The global launch for Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is on 1st July in Washington (Fusion Middleware Launch), and Inatech is pleased to announce that they will be attending the UK Launch in London on 2nd July, which includes keynote speeches from both Charles Phillips (President, Oracle) and Thomas Kurian (SVP, Oracle Development).
Following Inatech’s involvement in the Oracle early adopter programme for SOA Suite 11g (part of the Fusion Middleware 11g product suite), we have now established a SOA Suite 11g Centre of Excellence. Senior Inatech consultants have been working closely with Oracle on pre-release versions of Oracle’s SOA Suite 11g to evaluate and establish the key benefits and improvements within the product suite in anticipation of the product launch this summer. Inatech is now in a position to provide a complete service to our clients and prospects, whether they are looking at SOA for the first time, or are experienced SOA Suite users looking to upgrade to the new 11g release.
To complement the SOA Suite 11g release, Inatech will be running a series of events through late summer and autumn to give both existing customers and other interested parties a full briefing on the new SOA Suite 11g, including a discussion around new generation SOA principles such as SCA (Service Component Architecture) and the benefits this can deliver. Watch out for announcements on the Inatech blog and in your inbox about this exciting series of events.
Doug Toop
UK Oracle & Open Source Technology Practice Lead
Showing posts with label Middleware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Middleware. Show all posts
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
IBM’s CloudBust may not be as innovative as it claims to be
IBM announced the release of its new offering, WebSphere CloudBurst, this month with much pomp and circumstance.
The new product allows firms to make use of “private” cloud computing, and, according to IBM, speed up the process of testing and then rolling out new business applications. IBM’s general manager for Application and Integration Middleware division Tom Rosamilia, explained the advantages of the product in details: “About a year ago we started talking with customers about where the pain points were around cloud, and this is the resulting product," he began.
"You're doing development or modelling on someone else's cloud and making use of their services. The usage cases will be those you're willing to allow outside your environment. With the private cloud, you're doing the same thing but inside your firewall.
“Traditionally you've had to provision for peak use so your servers can stand up. With CloudBurst, you can dispense images so you can quickly bring up capacity and bring it back down again," he concluded.
This all sounds cutting edge, but, according to Inatech’s Simon Ellis, it is an approach that has already been used at length before now. “IBM’s latest announcement is in my opinion a small evolutionary step for clients either currently using virtualisation or cloud solutions."
“IBM takes elements of both and allows IT departments to provide cloud services internally through the deployment of their appliance. However, most tech savvy organisations are already following this approach: using virtualisation for provisioning on demand in their datacentres. Adding the word ‘Cloud’ doesn’t mean it really is new, but is perhaps a re-branding or evolution of something that already exists today."
“The use of an appliance means that it may be easier for some customers to get started as they can effectively buy it off the shelf, but in essence it’s nothing that most vendors and savvy IT organisations can do today, potentially for less cost.”
The new product allows firms to make use of “private” cloud computing, and, according to IBM, speed up the process of testing and then rolling out new business applications. IBM’s general manager for Application and Integration Middleware division Tom Rosamilia, explained the advantages of the product in details: “About a year ago we started talking with customers about where the pain points were around cloud, and this is the resulting product," he began.
"You're doing development or modelling on someone else's cloud and making use of their services. The usage cases will be those you're willing to allow outside your environment. With the private cloud, you're doing the same thing but inside your firewall.
“Traditionally you've had to provision for peak use so your servers can stand up. With CloudBurst, you can dispense images so you can quickly bring up capacity and bring it back down again," he concluded.
This all sounds cutting edge, but, according to Inatech’s Simon Ellis, it is an approach that has already been used at length before now. “IBM’s latest announcement is in my opinion a small evolutionary step for clients either currently using virtualisation or cloud solutions."
“IBM takes elements of both and allows IT departments to provide cloud services internally through the deployment of their appliance. However, most tech savvy organisations are already following this approach: using virtualisation for provisioning on demand in their datacentres. Adding the word ‘Cloud’ doesn’t mean it really is new, but is perhaps a re-branding or evolution of something that already exists today."
“The use of an appliance means that it may be easier for some customers to get started as they can effectively buy it off the shelf, but in essence it’s nothing that most vendors and savvy IT organisations can do today, potentially for less cost.”
Monday, January 26, 2009
7th Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum
The 7th Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum event took place 20/21 January in Malaga, Spain, with attendees from Oracle and partners across Europe.
Day 1
After a brief introduction from Alejandro Novo, Oracle Channel & Alliances Lead for Iberia, we were presented with three Partner Success Storys on SOA implementations by Logica, Promatis and Accenture. These covered adoption of SOA in Transport, Leasing and Public Sector.
The overriding theme in all of the presentations was focus on key wins around improving business process efficiency and adoption of SOA technologies to leverage existing investments. Jurgen Kress, Fusion Middleware Forum Lead, and Wolfgang Ehrenthaler, Director, Oracle Progam Office WCE, delivered Oracle’s SOA Sales Toolkit and campaigns for Partners.
The takeaway message from this session was around Oracle helping partners to generate more revenue, higher market awareness & deeper product knowledge. Wolfgang presented benefits, content and usage of Demand Generation campaigns around SOA that are available for Partners (links to follow). Grant Ronald, Oracle Forms & JDeveloper Product Manager, gave an overview of 11g Development Tools, in particular Forms & JDeveloper.
Day 1 concluded with a guided tour of Malaga, and a Tapas reception followed by dinner, with way too much to eat!
Day 2
The second day of the conference started with a brief demonstration of SOA Suite 11g by Torsten Winterberg from Opitz Consulting. Then there followed a series of breakout sessions covering a wide range of topics, including SOA Toolkit selection & adoption, Building Fusion with JDeveloper and ADF, Oracle BPM Studio, AIA, Forms to SOA, Telco Industry Value Proposition for Fusion Middleware. I attended the sessions on Oracle BPM Studio and Forms to SOA, summaries below:
Oracle BPM Suite (Matthew Schumpert, Oracle): One of the key messages I took from this session is that since the acquisition of BEA and the merging of the BEA Business Process Modelling tools with the Oracle BPA suite there is no real hard criteria around when each tool should be used, as it is possible to generate services / BPEL processes from both.
However, BPA suite lends itself more to processes with a Human Workflow element, and BPM lends itself more to system to system based processes. At a high level, the structure of the BPM Suite follows three roles: Designer (Business Analyst), Developer (Studio) and Enterprise (Runtime).
Forms To SOA (Grant Ronald, Oracle; Harald Wolf, Wolf Consulting): In this session Grant took a brief journey through the history of Forms and Reports, right back to 2.0 and Oracle 5! He then looked at the way in which many traditional tools-based users are starting to adopt newer technologies, and some of the barriers that are preventing them from doing so, such as lack of skills, retraining etc.
As a case study in how this can be done he talked about how Oracle itself retrained 5000 Forms & Reports developers (who previously worked on eBusiness Suite) with a one week training course, and they are now developing the Oracle Fusion apps using JDeveloper / ADF. The key to this is that although the technology itself is vastly different, a lot of the complexity is hidden from the developer via use of the relevant tools.
To demonstrate this, Grant worked through an example of creating a simple web service through JDeveloper and loading it through Forms Developer. The generated form then had a button that called out to a web service function to send an SMS message to his phone. He also demonstrated another simple web service call from a form out to Google Maps to track an order. There are a number of products currently on the market to support existing Forms users who are looking to modernise and migrate into the SOA world, such as the PITTS migration tool. Another offering was demonstrated during this session by Harald Wolf (WolfConsult, Germany).
Their product is a mixture of repository, search and migration tools. The repository tools are similar in some ways to the Oracle Designer toolset as they allow you to perform impact analysis on Forms based applications. However, the key difference is that the repository is based on the actual Forms metadata rather than ‘Design’ data. The migration tools allow you to migrate from traditional Client Server environments (Forms 4.5, 6 etc) to either web based Forms (10g etc), or SOA enabled, Web Services. The claim is that it is possible to migrate 100% of functionality, but I think this has to be taken with caution based on advice and experience from other educated sources.
Collateral
Jurgen Kress will be putting all of the presentations from the event on the Community website within the next few days.
Summary
Overall, the conference was extremely useful, and was an excellent opportunity to catch up on what’s happening in the SOA & Fusion community. This is the second event I’ve been to, and they are a great way of networking and meeting some of the top people around Europe in the SOA area, and at the same time having the ear of some of the influential product people within Oracle. The timing of this event was a bonus, as I’m working currently on an opportunity around Forms migration to SOA, so it was great to link up with both Grant Ronald and Wolf Consulting.
Link to Forms Modernization.
Doug Toop, Business Development Manager
Day 1
After a brief introduction from Alejandro Novo, Oracle Channel & Alliances Lead for Iberia, we were presented with three Partner Success Storys on SOA implementations by Logica, Promatis and Accenture. These covered adoption of SOA in Transport, Leasing and Public Sector.
The overriding theme in all of the presentations was focus on key wins around improving business process efficiency and adoption of SOA technologies to leverage existing investments. Jurgen Kress, Fusion Middleware Forum Lead, and Wolfgang Ehrenthaler, Director, Oracle Progam Office WCE, delivered Oracle’s SOA Sales Toolkit and campaigns for Partners.
The takeaway message from this session was around Oracle helping partners to generate more revenue, higher market awareness & deeper product knowledge. Wolfgang presented benefits, content and usage of Demand Generation campaigns around SOA that are available for Partners (links to follow). Grant Ronald, Oracle Forms & JDeveloper Product Manager, gave an overview of 11g Development Tools, in particular Forms & JDeveloper.
Day 1 concluded with a guided tour of Malaga, and a Tapas reception followed by dinner, with way too much to eat!
Day 2
The second day of the conference started with a brief demonstration of SOA Suite 11g by Torsten Winterberg from Opitz Consulting. Then there followed a series of breakout sessions covering a wide range of topics, including SOA Toolkit selection & adoption, Building Fusion with JDeveloper and ADF, Oracle BPM Studio, AIA, Forms to SOA, Telco Industry Value Proposition for Fusion Middleware. I attended the sessions on Oracle BPM Studio and Forms to SOA, summaries below:
Oracle BPM Suite (Matthew Schumpert, Oracle): One of the key messages I took from this session is that since the acquisition of BEA and the merging of the BEA Business Process Modelling tools with the Oracle BPA suite there is no real hard criteria around when each tool should be used, as it is possible to generate services / BPEL processes from both.
However, BPA suite lends itself more to processes with a Human Workflow element, and BPM lends itself more to system to system based processes. At a high level, the structure of the BPM Suite follows three roles: Designer (Business Analyst), Developer (Studio) and Enterprise (Runtime).
Forms To SOA (Grant Ronald, Oracle; Harald Wolf, Wolf Consulting): In this session Grant took a brief journey through the history of Forms and Reports, right back to 2.0 and Oracle 5! He then looked at the way in which many traditional tools-based users are starting to adopt newer technologies, and some of the barriers that are preventing them from doing so, such as lack of skills, retraining etc.
As a case study in how this can be done he talked about how Oracle itself retrained 5000 Forms & Reports developers (who previously worked on eBusiness Suite) with a one week training course, and they are now developing the Oracle Fusion apps using JDeveloper / ADF. The key to this is that although the technology itself is vastly different, a lot of the complexity is hidden from the developer via use of the relevant tools.
To demonstrate this, Grant worked through an example of creating a simple web service through JDeveloper and loading it through Forms Developer. The generated form then had a button that called out to a web service function to send an SMS message to his phone. He also demonstrated another simple web service call from a form out to Google Maps to track an order. There are a number of products currently on the market to support existing Forms users who are looking to modernise and migrate into the SOA world, such as the PITTS migration tool. Another offering was demonstrated during this session by Harald Wolf (WolfConsult, Germany).
Their product is a mixture of repository, search and migration tools. The repository tools are similar in some ways to the Oracle Designer toolset as they allow you to perform impact analysis on Forms based applications. However, the key difference is that the repository is based on the actual Forms metadata rather than ‘Design’ data. The migration tools allow you to migrate from traditional Client Server environments (Forms 4.5, 6 etc) to either web based Forms (10g etc), or SOA enabled, Web Services. The claim is that it is possible to migrate 100% of functionality, but I think this has to be taken with caution based on advice and experience from other educated sources.
Collateral
Jurgen Kress will be putting all of the presentations from the event on the Community website within the next few days.
Summary
Overall, the conference was extremely useful, and was an excellent opportunity to catch up on what’s happening in the SOA & Fusion community. This is the second event I’ve been to, and they are a great way of networking and meeting some of the top people around Europe in the SOA area, and at the same time having the ear of some of the influential product people within Oracle. The timing of this event was a bonus, as I’m working currently on an opportunity around Forms migration to SOA, so it was great to link up with both Grant Ronald and Wolf Consulting.
Link to Forms Modernization.
Doug Toop, Business Development Manager
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Inatech Exhibits at Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum – London
We are exhibiting at Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum in London where attendees will learn how to maximise operational efficiency and successfully address business expansion and flexibility. Join application infrastructure thought leaders and your peers for a pragmatic discussion on how IT preparation and execution can have a profound impact on the success of your corporate strategy. Key topics, based on today’s business realities and Oracle’s experience with more than 80,000 organisations, include:
- Patterns for business and IT efficiency - plan, design, and execute projects and strategies in less time at lower cost
- Keys for growth and expansion initiatives - prepare for success through a flexible framework for rapid and sustained expansion
- and application investments - learn how enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and industry-specific applications can be extended to achieve business goals
- Technical execution - define and execute your blueprint for business strategies
Attendees will benefit from:
- Customer experiences and case studies - examine how Oracle customers successfully managed their business in times of change
- Product strategy information - gain a greater understanding of BEA products as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware
- Peer-to-peer networking- discuss common challenges and experiences across business and IT
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