Effectively Leverage SOA and APIs to Increase Business
Los Angeles, CA – April 17, 2012 – SOA Software, a leading provider of SOA governance, cloud and enterprise API Management products, announced today that it has joined forces with Red Hat to present a webinar on the subject of API management. The live April 24th event is titled “The benefits of API Management with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform’s ESB and SOA Software.” Topics of discussion include how SOA can provide a foundation for an API program, and how approaching APIs with a combination of a sound SOA platform and end-to-end SOA governance promotes API service levels (SLA), security, and policy compliance.

“Service Oriented Architecture drives agility and efficiency, providing a foundation for APIs that can increase revenue,” said Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President of SOA Software. “But, as with so many other emerging technologies, how you implement your APIs can make a huge difference in how well you achieve your goals. This presentation is intended to give our audience new ways of thinking about both API implementation and sharing –two of the core elements of API success.”

SOA Software and Red Hat decided to present the webinar after working with numerous clients that were struggling with APIs on heavyweight, complex proprietary SOA platforms. The webinar will describe how some of the world’s largest companies have used SOA Software and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform’s ESB solutions to plan, build and operate their SOA & API environments. The presentation will also detail how automated SOA governance and API management help enterprises more effectively leverage SOA and APIs to increase business output while cutting their spending.

Pierre Fricke, Director of Product Line Management, SOA Products, at Red Hat and Ian Goldsmith, Vice President, Product Management, at SOA Software will jointly present the webinar. Mr. Fricke is responsible for strategy and enterprise messaging for these Red Hat products. Mr. Goldsmith drives product management for SOA Software. The two executives have extensive knowledge and experience in the arena of API Management, SOA implementation and SOA governance.

The webinar will be presented at the following times:
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 | 13:00 UTC / 9 a.m. (New York) / 3 p.m. (Paris) / 6:30 p.m. (Mumbai)
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 | 18:00 UTC / 2 p.m. (New York) / 8 p.m. (Paris) / 11:30 p.m. (Mumbai)
Register here

For more information about SOA Software API Management see: www.soa.com/atmosphere
For more information about SOA Governance for Red Hat see: www.soa.com/JBoss

About SOA Software

SOA Software is a leading provider of unified SOA governance, cloud and enterprise API Management products that enable organizations to plan, build, and run enterprise services and open APIs.  The world’s largest companies including Bank of America, Pfizer, and Verizon use SOA Software solutions to transform their business. Gartner placed SOA Software in the “Leaders Quadrant for the 2011 “Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies.”  The company is also recognized as a “Leader” by the Forrester Research Waves for Integrated SOA Governance and SOA Life Cycle Management.  For more information, please visit http://www.soa.com.

Last year’s Oracle University training offered prior to Oracle OpenWorld
was a great success, so we’re doing it again this year—on Sunday,
September 30. Our problem (and it’s a good one to have) is that we have
more potential sessions than we have time in the day.

Over the years, UML has quietly become a trusted modeling notation across a broad ribbon of application development.  But its utility for SOA has not been vividly apparent. The SoaML UML extension arose as a means to wed UML and SOA, but its uptake has been narrow.

”There’s a lot of room for raising awareness of SoaML. It’s not as well-known as it should be,” said long-time IBMer Lee Ackerman, now CTO and vice president of products, The Emphasys Group. Tools would help, he suggested.

And, in fact, Ackerman and his Emphasys colleagues have built a pattern-based add-on tool to IBM Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software. The IBM modeling tool supports SoaML, but Emphasys looks to ease the implementation and improve SOA development outcomes via its Service-Oriented Architecture Design (SOAD) Model Accelerator add-on.

”With the Accelerator, we provide patterns and model restraints and reports that leverage information from [design] models,” said Ackerman, co-author of Patterns-Based Engineering (Addison-Wesley, 2010). Ackerman said the SOAD Model Accelerator helps a team decide what should be modeled and how. Embedded in the tool is knowledge of practical service identification patterns, which would be useful for what can often be a difficult task.

Modeling may always be disliked by some groups of hard-core coders, but UML verges on ‘mainstream’ in a fair number of enterprises.  The evolving mix of SOA, UML and SoaML is worth watching.

Is SOA itself mainstream? “If it’s not, it’s on the verge,” says Lee Ackerman. He says there are still newbies coming online to learn UML. Tools such as SOAD Model Accelerator, he suggests, can help experienced and new SOA users alike.   But SOA is more than tools.

“SOA is best practices. It is an approach. It is a mindset. Moreover, it is an architecture style. SOA really becomes a problem solver,” said Ackerman.

Is SOA complex? No, says Ackerman, but the problems it is being asked to address in the enterprise these days truly are complex, he said.- Jack Vaughan

SAP gained a major presence in mobile development with its 2010 acquisition of Sybase in 2010, but it continues to look to advance its mobile offerings. This week, SAP announced agreements with Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha to provide users with a more versatile open mobile apps development framework. 

SAP’s collaboration with Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha will enable developers to effectively build mobile apps based on their choice of client architecture. Developers will be able to do so while leveraging a mobile application platform. The products involved in the agreement include Adobe PhoneGap, Appcelerator Titanium and Sencha Touch.

Adobe PhoneGap is a hybrid Web app runtime environment that allows developers to author native mobile applications with Web technologies such as HTML5. Applications built using PhoneGap have access to device APIs and can be published across major app stores.

Appcelerator Titanium is an Eclipse-based IDE, SDK and library of connectors used to build, test and
deploy mobile and Web applications. Titanium SDK is billed as enabling the deployment of native, hybrid and mobile Web apps all from a single JavaScript code base.

Meanwhile, Sencha Touch is an HTML5 mobile application framework. Sencha Touch includes built-in capabilities to make it easier to build applications that align with business architectures. The application framework also enables developers to build apps that work on multiple platforms such as iOS, Android and Blackberry.

Viewers suggest these boutique players represent  a cross-section of key open-source mobile tools today, and may come to effectively expand the developer base for SAP/Sybase mobile efforts. – Ryan Punzalan

Last MVP summit I met the only Italian BizTalk Server MVP Antonino Crudele (Nino). He has been an BizTalk MVP for 5 years in a row now and that is quite an accomplishment. During the summit we had a nice little chat and got to know each other a little better. I asked him a couple of questions for my BizTalk Community Series that bring BizTalk community members to the foreground. Here is his story.

Nino Crudele is 46 years old and has two daughters, one son and a fantastic wife Grazia. He lives in  the hills of the Val Trebbia near Piacenza (province Emilia Romagna, Italy). Nino has been working in the consulting world for almost 20 years. He started as a C developer and later moved to .NET and the Web. He has always been fond of the integration aspects of development. One day back in 2003 he had the opportunity to work with BizTalk. This was one of the first Italian BizTalk pilots using BizTalk 2002.

Currently Nino is the COO (Chief Operating Officer) at Overnet Solutions, a consultancy and training company in Italy. Besides that he is also a Virtual Technology Specialist for BizTalk Server, a role in which he works closely with Microsoft Italy. He enjoys this role as it enables him to work with many different clients seeing BizTalk in different scenario’s from a technical point of view, size, and criticality.
Nino has worked with most of the BizTalk accelerators, Rosettanet, HL7, SWIFT and has done some big projects on EDI and RFID. In the past he also had the opportunity to be part of a big integration project with a major Italian enterprise organization that integrates many technologies like SAP, AS400, TIBCO and others using BizTalk. During this project Nino faced one he’s memorable challenges a throttling assessment on a BizTalk architecture with more than a 100 CPUs.

Nino has to say the following about me, sharing knowledge, the BizTalk Server product, and the MVP Program:

“In Steef I found a wonderful person and a great professional, has a great energy and his blog proves it. I love to share my experiences and my knowledge with my blog and community, I think that in Italy and in the world is really important to speak about BizTalk, it is one of the best product that Microsoft did. I’m BizTalk MVP from 5 years and thank to my MVP lead, this 2012 has begun so wonderful, the MVP summit I met so many great people and great professionals, I am happy and honored to be part of this great family that is the BizTalk MVP group.”

His MVP Lead Alessandro Teglia, who I spoke with a few weeks ago has the following to say about Nino:

“As a Community Program Manager (aka MVP Lead) for CEE & Italy, I usually meet a lot of people, with strong skills and very passionate ones. I do (and I love) this job because of them, their attitude, and their willingness to help others. In particular, I found in Nino a valuable expert when I first met him and, lately and very good friend I can count on. I can easily say Nino is one of the most popular BizTalk expert in the whole Country. Nino’s ability to involve you in activities and projects is just amazing; his charisma, his positive attitude is so vivid in him that you could follow him everywhere ! But it’s also supported by his strong technical knowledge which makes him a very valuable Consultant, Community Expert, Project Manager, COO and to me, a great friend.”

In his spare time Nino likes to spend as much time possible with his family. He like to write articles, create webcasts, and experiment with technology. He follows the various BizTalk communities in the world. Nino himself created the first Italian community for BizTalk (ugics.org).

There are however a lot other things Nino likes to do in his spare time. He told me he could write a book about it. So I will quote here what he told me:

“In my life I did everything, I started to practice martial arts 4 years ago, have a brown belt Judo, did Kung fu, practiced Boxing and I’m an instructor in Muay Thai. I practiced the free climbing for nine years and was part of the free climbing Italian Team for three years. I love Kayaking, I like to run and did the marathon in Athens. The others sports in my life when I was young were rugby, scuba diving, skateboarding (free style), break dancing, and so on as I can’t remember all.Nowadays I like to do karting, and I have a 125 cc, play chess and friends on mine. I love music like music like rock, metal, pop, rap”.

Nino is indeed a very active person and I like to thank him for his contributions to BizTalk community and time to have a chat with me. Nino and I will meet again in May, when we will organize a BizTalk event at Microsoft Italy in Milan. I am looking forward to that event and spending some time with Nino, meeting his family and share our passion for BizTalk and rock music.

NASA chose its website as flagship for a revamp of its open government plan rolled out yesterday, and — as if to show the agency meant business — did so with a brand-new, brightly colored buzzword-catcher of a website.

There are two things worth noting here. First, NASA — which, seeing as it has its own cloud computing environment, is on the leading edge of government IT already — is making the case that accessibility through web design and funcitonality will be important for open government. Second, the agency promises a full-scale reorientation in how it chooses technology. NASA’s new goals include a transition to an open-source content management system and change its procurement process to value open-source over proprietary solutions. This in a federal government that wasn’t clear on how to treat open-source software until 2009.
Reproduced from: NASA’s Open-Source Open Government Future | TechPresident.

Event: Glue Conference
Date: May 23-24
Location: Omni Interlocken Resort, Broomfield, CO

Join SOA Software at Gluecon, the developer centric conference. Topics will include NoSQL, API’s, Node.js, HTML5, Backend-as-a-Service, Cloud Management and Security, Cloud Storage, Hadoop, DevOps, Mobile App Development, Cloud Platforms and more. 

Alistair Farquharson, CTO
GlueCon Keynote and Breakout Speaker
Topics: Using APIs to Extend Your Business Reach and The Benefits of API Management and SOA

Event: Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit
Date: May 14-15
Location: Park Plaza Westminster Bridge,  London
Join Silver sponsor SOA Software at the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit. Enterprise architects will discuss the adoption of new business models; the nexus of cloud, social, big data and mobile technologies. Sessions will include critical EA competencies: business strategy integration, stakeholder engagement, measurement, effective communication and governance.

On how open source software will play a role in the agency’s ongoing open government efforts the plan states, “We continue to test open-source software solutions and incorporate open-source business rules engines in several production applications. In addition, we established an enterprise service bus based on open-source technology and continue to incorporate open-source solutions in our integrated development environments … We look forward to sharing the products of our open-source platform efforts across the growing Federal open-source development community, as well as partnering with other agencies in future endeavors.”

Taken from: Social Security Updates Open Government Plan, Highlights the Crowd, FOIA, Open Source | FedScoop.

Stories continue with the BizTalk Community Series that bring BizTalk community members to the foreground. The ninth story will be on Nausad Alam, who is currently one of most active community members on BizTalk forums. Not only on the forums has Naushad been very active. He has also written a few extensive wiki articles for Technet wiki like:

• BizTalk Server: Performance Tuning & Optimization
• BizTalk Server: Integration With MQ Series

A few weeks a go I had a chat with Naushad and here’s his story.

Naushad is BizTalk Developer/Administrator/Designer/Architect, working with one of the largest Bank in the United Kingdom. He has more than 9 years of working experience with Microsoft products.

Naushad enjoys the BizTalk Administrator and Developer role the most. He started working with BizTalk early 2004 during a BizTalk 2002 project, and after that it seems he got married with this product. Nowadays he is working/thinking/sharing his knowledge on the BizTalk forums.

Naushad has certainly showed his enthusiasm on the forums, TechNet wiki and blog. I quote:

“There are really great articles/forums (MSDN)/blogs evolved during last 3-4 years, I remember when I started working with BizTalk 2002, there was not much information on the internet, So I really had some difficulties find information, but things have been revolutionized in recent years. People should get benefit from this and make the BizTalk product the most popular and successful ever.”
 
His view on sharing knowledge is and I quote:

“I would like to say that it really takes time and passion to write and maintain technical blogs online with a consistency, People should try to get maximum benefits from the blogs/articles because it could give them a simple solution of their complex problems.”

He feels BizTalk is a great product and as he states:

“Certainly BizTalk is a great product and its been evolved a lot during last couple of years, the guys at Redmond are really shipping great features every time making it a better product. I would love to continue the rest my career around this product and other integration products of Microsoft.”

In his spare time Naushad likes to watch animations like Cars, and Toy story with his little daughter, and he is an active reader. He recently finished reading the biography of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, which aligns with his passion for Apple products. Naushad likes his Mac and loves to design simple user interfaces for it. Currently he is working on a design for a user interface for one of his personal media management software.

Regarding sports Naushad loves to watch cricket; the Indian Cricket team is his favorite team and Sachin Tendulkar his favorite player. Since the last couple of months he has been enjoying playing badminton on the weekends.

Thanks Naushad for your time and your contributions to forums and the TechNet Wiki.