Outlook Series | SOA Archive

Business Rules Management

Making consistent decisions across your organization is a complex task. Usually for any one decision, multiple data elements must be evaluated. In addition, decision making must respond to constantly changing conditions—external factors such as economic changes, competition, or regulations, as well as internally driven changes such as new product launches or new strategies. Without a sophisticated system for managing rules, it’s highly improbable for an organization to make decisions that avoid losses or drive maximum revenue. When selecting a BRMS look for technologies that help IT and business experts work together to develop intelligible, effective rules; and to quickly deploy new process applications with immediate support from the rules system. We interview Don Griest to gain FICO's perspective on BRMS. Don Griest is Sr. Director, Product Management with FICO. 43 Minutes

EA Modeling

Achieving alignment between an organization’s core goals and the IT infrastructure that supports an enterprise’s strategic direction is an ongoing challenge. So, you need to find ways that business processes and the data for information systems can be used to align business needs and information technology. Furthermore, aligning business processes with data from information systems enables the development of a model-driven approach that ultimately leads to heightened agility and greater productivity across the enterprise. Data modelers, analysts and information resource managers will appreciate the ways that different data flows can be used to visualize, understand and contribute to effective business processes when business models and data models meet. We interview David Dichmann to gain Sybase's perspective on EA Modeling. David is a Product Line Manager for Design Tools at Sybase. 44 Minutes

Better Decision Management

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses is to make sure they can manage decisions with greater precision, agility, speed and consistency, all while driving down costs. To meet the challenge, Decision Management Platforms tightly integrate their capabilities with a company’s existing IT architecture. Moreover, DM builds on your modern IT architecture and allows you to manage decisions as a true corporate asset. Managing decisions as assets empowers business users, accelerates the time to value for business changes and helps build a new partnership between the business and IT. Furthermore, when it comes to making decisions in the face of uncertainty, it is critical to leverage analytics for more effective risk management. We interview Carole Ann Matignon to gain FICO's perspective on decision management. Carole Ann is VP Product Management at FICO. 43 Minutes

SOA Testing, Validation & Virtualization

Companies are adopting Virtualization in the data center to reduce the server costs of supporting SOA. Furthermore, if you are tackling the hardest quality and integration challenges, you need to eliminate dependencies among teams throughout the application development lifecycle. That can be achieved by virtualizing the behaviors of complex services-based applications. Moreover, expanding on the value of server consolidation and test lab virtualization beyond the enterprise data center, is key to providing faster time-to-market and quality across the full lifecycle of developing, testing and maintaining highly interconnected services-based applications. We interview John Michelsen to gain with iTKO's perspective on SOA Testing, Validation & Virtualization.
John is the Chief Scientist & co-founder of iTKO. 45 Minutes

SOA Quality Management

SOA bring challenges for every part of the IT organization, and the IT quality organization is no exception. Moreover, SOA requires quality management across all types of testing—functional, performance, security, and compliance. Each of these is affected by multiple factors such as the type of SOA being built, the needs of service providers and consumers, and the testing tools and techniques currently in use. Furthermore, IT quality managers must develop and implement a SOA quality program thatfurthers the organization’s goals for SOA. Success can be achieved by leveraging the right strategy, implementing the right processes and selecting the right tools. We interview Jeff Meyers to gain HP's perspective on Software Quality Management for SOA.
Jeff is a Senior Product Manager for HP Software's SOA Quality Management Solutions. 55 Minutes

Multi-Enterprise SOA

In today’s enterprise environment, growth is king. To facilitate growth, executives must listen to the marketplace, as well as their customers and partners and adapt strategies to wring value from constantly changing conditions. But if processes are to keep pace with executive decision-making, the old paradigm of IT manually automating individual, monolithic processes must evolve. Instead, IT must facilitate system heterogeneity and reusability, not only within the enterprise, but with an expanding number of partners, customers and distributors. To gain that completive advantage, IT must go beyond today’s B2B applications and processes and marry them to service-oriented architectures. We interview Russell Scherwin to gain Sterling Commerce's perspective on Multi-Enterprise SOA. Russell Scherwin is a Global Director of Product Marketing with Sterling Commerce. 40 Minutes

Higher Business Performance

Enterprise BI solutions need to be efficient, reliable, and agile. To meet that requirement, leaders must leverage an architecture that is open and standards-based, platform neutral, location transparent, and that features peer-to-peer services that are loosely coupled, interface based, and coarsely grained. SOA, on the other hand, is ideal. Furthermore, with the right information-enabling technology and leadership, decision-makers can become performance managers. Reporting is key to catalyzing your performance management effort. We interview Meg Dussault, and Leah MacMillan to gain Cognos' perspective on turning information into higher business performance. Meg is the Director of corporate positioning, and Leah is the VP of product marketing both are with Cognos. 39 Minutes

Decision Services

When planning BPM systems and SOA, the role of business rules management needs to be examined and clarified. This is best achieved by creating a set of modular software applications that can work together and allow each component of the system to focus on what it does best. By leveraging SOA, organizations can create and implement new applications more quickly than with other development approaches. These new service-based applications can easily be designed to interact with other “services” both inside and outside of the organization. The next step in the SOA paradigm is to automate the answering of business questions for other services, applications or processes. We interview James Taylor to gain Fair Isaac's perspective on decision services. James is the VP of marketing at Fair Isaac. 46 Minutes

Mass Market SOA And Web 2.0 Apps

Rich Enterprise Applications arise from the convergence of two major trends in the development of Web applications. Those applications have become more complex, and any project that is targeting the goal of “retiring” an old outdated system often ends up, not only replacing the old functionality, but actually adding many new functions to the system. Furthermore, enterprise developers must serve two demanding groups of masters at the same time: consumers desiring all of the user interface aspects of Web 2.0 and businesses wanting more and more functionality.

We interview Fima Katz to gain insight into meeting the Web 2.0 challenge with a components-based approach.
Fima is the CEO of Exadel. 43 Minutes

Collaborative Software Development

Distributed development organizations are often limited by conventional build and test processes that are not designed to provide the flexibility, optimization and processes to meet the operational challenges associated with building and testing software in highly distributed environments. To overcome this limitation, centralized LAN-based approaches are being displaced by a distributed Collaborative Development Environment (CDE) approach. The goal of a CDE is to unify project managers, developers, and business users within a single development environment accessible from anywhere in the world. We interview Nick Bonfiglio to gain COLLABNET's perspective on build and test governance capabilities. Nick is the VP of Worldwide Operations for CollabNet. 40 Minutes

Semantic Tech Drives Actionable Insight

Semantic technology intelligently links customer data from existing disparate systems to create a common understanding of your customer across the enterprise. Using this contextual understanding, semantic solutions enable real-time analysis and insights, orchestrating coordinated responses amongst existing systems to optimize customer response and relationships. Furthermore, the semantic approach intelligently integrates existing systems in real-time to optimize and implement decisions based on the best data available. We interview Colin Britton to gain Metatomix's perspective on how turn data into actionable insight.
Colin is the CTO of Metatomix. 32 Minutes

Driving SOA With Consistent Decisions

SOA's decentralized application environment provides a great deal of flexibility for business units, but it also creates difficulty in managing the consistency of business decisions delivered through various applications. Consequently, businesses must meet the challenge of how logic and rules relate to and can be expressed through through services. Business rules management systems provide a mechanism for managing decision logic and acts as a conductor in order to align application decision behavior.
We interview James Taylor to gain insight into achieving decision consistency across a SOA based enterprise.

James is the VP of marketing at Fair Isaac. 52 Minutes

ECM Web Services

With Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent and IBM’s acquisition of FileNET, it’s clear that the ECM, SOA relationship is tightening. There are technical and practical realties that enable this relationship, as well as constraints. So, what are the technical consequences and impacts of ECM web services on the document life cycle? The answer to that question lies in the invocation and provisioning of web services. We interview Lloyd Dugan to gain IES' perspective on ECM web services. Lloyd is IES' CTO. 54 Minutes

Can ECM and SOA Forge A Marriage?

Can SOA and ECM be bought together in a Technological Marriage?

Particularly, should ECM technologies be run on or as part of the SOA infrastructure?

Furthermore, what roles do the platform vendors, and niche ECM vendors play in this paradigm.

We interview Lloyd Dugan to gain insight into integrating records management with SOA.
Lloyd is Information Engineering Services' CTO. 59 Minutes