IBM DB2 Data in action

I was recently invited by IBM to paricipate in a virtual conference called Data in Action essentially about their DB2 product. This was an interesting experiment as it had a number of virtual booths that were 'manned' by IBM personnel and then there was a solutions area where we presented. There were approximately 800 non IBM personnel and 100 people from IBM personnel registered. At one point when I checked, it appeared that there were over 400 people in attendance.

It was quite an interesting experience as it was possible to see who was entering each area. It was then possible to engage people in a chat or they could start a chat with the 'expert' for the solution that they wished to have answers to. While not perfect by any means (what conference format is ?), it meant that people could attend at no travel cost while potentially still sitting at their desks available to participate in any crisis that may occur in their organizations.

Register for the event here and have a look at the presention from Risaris. We did the slides and IBM did the voiceover. Essentially our pitch was the ability to access DB2 from various clients. You can find more specific information in accessing DB2 Data from Excel , VB, JAVA or PHP as an example. You can also download the software for a Free trial.

Best regards,

John

Accessing Existing Data and Business Logic from new Business Process

Intalio and Risaris have teamed up to show how new Business Process Managment (BPM) implementations written using Intalio's BPM suite, and the SOA Gateway from Risaris, can access existing data or business logic. This ensures that new BPM implementations can work side by side with existing manual processes such that they can be used interchangeably until the eventual phasing out of the manual processes which provides many advantages. Learn more here.

The first results of this effort is a tutorial which uses community editions of both Intalio and the SOA Gateway to make existing COBOL business logic available to a new process. This is available on the Intalio Community site here (registration required). In addition, a paper describing this may be found here.

Future tutorials will show how to access CICS, Natural or other business logic or databases such as DB2, Oracle, VSAM, ADABAS and so on from the Intalio Suite. If you wish to see advance notice of such tutorials, please contact us on info@soagateway.com.

This illustrates how standards ensure that best of breed products in their class can work together through the use of open standards.

Best regards,

John - BPM Access to Existing Data

Lifecycle Governance of your core assets

The SOA Gateway enables your core software assets, including data and business logic, to be exposed as standards based services that can be used from multiple client technologies. Once a service has been deployed and is in use from one or more systems, there are reasons why it may change:

1. In order to improve the functionality available to the users.
2. In order to improve the business process with which it was associated
3. Users asked for something and didn't like what they got
4. ...and so on

The problem with this is when a service is deployed, how does one control change to this service ? Many organizations implement multiple versions of a similar service when a well designed single service will do. The SOA Gateway is being modified to provide the facility to ensure that the lifecycle of a service can be controlled such that a single service and its clients may be enchanced in a controlled fashion as described here.

This is still a work in progress so we're always interested in ideas or feedback to the direction we plan to take.

Best regards,

John

Want sub second response times with Rich Gui Interfaces ?

Those of us who have been around for more than a decade can remember the concept of sub second response times. A single 'second' was considered the maximum time between when a user hit 'enter' on their dump terminal and when they got a response from the system. This wasn't just a rule of thumb or some geeky idea of how a system works, there are many reports available which illustrate quite clearly that as response time gets longer, there is an increased reduction in transaction rates and essentially throughput falls. In other words, less work is done. Some might consider that this is just because of the longer response times but it has been illustrated that lapses in concentration add additional delays to the completion of a business process.

Since the advent of the PC and more so the Internet, we are being treated to vastly superior GUI displays which make like much simpler in terms of the usage and understanding of applications. However, this has been mirrored by a commensurate reduction in response times as GUI screens build and one must wait until this build process completes. This is probably quite acceptable for occasional users or those in Internet land prepared to wait. However, it leads to loss of productivity within organizations where employees are expected to plough through as much work as possible which is severely impacted by slow GUI response times.

The Enterprise Application Infrastructure described here provides an architecture that can deliver significant benefits and sub second response times while still delivering a rich user front end GUI. This is achieved through the use of the SOA Gateway and CaptainCasa tool sets which in turn achieve the result through a simple adherence to and usage of industry standards.

Check it out if you would like to reduce your user response times !

Best regards,

John

SOA Gateway now 'Ready for IBM DB2 data server software'

The SOA Gateway has now just achieved the 'Ready for IBM DB2 data server software' award from IBM. This means that the SOA Gateway has now proven itself while running with IBM's DB2 Database which is guaranteed by IBM themselves. More information on this award can be found here.

SOA Gateway and the Cloud

Having recently seen a number of presentations about Cloud, it has struck me that like SOA, we are seeing the same boxes being placed in a similar pattern and there seems to be an assumption that they will simply communicate with each other. Is it any wonder that people are turned off some of these new advances in technology when the powerpoints make it look so easy. The Cloud offers some fantastic benefits in terms of making resources available easily and 'on demand', however, if the applications that are implemented within the cloud are using proprietary technologies to talk to each other, they will become locked to the one Cloud. One of the dreams of Cloud Computing is an ability to pick the best Cloud based on your most important criteria be that cost, availability etc. Then why should you not be able to roam from Cloud to Cloud as the criteria change. We believe that the usage of standards based interfaces to communicate between applications in the Cloud gives the best of both worlds as discussed here.

Best regards,

John Power - Free Industry Papers Here

Best of Breed Mainframe Integration and SOA Tools

I came across this white paper recently which touched on a number of the confusing aspects about SOA 'terminology' for want of a better word. Statements like '...with the connectivity and accessibillity offered by an SOA offers a great deal of promise....' confuse the issue even more IMHO as implementing a SOA in itself does not help with connectivity, accessibility or integration. When I originally came across SOA, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with the above but as I have said in other postings, the term SOA has now become so abused that it needs to be clarified what is meant. To be fair in this document, as one gets deeper into it, it gets into the standards that are used that do provide the ability to discover and use services available on mainframe. At the end of the day, most mainframe shops are also likely to be running at least one other server platform such as Linux or one of the various flavours of UNIX available. It is clear that getting at resources on both the mainframe and other platforms in a standard way is a base requirement which will ensure an organization can get the key benefits of implementing an SOA with an improved ability to reuse resources. While there are a number of ways to do this, it generally requires different tools for different resources. For example, there is generally one tool to access databases with another to access business logic. It is sometimes also necessary to use different tools on different platforms leading to multiple different interfaces. The SOA Gateway has been designed to provide a single tool to get at data and business logic on any platform thus providing a single, standard way to access core assets on these different platforms.

Best regards,

John - SOA Tools