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A small action on Blog Action Day 2008 - Poverty

As I considered what to write for today’s blog action day on poverty, I couldn’t help but think of how fortunate I am to be contemplating ‘poverty as an issue’ from behind a keyboard as opposed to as a life circumstance. Going down that path for a minute, I’m grateful my grandparents had the foresight and fortitude to reach Ellis Island and that my parents instilled in me the importance of education, working hard and living within means (savings good, debt bad). Essentially, my family provided me the circumstance and tools to reach towards success. 

At this point, it became clear to me what my blog action day ‘action’ should be. Give others an opportunity to create their own success. This led me straight to Kiva.org, a micro-lending site that brokers loans between individuals and (working poor) entrepreneurs in the developed world. 

I just made my first loans, one for bigger fishing nets and another to transport a child to school. Check it out, do what makes sense for you.

Event Processing Links, October 10, 2008

Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of activity in the event processing space.  Here are some related links, post Gartner EP Summit & EPTS.  I have some EP briefings and research on my docket, so more to come.  It's fair to say the EP floodgates are open:

The StreamBase Event Processing Blog: CEP Begins to Break Out with Enterprise Deployment: BNY ConvergEx

More interesting than product announcements, here is an implementation story via Streambase "Specifically, ConvergEx has announced it has deployed StreamBase for market interaction monitoring, routing, trading operations analysis, credit risk correlation, system health monitoring and real-time analysis of market feeds for latency and response time. It provides these services BNY ConvergEx’s entire U.S. electronic trading infrastructure, which includes its dark liquidity pool VortEx." 

SOA Consortium Insights: New Podcast: Savant's Bruce Henderson on SOA Event Processing via Mashups

In this podcast recorded at the June 2008 SOA Consortium meeting, Bruce Henderson was frighteningly dead-on about the US Banking Crisis. "Supporting his thesis, Bruce spoke of three major events, the dotcom bubble, the September 11 attacks and the U.S. housing market implosion, whose impact could have been reduced had the available, yet scattered, data been correlated and viewed in totality. Bruce then shared his prediction, based on applying Savant’s information agility techniques to publicly available FDIC reports, that the US Banking System faces impending failures similar to Northern Rock in the UK." 

Red Hat boosts open source SOA | InfoWorld | News | 2008-10-08 | By Paul Krill

Not to miss out, Red Hat (JBoss) touts event processing features "With version 4.3, stateful rules services decision tables and rule agent support further enable business event processing and an event-driven architecture, Red Hat said. Also, non-developers can construct business rules."

Oracle Launches Expanded Service-Oriented Architecture Offering

Speaking of EP announcements, from OpenWorld Oracle positions the former WebLogic Event Server as part of SOA offering... Oracle "Complex Event Processing – provides a rich, declarative environment for developing event processing applications to improve business operations." 

Complex Event Processing (CEP) Blog » TIBCO BusinessEvents 3.0

Among the Event Processing vendors with recent news is TIBCO with BusinessEvents 3.0

IBM Research | IBM Research | Exploratory Stream Processing Systems

Lab work on IBM's Systems S, this looks very interesting to me. "The Exploratory Stream Processing Systems team at T.J. Watson Research center conducts research on advanced topics in highly scalable stream processing applications and systems. Most of the research efforts come under the umbrella System S project, which spans several teams at Watson."

IBM Press room - 2008-09-09 IBM Extends Lead in Business Event Processing Software With New Products, Services - United States

IBM's "we are the leader now" Event Processing announcement. Glad they are finally connecting the dots of their portfolio. "The new IBM products and services represent the unification of several IBM global initiatives, including Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Information on Demand, Virtualization and Web 2.0. They combine business process management (BPM) and business event processing software to quickly and accurately predict, detect, analyze and act upon the flood of events they face everyday..." what follows is product list... too long to include ;-) 

Macehiter Ward-Dutton: Blog on IT-business alignment and related things

Neil Ward-Dutton unearths value in IBM's BEP announcements. "As the press and analyst day unfolded, it became clear (not through the presentations from the IBM execs, tellingly, but through Q&A and one-on-one meetings) that behind the scenes, IBM is actually trying to do something pretty interesting. It's got a big kit-bag of event-processing technologies, yes - but behind this, it's working to put together a common event processing technology framework that will allow its individual technology components to be assembled in different combinations to support different types of business and IT requirements. So, rather than having separate event processing stovepipes in the WebSphere, InfoSphere and Tivoli software portfolios, together with assorted miscellaneous other components, it's enabling all of these distinct efforts to cross-fertilize. One of the first outcomes of this work is the snappily-named WebSphere Business Events eXtreme Scale, which marries the former AptSoft technology (never marketed as a platform for high-volume processing) to the WebSphere eXtreme Scale platform." 

Towards a Streaming SQL Standard -- streamsql.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Streaming SQL Standard paper co-authored by Oracle & Streambase. No surprise, a lot of industry chatter about this. It's on my "to-read" list. More later (I hope).

What's a CEP engine, anyway? | Coral8, Inc.

Mark Tsimelzon, President & CTO, Coral8 defines "CEP engine" --"A CEP engine is a platform that makes it easy to write and deploy applications that process and analyze real-time data." In this post, he then explains the major terms in his definition, starting with 'platform'. 

 

[Disclosure: None of the above are direct clients of Elemental Links. IBM & Savant are sponsors of the SOA Consortium, which is a client.]

Quick Poll: Economic Downturn & Discipline in IT Business, Engineering

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that lately the bulk of my conversations with IT practitioners and providers center on the economic downturn that started in the U.S. and is now going global.  As I've written previously, the natural reaction in hard times is cost cutting.  But, cost-cutting alone is often problematic in the long-term, as a recent McKinsey article on Managing IT in a down-turn calls out:

"IT capabilities have fostered new sales channels, defined new customer segments, and even helped create new business models. 

These factors make reductions in IT spending more complicated than ever. Simplistic cuts, applied across the board, may endanger critical business priorities from sales support to customer service. That potent message should resonate even among corporate officers anxious to find quick savings. 

CIOs, of course, should continue to make their operations more efficient and to reduce costs, especially in areas that show signs of bloat. Discipline tends to slip during a lengthy upturn in spending such as the one that has occurred in recent years. Reducing pockets of unproductive expenditure will bring savings that help meet corporate cost targets. 

Still, except in the most dire circumstances, turning off technology investments during a downturn is counterproductive. When business picks up, you may lack critical capabilities. Besides, many technology investments can improve profitability in the short to medium term."

So, the wise IT executive should continue to invest, but those investments need to be selective and well-executed.  This brings me to a second conversational theme of late -- software engineering discipline.  At the recent SOA Consortium meeting, one of the findings Jeanne Ross shared was that "the table stakes for SOA success are mature project management and software development practices".  The software engineering theme re-emerged during our 'soapbox derby sessions'.  While respectfully disagreeing on the "how", both Victor Harrison of CSC and Peter Walker of Sun called out the more 'art than science' (my term) mode of the majority of today's software development.   And that to achieve success with any highly distributed, shared software development approach, more (some) rigor is required. 

Yesterday, with these ideas swirling around, I tweeted the following question "does corporate IT gain or abandon discipline/structure in software dev/delivery in tough economic times?"  The responses I received varied from "I hope so, lack of discipline caused this mess" to "the first victim of any time/$$$ pressure is quality". 

All that said, I've created a quick poll to gather additional perspectives on my question "Does your IT organization gain or abandon discipline during an economic downturn"?  The poll answer choices separate IT business discipline and engineering discipline. 

If you would complete the following quick poll, I'd appreciate it.  Feed subscribers, here is the direct link. 

Synovus Financial's SOA Success bigger than winning SVP initiative

Synovus Financial was awarded top honors in the CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium case study contest for a Secure Value Payments (SVP) initiative.  At the time of the announcement, I mentioned that more information from the winners and entrant pool was forthcoming.  [Honestly, there were really no "losing entries".  Tons of good cases and lessons.] 

After promising "more", I promptly took a couple of days off.  Luckily, CIO.com's Esther Schindler was hard at work, following up with Synovus Financial on their entire SOA strategy.  In a new article on CIO.com, Esther discusses the SVP initiative, along with related technical and business wins:

"Synovus has had plenty of technical and business wins. Prior to the SOA implementation, Mize explained, customer and account information, funds transfer, credit card balances and intraday bank balances and transactions were not possible outside the branch channel. "Now this data has been integrated into call center, Internet and mobile banking channels using services from the banking and credit card legacy systems," he wrote.

The result is that the IT department could increase the business' ability to bring new products to market. For instance, Internet banking was the first company-level SOA project. As a follow-on, Mize explained, the business deployed mobile banking with less than 500 hours of IT involvement because the Internet banking Web services were reused in the mobile channel. "IT was able to bring great project ROI and business agility to deploy new products like SVP to the end customer," wrote Mize.

The company had plenty of "lessons learned," which may help your company in its own SOA adoption. For example, to make a success of the business IT architecture, Mize recommends, it's important to educate the business on design decisions that may compromise architectural principles. Leverage your business objectives to fund your SOA on a pay-as-you-go basis, he recommends; don't overbuild or over-promise."

Check out the full article.  And yes, more information is coming.  Really...  Including, as requested, a post on the judging criteria.

 

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links]