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Last week, the British Government made an unprecedented move by releasing a number of previously unavailable data sets together with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for use in composite applications or mashups. The “Show us a Better Way” initiative by the Cabinet Office is to get input from the Web 2.0 savvy public on how Government services can be improved using mashups. This welcome but unusual public consultation includes a competition with a prize money of UK£20,000 for seed funding the bes…
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/07/2008 - Sarah Burnett
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The saga of vendor consolidation continues in the world of SOA infrastructure providers. The latest event in this story is the announcement on 24 June 2008 that Progress is to acquire IONA. Because IONA is an Irish company the acquisition was conducted under Irish law, and this means that there was less opportunity during the announcement call for executives to be drawn on the detail than in a comparable North American acquisition. However, this particular instance is unusual in a SOA context in that it …
OpinionWire Articles - published 03/07/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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The convergence of three architectural waves is gathering momentum to significantly change the software application landscape, but if organisations are to reap the benefit of this change, it is the traditional disciplines of management, measurement, and governance that will be essential.
TECHwatch Articles - published 03/07/2008 - Tim Jennings
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FloSuite is a Microsoft .NET-based Rapid Application Development (RAD) solution for building composite applications. It is aimed at supporting content-based human-driven business processes that involve integration with document management solutions, line-of-business applications, legacy industry-specific software, and productivity and messaging applications. The suite comprises a Microsoft Visio-based process modelling solution, the FloDesigner, a process execution component, the FloServer, and the FloCl…
Technology Audits - published 19/06/2008 - Karthik Balakrishnan, Michael Azoff, Somak Roy
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The way people interact is radically changing. In fact, we are in the midst of a social networking revolution which impacts both our personal and professional lives. Hardly a day goes by without a new article announcing some aspect of how our lives are changing due to the proliferation of consumer services such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and a host of others.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 04/06/2008 - David Lavenda
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Social networking has had phenomenal success almost everywhere and in India the hype touches new heights everyday. Five things are clearly observable.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 04/06/2008 - Somak Roy
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Many benefits have been claimed for the deployment of SOA. Surprisingly, most of these appear to be deliverable provided that sufficient investment is made in the planning, design, change management, and ongoing governance (plus, of course, the infrastructure investments that will be needed, although these are strictly secondary to the organisational issues).
However, there remains one claimed benefit regarding SOA of which I am increasingly sceptical. This is the claim that SOA will enable organisation…
OpinionWire Articles - published 29/05/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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A few IT innovations in the past decade, including technology and business models, have tried to address the business need for agility. While the end goal of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and outsourcing has at least partly been to reduce the mean time to business-driven change, legacy considerations and a lack of proof of concept in the early adoption stages, and considerations of internal process maturity often lead to a more tactical use of such promising concepts.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 02/05/2008 - Somak Roy
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SaaS is an example of the one step forward, two steps back adage. The ability to subscribe to cloud-based business applications that are run and managed elsewhere, require no additional in-house infrastructure, limited up-front costs and implementation efforts, and are instantly available for use, is at least one step forward in terms of application accessibility and availability.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 02/05/2008 - Angela Eager
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While Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has always been intended as an architecture that should be appropriate for organisations of all kinds, the reality is that deployment of SOA has been spearheaded by large enterprises. This isn’t altogether surprising – any major shift in the deployment of IT solutions will initially attract a premium price and appeal to those organisations that have the biggest problems, the biggest incentive to do something about them – and the biggest budgets. Now SOA is becomi…
OpinionWire Articles - published 01/05/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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Outsourcing and its many benefits, along with a formidable list of management challenges, has long been a fact of life. While the Wipros and increasingly, the IBMs of the world have consistently played an important role in stretching the perpetually under-pressure IT dollar a bit more, there are a few areas where the enterprise IT world could have looked very different had it not been for India’s army of low-cost young software engineers.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/03/2008 - Somak Roy
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It is nearly a year since Software AG acquired webMethods. Prior to that acquisition, Software AG had a relatively low penetration in the US, and despite several competent products in the integration and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) space, it was best known for its legacy Adabas and Natural products. We commented at the time that if the acquisition was managed well it had the potential to turn Software AG into one of the leading SOA infrastructure vendors. A whole swathe of recent announcements ha…
OpinionWire Articles - published 13/03/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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Capacity planning has always been a bit ‘hit and miss’. There are plenty of useful modelling tools and techniques that do a good job of determining the physical capacity required for a particular workload, but in the end they are all dependent on an estimation of the volume of transactions that are going to hit the system. Sometimes this can be predicted quite accurately (such as the number of car tax renewals on a daily basis, or the number of purchase requests in a manufacturing environment). However, …
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/02/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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K2 blackpearl provides a BPM product, which is built on .NET and Windows Workflow Foundation platforms. It provides business and IT personnel with the ability to collaboratively assemble process-driven applications that span multiple systems. By separating the view information from the process definition, both business and technical users are able to develop processes in the environment that they are familiar with. The platform is currently missing a simulation capability, but this will be added in the n…
Technology Audits - published 14/02/2008 - Sue Clarke
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For the majority of organisations, their core enterprise applications represent the single most important IT investment that they will make, and one that is increasingly rooted in packaged software, albeit augmented by existing legacy applications and custom development.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 29/01/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Whilst we often talk about the discipline of IT maturing from its pioneer days to become “business as usual”, the tendency for continued innovation is nonetheless remarkable. Looking ahead to 2008, one might imagine that with a cautious economic outlook, and an increased focus on creating a well-defined and well-managed IT service to support the organisation, the pace of technology change might slow down.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 29/01/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is still relatively early in its lifecycle, even though it has been deployed as a mainstream architecture by leading-edge organisations for some years now.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 29/01/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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There has been so much recent discussion around business/IT alignment that an outsider might believe that the requirement is a recent discovery. It has, of course, always been the case that the role of IT is to enable the business to conduct its operations more efficiently and effectively, and to support new initiatives. The current concern is the result of the combination of a period of rapid change in the business world and a period of relative under-investment in IT.
White Papers - published 18/01/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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Considerable momentum is building up behind the Software as a Service (SaaS) market, as both large software companies and smaller Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) get to grips with the potential transition from software being installed on their customers’ own servers, to the delivery of that functionality as a service, irrespective of the physical location of the infrastructure. Allied to this is a combination of changes in the management responsibility for the deployment, and the commercial basis on …
TECHwatch Articles - published 08/01/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Web 2.0 is going to catch a lot of IT organisations ill-prepared while they are looking in the wrong direction. Web 2.0 is an umbrella term that encompasses a number of consumer-driven technologies, including collaborative tagging (or ‘folksonomy’), virtual worlds, mashups, wikis, blogs, and more. What they all have in common is the notion of electronic collaboration that is not dependent on mainstream IT. In fact, the uptake of Web 2.0 is showing a lot of the same symptoms as the initial adoption of the…
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/12/2007 - Rob Hailstone
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The Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite is a complete enterprise software application designed to create an operational environment that provides everyone within the organisation the opportunity and the platform to drive process improvement. The product is made up of multiple modules, seamlessly integrated and designed for the specific needs of each user group. Modelling, analysis, and optimisation capabilities are deployed in easy-to-use graphical interfaces for business analysts. Reporting and Business Activity…
Technology Audits - published 11/12/2007 - Mike Thompson
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Cordys offers a comprehensive and integrated Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), which brings processes under the direct control of business managers. It supports the management and improvement of business processes quickly and efficiently throughout the entire process life cycle. It is good to see that Cordys BPMS is targeted at modelling and implementing end-to-end business process that span humans, systems, and organisations in a single model. Using the BPMN standard for modelling, Cordys BPM do…
Technology Audits - published 10/12/2007 - Mike Thompson
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The Teamworks Enterprise BPM Suite from Lombardi is an enterprise-class, Web-based, Business Process Management (BPM) platform that comprises of a broad range of integrated process development, execution, monitoring, automation, improvement, and management components. Developed entirely by Lombardi, using a 100% Java and J2EE technology approach, the Teamworks solution is designed to address the human-to-system business process conflicts that often restrict business efficiency and certainly inhibit the w…
Technology Audits - published 10/12/2007 - Andy Kellett
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Version 5.3 of PegaRULES Process Commander (PRPC) is the latest release of Pegasystems' long-established Business Process Management (BPM) solution. Across its product portfolio, PRPC continues to combine the dual functionality of the executable, business-driven flexibility of a leading BPM solution, with the core capabilities of the company's well-respected PegaRULES Rules Engine. Within the Process Management sector, Pegasystems is something of a unique entity, in that it is positioned as a lead player…
Technology Audits - published 10/12/2007 - Andy Kellett
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IBM BPM Portfolio is IBM's solution for Business Process Management (BPM) involving people, content, and systems. It primarily comprises components from WebSphere v.6.1 and FileNet P8 v.4.0.2, plus other IBM software, all made interoperable at run-time through services integration, and a layer of common modelling and monitoring tools that provide a single interface to the solution. WebSphere is the home-grown product that historically emphasised business integration and workflow and has evolved to includ…
Technology Audits - published 07/12/2007 - Michael Azoff
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