While the enterprise software business remains a good one, integration hardware appliances continue to grab headlines. With Oracle’s Exalogic and, now, IBM’s PureSystems, unveiled at Impact 2012, the integration hardware appliance product pipeline seems primed.

These machines are said to cope with complexity, one of the biggest hurdles to software integration today, by ”canning” known good integration configurations. As with a prefabricated house, there is room for customization, but the appliance may not meet the special needs of all integration developers.

Ease of integration is the basic raison d’etat  behind IBM’s PureSystems box, shown above. Integration has become such a tangle, that there is little doubt some shops will consider the box as a way to cope.  The path has been set for Big Blue shops by DataPower, the XML appliance that IBM acquired a number of years ago from start-up DataPower and took to market in a big way. For many IBM-oriented undertakings, ”DataPower” is almost synonymous with ”ESB.” Its utility was especially enhanced with the addition of object brokering and data caching capabilities.

If you’d like to see more of PureSystems and other doings at IBM Impact 2012 check out SearchSOA.com’s Impact 2012 in pictures slide show.

Next week there will be BizTalk event in Milan. Overnet Education in collaboration with Microsoft Italy and User Group Italiano Connected System will organize, for the first time an interesting event related to BizTalk Server and integration services with the presence of international speakers. Myself, Sandro, Tord and Saravana will speak at this event.

Event is organized by Nino Crudele in collaboration with me and few others. Nino is the founder of the User Group Italiano Connected System and will be our host. I would like to invite you all to join us next May 24, 2012 in Milan, Italy.

The agenda for the event:

13:45 – 14:00: Registration;

14:00 – 14:15: Welcome;

14:15 – 15:00: BizTalk Host thresholds and automatic throttling
by Tord Glad Nordahl;

15:00 – 15:45: BizTalk360
by Saravana Kumar (MVP BizTalk Server)

15:45 – 16:00: Break;

16:00 – 16:45: Adapter Pack Integration Capabilities (BizTalk)
by Steef-Jan Wiggers (MVP BizTalk Server)

16:45 – 17:30: Introduction to the Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI features
by Sandro Pereira (MVP BizTalk Server)

17:30 – 18:00: BizTalk Innovation Event Wrap up
by Nino Crudele (MVP BizTalk Server)

18:00: Closure

Click here to ensure your registration or to get more information’s about this event.

VideoLAN would like to thank VLC users 1 billion times, since VLC has now been downloaded more than 1 billion times from our servers, since 2005!

VideoLAN – VideoLAN – Download Statistics.

If you’re innovating with Oracle Fusion Middleware, then you need to know that the Call for Nominations for the 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards is open now through July 17, 2012.

#bizarch The obvious ones – Apple, Amazon, Microsoft

General comments

“The new market disruption is the migration of a large number of
demanding customers away from phones-as-voice-products to
phones-as-computing-products. The low-end disruption is the migration of
a large number of less demanding customers from branded phones to
unbranded, commodity phones. … The new market disruption is evidenced by the shift of fortunes to Apple and Samsung and away from every other device maker.” Horace Dediu, The phone market in 2012: a tale of two disruptions (May 2012)

“Apple is the most valuable company in technology (and indeed in the
world) because it integrates hardware, software and services. It’s the
first, and only, company to do all these three well in service of jobs
that the vast majority of consumers want done.” Horace Dediu, Which is best: hardware, software or services? (May 2012)

Disney

• John Hagel, Disney, Pixar and Jobs (February 2006)

• Disney, Pixar, Apple and Jobs (February 2006)

Back in 2006, people like Hagel thought that Steve Jobs didn’t understand platforms. Maybe he didn’t then, but he certainly caught up later. 

eBay

• Dare Obasanjo, eBay Web Services: A Marketplace Platform for Fun and Profit (March 2006)
• Haydn Shaughnessy, eBay’s Platform Strategy (Oct 2011)

Elsevier

• Smart Content (Oct 2011)

Nike

• Nick Vitalari, Competition and the Elastic Enterprise: Business Platforms, Personal Biometrics and Strategic Options: Nike and FuelBand (Jan 2012)

• Art Petty, Systems Thinking Meets Platform Strategy and Social Media via Nike+ (March 2012)

Nokia

• Ron Adner, A Sad Lesson in Collaborative Innovation (HBR May 2012)
• The partnership between Nokia and Microsoft “is a clear admission that Nokia’s own-platform strategy has
  faltered,” said Ben Wood, an analyst with research firm CCS: Insight. (BBC News, Feb 2011)

Walmart

• Nick Vitalari, Walmart and The Power of the Business Platform (Sept 2011)

and finally Google

• Steve Yegge, “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant” (Oct 2011)
• Christopher Meyer, Steve Yegge’s Google Platform Rant (Oct 2011)

Steve Yegge compares Google with Amazon: Google has a lot of things in its favour, but its platform strategy is not one of them. See my comment Google as a Platform (NOT) (Oct 2011) 

• “Page and his management team have mandated that all Googlers focus on
  seven business areas, and that they don’t look to expand Google’s reach
  beyond these core initiatives.” Farhad Manjoo, Google’s Grand Plan (Slate, March 2012)

• “Page’s emphasis on streamlining Google’s product line has made the
  company’s thousands of employees focused on how — and if — a tool
  adequately fulfills users’ needs.” Bianca Bosker, Google’s Future (Huffington Post, March 2012)

 That’s not a platform strategy, that’s a traditional product portfolio strategy!

• Eric Jackson, Google’s Paranoid Structure has made it less innovative, not more (Forbes, April 2012)

It has been a few weeks since my last post. Why, well I have been busy promoting my BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook, which was published last month. I recommend you to buy a copy (eBook and/or printed version) if you haven’t done so already. A few weeks ago, just before the book was published, I had a conversation through email with Sriram, the person who as a BizTalk community member I like to bring to the foreground now. He has recently been awarded Microsoft Community Contributor. Well done and here is his story.

Sriram Chidambaram Narayanan is 27 years old professional from Chennai located in the southern part of India (State: TamilNadu). He works as a Senior Application Architect for Computer Sciences Corporation(CSC) in Bangalore. Sriram was at Unum for 14 months in the United States and returned back to India a couple of months ago.

Sriram has a total of 6 years of BizTalk experience.He started his career with developing and gradually evolved to a role where he is designing and architecting integration solutions. During his career he started with experimenting and creating connections with BizTalk Server to different applications. More recently his interest shifted towards learning the concepts and technology behind the ESB toolkit and Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus (now renamed to Service Bus Connect). These are currently the two areas where he is focusing on.

Sriram loves the BizTalk product because I quoted:

• its a fresh approach for designing Business flows and connections through built in shapes and configurations instead of the traditional 20000 lines of code
• provides a clear view on everything that flows through the system via various tracking options and monitoring tools
• it has and is maturing as a product with various enhancements and accelerators since the time I started working on the 2004 version
• it also has many interesting concepts, designs and logics that one has to think on opposed to just configure type products
• it never stopped challenging me and I never stopped dissolving them to feel the exhilaration.

His enthusiasm for the product shows through his contributions on the BizTalk forums (profile) and other channels. Whenever Sriram gets time outside of his regular work he will spend time on the forums. He enjoys doing this as it introduces him to different issues and solutions, which otherwise would take lots of time for him to personally explore. He also maintains a blog, where he shares his experience and knowledge or some times writes a post on issue resolutions that might help others. He also contributes to Codit’s(http://www.codit.eu) technical blogs. To the readers of his personal blog he would like to say:

“Show love, keep learning, be strong and don’t compromise on your goals.Keep a rockin’ attitude!”

Beside blogging Sriram has recently written his first article for the TechNet Wiki.So we have another BizTalk community member as contributor.

In India, cricket is a religion and Sriram is a great fan of Sachin Tendulkar. He support his home team, Chennai Super Kings and enjoys playing tennis once and a while. Besides sports Sriram enjoys listening to music especially to A. R. Rahman. Furthermore he regularly visits his family every weekend and now and then he spends some time with his friends.

Finally Sriram has a word for me and this blog:

“Steef is a great inspiration to all new BizTalk and Integration professionals and his contributions in the forums and TechNet articles are tremendous. I would thank and appreciate Steef for all his contributions and for keeping the ball rolling.Nandri!(Thank you)”

Thanks Sriram for your time and your contributions to forums, your blog and now also the TechNet Wiki.

Agile development and composite applications are a hallmark of SOA these days, but they are not without their difficulties. The push to rapidly deploy composite apps complicates the life of the QA team, whose members must now create test beds to work with a mishmash of services.

Some of these services are complete and in operation, while others are under development. All of them, unfortunately, are usually undergoing versioning.

The open source community has created mock services architectures to deal with this symptom of SOA. Too, vendors have fielded tools to deal with the new paradigm. ITKO (now a CA company) Parasoft, GreenHat (now an IBM company) and Hewlett-Packard Co. now support simulation of services. These are often called “virtualized services” as well.

While there is a certain natural solidity to enterprise back-end systems, the Web, with its constant change, is influencing the need for virtualized testing.

“People need to have an e-commerce experience that is extremely dynamic. Expectations change almost every week,” said Kelly Emo, director, Applications Product Marketing, HP. “This places demand on the developer team, and potentially, on the scalability and elasticity of back-end services.”

Application owners help drive the use of services virtualization tools, she noted, saying, “They see the costs in waiting and the problems that arise with limited testing.”

HP entered the virtualized services fray about a year ago, and has recently updated its HP Service Virtualization offering with support for REST services, now found widely in cloud and Web APIs. Native support is also available with this release for IBM WebSphere MQ services, which has been seeing a lot of demand, she said.

Cloud computing, too, is a driver of the move to virtualized services testing, according to Emo.

Read full story: The open source problem solvers creating government 2.0 | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

SOA has been used for application transformation for several years – now SOA itself is undergoing a transformation. At IBM Impact 2012, IBM Application and Integration Middleware General Manager Marie Wieck went so far as to dub the transformation “SOA 3.0.” She was not alone among IBM leaders showing support for SOA services – old and new.

A number of elements of Web 2.0 – cloud services, open APIs and mobile apps – are becoming the means to drive a new form of SOA. This SOA is much more likely to use REST than SOAP. Services continue to underlie new IBM integration offerings. At Impact 2012, IBM rolled together some mobile services development tools, with its newly acquired Worklight mobile middleware platform forming something of a centerpiece. IBM also promoted the newly forming ecosystems of open APIs, announcing IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Live Web API services.

“Today SOA is about linking systems of record together. SOA is the core. It simply is just good design. Design principles like SOA are fundamental in allowing you to bring isolated silos together,” said IBM’s Wieck, discussing traditional SOA.  But Wieck is also watching new forms of SOA – ones that reach out to Web users and reach back to enterprise assets.

“New API services unleash your business to new users,” Wieck said.

Wieck’s boss, IBM Software Group leader Steve Mills, echoed her comments. He reminded, as he sometimes does, that core SOA concepts are not really new. “It’s good fundamental design,” he said. “Winding everything up into a big ball of twine is not a good idea. [But] modularity  … is an idea that has been with us for a very long time.”

Is the onslaught of RESTful APIs showing SOA the door? “What we are seeing today in a many ways is the logical extension of SOA – not something new and different from SOA,” responds Mills.

A financial industry technology leader on hand at Impact concurred that services-style thinking is a key to development today. “We have to get to this world where we are focused more on services rather than applications,” said Steve George, CIO, Huntington Bank. “Flexible SOA accelerates solution delivery.”

#bizarch @nickvitalari sees signs of resurgence at #Microsoft. Everyone Beware: Microsoft is Alive Again and May Become an Elastic Enterprise (April 2012)

Vitalari sees Microsoft’s deal with Barnes and Noble as a promising signal, although he admits that it is open to conflicting interpretations. On the one hand, the idea that you can compete with Amazon by getting into bed with Barnes and Noble looks suspiciously like the idea that you can compete with Google by getting into bed with Yahoo. On the other hand, the deal might have the potential of getting Microsoft membership of the elite club that Vitalari and Shaunessy call “The Elastic Enterprise”. (See my post on Business as a Platform at Amazon, discussing Shaunessy’s recent blogpost.)

Among other things, I was intrigued by Vitalari’s comparison between Apple and Microsoft.

“Microsoft was the undisputed leader in the formation of 20^th
Century ecosystems, along with Cisco and WalMart. Everyone envied
Microsoft’s partnership with Intel and the extensive VAR (value-added
reseller) system they created.  But the ecosystem was closed.  Anyone
who participated in the old Microsoft ecosystem had to be approved and
most importantly it did not have a powerful business platform as seen
today with Apple, Amazon or Google.  But that is changing.”

Most software historians perceive the difference between Apple and Microsoft the other way around.

“The more restrictive a platform, the less attractive it becomes. Had
Microsoft imposed T and Cs as restrictive as Apple’s on Windows software
developers, Windows would not have achieved the dominance it did during
the 1990s.” (Jack Gavigan, Apple’s Platform Strategy, June 2011)

“From the beginning, Jobs resolutely resisted efforts to unbundle the
Macintosh operating system from the hardware. This contributed
significantly to the long-term erosion of both Apple’s hardware and
software market share in the computer business relative to more focused
players like Microsoft and Dell.  From his perspective, perfection
requires tight integration. In working with Disney, Jobs is likely to
push for larger, more tightly integrated content – exactly the opposite
direction from the one required to maximize returns on content
development in a world of attention scarcity.” (John Hagel, Disney, Pixar and Jobs, February 2006)   

From this point of view, Microsoft beat Apple because its platform was more open. Some people may have thought that Microsoft didn’t care enough about controlling the quality of third party developers, and Apple cared too much – but for many years it was the Microsoft platform strategy that was more commercially successful. Apple’s commercial breakthrough didn’t come as a result of changing its platform strategy, but extending it – in other words, radical adjacency. Above all, iTunes as the killer app.

But then this is evidence that a proprietary platform, like iTunes or Twitter, will sometimes produce the strongest network effects. Here’s Jack Gavigan again.

“In principle, there’s no barrier to building an open version of Twitter. … But Twitter
don’t want that because, in that scenario, the network effects that
currently drive everyone to Twitter would be neutralised.” (Jack Gavigan, Open vs Proprietary platforms, March 2011)

People talk about different platform strategies, using terms like “open” and “closed”, but these terms seem to have worryingly unstable meanings. Platform strategy is clearly a critical question for business architecture, but business architects don’t always seem to have consistent ways of describing platform strategy, let alone predicting its consequences.