SOA Series, July: Why SOA is still so now

SOA has had a torrid time of it in the press. At the start of this decade, it was cutting edge. By 2005, the love affair was waning; people were growing wearied reading endless blogs, articles and press releases about the wonder of SOA. It seemed that SOA had gone from wired to tired in just 10 years, but actually, there are several reasons why SOA should still be at the front of the minds of CIOs and consultants alike. In fact, the factors that have made SOA so important - intensified global communications, ever more demanding consumer needs, increased business collaboration - are unlikely to reverse themselves. So, SOA should now be considered less a hot topic that is wearing thin, and more a central ethos that has only just begun gaining ground in what will be a very long period of influence.

Most importantly, SOA is essential to real-time event processing. Businesses need to be able to respond to consumer needs and demands almost at the moment they arise, thanks to the hyper-competition brought about by easy global trade. Having data and applications accessible and logically ordered across a business gives a business the advantage it needs to survive in this kind of supply-demand climate.

On the subject of information itself, SOA is equally as important. Put simply, in systems designed according to SOA, information is seen by all eyes across an organisation, and updated and ‘cleansed’ accordingly. It’s simple, yet effective; good information makes for better, quicker decision-making.

Finally, it’s the biggie: cloud computing. Like it or not, cloud computing is on its way in and pretty soon, no business will be able to operate whilst avoiding it entirely, either within the organisation, or where it is being used by clients. Increasingly, businesses are using cloud applications to cut costs and save storage. SOA is the only way to successfully integrate and manage services coming from IT departments or outside providers.

The New Age of SCA – Service Component Architecture

In theory, Service Computing Architecture (SCA) is all about Developer productivity, flexibility and control of processes through process orchestration, standard & unified management of business functions through a common service bus, and standard, ubiquitous access to services through use of business service adapters. All of this is underpinned by re-usable services and managed through a common framework and toolset.

In practice, however, this is not always the case. In many SCA deployments, a vast array of different tools are used to develop and deploy the processes and components, such as different UI developers, process orchestration tools, service bus management tools. This can lead to SCA artefacts being too finely grained due to constraints being imposed by the various tools & engines, which in turn leads to unnecessary complexity in the operational management of services due to ‘artificial’ service dependencies.

Service Component Architecture – how does this help?

New generation SCA toolsets such as Oracle’s SCA Suite 11g (launched in July 2009) address the issue of unnecessary operational complexities by deploying an ‘Assembly Model’ for Service Oriented Architecture known as Service Component Architecture (SCA)
SCA defines a standard assembly model for SOA, and client & implementation standards for major SCA languages & technologies (BPEL, Java).

So what is SCA?
Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a Suite of specifications that define a model for building SCA applications. An SCA application is a composite application composed of networks of service components, which provides a greatly simplified component programming model for implementing service components:

• Assembly – defines how to specify the structure of a composite application. This should be a vendor, technology and language neutral representation of a composition and deployment of services.
• Implementation Languages – define how a service is actually written in a particular programming language (e.g. Java, Spring)
• Bindings – define possible methods of access (e.g. Web Service, JMS)
• Policy Framework – defines how to add infrastructure to the framework (e.g. security, transactions)

Oracle SOA Suite 11g and SCA
Oracle’s next generation SOA toolset – SOA Suite 11g, which is to be released in July 2009, embraces the Service Component Architecture model, and will be the first service platform tool to:
• Unify the SOA design-time experience, with the SCA Assembly Editor tool
• Unify SOA runtime, with SOA services infrastructure
• Unify SOA management, using Fusion Middleware Control

Look out for further detailed updates & discussions on the blog once SOA Suite 11g has officially been launched.

Doug Toop
UK Oracle & Open Source Technology Practice Lead

Inatech to attend key Fusion Middleware 11g Launch

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

Oracle launches E-Business Suite R12.1

Following the wide-ranging success of Oracle’s E-Business Suite, the leading systems vendor has released an updated version of the tool, referred to as R12.1.

The product offers stand-alone business solutions that complement existing versions of Oracle E-Business Suite such as 11i or R12. Its aim is to help companies achieve rapid value in order to maintain and strengthen their position in competitive markets.

Inatech has managed many successful installations of the E-Business Suite including Dubai Bank and Harvest Foods. This new upgrade will provide product enhancements in channel revenue management, logistics, manufacturing, master data management and supply chain planning.

For businesses currently considering an upgrade from 11i, the time is now. R12.1.1 was designed to fix all of the issues that arose from the initial release of R12, and so for those businesses that waited for a smoother upgrade, this is the product to invest in for a more stable transition. Aside from this added stability, there are a number of additional functionalities in this version that make it far superior to R12.

The new product offers several functionality advancements in asset lifecycle management; channel revenue management; financial management; human capital management; lease and finance management; logistics; master data management; order management and contracts; projects; supply chain planning; procurement; sales and marketing; and service management. It also offers enhanced integration between project resource management and human resources, helping to smooth the processes of controlling staff and budgets.

The specific aim of those functionalities is to help businesses retain their edge in a competitive market. “The Integrated SOA Gateway helps organisations to provide, consume and monitor web services for integrations in a heterogeneous ecosystem,” Inatech’s Kanchan Manoharan said.

“A number of enhancements in supply chain operations for improved visibility into inventory levels provide for the better management of raw materials and finished goods.”

There is also more functionality in that crucial area, CRM. Oracle Trade Management has been adapted into Channel Revenue Management. The repackaged CRM is now formed of two product modules, plus two new modules which help businesses to managed financially oriented channel processes.


The new release holds plenty of exciting new functions and possibilities for users. The version of AutoConfig includes an option to run in a profile mode, whilst AutoConfig Parellelization across nodes of the Oracle E-Business Suite system helps to reduce overall time spent on tasks. Autoconfig also comes with Service Control Dependency Management; Search Utility; and Check Config Utility to report on relevant file system and database changes before running, and support for Oracle Database 11g, which can be used with R.12.1.

As well as these AutoConfig features, R.12.1 offers a Build Context XML Utility for Cross Platform Migration; Technology Stack Inventory Validation Report; Network Traffic Encryption Capability; and Advanced Configuration Wizards. Last but not least, the new product features advanced support for Sharing Application Tier File System, Application Tier Load Balancing and DMZ.

Oracle has worked hard to ensure that all users, despite their current systems, will be able to use the new release with ease. Upgrades from Release 11i with Oracle 10g Release 2 and Oracle 11g Release 1 are both supported by the new product. All in all, the new release represents a step from Oracle towards greater user support and ease of use than any previous product.

Arun Kumar reports on Dubai Connection Point

My first visit to the Oracle-obsessed Middle East region, for the Connection Point event in Dubai hosted by the OAUG group, truly was an experience from many angles.

The Keynote session delivered by one of the prominent personalities within the region, Husam Dajani, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, MEA, Oracle Corporation. The message was in concurrence to the IT users of Oracle products: “We will embrace the Oracle products and make them work for us.”

Inatech had hosted a stall which attracted most of the visitors with a host of solutions and services that can help businesses. We displayed the variety of offerings and project experiences in the form of brochures and case studies. Our rolling presentation on a flat screen was even more appealing to the audience.

The buzz words among the sessions and participants were as expected; R12, SOA, IDM, SSO, Integration, MIS. Conversations with the users made me realise why Inatech stands apart in the region in terms of “pure” consulting. In today’s information-overflow age, users are not shopping for products. They have their agenda of business drivers very clearly chalked out and look for some experienced business and technical consulting experts. With Middle East’s passion for Oracle, one needs to really know Oracle offerings in depth.

I also managed to attend few sessions which were very interesting and inspired me to give back something to the Oracle community. The choice of the topics and speakers were of a high standard. To start with, Dr. Nadia Bendjedou’s session, “Oracle eBiz R12 – Technology Highlights” gave an insight into how much Oracle is investing in ensuring the success of their latest release and to ease the process of upgrading to R11i.

Interestingly, the sessions delivered by end-users who have adopted SOA and AIA. One such session was on “Use of SOA Suite Tools in Public Sectors” wherein City of Las Vegas had used SOA extensively demonstrating the advantages of SOA and getting a quick ROI out of these technologies.

Another interesting session was on “Using Oracle AIA Foundation Pack to Build a Best-of-Breed Landscape” delivered by Michael Rulf, AT&T. This was my first impression on AIA in real world and clarity towards the structuring of the product.

Other sessions on Identity Management, GRC and a demo on SOA with eBiz were enlightening to see the products in action. I had also enjoyed the dinner cruise on Dubai Creek with stunning views of what Dubai holds.

Overall it was a rich experience for the participants with the variety of information offered in a short time. I appreciate the impressive energy of the OAUG team who had organised the event.

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

Security meltdown: London hospitals highlight the need to protect systems

This week, security threats have dominated the digital headlines. The need for digital security was made particularly apparent by a “major incident” at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the London NHS Trust caused by a particularly effective virus. On Monday afternoon, the virus was discovered, after it caused a large volume of messages to be sent through the trust’s system and overloading its system.

For two days, the virus went on wreaking havoc at St Bart’s, home of London’s air ambulance and England’s largest heart attack care centre, as well as affecting the Royal London and London Chest hospitals. A spokesman from St Bart’s said that the source of the virus was as of yet unknown, and that the system was being brought back up speed gradually. While MRSA is causing the health service grief it seems the digital virus has taken over as the most debilitating factor for the health service.

The news of St Bart’s viral meltdown comes after a study by security firm Webroot, which highlights some alarming attitudes to internet security amongst companies in the UK. According to the study, 25% of companies participating had experienced a web-based threat in 2007, which caused server outage, compromise sensitive information or threatened online transactions. Despite these problems, 25% of companies still underestimated the risk from hackers and viruses. As with software licenses, reported on this blog last week, it would appear that there is a lack of awareness about online security amongst the UK’s businesses and other organisations.

Perhaps appropriately, the computing security market has been rather active in the past few weeks. The biggest deal announced this week was McAfee’s acquisition of Secure Computing. The new deal, worth $462 million, will bring to McAfee Secure Computing’s 22,000 customers from 106 countries, furthering and deepening the global reach of its services. The acquisition will bring together two of the best-placed companies to tackle online security threats.

Secure Computing president and CEO Dan Ryan will now lead McAfee’s Network Security product business unit, reporting to McAfee’s CEO and president Dave DeWalt. Mr DeWalt said: "McAfee's goal is to provide intelligent security that protects from every angle, including the endpoint, the network and all points in between." He added that the takeover will enable McAfee to combine its end-point security and network intrusion prevention technology with Secure Computing's web and email security capabilities.

Here at Calsoft, we know that poor software management, lack of awareness of software licensing and a ineffective communications within IT systems can leave businesses and organisations open to security threats. Good SOA, coupled with anti-virus software can help protect your system from hackers, theft and viruses.

Competition drives standards up for communication and integration

Over the past few weeks we have seen both Microsoft and Google introduce various new products or updates of existing products in the bid to provide the best integrated communications features for their users. The competition has driven standards sky high.

This week, Google launched a new video and voice mail feature to its popular Gmail programme. Users will now be able to switch between email, instant messaging and visual and audio communication with relative ease. This new development comes after Microsoft introduced its updated Windows Live product. The new programme integrated email inboxes with instant messaging, contacts lists and links to social networking sites.

The competition between the two giants has led to many positive developments, as well as an exciting display of sharp marketing on both sides. Microsoft, in an effort to tighten up services, fixed four Windows bugs this week, in a move that has prompted sighs of relief from Windows Office users. The company has also signed a new distribution deal with Sun Microsystems, where Sun users will be able to download Microsoft’s toolbar when using Sun’s JRE, giving them instant access to Live Search, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. Added to that, Microsoft is reportedly near to signing another distribution deal to Verizon Wireless to become the default search provider on Verizon’s mobile phones. Rumours report that Microsoft is also looking to negotiate a separate deal to provide search tools for Verizon’s other devices, but little is known about this as of yet.

Back in the world of business intelligence and service oriented architecture (SOA), similar levels of market competition between SAP and Oracle have provided plenty of hot news for the industry. The rivalry between Oracle and it’s German counterpart SAP is well-known, which is why former Oracle vice president John Wookey’s move to SAP has caused some surprise in the IT business community. Mr Wookey left Oracle in October, and has now been hired as SAP’s new executive vice president.

Oracle has signed deals with new clients as the drive to conquer the market goes on. The issue of today is how SOA can be implemented to make green technology more viable, and Oracle is getting onboard. Yesterday, Oracle announced that it will be working together with ESS, a leading provider in Environmental, Health and Safety (EH&S) and Crisis Management Software. The two organisations hope to deliver a cohesive solution for environmental sustainability information management. They aim to help organisations reduce the risk, cost and complexity of sustainability management.

Meanwhile, new research from Aberdeen Group released this week shows that 58% of small to medium sized businesses can reduce their time-to-information to a real- or near real-time basis using business intelligence. Hot on the heels of this, SAP-owned company Business Objects has launched Business Objects XI 3.1, a unified business intelligence platform. The platform promises to integrate various data sources, including the internet and Microsoft, Oracle and Netezza products.

Here at Calsoft, all of this is good news to us. The two buzz words of this week have been “competition” and “integration”, and we are ready to tackle both, for the good of both businesses and our professional services.