Oracle Business Process Management Suite, the best of both worlds

This is a joint effort post from the Dutch Oracle Technology team Léon Smiers, Ruben Spekle and Arjan Kramer on Oracle Business Process Management Suite.

Since the acquirement of BEA there has been a lot of discussion with clients around the topic of Business Processes Management or BPM. Oracle has now got two strategic components in this arena. Firstly the already existing component BPEL Process Manager (BPEL PM) in combination with the OEM-ed product Aris (Oracle BPA), and secondly the former BEA Aqualogic BPM product, now called Oracle BPM. On Oracle Open World, last October Oracle announced the unification of both products. What is the impact of this unification and when will this take place?

Oracle placed BPEL PM in its stack with the acquirement of Collaxa some years ago. In the years after the BPEL PM product was enriched with adapter functionality and a Human Task component. BPEL PM is aimed at the more low level process integration which is also known as orchestration. Because of this, designing a BPEL application is a rather technical process. For Business Analysts BPEL is too technical. In order to fill the gap for designing Business processes Oracle OEM-ed Aris and enabled the creation of BPEL models based upon Aris Business Process models. Aris is the de facto standard in the market for Business Process Management Modeling, and contains a huge stack of reference (industry) models.

In BPM creating Workflows is much easier, a Business Analyst models all the processes and creates the lines in between the process steps, based upon which run time components are created automatically. It is a complete framework for creating workflow type of applications. Besides the ease of creation of the workflow processes, BPM is very strong in the build-in mechanism for simulating processes. The designer (Business Analyst) sets timings for each step in the process and can simulate the process. Based on this simulation bottlenecks, like human tasks or asynchronous services can be easily spotted already in a design time stage, without even involving real services yet. During the runtime of a business process, audit information is captured and can be fed back to the process to be able to tune the process based on runtime information as well. This means a real roundtrip lifecycle for business processes. A third strong point is the versioning capability of components (processes, variables) within BPM which allow current versions to run in parallel. Oracle BPM hasn’t (yet) got as many adapters as BPEL, but integration with the use of Web Services works very well.

On Oracle Open World (October 2009), Oracle announced BPM, BPEL PM and Human Tasks will be moved into one Business Process Management Suite. During OOW there were possibilities to get hands-on with this new stack which looked really promising, the same excellent process definition functionality BEA Aqualogic BPM users were used to, extended with integration with BPEL, Human Tasks and other service components all combined in one single stack. In this process of unification predominately the BPM part will be changed. BPM will be based upon the BPMN 2.0 standard, the design time moves towards to both JDeveloper (the implementation part) and the Browser (Design time) and the run time will be based upon a shared runtime environment with BPEL PM. The BPEL PM product on the other hand stays rather untouched in the unification process.
In this architecture BPM, BPEL, Human Tasks and Aris support the following functionality:

• BPM supports the Choreography type of functionality, and is more aimed at Business Analysts.
• BPEL PM supports Orchestration, low level process integration, and is more aimed at technical people.
• Human Tasks support the workflow component of a process, whether this is started from within BPM or BPEL PM.
• Aris is used by Enterprise Architects and Business Analysts on a high level.

Unfortunately Oracle does not provide any dates when a version will be released and what functionality it will contain, but we can be convident that it will be available somewhere in the first half of 2010. In the meantime we still can use both separate Process Management solutions, with a preference for the BPEL over BPM, because of expected minor migration complexities towards future releases.

Léon Smiers is Oracle Solution Architect at Capgemini, you can follow him on Twitter
Arjan Kramer is leading an Expert group of Java based Integration Technologists and is thoughtleader on Oracle Fusion Middleware at Capgemini. Follow his thoughts on Twitter
Ruben Spekle is Oracle Solution Architect within Capgemini, you can follow him on Twitter

Originally posted on the Capping IT Off  blog

Oracle is still buying the Sun…

A lot of you (at least the people in the Java community) are probably curious what the status is of Oracles acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Well since this is a merger that really has a great impact on the market, organizations around the globe sense that it must be considered thoroughly. This means that both the European Union as well as U.S. officials are taking their time to review the deal.
At least Sun’s shareholders have approved the acquisition now.

Pitty
The slow process might be good for the law enforcers that are evaluating the acquisition, it’s not that good of course for Sun and Oracle at least but also for the Java market as a whole. Uncertainty whether this acquisition will proceed or not will make potential customers hesitate. That will not only influence Sun and Oracle’s position at customers, but also competitors like IBM.

Competition
Meanwhile the competition is also taking advantage of the indistinctness in both the hardware area  as well as the software area.

Still this merger of a company which is really dedicated to best way of applying Java and Java Enterprise Edition as the firm basis for their complete product stack and the company that founded Java seems a very good move. Since Java is so crucial for Oracle and the success of their products they would be mad not to keep most of the Java community that is in place currently intact and leverage it. Only because of this vivid community around Java is what it is now, a firm and stable infrastructure for a wide variety of business applications and improving all the time.

Of course Oracle will have to make sure that the competitors that base their products on Java, get their take at improving Java and give input to it. Only this way Oracle, together with the other Java based companies will be able to fight the battle against Microsoft and their .Net platform.

The story continues, the next step will be on September 3. as the European Union will announce whether the acquisition can take place or they will need to do a more thorough investigation. Fingers crossed it will be the first option and the merger will not be postponed needlessly more.

Original post on: Capping IT Off

Oracle buys the sun

Yesterday Oracle shocked the world by announcing it will acquire SUN Microsystems. Now, the day after it's a good moment to take a look at what hit us...

As we all know Oracle has been buying a lot of companies in the last couple of years. Although this is not the largest purchase (e.g. BEA and Peoplesoft were larger) and not the smallest (Hyperion wasn’t that big) to my opinion this is one which is really one of the most significant ones. SUN being the founder of Java and a lot of Open Source programs it is a unique step in history!

So what's behind it? Well, as Larry Ellison puts it in his voice over (which can be found here) the solid reason for it is Oracle's strategy to be Complete, Open and Integrated.

Complete
Well Oracle can definitely say they are complete now: from applications, through Fusion Middleware, security and governance all the way down to virtual machines (Java and hypervisor), databases and Operating systems and as a small plus even hardware: SUN Sparc server technology. You would say this completes the total stack...

Open and Integrated
Because of the wide variety of products within their stack Oracle has a strong strategy on integrating their products. Fusion applications, means seamless integration of all applications with each other, but also with customly build component based applications all the way down to the way the connect with their data-storage and OS. The heart of Fusion applications is Oracle Fusion Middleware, the number 1 middleware stack out there, believe me this is not a Oracle commercial, it's really great! And as you might know it's Java based Integration technology. This means by buying the founder of Java the key of the innovative power behind Java is in good hands since Java is the key foundation of the Fusion middleware stack and thus the Fusion application strategy.
So how about Open then?! Well let's be honest, when a company has so many products in its product stack, the only way to get all of those components integrated is to use Open standards and adopt Open source components. Like with other acquisitions it's my opinion, that Oracle will only pick the cherries especially for the Open Source projects they will contribute to, of course. But they will definitely be contributing and actively invest in Open standards and Open Source projects, simply because they have to, to reach their goals in integrating the complete product stack.

So, I think this acquisition will mean great new investments in Java, it gives another boost to the development of Fusion Middleware and thus Fusion Applications and it makes Oracle a true one-stop-shop which give major TCO benefits.

Question is what will be next? Will Oracle be buying the moon?

Original post on: Capping IT Off

Nothing but the real thing... Well...

So here I was telling you that with conferences there's nothing but the real thing. And that conference will never be replaced by online conferences.

Well I must admit, although there is going to be a Oracle Open World again this year, and thus the "live" are there to stay, I just found out that on 19th February Oracle has it's first online Virtual Conference.

Well we'll see how this evolves..., although I still think that 'there's nothing but the real thing' as far as conferences are concerned. It's good to have these virtual conferences, but this will not mean the real ones will be over.

Java based Integration Technology

So how hot is Java these days? A lot of enterprises are moving from Customized Software Development towards standard applications. You would expect that Java's footprint is decreasing because of this movement as would Microsoft actually.

Well let's focus on middleware or integration software. A lot of effort (and they're succeeding) is put in creating integration platforms, like ESB's or BPM environments, just to minimize the amount of coding and the possible errors you introduce with it. Resulting in robust, state-of-the-art firm bases for your business technology. This means that enterprises will want to move from error-prone custom-built applications to more standardized and configuration based way of developing applications based on services.

So what does this mean for the good old Java programmer then?! Hmmm... well this might be like telling a turkey what's on for the christmas dinner, but eventually we won't be coding a lot anymore. Sorry guys but it's the way it is. I'm not sure how long it will take, but the day will come... Currently we are already sensing this quite a lot at our customers.

But now the good part! If you take a look at the best-of-breed integration or middleware software out there you'll find out that most (if not all, after all I said best-of-breed ;-)) of these are Java based! WebMethods, Tibco, BEA / Oracle Fusion Middleware, SAP Netweaver, IBM Websphere, to name just a few insignificant ones are all Java based. This means, and it will keep meaning in my opinion that in order to tweak / configure or even add that specific functionality that's just not available out-of-the-box will definitely require that good old java skilled developer to do the trick.

So will this be the end of Java?
No! Because it's gonna be Java based Integration Technology!

The I in IT...

Today during lunch I had a nice discussion with some colleagues about information sharing between for instance the Dutch government and the US government whenever someone is flying to the US.

It's interesting that especially people in the IT industry are pretty paranoia about their personal info and who get's hold of it. Probably because we know what you could do with the information if you get hold of it.

Personally, I think that it is no problem if information is shared as long as the purpose is clear and it can really prevent something or enable pro-active handling. That's currently not yet the case I think. To my opinion a lot of information is shared and stored, only to be touched whenever something has already gone wrong, not before...

Another interesting thought is what if, like with open source software, everyone would share all of his own details? I know that currently nobody would present his bank-account balance on a blog or post his mortgage details on twitter. But it's an interesting thought... Who would have predicted that today so many software vendors would provide the source code of their software to the community years ago?

Who knows what happens to the I in IT :-)

Nothing but the real thing

I'm writing this in the train back home from the airport. Just had a 10 hour flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam. Actually not the best part of the whole thing, but it's definitely worth it. Meeting people, attending sessions, eating the sponsored lunches, going to the customer appreciation event, Oracle OpenWorld was great! It was fantastic!

I was just thinking of the fact that in IT currently Social Computing, collaboration or Enterprise 2.0 within the boundaries of an enterprise are very hot things. So you'd think that with all new technology in place in a couple of years attending a conference might mean not going there physically, but virtually.
To my opinion attending a conference will not be as much fun, and as worthwhile then now.

I think that conferences like this, although technology is advancing rapidly will still be about people flying in from all over the world and meeting each other, no chat or webcam session can change that. I saw a lot of people finally meeting each other after a long while of being in email contact or even chatting or blogging together and everyone start smiling at that point.

Nothing but good old human interaction, face to face, discussing live and drinking beers together.

Nothing but the real thing.

CTRL + Shift what a combo..

Windows (XP or Vista) users in the US probably don't experience this, but Europeans do: There is a "hidden feature" in both XP and Vista namely the CTRL and Shift shortcut that really changes things drastically in your Windows environment...

So what is the shortcut all about?! Well it switches the keyboard layout to the next keyboard layout that is setup on your computer. So what is the big deal? You'll only have one keyboard layout, right?! So no sweat! Well if you live in the US that's correct, but if you live in The Netherlands for instance and you selected your own time zone and country during initial setup, Windows will do a couple of nifty things for you automatically...

Windows will automatically create settings for your home language AND create a keyboard layout setting, the default one for your country, although in a lot of countries the keyboard layout is US 101.

And there you are working on some document or Java code or even writing a blog. You intend to select a  line or a couple of words so you press CTRL + Shift. You change your mind so you don't press any other key while holding down CTRL + Shift and you release them. Et-voila! when you continue typing you find out that a lot of the keys you hit do not turn out to be the keys you intended to use!

Actually I myself found out this "hidden feature" already a couple of years ago, but it seems today a lot of people are still suffering from this: closing all programs, rebooting windows or even reinstalling Windows to get rid of the problem.

So the one feature I would definitely want to be in Windows 7 or actually NOT to be in the system is the default keyboard layout switching shortcut CTRL + Shift.

Thank you Microsoft. Maybe Bill and Seinfeld can record an item on this topic, sounds like a lot a of fun to me...

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: Policies, SCA, Beehive and...

Most of the conferences have a couple of things they want you to take home. Although I understand that last year was already about SCA and policies, it's still pounding here now. And of course Beehive... Well BEA had Beehive as their "making life easy", "Spring like" framework, but is brand new! Or isn't it...

Well actually Oracle Beehive is actually an awful lot like the Liquid Enterprise BEA revealed at BEA World in 2007. Then again, that's one of the reasons why they bought BEA, so no wonder!

SCA is hot at Oracle OpenWorld as well. They are pushing mainly the Weblogic Application Server platform and the BPEL / BPM products forward as their SCA enabling platform, ready for the agile Enterprise future. I'm not so sure yet about the real advantage of SCA over plain old BPM. So mainly what the added value is above having business processes being defined is that you have a good notion of what is in your composition (which services), what the interfaces (dependencies) to other components are and what the properties for the component are. You still have the point (as with BPM) that services are deployed over several systems and you'll have a deployed composition of the services on another system. A good thing is that you're not restricted to having Web Services, with SCA a composition might also contain Java classes or .Net classes. Which actually could be done with BPM using for instance the Oracle Service Bus! Nevertheless SCA is a nice clean way of composing Service based applications and since Oracle is pushing it might be here to stay.
It seems however it is mainly a technology thing, which might not make it up to deciding business level.

The scoop of the conference was actually presented on Wednesday by Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) in what you can best summarize as a sales pitch or commercial of about 30 minutes of the new HP - Oracle Exadata Data server.
Cool server technology but I did not like the presentation actually. Rather then setting out the new Oracle way forward he spent the whole presentation, which looked a bit unprofessional("next slide please...") on how good the relationship with HP is (elephants do love elephants) and what a perfect hardware / software combination they created for handling bigger and bigger query data throughput demands. Impressive, but I didn't like the keynote at all!
Just to be complete a little info on the Exadata servers technology. The server consists of several high performing Disks combined with Intel processors for running queries on the data. This together with a high bandwidth data pipe for sending out data puts together the Exadata server. The real trick with the server is that queries are performed on the same server that hosts the data (not on a separate server) and only the result data is passed to the database server that requested the query.
This can be a good thing for some of the Oracle customers, but it will be a limited set. The other thing is: how about inserts, updates and delete? These servers are mainly tuned for high performance on querying, not for those. Maybe next year...

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: Tom Kyte keynote - The best way...

Just went to see Tom Kyte's keynote titled "The best way...". It once again made me realize that trying to aim for simple solutions is the best way to do things. He had one slide in his presentation stating: "you don't need 14 tiers in every solution to get things working!".

It all comes down to K.I.S.S. (Keep IT Simple, Stupid!)

To my opinion that goes for a lot of aspects of software engineering; In his case it's Database design and query / data retrieval optimization (Tom Kyte is thé Guru on Oracle Database technology) in other cases it's Software design and Software implementation or Software Configuration Management. Another one is Architecture... Just take that 14 tier example into account...

So why is it that in Software development, and typically in the Java world, people tend to over complicate things? Is it to prove own knowledge? Or to impress other people? Or does it have to do with the Software development industry, especially Java, being rather young and thus not so detailed out?

Well I'm not sure what the answer is. What I do know is that keeping things simple can make it a lot better to understand for people and in the end get more appreciation.
I think there is a lot of analogy with music, where some of the greatest hits in history consist of a very simple chord scheme and very easy tunes.

So let's Keep things simple!

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: Sunday 9/21/2008

Well today started pretty nice actually, we did not go to the sessions this morning... because there weren't any!

Instead we spent the morning cycling up the Golden Gate Bridge and beyond to the Vista Point, which is at the other side of the GG bridge in the National Park. A hell of a ride (by bike that is) but normally (if there's no fog) the view on San Francisco, the bridge and the bay would have been more than worth it. Would have been, because when we arrived up there, the clouds and fog moved in and all of  a sudden the view was gone! The trip was worthwhile nevertheless.

In the afternoon I went to three sessions:

• The next generation Application Servers Infrastructure: trends
• Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Service SOA Overview
• Introduction to Web Service Manager

The next generation Application Servers Infrastructure: trends
The first session described the past, the present and the future (of course with the disclaimer: "...nothing in this presentation can be held against us...") of Application servers. 
One of the conclusions of the session was that J EE will continue to play a big roll in Enterprise development. I think so too, but what will be key for JEE is that there needs to change something to the complexity of the platform in terms of what can and must be used. This implies that for instance if I'm only using Servlets, JSP's, some JDBC and some EJB's in my application I should not have to load (in memory) all of the things needed for for instance JMS and all of the other JEE parts that are available in an application server. This will make the memory footprint and by that the necessary resources for an application very much smaller and thus performance and necessary resources will benefit of that.
For this exact reason the Oracle Weblogic team is really pushing hard to get so called "profiling" into JEE 6, which is due somewhere in 2009. This will (when the 6.0 standard is implemented) eventually lead to a more monolithic Application server. The term the presenter used is "WYGIOWYN": What You Get Is What You Really Need!
Actually SpringSource is working on the exact same thing with there SpringSource DM Application server!

One of the other trends (which you already see actually) will be that more and more POJO's will become important (Spring, etc.), as well as the support of other more scripting oriented languages to be ported on Java / JEE. This is mainly because newer languages are suffering of the lack of a good runtime environment which the JVM (with approx. 2000 man centuries of R&D) is nowadays. This means that the JVM is actually a very good runtime to host new languages, which will mean porting of the languages, like JRuby, etc.

The last point I'd like to mention is SCA, it really seems like Oracle has adopted SCA (Service Component Architecture) which will also need it's support in for instance the Weblogic Application Server platform. I'll come back on SCA in one of the following posts.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Service SOA Overview
Other than what you would expect from the session title, this session was mainly on the roadmap of the Weblogic Application server. The guy presenting it was a good prototype of a "businetized" nerd (he was wearing a suit, but was really into technical details :-)). I'll give you some highlights on this:

- Policies
- SOAP attachments (MTOM)
- Dual WS stack (supporting both JAX-WS and JAX-RPC)
- JDeveloper dev environment -> HTTP Analyzer / WS testing
- Although Workshop might be around for a while for J2EE development.

Roadmap: FMW 11g R1, 1st half of 2009 mainly combining WLS 10.3 and OAS 10.1.3.x

Introduction to Web Service Manager
Although I know it is not really the case I can't help thinking that Oracle's WSM product does really do a lot of things the old Aqualogic Service Bus is already capable of itself. I'm having a session on that on Tuesday, so I'll keep you posted on this...

More to follow...

"Sun targets BEA WebLogic users"

I read this article a couple of weeks ago about Sun's new strategy to try to get current / former BEA Weblogic users to move over to SUN Java CAPS, SUN's SOA Platform.

Sun tries to convince people to start using their platform with some kind of simple SOA TCO calculator. To my opinion a little to short to conclude the TCO of SOA based on the parameters (# of sockets (per core), # of employees and # of years).

Well it might convince people to start looking a little closer to investments in SOA, which is good. Probably the outcome will be that they will conclude to go for SOA players like Oracle - BEA.

We'll see...

Oracle OpenWorld 2008: It started!

Well yesterday (Saturday 9/20/20008) I flew in from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport for joining the Oracle Open World (OOW) conference 2008 in San Francisco. The flight was pretty good, no delay (we had a direct flight) and no real "roller coaster rides". Although 10 hours straight flying can be a pretty hard time...

After waiting for a colleague flying in from Detroit, we went to the Hilton Hotel, where we're staying and checked in. Nice hotel, no problemos there ;-) So that one's also checked!

Then the registration part of the conference: We went to the Moscone center, actually the hart of the conference and checked-in there. Retrieving our Full-conference passes and the goodies. We also found out to be able to see the really good stuff (sessions) we'll need to register for the Oracle Develop part of the conference, which cost an additional $100! They try to make money out of everything... Found out that due to the fact that I've been to BEA world in Barcelona last year officially I belong the veterans, being an Alumni member, meaning that I received even more goodies than "normal" registrants ;-)

Having this one settled as well we took a stroll around the city center, walking along the streets of China town, Italian quarter, seeing the Pyramid building and finally ending up at a place called Burgermeister. Very nice how the made an art out of making real Hamburgers and actually very good fries! Good thing my wives not with me because there was a lot of garlic in the stuff...

Feelings so far: so I've been to big conferences before, but this one is actually the most big and impressive one! I'm not sure about the exacts figures, but something like 1200+ presentations, keynotes and labs and about 45.000 people visiting the place from literally all of the world. In the plane I sat next to a guy from Latvia and behind me a couple from Italy, I heard some Scandinavians (Denmark, Norway) and go on... This is really big.

So what's next: this morning (I'm writing this at 3:44, jet-lag -> so what to do else :-)) we planned to go biking across the Golden Gate bridge and ride into the National Park right across the bridge to have some nice views of the bay. Later on today some sessions on SOA (Fusion) and Java (mainly the old BEA stuff) are planned. I'm really excited to see what the strategy Oracle layed out in July actually really implies. I'll keep you posted with my findings :-)

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