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The Benefits of an Open Source SOA

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Posted on Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:46 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Red Hat Announces JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 and JBoss Operations Network 2.1

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Responding to and working with customers and the open source community around the world, we have announced the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 with JBoss Operations Network 2.1 support. See the Press Release. Visit the JBoss SOA Resource Center for a lot of information about open source SOA and guidance on how you can improve your business using JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Consulting Services.

Posted on Wed, 8 Oct 2008 10:11 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Financial Rogue Waves, Black Swans and Open Source SOA

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Red Hat Delivers JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 to Help Enterprises Weather the Storm!



The Panic of 2008

Rogue Waves are spontaneously generated large waves that may appear suddenly even on a calm sea, surprising ship crews that may be in their path, and wreaking havoc and destruction.

Black Swans are a rare type of swan mainly found in Australia. The term, black swan, has also been applied to rare events that suddenly and unexpectedly occur. Black swans in business have been popularized and described in depth by the book Black Swans: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

The financial oceans have been quite turbulent with rogue waves and the sky filled with black swans over the past year and especially over the past weeks. We've seen a ongoing real estate crash spread to a number of markets around the world (See The Housing Bubble Blog). We've had credit markets deteriorate over the past year and accelerate in recent weeks as market participants realize that the real estate bubble and bust are much larger than previously thought. We've seen banks reel and be bought or go out of business. I personally saw a physical bank run 11 days ago at my bank with the line out the door here in Atlanta. Electronic bank runs have been rampant.

Recalling the stories of the 1930s my grandmother used to tell me when I was a child was chilling during some of these events of the past weeks. Heck, didn't we learn anything? (I guess not). Weren't we “smarter” than they were? (No...maybe not even as smart). Didn't real estate “always go up” and we'd all be rich just like they said on various home TV shows? (Having lived through the real estate crash of the late 1980s in Austin Texas, the short answer is NO).

JBoss Enterprise Middleware Delivers Enterprise SOA

What does this have to do with open source SOA? It's quite simple. We live in dramatically turbulent times. And the turbulence is not going to end soon. More on that below. SOA is an architectural approach to designing IT systems to automate business processes with greater agility and flexibility enabling a business to be responsive to rapid change. Seems like larger doses of SOA-enablement with accelerated project schedules will be forthcoming by enterprises that will survive these times and even prosper. SOA will give them competitive advantage by allowing them to respond to new customer requirements and differentiate their products and services faster than competitors locked into a stove-piped application strategy.

However, many enterprise IT budgets may be cut. IT organizations won't be able to fund projects based on complex, hard-to-develop-to and deploy, and expensive SOA Platforms. They will have to do more with less as we've seen earlier this decade when open source came to the rescue at the operating system and application server level. This time, JBoss offers the simple, open and affordable JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform that is ready and able to deliver on your enterprise integration and process automation needs. Open source SOA, battle hardened in the worldwide open source community and in an increasing number of enterprise deployments, is the ideal platform to gain competitive advantage with during these challenging times.

I was talking with one of our major financial services customers, a major American bank a couple of weeks ago as the "Panic of 2008" (We used to call them “Panics” in the 19th century) was getting underway in earnest. They've taken their lumps and face smaller budgets with demands to make the business more agile and cost-effective. They also are looking beyond this crisis by preparing the business to exceed customer expectations in service and product offerings with open source SOA deployments built on JBoss Enterprise Middleware. They are finalizing two significant deployments centered on the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and then will take their experience and look to expand the use of JBoss Enterprise Middleware for more SOA projects. We are excited to be working with them!

Looking Ahead

So as we deliver JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 to help businesses weather and prosper through this financial storm, what are we likely to see? While I cannot know for sure, of course, I can draw upon my experiences living through several other manias and busts including the oil boom and bust of 1973-86, gold and coin boom and bust of 1978-82, Austin real estate boom and bust of 1983-92, stock market boom and bust of 1996-2003 and the real estate boom and bust of the late 1990s till sometime in the next couple of years when we will see the "bottom".

Since this is a real estate bust, I'd offer the following...

  1. This is probably not going to be like the Great Depression of the 1930s.. It seems more like the Panic of 1893 substituting real estate for railroads. Or it could be like the Japanese "Lost Decade". We hope not, but the similarities are striking.
  2. Real estate prices will bottom out when prices fall to less than 120x monthly rent. Additionally, rents will decline in overbuilt areas as well as in many resort areas. In some exurb and suburb areas the price of a house, town home, or condo may overshoot this 120x level down to 80x monthly rent (We saw this in Austin 20 years ago). 120x monthly rent is the approximate value of a house that makes sense as an income producing asset. This valuation brings typical mortgage payments in line with rental costs. Residential real estate valuations much above 120x monthly rent are generally speculative in nature and not sustainable over the long term. There are a few exceptions, such as a historical 1890s Victorian “grande dame” house fully restored and in a great location that would be worth more. Or picture perfect houses in a close-in “street car” neighborhood like those built in the 1920s and 1930s that is highly desirable may continue to command a premium due to scarcity of supply. Another way to look at it is that buying a house will become cheaper than renting one including allowing for all maintenance expenses, taxes, home owner association fees, etc... (In some areas homes may actually be nearly "free").
  3. This ongoing deflation will create more stress on the financial systems around the world challenging most enterprises and value chains. Agile companies that delight their customers with innovative products and services that are also value leaders will be in the best position to prosper and take market share. We will see a lot of turbulence in both the credit markets as well as in the regulatory environment which will convey competitive advantage to those enterprises that are prepared. SOA-enabled IT will be key to that preparation. For example, an enterprise that has its business rules in JBoss Rules and made available to the business and its partners and customers through the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform will have a great advantage over those who have their business rules locked up in stove-pipe web applications.

While there is pain, there will be great opportunities to build the next generation of great companies of the 21st century out of this turmoil. With JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, we aim to help our customers become part of that community of leading enterprises in the coming years!

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 is planned to be available by the end of October. Also, please visit the JBoss SOA Resource Center and try out our new JBoss SOA Assessment Tool to start paving your way to the new business opportunities of 2009 and beyond!

Posted on Wed, 8 Oct 2008 08:36 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Red Hat Launches New JBoss SOA Assessment Tool

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Along with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3, Red Hat is helping enterprises understand where they are in their SOA strategy development with a new JBoss SOA Assessment Tool. The JBoss SOA Assessment Tool is designed to help companies assess their current SOA Optimization and determine their best path for SOA success. It will analyze them in any one or more of 6 capabilities:

  1. Business process understanding
  2. IT assessment
  3. SOA design
  4. SOA enablement
  5. Infrastructure
  6. Orchestration

The tool was developed jointly by Red Hat and the experts at Alinean, Inc. Their database of more than 20,000 organizations allows us to provide you with a complete, customized analysis of your SOA readiness. Your personalized report will explain how you compare to your peers, the risks of not addressing the identified SOA capabilities and recommended next steps including resources to help you along the way.

This is a great way to get a different view point, based on a lot of other companies' experiences, of where you stand on your SOA journey to business automation and agility.
Link to the JBoss SOA Assessment Tool
Link to the JBoss SOA Resource Center

Posted on Tue, 7 Oct 2008 09:21 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

JBoss Portal Wins Over Another Developer!

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

I couldn't say it better myself. Check out a developer's experience with Liferay V5.1 and JBoss Portal V2.7.

Posted on Fri, 8 Aug 2008 15:02 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

JBoss Wins InfoWorld Bossie Awards - SOA Platform/ESB and Drools

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Congratulations to the JBoss ESB and Drools teams and communities and the SOA Platform teams overall as well!

Best open source developer tools - Drools - Business Rules Management System.

Best open source plaforms and middleware - JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform - ESB.

Posted on Mon, 4 Aug 2008 17:31 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

SOA World Magazine - Awards - Please Vote!

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Middleware has entries in these categories:
  • Best App Server
  • Best BPM Engine
  • Best OSS SOA Tool
  • Best Portal Plaform
  • Best SOA Platform
Please vote here!

Posted on Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:27 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Daiwa Securities America Improves Performance and Reduces Costs with JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Daiwa Securities is featured as a JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and JBoss Rules customer in this Red hat press release. They migrated away from an expensive and inflexible proprietary solution for an internal B2E (employee) portal supporting about 120 applications. In addition to featuring JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform,, JBoss Rules is used as an embedded framework (one of the great strengths of JBoss Rules) to provide intelligent alerts to portal applications. Daiwa Securities mentions an immediate $300,000 savings due to the JBoss enterprise open source subscription model.

Posted on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:12 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Early Adopter Swedish Railroad Expands Revenue Opportunities with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

The JBoss SOA early adopter Swedish Railroad has been blogged about here earlier. Matt Asay picks up on this deployment more recently here.

Additionally, I presented Open Source SOA Value and Strategy at Red Hat Summit and SOA World in late June. CIO e-magazine picked up on the Swedish RR example and other current status of open source SOA and future projections here. In particular, we see the convergence of EAI, SOA, BPM, EDA and CEP into a set of integration styles that may be implemented using a common platform - the 2nd generation ESB or SOA Platform. A flexible platform like this is a more cost effective and simpler (reduced to no need for separate architectural bases for EAI, SOA, EDA, BPM, etc...) way to implement an agile IT and enterprise in the future.

Posted on Tue, 8 Jul 2008 16:04 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Interview with Bruno Georges - Customer of and Now Employee of Red Hat's JBoss Division

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

I met Bruno when he was a customer of JBoss, Inc. back in 2005 at JBossWorld Barcelona (Spain). As a customer, he was a leader in adopting open source for high value SOA projects. As a colleague at Red Hat, I continue to enjoy working with him. Presented below is an interview with his perspective as a user/customer of open source for SOA.

Bruno Georges was Enterprise Architect and Head Of Development for a privately held, major global company in the Oil & Energy industry, of over 10,000 employees with over 140 billion dollars in yearly revenue. Today, as a senior technical manager at JBoss, a Division of Red Hat, Bruno Georges offers some insight into real-life business factors that cause CIO's to choose JBoss.

Q: Bruno, what was the business need for the project. Why change at all?

The majority of our IT budget was spent in maintenance, rather than investing in added value. The primary challenge was raised during a global meeting we held on SOA adoption. Growing complexity resulting from integrations meant budget spent in re-wiring and maintaining multiple source of “business knowledge / business rules” and corporate processes. We were suffering from duplication of these processes, and running the risk of accidentally not updating one of them. It was getting too dangerous: we urgently needed to reduce time to market, decrease risk through exposure, and protect ourselves from wrong financial reports and statements.

Q: What kind of new services were needed?

Integration Services really, ensuring that services were decoupled from each others, with well-defined boundaries. The integration service needed to take responsibility for validation, routing, transformation, and enrichment,etc.. before forwarding this to our core business services, for example, accounting, treasury, trades, etc.

The company's core applications and systems relies partly on Enterprise Java. These applications rely on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) , where coarse grain interfaces to Accounting, Treasury and Commodity Trading systems can be invoked over the network.

The business challenge revolved around migrating these Core Business Services from one Enterprise Java platform to another without any noticeable downtime, loss of performance, assuring data integrity and more importantly, without affecting financial transactions like trading activities, currency hedging, etc. Other business challenges included planning, where it was crucial to run the migration project without disrupting any existing deliverables.

Technical challenges were encountered during the planning of the migration, such as managing the dependencies of the services to migrate, based on whether or not they were using vendor-specific features. The aim of the migration was that it should bring equivalent - if not better - performance, quality and stability.

Q: Was there a particular desire to employ open source technology? If so, why?

We initially identified that we needed to implement our S.O.A. plan at the lowest cost, and with minimum risk. Then the question was raised of whether to use alternatives to commercial products to follow our SOA initiatives with minimum risk and expenditure. It was from identifying these specific requirements that we decided to seriously assess open sources alternatives such as JBoss.

Total Cost of Ownership was a main concern. Moving to a company-wide SOA implementation based on proprietary solutions (i.e WebLogic) would have reached 7 digits, especially considering that we were in the middle of a hardware refresh cycle, moving away from 1-2 CPU machines to 8 core Sun boxes.

Q: How did the project happen in terms of actually getting it underway?

First I arranged a meeting with (JBoss CTO) Sacha Labourey to discuss how we could approach this. We then decided to go ahead with JBoss's 3-Day Assessment offer. From this point we decided to further extend the assessment to come up with a more accurate picture of the resource and planning involved. In the meantime we also assessed local providers and partners like HP and Syseca to identify who could lead the migration and support us afterwards.

We hired JBoss professionals and Red Hat Partner Syseca to support us during the migration. Careful planning and regular reviews were conducted to prevent any issues and conflicts with existing projects or deliverables. Few internal resources were involved to reduce impact on daily activities and existing projects.

The Services forming our SOA have been migrated in 2 steps, the first one being a small and fairly low risk application, so we could give our engineering and operations some production experience and start building a new support and monitoring infrastructure using JBoss ON.

Technical issues were addressed directly with JBoss using the Customer Support Portal. We were really impressed to see JBoss's leading developer and guru Scott Stark getting involved when things got difficult.

Q: Why was JBoss technology considered?

The maturity of the product was important. and of course, the low price! But other things were especially important, too - like the local and global availability of JBoss expertise (Partner: Syseca), Because I was working for such a huge company, Red Hat's global presence was critical.

Q: What solution was finally decided on? Did this result in any savings? Any efficiency advantages?

The vendor selected was JBoss, due to its impressive market share, product quality and support offering, of which there is no equivalent in the open source application server landscape.

JBoss Enterprise Middleware provided a consistent open source platform and choice of tools to build our new infrastructure and applications. Also it offers a comprehensive set of products and a clear roadmap to support our SOA and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) initiatives.

Q: How long did the project take to deploy?

There were two phases: the first one took three months, and the second and final phase was completed six months later.

Q: What was the most interesting aspect of the project, from a business point of view?

There were many examples, but one thing I especially noticed was time-to-market in an M&A situation. For example, we could now - and did - integrate very quickly with a company which had totally different accounting systems and technical / developer resources. The time-to-market to integrate two totally different platforms (.Net and Java) was dramatically reduced by the use of simple industry standards. What's more, we were able to confirm and validate the in-built functionalities and logic as we progressed. Validation of these milestones was even built into our migration contract, in order to contain, measure and insure against any business risk. This could then be prototyped with minimal effort and in less than one day. Unbelievable! No change was needed in our application/ implementation, or within the infrastructure, and the protection of the existing investment allowed full re-usability of existing infrastructure and resources. To be specific, we did not alter existing IT landscapes, hardware, or business processes, which was great. Another example is where jBPM helped us to reduce the development life-cycle, and allow business analysts to interact with the developers at the “right level”. i.e, the process definition.

Q: How did the JBoss solution improve the business bottom-line?

The great thing about an SOA project is that it brings business stake-holders together to agree on common corporate business policies, processes and rules. Long term business benefits will include removal of license costs on commercial products [through Portal and Integration solutions], and significantly reduce our capital expenditure. In addition, rollout of new business processes became a much simpler exercise, including analysis, implementation and validation.

Q: How was business improved as a result of the new deployment?

The first benefit was financial. We moved away from WebLogic products to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, saving up to six digits yearly. As a result, I was then able to invest more into staff training and development, technology, intellectual IT assets, and other high-value areas.

Executive management can now add more requests for the next Financial Year, and will see that resources are allocated more efficiently. IT department gained credit with the companies business folk. Perception is better, business sponsors become confident that IT is investing in the right direction, and subsequently become more ready to sponsor such changes.

Q: Any advice to other companies considering JBoss Enterprise Middleware?

Go ahead, don't wait. The longer you wait, the harder it will get.

Posted on Tue, 8 Jul 2008 14:58 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

JBoss Portal - Another Adopter's Story

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

This blog says it all. It also explains why JBoss Portal is well ahead of other OSS Portals in the Alfresco community.

Posted on Tue, 3 Jun 2008 10:31 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Avoid the SOA Pitfalls that Prevent ROI - JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and SOA Software Webinar

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

I recently did a webinar with Frank Martinez, Executive VP Product Strategy, SOA Software describing the benefits of an open source SOA Platform including application server, portal, ESB, BPM and business rules that is "governable" by an enterprise SOA Governance suite. As enterprise grow their SOA deployments, the cost, ROI and value benefits of open source subscription licensing play a larger role. These benefits are magnified with an enterprise SOA governance platform that delivers value across the entire SOA lifecycle, from planning to management.

Check it out by clicking this link!

Posted on Fri, 30 May 2008 10:16 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform Deep Dive Webinar

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Burr Sutter presents a great JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform Deep Dive Webinar!

This is the recording from April, 2008 with lots of detailed information and demos.

Posted on Tue, 13 May 2008 11:03 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform with ActiveEndpoints Active VOS (BPEL) demo

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Our partners at ActiveEndpoints have created an interesting and educational demo showing how to use their ActiveVOS (BPEL) with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to solve business process challenges and improve business execution.

Posted on Tue, 13 May 2008 10:19 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

jBPM Turns in Strong Performance Numbers

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Tom Baeyens, jBPM lead, blogs about performance tests done by a user of jBPM and SeeWhy's business activity monitoring software. It is interesting to note that a fairly complex process only took 12 milliseconds ot processing time!

Posted on Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:07 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

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