elemental links

OMG's Event-Driven Architecture DRAFT RFI available for public review

Updated 8.23.2006 at 11:02 to insert "DRAFT" into the post title, and add the following clarifying note:

The linked document is a "work in progress", and not (yet) an official RFI.  In other words, please review the RFI for content (additions, changes, deletions), not for submitting a response.  Thanks.

[The original post starts here]

The Object Management Group’s SOA SIG is looking for community (practitioner, vendor, researcher, observer) feedback on a draft request for information (RFI) on event-driven architecture (EDA) and its relationship with service-oriented architecture (SOA) & business-process management (BPM).

Here’s the RFI Summary:

The EDA Sub-group of the OMG SOA SIG seeks information from members of the EDA, BPM and SOA community as well as anyone interested in promoting standards in this area. Requested information will be evaluated by the EDA Sub-group, resulting in the development of Requests for Proposal(s) (RFP) for standardization of Event definition, relationship between EDA, BPM and SOA that will ultimately allow development of standards for Complete Life Cycle of Events -Ontology of Events, Sense and Respond Services, Events Metrics and processing of complex events. Please note that it is our intent to develop modeling standards for the EDA/SOA and EDA-Business Process interaction and provide standards for the implementation of that interaction as well.

For those (like me) not completely familiar with the OMG process, here’s the description of the RFI process taken from section 8 of The OMG Hitchhiker’s Guide, V7.3:

The intent of the Request for Information (RFI) is to gather information for the purpose of guiding a subgroup in its efforts to provide solutions to industry problems. The RFI is an optional process used by a subgroup to canvass a targeted industry segment for one or more of the following purposes:

•                
  • Soliciting assistance in identifying potential technology sources.
                 
  • Soliciting input to and validate a subgroup’s roadmap.
              

  • Acquiring general or specific information about industry requirements.    

Generally speaking, the RFI process determines which Request For Proposals (RFPs) get issued (and, based on negative feedback, which don't) or influences the way a particular RFP is constructed.

There are no restrictions on who may receive or respond to a RFI. Both OMG Members and non-members can respond. RFI Responses may include information about relevant technologies, products, standards, research, requirements, and other guidance for the subgroup.

If you are interested in EDA (simple, stream, complex), take a look at the RFI and provide comments to Dr. Harsh Sharma. The plan calls for a final review of the RFI at the OMG’s September Technical Meeting in Anaheim.

I suppose this is where I say “I’m going to Disneyland!” I am a guest contributor (no $ exchanged either way) to the EDA subgroup of the OMG SOA SIG.

Introducing: Elemental Links, Inc.

[Update July 20, 2008, For the latest information on Elemental Links, Inc., please visit the business website.]

As I alluded to earlier this year, my research, writing, and field work interests, bolstered by positive community response, signaled an impending change for me. It was time to accelerate the articulation, evangelism and practice of business-driven architecture:

Business-Driven Architecture is my view of architecture, developed on the premise that architecture is not an end, but a means, and the business must drive architecture composition.

I believe the most viable, agile architectures will be comprised of a blend of architecture strategies, including (but not limited to) service-oriented architecture, event-driven architecture, process-based architecture, federated information, enterprise integration and open source adoption. How you blend, depends on your business.

In Business-Driven Architecture, enterprise architects are not only responsible for articulating the architecture, but also for actualizing the architecture, and introducing the architecture into IT business projects.

Business-Driven Architecture has a strong bias to action, business opportunity, and project and portfolio advancement.

The question I pondered the last several months was ‘How’. How could I increase my focus on business-driven architecture, continue to write on relevant business, architecture and technology topics, spend time in the field with practitioners and providers, and pay the bills?

The answer brings me to today’s post. In early June, I left my position at the Patricia Seybold Group to devote my full attention to building Elemental Links, Inc. and furthering my work on business-driven architecture.

Before I delve into Elemental Links, I want to thank Patty for supporting my plans, and being the first Elemental Links business ecosystem affiliate. (more on that later).

And now, in the remainder of this post, I’m pleased to officially introduce Elemental Links, Inc.

Elemental Links, Inc.

What is Elemental Links?

Elemental Links is an IT consulting and advisory practice specializing in strategy, architecture, and portfolio planning for business-driven IT.

What is the Founder Thinking?

While the one-liner is important to express what and who, I think clients, prospects, and community members are also interested in understanding the business design principles. What is the architectural premise? What influences the principal’s decisions on business interactions, product and service offerings, research agenda, and engagements?

What follows is my thinking in framing Elemental Links. My premise is simple:

Content and relationships are the foundation of a business. A business with relationship oriented principles (accessibility, relevance, collaboration and transparency) and execution can be profitable, even when, or perhaps because, good content is provided freely.

Stated in terms of my business design principles:

Elemental Links is relevant, accessible, collaborative, transparent and profitable.

Expanding on each design principle:

Elemental Links is Relevant:

• Grounded in Reality. Research and advice is relevant in the real-world. Insights are delivered with a healthy dose of pragmatism. Advice is actionable.

• Business-Driven. Research emphasizes business-driven IT. Advice pertains to client’s business.

• On Topic. Research agenda, client engagements, and community participation relate to business-driven architecture.

Elemental Links is Accessible:

• Content. Content is consumable. Good content is provided freely.

• Interactions. Easy to reach. Receptive to provider and enterprise briefings. Simple to engage: No subscriptions. No advisory relationship prerequisites.

• Investment.  For purchase products and services are reasonably priced.

Elemental Links is Collaborative:

• Clients.  Collaboration is the key to client engagement success. Elemental Links will augment, not displace, client team.

• Community. Elemental Links will contribute to formal and informal communities in areas of interest to business-driven architecture and business-driven IT.

• Partners. No single individual or business has all the answers. Elemental Links will create, and participate in, business affiliate ecosystems for some content co-creation, community outreach, and engagement delivery.

Elemental Links is Transparent:

• Economic Interest Disclosure. Writings and conversations pertaining to technology, solution or service providers in which Elemental Links, or Brenda Michelson, has an economic interest (client, direct equity position) will include disclosures.

• Funding Disclosure. Any sponsor funding received for topical or practitioner research pieces will be prominently, and repeatedly, disclosed. No sponsor funding will be accepted for product or vendor research pieces.

• Yet Protective. Transparency practices will not infringe on client and community privacy, nor violate non-disclosure agreements. Clients requesting anonymity will not be mentioned in writings or conversations.

Elemental Links is Profitable:

• Fair Profit. For accessibility to work - free access to good content - there must be a supporting revenue stream.

• Client Priority. Client project priorities may result in periods of “blog silence”. Better silence than noise.

What are Elemental Links’ Products and Services?

Initially, Elemental Links is offering one class of product (research) and two broad classes of services (advisory and consulting). All offerings were created using the business design principles above. Creating the advisory and consulting services was straightforward. Not so for the research model.

Research Model

In deciding on the right research model (channel, content and funding) for Elemental Links, I considered the importance of relevant, good content, the accessibility and collaboration afforded by blogging (web 2.0), the depth and packaging of formal research, reader behaviors, the time investment, the funding options, the credibility issues, and of course, my writing preferences and capacity.

The result is a research model centered on freely accessible and participatory blogs, supplemented by occasional formal research documents, and syndicated pieces.

Blog Research Funding

Elemental Links, and the occasional sidebar ad click, fund the creation and distribution of all original blog based content.

Formal Research Funding

Since formal research pieces require a substantial time investment, outside funding will be required. The funding options are driven by the content, as follows.

For topical or practitioner pieces, Elemental Links will accept sponsor funding for research time and/or distribution. With sponsor funding, the piece will be distributed freely to the public. Without sponsor funding, the piece will be sold at a reasonable price for individual or group use. Examples of topical pieces are here, here, here, here and here.

To safeguard against sponsor influence, the agreement for research and distribution funding includes a pre-publication escape clause. If the sponsoring company finds the resulting piece to conflict with its views, they can cancel distribution sponsorship.

For product or vendor pieces, Elemental Links will not accept sponsor funding. These pieces will be sold at a reasonable price for individual or group use. Examples of vendor and product pieces are here, here, here and here.

Syndicated Research Funding

Elemental Links funds the creation (research time) for all syndicated pieces. Distribution funding is provided by the syndicate. Only finalized (as-is) research pieces are offered for syndication.

Transparency

All research will adhere to the transparency design principles for economic interest disclosure and funding disclosure (see above).

The Elemental Links Research Model is outlined in the following tables:

Advisory and Consulting Services

Clients can engage with Elemental Links via an advisory relationship, or a consulting engagement. Both services are offered to enterprises and providers (technology, solution, service). Areas of specialization are strategy, architecture, business-driven architecture, product positioning, technical communications, and portfolio planning.

Advisory Service

For clients requiring ongoing assistance for a loosely defined set of activities, Elemental Links offers an advisory service. The advisory service is a retainer relationship, available in 10 hour increments.

Examples of enterprise advisory relationship activities include: facilitation, input, review, collaboration, mentoring, or education, in the areas of strategy, architecture or portfolio planning.

Examples of provider advisory relationship activities include: input, review, or collaboration, on product positioning or technical communications, and customer outreach activities.

Consulting Service

For clients requiring specific assistance, Elemental Links offers consulting services. Consulting engagements have defined scopes, activities and deliverables. Engagements can be as short as half a day, or as long as half a year.

Examples of enterprise consulting engagements include: strategy and architecture articulation, roadmap creation, roadmap activity execution, portfolio planning, workshops, awareness talks, and training.

Examples of provider consulting engagements include: customer outreach activities, technical communications planning and development, architecture program development, product and service requirements, product and service positioning, and customer insight gathering and analysis.

What Else?

Elemental Links is actively working on projects for inaugural clients, developing a formal research agenda, blogging (elemental links and business-driven architect), and planning a corporate website.

New clients and assignments are welcome for the Fall.

For more information on Elemental Links, please leave a comment, or contact me.

Trying out Amazon's Omakase Links (beta)

Update 1/07/2007 - I've replaced the Amazon Omakase ad with auto-generated product ads for books in Amazon's Internet and Computing Category.  Not sure what influences the product selections - best sellers, blog content, buyer history, or overstock :)

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I'm trying out the beta of Amazon's Omakase ("Leave it up to us") product advertising.  See the lavender bordered ad box (below the google ads) on the right side bar.

Amazon describes the Omakase program as: "Omakase - leave it up to us! Omakase links will show an Associate's visitors what they're most likely to buy based on Amazon's unique understanding of the site, the user, and the page itself."

In quick - completely unscientific testing - I noticed that "the user" influence is strong.  On my machine without Amazon cookies, I was offered books on service-oriented architecture, information architecture and enterprise architecture.  On my machine with Amazon cookies, in addition to the geek tomes, I was offered fiction and an X41 docking station that I looked at recently. 

Right now, the only configuration offered is the ad display.  So, the products offered might be from any category (cheerios anyone?) or even from a competitor (Service Orient or Be Doomed!). 

While trying this won't expedite my retirement, the best way to understand something is to participate. I'm interested in hearing from readers - are the offers presented matches, complete misses, or just annoying.

David Luckham on Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP)

David Luckham, the father of CEP, just published an article What's the Difference Between ESP and CEP?   In the article, Professor Luckham discusses the origins of CEP and ESP, the differences between streams and clouds, where ESP engines are today, how CEP and ESP will be less different over time, and the challenges going forward. 

The article is a must read for anyone interested in event processing (simple, stream, complex).  But before you go over, I have a quick thought on the challenge of “New Horizons”, described by Professor Luckham as follows:

New Horizons: The first challenge is to expand the areas to which event processing is being applied. We have to educate the IT community, and a lot of other communities, about its potentials, and that will involve a lot of proof of concept work. So far, the early adopters have been people who already know they need real-time event processing and their problems are usually well formulated. It is true that new applications are appearing all the time – in areas involving RFID, eRetailing and so on. But there are other areas where event processing could be applied…

…There are huge clouds of events from multiple disparate sources in Homeland Security², Epidemiology, Global Warming and the Environment, just to mention three areas. We need to demonstrate that event processing can be applied to challenging problems in these areas. For example, could Homeland Security use telephone surveillance data to enhance monitoring bank transfer events on SWIFT networks for money laundering? Another example, there are some very imaginative experiments going on in medical epidemiology. It turns out you may be able to predict ‘flu outbreaks earlier by monitoring over-the-counter medication sales than by monitoring doctor’s reports. What about analyzing a lot of event sources for early prediction of epidemic outbreaks? And the world itself is becoming an event generating globe with sensors and probes for deep ocean pressure monitoring for Tsunami warning, fault monitoring for earthquake studies, forestry monitoring, etc. All of these events are available via satellite. What are the possibilities for event processing here?

The big question is what problems (business, social, government, science, technology) can/should event processing solve?  But to answer that, we first need to understand the possibilities.  Not only what events are swirling around in clouds, and floating in streams, but how those events connect, and what are appropriate responses. 

This will require tapping into folks with deep domain knowledge, a knack for ‘pattern recognition’ and ‘connecting the dots’, and the ability to influence change.  My early thinking is this person is a true ‘business architect’.  A business person who architects (designs, creates) business models, processes, information flows, rules and policies. 

If you are an IT person, considering event processing, find a ‘business architect type’ partner to explore the new horizons.  Event processing isn’t just an IT thing.  Read the article.

LogicBlaze Releases FUSE 1.2 - Focus on Accessibility

Yesterday, LogicBlaze announced the availability of FUSE 1.2 and a related technology partnership with eCube Systems.  FUSE, as I’ve written about previously, is an open source SOA platform, designed to serve three (interconnected) areas: high volume integration, service-oriented solutions and web 2.0. 

Over the last four months, since the initial FUSE release, LogicBlaze has made good progress on both the product and business fronts, to make FUSE, and the idea of an open source SOA platform, more accessible to the enterprise. 

On the product front, there are both new features and changes to the FUSE code build.  The new features (from the press release):

Improved Security:

-- Single sign-on is now delivered through the Java Authentication and Authorization Service;

-- Support for the WS-Security standard in the Apache ServiceMix enterprise service bus.

Improved Ease-of-Use:

-- Eclipse-based tooling for Apache ServiceMix and FUSE 1.2 provides end-users with a convenient, GUI-based solution to deploy and configure FUSE 1.2 components;

-- Integrated support for Apache Maven enables developers to package and deploy services, assemblies and components, and manage dependencies among components.

Business Information Portal:

-- LogicBlaze FUSE 1.2 now incorporates the LifeRay portal, providing end-users with a graphical interface for real-time visibility into business processes and information.

Of the new features, I think the tooling is critical for enterprise evaluation and adoption.  While I applaud the LogicBlaze team for initially focusing on delivering a solid execution engine, the requisite XML hacking had to go.  The tooling will undergo continuous development, FUSE 2.0 (October) will include BPEL designers and process flow designers.  Beyond tooling improvements, next items on the FUSE roadmap are improvements for high availability (clustering at the message layer) and continuous availability (restart automations). 

Rob Davies, LogicBlaze’s VP of Product Development, shared that he is very excited about the changes to the code build in FUSE 1.2.  In previous releases, FUSE used the defined releases from Apache for ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, etc.  This meant FUSE was dependent on the Apache community schedule, for new features, as well as bug fixes.  In FUSE 1.2, LogicBlaze is doing its own code builds, based on the Apache software, and as appropriate adding some extensions.  This change gives customers the best of both worlds.  The talent of the Apache community, combined with vendor responsiveness and predictable packaging.

For those (like me) that prefer pictures, here is an Illustration of FUSE 1.2.  I outlined the additions from the prior version in red.

[click on picture to enlarge]

On the business front, there are compelling (think innovation and cost savings) customer stories, customer success oriented services (CoRE network and quickstart training), and early partner agreements. 

Customers: LogicBlaze has customers solving SOA, integration and/or Web 2.0 problems for a variety of industries (finance, telecommunications, defense, utility, SaaS).  For some details, listen to the ebizQ podcast of Gian Trotta interviewing Rob Davies. 

Partners: One of the features of FUSE’s JBI architecture is the ability to embed it into other applications.  I asked the LogicBlaze team if any (application or infrastructure) vendors were currently doing this.  Because we all know, a first step to wider enterprise adoption is getting the product in the door, in one form or another.

This question connected me with Peter Marquez of eCube Systems.  eCube specializes in ‘technologies that are old and hard to deal with’, offering consulting and software solutions to extend the ROI of legacy technology. 

eCube will be embedding FUSE 1.2 into the next version of its NXTware Evolution Server.  This allows eCube to focus on its core technology solution (legacy side), yet have visibility into, and contribution input to, the technology for the modernization side.  Peter’s response to my “Why FUSE?” was the modularity (pick and choose components to deploy) and supporting community.  When I asked how the eCube team was doing learning JBI, he indicated they were just starting now.  Their first project was building an adapter, which didn’t require any JBI knowledge.

As an aside, for anyone living with legacy Unix applications (TCP/IP or RPC) that wants to move to virtualization, eCube will be making an announcement in the next few weeks of a software solution to this problem.  If that’s something of interest, keep an eye on eCube’s news.

So, enough talk.  If the latest, more accessible, version of FUSE sounds intriguing, go check it out.  Download FUSE here.  After you try it, let me know what you think.