line allows business users, business analysts, QA engineers, sales engineers, consultants, and developers to quickly and easily test and certify new web services, business processes and applications. Gardner is an industry veteran with more than 30 years in the enterprise software industry.

1. For business executives who may not be that attuned to technology, explain in plain English what SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is and how it differs from traditional software development and testing approaches.

SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture. Modern application architectures have evolved from mainframe and client/server architectures so that enterprise applications can be delivered over the Web. The architectural idea is that the software will be composed of a set of loosely coupled components (called services) that exchange messages across the Web to do work. While there are hotly debated variations in approach and terminology (SOA, REST, Composite Applications, Web 2.0, etc.) there is deep consensus that XML Messaging and Services are the basic building blocks of new Web applications. Visual Tools available from many vendors allow NEW business processes to be very quickly composed and modified combining Services over the Web.

This new architecture runs on shared computing resources (cluster or grid) giving large cost savings over the previous generation. The enterprise gets a flexible, scalable, ON DEMAND processing infrastructure that can be easily integrated with existing applications and customized for that enterprises’ needs. Every leading software application vendor is moving rapidly to deliver versions of their products to enable this approach.

2. Your web site describes SOASTA’s approach as “revolutionary.” What’s revolutionary about it?

Testing is a complex and very detailed activity requiring the tester to design test scenarios. Existing testing tools are script-based which means that you write code (JAVA, C#, Perl or a proprietary scripting language) in order to construct and execute the tests. So, the tester writes script code to test the application code. This a tedious, time consuming and expensive process.

SOASTA provides an easy to use product for testing web-based services and applications. The objective is to substantially reduce the effort and technical expertise necessary to create and execute complex parallel message scenarios necessary to test new Web applications. That is accomplished in SOASTA Concerto by providing a suite of visual tools designed to automate all of the tasks necessary to test Web applications.

SOASTA Concerto uses a NEW and REVOLUTIONARY visual approach borrowed from the world of digital media creation. It is very similar to products like Apple’s Final Cut Pro or iMovie. In a digital movie, video and sound clips are arranged in a drag-and-drop multi track mixing board in order to control the sequence and timing of the final video. Transition effects like fades and special effects are specified. Similarly, in SOASTA Concerto, the test designer visually creates messages, combines messages into message clips and arranges the clips in a drag-and-drop multi-track mixing board in order to control the sequence and timing of the test composition. Complex, parallel message streams are quickly and easily created without writing code.

Visual approaches to solving complex problems are much easier to show than to describe. Please visit http://www.soasta.com in order to see a short video demonstrating the power of these visual tools.

3. What are the business benefits that customers can expect from SOASTA’s environment?

SOASTA Concerto is offered as a hosted service and on a monthly subscription basis for in-house use. The application is delivered via any Web browser using AJAX technology over the Web. Customer benefits include dramatic productivity gains in building tests and certifying Web applications (no coding or scripting required), automation of the testing of web applications, higher quality web applications which will reduce end user support costs, an affordable testing environment, and the ability for dispersed testing teams to collaborate over the Web in building and executing complex tests.

4. Who will use SOASTA and how will they find out about it?

SOASTA Concerto will be used by any developer, tester, sales engineer, consultant or business analyst involved in the implementation of Web applications. SOASTA will go to market using a variety of new communications vehicles such as video podcasting, blogging and free trial offers.

5. Where are you now and where do you expect to be a year from now?

The Alpha version of SOASTA Concerto is currently in use at selected companies. SOASTA is continuing to build out the SOASTA Concerto environment and expects a Q1, 2007 launch of the hosted service.

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Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

http://www.enterpriseweb2.com

Financial terms were not disclosed as IBM announced its acquisition of Webify and its service oriented architecture (SOA) software and services. SOA has been increasing in importance as firms look for ways to make legacy applications available as web services.

IBM has plans to make Webify part of what it can offer to companies through its business consulting services. These services provide richer profit margins to their providers than software sales do in that heavily competitive market.

Webify’s semantic expertise will make it useful when IBM comes calling to recommend a solution in a given vertical market. The Webify semantics will be the bridge to bring proprietary applications to a point where they can communicate with other business processes.

The company has been an IBM partner for a few years, and all of its 120 employees based in Austin and Mumbai, India, will join IBM when the purchase has been completed, the companies said in a statement on the deal.

Robert LeBlanc, general manager, IBM WebSphere Software, emphasized a couple of vertical markets where Webify will help IBM. He mentioned the insurance and healthcare markets, both of which notoriously run proprietary applications and lots of them.

Both markets have plenty of deep-pocketed players that can afford to make the kind of investments in SOA that will make IBM happy they picked up Webify. As long as IBM can assure those industries they can establish and maintain security with SOA, while making those back-end processes more accessible, they should be able to capitalize on this purchase.

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

Days of happily coding dynamic, functional web pages suddenly have a dark cloud pass over them. The powers-that-be have decided to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) into the business.

IBM has noted in an article on developing the SOA team internally requires an assortment of roles taking their places in the group.

Developers have a spot, along with architects, business analysts, and project managers; naturally various tech support areas have roles as well. We’re only worried about the developers here. Project managers can go play with their BlackBerries or shift some paradigms if they like.

What SOA does is to promote the delivery of services that are integrated with business processes to the people who use those services. Instead of a bunch of applications eating space on hundreds of desktop PCs, users access what they need and are allowed to have from their workstations across the network.

Since the web browser has started to become what Microsoft feared of Netscape, an environment that renders the underlying operating system irrelevant to the browser, developers must craft the technology people will use to access applications through it.

IBM emphasized in its discussion of SOA roles that developers do something they may be averse to doing: reusing code for services. They explain why developers should reuse instead of reinvent:

Fortunately, the reference material and other sources of information about web services should make developers the best suited to the SOA transition. You’ll know if this is true when the project managers come by to ask a lot of questions about SOA.

Discuss this article with your fellow WebPros at WebProWorld.
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The partnership between middleware company BEA and database maker Ingres presents service-oriented architecture (SOA) developers on Eclipse another option for building their applications.

Both firms have made trial versions of their software available for download. Ingres also provides a Community Edition of their database with licensing under the GNU General Public License version 2.

BEA Workshop Studio comes with a 15-day trial, and can be downloaded using the Express option if Eclipse is already in place on the workstation. A JDBC connector in the latest versions of Workshop Studio allows for easy connectivity to Ingres through the DbXplorer tool.

Once added and tested, the objects available in the Ingres database come into view. Then, the various features of Workshop Studio as well as Eclipse can be used against those objects.

Current users of Ingres r3 who want to try out Workshop Studio will need to download the latest Ingres JDBC Driver that comes with Ingres 2006. Support for trial users of the software packages can get help on BEA’s forums.

The BEA arrangement represents the first ISV partnership for the now-independent Ingres. As part of developing a blended open source strategy, Ingres provides services and donations of its source code, while commercial vendors like BEA add value with their product lines and certification of a combined solution.

Eclipse’s popularity only contributes to the potential effectiveness of such pairings. With Workshop Studio available as a plug-in to Eclipse, and JDBC connectivity to Ingres as part of the package, the deal makes the offer more appealing to developers who are considering SOA-development options in the workplace.

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It’s either a brilliant idea or it isn’t. Detractors see no difference between so-called 1.0 and 2.0 versions of SOA. Advocates like Oracle believe the difference is quite noticeable.

During the JavaOne Conference, Oracle executive Thomas Kurian, Senior VP for server technologies, discussed the future of Oracle and its next-generation application platform.

A report by Search Web Services showed how J2EE will figure in the SOA 2.0 world. Kurian contended that developers would adopt the latest version of J2EE, which will make it easier for them to build interfaces for underlying applications.

“We see a new application development framework emerging,” he said at the conference. Interfaces for those applications would be constructed using Java Server Faces technology.

The Fusion and J2EE framework behind SOA 2.0 would be an event-driven architecture instead of the conventional client/server methods employed in the present implementations of SOA. Some don’t see the big deal.

Joe McKendrick of ZDNet noted how JBoss director of standards Mark Little derided the proposal:

Oracle seems to be hedging its bets too. InfoWorld reported how Oracle is playing it safe when it comes to development:

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Now, since I was the first to write extensively about Enterprise 2.0 I feel I’m entitled to define it:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of freeform social software within companies.

‘Freeform’ in this case means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional
• Free of up-front workflow
• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
• Accepting of many types of data

‘Social’ means that there’s always a person on at least one end of the wire with Enterprise 2.0 technologies. With wikis, prediction markets, blogs, del.icio.us, and other Web 2.0 technologies with clear enterprise applications people are doing all the interacting and providing some or all of the content; the IT is just doing housekeeping and/or bookkeeping.

I’m in agreement, and find it easier to be than naming debates of the past (and reminiscent at my first stab at naming: “Social Software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software“).

If there is debate, it will be on two fonts: the role of organizational identities (Egalitarian) or an emaphasis on technology over social dynamics. McAfee focuses on the second, that of Enterprise 2.0 vs. SoA:

Jeff Nolan insightfully points out that Web 2.0 is greatly aided by things like scripting and REST architectures, and I agree that Enterprise 2.0 applications are a lot easier to use if users can drag and drop and do other cool AJAX-enabled things from within the browser. But to me these components aren’t even enabling technologies, since Enterprise 2.0 could happen without them. They’re clearly accelerating technologies, but keep in mind that the first wiki was built in 1994 and put on the Web in 1995, well before the initial XML spec was submitted.

Programmers could build fully-functional wikis, blogs, tagging systems, and prediction markets by carving them out of solid COBOL and serving them through the first Netscape browser. They’d be clunky, but they’d work. And I bet they’d draw users, too, because they’d tap into our desire to use technology to interact with each other, and also tap into the good stuff that emerges when we do so. As I wrote earlier, I think of Web 2.0 as the era when technologists really woke up to this; Enterprise 2.0 will be the era when business leaders join them…

Claims about the power and benefits of SOA and its predecessors have been running ahead of reality for years. Claims about the power and benefits of freeform social software, on the other hand, mostly cropped up in the wake of real-world examples…

A second difference between SOA and Enterprise 2.0 (which I think is closely connected to the first one) is that a service oriented architecture has to be imposed up front, while an Enterprise 2.0 environment emerges over time…

The second front, that Enterprise 2.0 is Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities, not only flys in the face of enterprise culture and convention, but previously encoded political bargains. For example, a primary property of social software is easy group forming — but most enterprise systems expressly prevent it. To form a group, you not only need permission from IT, but complex configuration and in many cases even software development. Beyond applications, ever come across an LDAP implementation that supports easy group forming? This runs counter to the way many enterprises actually work today, where ad hoc cross-functional teams drive more than professional services organizations.

A second example is fine grained security. Content management, document management, portals and poorly designed wikis highlight per object/page permissioning. Certain expert users have the ability to control access and rights for a specific document. This harms productivity — when a user needs to access a document to perform a task and has to incur the overhead that can unlock it, plus the overhead of locking (structure upfront) and unlocking itself. This harms knowledge sharing — documents go undiscovered and are decidedly static, despite how the knowledge in the document is never finished. This harms competitive advantage — any system that exhibits inertia compromises a firm’s ability to adapt to it’s dynamic environment.

While .pdf is where knowledge goes to die, there are some documents that benefit from being static. But they are a fraction of the documents in a given enterprise. And with the discovery afforded by hypertext and tagging, documents have the potential to exist in a social context. Even a locked down document, if viewable, can be annotated through linked messages.

Imagine how useful Wikipedia would be if a handful of admins could lock down links to articles indefinately and without oversight, their ability to be discovered through Google, let alone edit them. Then imagine the same thing behind the firewall, where there is less risk (you can presume a greate innocence of users and know their identity). Utility is decidedly compromised.

This is why enterprise systems have low adoption rates, little user generated content, high quality metadata and email is used for everything. Every sacrifice made for sake of control reduces network effects, assumes a static environment you can design against and is designed by supposed experts outside the context of use. Contrary to the most disruptive pattern of social software — sharing control creates value.

UPDATE: Traditional KM Systems Compared To Print summarizes a post by Jeff Jarvis (The Book is Dead) in related terms:

1. Enterprise 2.0 defreezes knowledge.

2. Enterprise 2.0 enables knowledge churn & flow.

3. Conversations are central to Enterprise 2.0 and incidentally knowledge resides in conversations.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

Big Blue is rolling out a total of 11 products alongside 20 WebSphere enhancements and training tens of thousands of consultants for the SOA initiative. IBM’s aggressiveness in the SOA software market is in recognition of the market’s slow growth, primarily due to the complexities of it.

“An SOA plays a strategic role in any company — from a retailer to a car manufacturer to a financial institution — because it enables people to collaborate and innovate, identify new business opportunities, and move the customers’ needs to the forefront,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group.

IBM says there are five “entry points” that make it easier to initiate SOA projects. Those entry points center around users, processes, information, connectivity, and reuse. Targeted toward those entry points, the company released four software packages to support SOA.

For supporting a people-centric approach to SOA, WebSphere Portal version 6.0 integrates IBM Workplace and collaborative technologies, making it easier for users to build and deploy composite applications that can be tailored by industry, role or task. The new release takes advantage of AJAX to create a more responsive user environment.

Additionally, the latest version provides a workflow builder that utilizes the process engine from WebSphere Process Server, open standards-based software powered by WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that helps simplify the integration of business processes.

The WebSphere Business Monitor version 6.0 is a software that provides an “an aerial” view of the business and enables customers to proactively identify potential issues before they impact productivity. New features include business alerts, links to third-party reports that combine real-time performance and historical analysis, and scorecards to track the status and metrics of projects.

The alert can be integrated with third-party research, customer feedback and recommended next steps that could help minimize the impact of a competitor’s move on the market.

The enhanced IBM Banking Information FrameWork and IBM Insurance Application Architecture models provide a set of critical processes, workflows, and activities to help organizations reengineer their business processes to implement strategic initiatives such as master data management.

A big issue among business is the capability to reuse SOA applications as reuse is five times less expensive than writing new applications, says IBM. WebSphere Application Server version 6.1 and WebSphere Commerce version 6.0 both focus on enabling reuse and easier SOA management.

WebSphere Commerce includes several new features, providing a consistent view of the customer across sales channels. It also includes a set of tools that enable merchants to replicate the online experience in their store to deliver more personalized customer service.

Automotive after-market retail chain Pep Boys recently employed IBM’s SOA building skills.

“We struggled with identifying the most effective way to service our customers, fend off competitors and make sure that we have a strategic approach to integrating all of our 593 stores without losing profit due to tactical missteps in our operations,” said Bob Berckman, assistant vice president, Pep Boys.

“With an IBM-based SOA, we’re able to pinpoint gaps in productivity and customer service before they negatively impact our business.”