Oracle acquires BEA cont...

Here's a little on the new plans.
Oracle has voted BEA's JRockit to be their strategic JVM meaning so much that the Oracle – BEA products that are built upon a JVM will by default support the JRockit JVM and will all benefit from the enhanced features of JRockit. Furthermore the products will also support other JVMs like Sun, HP UX JVM, etc.
Secondly BEA’s Weblogic (Application) Server has also been voted as Oracle’s strategic JEE container. This means that all of the Oracle – BEA products running within a JEE container (environment) will by default use the Weblogic Server JEE platform and benefit from the enhanced features like High availability and scalability. But again other JEE platforms like SUN, JBOSS, etc. are still supported and, like Oracle stated it during the webcast the Oracle – BEA products will be hot-pluggable with these JEE platforms.
Later I’ll add some comments on BPM and WLI…
cheers,
Arjan

Oracle acquires BEA

Now the sight on the merger (or actually I should say acquisition, I know….) between Oracle and BEA is getting clearer also speculations start about what will happen to BEA. Well the truth is that we’ll all have to sit this one out. I am in tight contact with people at BEA in The Netherlands, but they also don’t know what will happen exactly. Since we do like to know what will be our future I think it will harm nobody if I shed some light on what I think will happen.

Here I go…

To my opinion what made BEA worthwhile to Oracle is especially the Weblogic Server base of their products. Oracle doesn’t have such a state-of-the-art JEE platform, with the great scalability and high availability options the Weblogic Server base has. Also the way BEA is progressing in the Virtualization of their product stack is something Oracle is still dreaming of. One of the Aqualogic products that will also be adopted by Oracle will definitely be BEA’s Aqualogic Service Bus (ALSB). Although Oracle has got its own, the ALSB product by far better than the Oracle Service Bus.

Parts of the BEA product stack highly overlap with products that can already be found in the Oracle product stack. Take for instance BEA’s BPM Suite, people won’t like this, but Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager does the same thing (and maybe even better) so the former Fuego product will probably have a hard time within the new Oracle | BEA organization.

So the bottom-line to this all is that Oracle will definitely take a look which jewels to pick from BEA’s crown and which jewels they already have and put them on their new Integration and SOA crown. Maybe even rebranding them all to Fusion, maybe some of them will still be called BEA.

Update 6-6-2008...

Well in the mean time one thing seems to be sure: As I predicted the ALSB product will be chosen as Oracle's new Enterprise Service Bus product! What they probably will be doing however, is getting the ALSB product to run on several other JEE platforms (not only the Weblogic stack). It also seems that the WLI and the SOA counterpart Aqualogic Integration (combination of ALSB and WLI) will not be continuedin favour of Oracle's BPEL Process Manager.

You might not have noticed...

Well, you might not have noticed because of all the fuzz about Oracle acquiring BEA, but last week the announced Genesis stuff was released! With this press-release BEA Systems proudly presents the new BEA Aqualogic User Interaction products.

BEA states they launched the "first full-fledged social computing platform" adding a lot of new features to already existing or new products, and I must say the list of features is impressive.

The products provide a complete Enterprise Social Computing platform including profile pages, real-time Analytics of usage, user interface improvements for the Portal product and a lot more...

Watch it yourself at BEA's special site for Enterprise Social Computing.

Genesis: IT starts all over

Under the codename Genesis, BEA is working on a couple of products, solutions and technologies to enable the so called Dynamic Business Applications of the mid and longer term future.

The two main drivers or goals for Genesis are industrialization of the SOA Infrastructure and enabling collaboration in an organization via Enterprise Social Networking.

As far as the industrialization of the SOA infrastructure is concerned, we'll see work moving from the integration layer upward to the more higher levels of the SOA. At the moment a lot of effort goes into integrating systems with custom applications, whereas the future will be that the SOA infrastructure will be more Out-of-the-box and can be bought in a store around the corner. Standard adapters being available for everything! This means that even a BPM specialist will not be dealing with integration issues, but more with the real issue, being the business!

To get all of the magic at the SOA Infrastructure aligned correctly above the SOA layer the BPM layer can be found, which will provide a business driven way of looking at the services available within a company. This will mean getting the most value as possible out of available services and being able to respond to changes within a companies market quick and agile.

And finally Web 2.0 will (have to) come into the enterprise! This means that what we see happening now on the Internet (Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, Hyves, etc.) moves into the boundaries of companies. Because of this movement the new buzz word "Enterprise Social Computing" was introduced, which comes down to people sharing ideas via internal blogs, co-workers commenting on that, valuating thoughts and ending up with better ideas or solutions by combined knowledge and effort. This might even end up in employees writing their own mashup application of that particular SAP service with (the old example ;-)) Google Maps.

In other words as with the bible's Genesis, IT starts all over!

Las Vegas, Barcelona, Scheveningen... What's next

The last couple of months can be best described as: New, hectic and fantastic.

As I told you I've been in the Fast Forward Leaderschip development program for almost a year now and at the end of this year one of the assigments was to write a positioning paper on what the first year brought you and what you did with it during that year.
Well to my opinion I grew in a professional way, showing leadership in technology knowledge and the way I perform at customers and within Capgemini. As a natural result of that I was asked to present at Inforum 2007 (www.inforum2007.com) a big conference of Infor a large software vendor which can be placed besides Oracle and SAP, at least that's what they do ;-)
So I've been to Las Vegas for this conference and did my presentation on combining CRM and SOA and what it can bring your organisation "Where SOA meets CRM", and it was great!'
I'm writing this while I am at the BEA World 2007 conference in Barcelona about BEA and there SOA strategy, currently listening to a great story about transformation to a Out-of-the-Box SOA infrastructure, which you buy and can use, without hard implementation only having to worry about implementing the business processes. My next blog will be at that topic.
Next week I will be at the Infroum Benelux 2007 event in Scheveningen, holding the presentation I did in Las Vegas mainly for the Dutch customers of the Infor CRM Epiphany product.

Besides that we (my wife Bea and I) bought a new house (see my photo album) and we got the great news that Bea is pregnant so we're expecting our second child approx. mid april 2008! Isn't that great!!!

So as you can see the last couple of months were hectic, bringing a lot of new experiences, but it was fantastic and I'm looking forward to all the new experiences that are waiting for me in the next period!

Is J2EE really dying?

Yesterday one of my colleagues sent me an e-mail with the subject "Enterprise application environments - does J2EE still have a future?". His opinion was that when comparing J2EE and .Net at the moment there is no real benefit of using J2EE or JEE as it will be known I think in the near future.
Summarizing he stated that pro-J2EE arguments like having no Vendor Lock-in, OS platform independence and having open source solution no longer really go for J2EE. His arguments supporting this were for instance when you use a platform from BEA or IBM you're stuck to using their components because when you would like to use a third party or open source component you'll be stuck working around a lot of integration problems. Another argument was "who needs OS Platform independence nowadays really?".
As such he concluded that .Net wins by points, J2EE just on Emotions.

Well I replied to him as follows....

To my opinion the only thing my colleague noticed are fading edges between J2EE and .Net. However this does not necessarily mean that all of a sudden J2EE is useless and does not meet Enterprise Application developments needs.

To my opinion it's fine that the two technologies are developing towards each other, because it makes sure the discussion about it will only grow and it will give the opportunity to have a critical look at the way forward for J(2)EE.
Furthermore it leaves the choice to customers and System Integrators like Capgemini for a certain technology more open, both being able to serve their needs. This might mean that the decision will be a "gut feeling" decision in some cases again! Some of my best decisions were based on my gut feeling....

As far as the ready-made stacks of vendors like BEA and IBM are concerned (he mentioned that in his email as an argument for vendor lock-in becoming a theme in J2EE) you see that those are moving towards out-of-the-box solutions to build a nice SOA for instance. This is different from building a Web application with for instance Spring and Hibernate, but it does very much have to do with Enterprise Applications and is based on the J2EE technology!

So to my opinion J2EE is still alive and kicking, and after 10 years now providing a solid base for a lot of Enterprise Applications and SOAs.
There's a enough room for both J2EE and .Net and if they will grow towards each other more and more we might en up with the best of both worlds in the end!

Well, just a blog.....

Hi!

Well again It's been a while, but I worked on this one before, just did not publish it. As an example the title started as "Happy new year!", so that's what I'll just give you: I wish you all a very happy new year and all the best for 2007!

At the end of January (31st, just like queen Beatrix of the Netherlands :-)) we celebrated the first birthday anniversary of Anne-Roos. She likes cake, we found out that ;-)!!! And as of the 25th of February she can walk! Yep it's official, she walked from the couch all the way to the dining room table, which is approx 15-20 steps for her! There are some new photo's of her (mostly :-)) in my photo album.

As I told before I'm currently on a project for Deutsche Post AG, thé postal firm in Germany. It's very nice to be in an international project like this. The projects assignment is to bring the current CRM system built with Epiphany which is a J2EE CRM Software package to the next level. The environment for this system is great since the CRM system itself connects to 16 (!)different other system by using mainly EJB / webservice interfacing. We will be responsible for first upgrading the current system from version the current to the next and after that designing and implementing new functionality, mostly involving "inserts and updates" to the interfacing systems.

In January I had the third module of the Leadership program and what I got from this module is that I still miss my dad... a lot... (he died of cancer in 2000) And that he pushed me a little to much to become independent in the past. He just wanted to do it right, because he did not get the opportunities when he was young. This brought me that sometimes I have some difficulties with deciding and I sometimes leave decisions to others, just to keep the peace.
This is gonna change! From now on I will stick to what I want.

And the last topic is the choice of my new car....
The short list at the moment is:
Renault Gran Scenic (the one at the back...)
Citroën C4 Picasso

So much going on!

Hi! Yep you're right it's been quite a while again since my last post, but there's so much going on at the moment.

Currently I'm working on an International assignment for the largest Postal firm in Germany (well which company will that be?!) . It's a stretched assignment which fits in great with the Fast Forward program I'm in. The project is based in Bonn in Germany and so far it's been a great experience!

Besides that I've been to a training this week at Les Fontaines, Capgemini's training center in Chantilly, France.
It was great! Although it took so much energy physically, it returned so much mental energy and strength. The training called "Emerging leadership", actually took us on a journey through what leadership means, which styles there are, what style(s) you might have and most of all being authentic. The last item meaning so much as sticking to your own values in whatever you do. To me that means from now on keeping a close eye on my work life balance, especially since I'm abroad a lot at the moment.

Well another thing going on at the moment is that I'm in the process of writing an article together with colleague Sid B. Dane, about the combination of SOA and RIA (Service Oriented Architecture and Rich Internet Applications for the few of you who haven't been swamped by the Web 2.0 and SOE (Enterprise) buzz ;-)) so soon you'll be able to judge that I hope....
Another idea for an article is coming up at the moment probably about Configuration Management then.

And finally with the holiday season coming up, Shuap (the band I play bass-guitar in and sing) is going to play at a children's Christmas service. I'm really looking forward to that!

First Fast Forward module!

As mentioned before I'm currently in a young leadership development program, called Fast Forward (FFWD). This program has been setup to ensure the future leadership within Capgemini Netherlands.

This first module was mostly about getting to know each other. Well we sure got to know each other ;-)
At the end of two days at least my conclusion (and I think others felt so too) was that being someone who's leadership skills are noticed by the outside world most of the time has to do with how much you've experienced in the past.
What I mean is that most (if not all) of the FFWD participants seem to have a "history", meaning they lost a relative, have been in an accident or somehow had an experience that changed their life drastically. Especially their view on life and how and what they want to achieve.

Besides this serious stuff we also did some fun stuff, like:
Making an helicopter flight, doing a GPS survival tour and some crossbow shooting.

At the end of day two the energy level for most of the participants was fairly low, but the mental energy level was very high. A good feeling is what remains at this moment!

We'll see what the next module will bring us... The location (Les Fontaines) is alright so...

Yep I sold it....

As I told you earlier I got myself a Canon 350D camera... So it was time to sell the got old (well old...) 300D or Rebel as the rest of the world calls it.

I tried the dutch e-bay site marktplaats.nl, but that turned out to be a mistake... A lot of 300D's there and eventually a shitty price!

So I thought hey what the hack, I might as well sell it to my brother-in-law. He likes to play around with photography since he's been in Mexico this summer, still analog back then (seems like ages ;-)) and now he's moving on into the digital world!

The next post....

As you can see it's hard to get into the Blog rhythm...

Here is a try to get it on!

I've been uploading some pictures to my picasaweb site (http://picasaweb.google.com/arjan.kramer) like the one you see here from my daughter! Take a look around, I think they are nice ;-)

A lot happend the last few weeks, a couple of highlights:
- I got the Canon 350D digital camera! Woowie!!!
- I'm currently working (with a couple of colleagues of the German part of Capgemini) on a Proposal for a big German company. I might have to go there for approx. 6 months.
- I was asked to participate in a Leadership development programme within Capgemini Netherlands!!!

I will get back with more on these topics soon ;-)

First post....

Well, I finally managed to startup a blog...

This is my first posting, hope you'll come back and check my blog again!

Yesterday our daughter Anne-Roos was christened in the church in Buurmalsen. It was a very nice moment in her (until now still) short life.
The band I play in, played a couple of Christian songs during the service, and Anne-Roos was just sleeping during the whole thing!

Hope to show you some new pics soon!