DevOps is speeding towards the IT world like a freight train and the hype around it is deafening. There is no reason to be afraid of this change as it is the natural reaction to the agile movement that revolutionized development just a few years ago. By definition, DevOps is the natural alignment of IT performance to business profitability. The relevance of this has yet to be quantified but it has been suggested that the route to the CEO's chair will come from the IT leaders that successfully make the transition to a DevOps model. If this still seems foreign to you, I recommend reading up on DevOps Blog from IT Revolution, the OpsCode Blog, and check out The Phoenix Project. Despite all the talk around simple monitoring tools, breaking through the walls between Dev and Ops still poses a real challenge. This is because of a misunderstanding around Operations real pu... (more)

Building a Cloud Factory

Few areas of human endeavor can match the pace of change in IT. Even by IT standards, the change being driven by cloud computing sometimes seems surprising. To refer to a virtual environment that has only recently been deployed as "legacy," as some organizations are now doing, underscores the fact that the only thing constant in the data center is change. To deal with change of this magnitude, which can involve transforming the workload hosting model of an entire organization, some industrial-strength thinking is required. In order to tackle this challenge, it's important to properly frame the cloud transformation problem. Many associate cloud with agility, flexibility, cost transparency and other end-user-oriented benefits. But many of these attributes are primarily associated with new infrastructure requests, and specifically, the use of self-service portals to "... (more)

Committing to Overhead: Proceed With Caution.

Back when SaaS was making its debut in the enterprise, I was a mid-level IT manager with a boss that was smart. It was a great experience working for him overall, and if not for external pressures, I might still be working on his team. One of the SaaS conversations we had was pretty relevant to today’s rush to public cloud. He looked around the room and asked “Why are we getting rid of our mainframes?” There was the standard joking about old dogs and new tricks, and then the more serious cost analysis. Finally he said “No, we’re getting rid of our mainframes because a couple of decades ago, someone in my position said ‘we’ll sign these contracts that create overhead for ever, and future IT managers will have to deal with it. We won’t consider what happens when the market turns and the overhead is fixed even though the organization is making less, we won’t consider ... (more)

SYS-CON Launches WebRTC Journal

Click here to follow ▸@WebRTCSummit SYS-CON Media has launched WebRTC Journal on Ulitzer.com featuring over 160 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries. WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is an open source project supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera that aims to enable browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat, and P2P file sharing without plugins. Register FREE for WebRTC Summit here ▸ http://bit.ly/1exOL9h WebRTC Journal ▸Home Its mission is "To enable rich, high quality, RTC applications to be developed in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5." Follow WebRTC Journal on Twitter at @WebRTCSummit. Register FREE for WebRTC Summit here ▸ http://bit.ly/1exOL9h WebRTC Journal ▸Home About Ulitzer.com Ulitzer is a "new-media" platform for creating, delivering, and consuming content on the Web. Anyone can create topics,... (more)

BPEL Unleashed

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) makes business processes and composite Web services first-class citizens of the Java and .NET platforms, while preventing vendor lock-in. The result is a drastic reduction in the complexity, delivery time, and cost associated with implementing workflow, BPM (business process management), and related business integration projects. BPEL is a new standard for implementing business processes in an emerging service-oriented architecture world. As such, applying BPEL introduces new considerations, challenges, and pitfalls for delivering process-aware applications based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Rise of BPEL There has been a continuous need in the enterprise to integrate systems and applications into end-to-end business processes. Traditional integration solutions are arcane, proprietary, and expensive, and have ... (more)

Managing Enterprise Data Complexity Using Web Services: Part 2

Enterprises are increasingly feeling the need for shorter lead time for decision making, the need to extract and present KPI (Key Performance Indicators) to management, and the need for enhanced response capability. These business needs are not in sync with the technological challenges such as the presence of heterogeneous technologies and disparate enterprise systems (e.g., ERP, SCM, CRM, etc.). This situation gets complicated with the increasing number of mergers and acquisitions resulting in the various business units within an enterprise having their own data warehouses. Adding to this is the increasing number of users inside and outside the enterprise who need real-time access to information. In such a scenario, an EDD (Enterprise Digital Dashboard) would improve the lead time and quality of decision making by extracting and generating KPIs from enterprise sof... (more)

IBM Upgrades WebSphere SOA Security

The emergence of organized cyber crime, coupled with the necessity for organizations to comply with myriad government regulations that ensure security and privacy of client data, has made securing IT infrastructures through industry standard technologies critical for organizations of all sizes, and in all industries, according to IBM. As a response, the company is announcing new IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances and SOA security consulting services, resulting from the company's DataPower acquisition last year. The new IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances are less than two inches tall and 19 inches wide and can be installed and configured in minutes, the company says. These specialty devices are inserted into a client's existing network to secure, manage and authenticate the validity of messages from various sources including Web transactions, RFID and other wir... (more)

Parasoft's Kolawa Foresees An "Explosion of Web Services" in 2007

Parasoft co-founder and CEO, Dr Adam Kolawa, anticipates a significant demand for Web services orchestration in the upcoming year, especially in the United States. "Many organizations now have at least one Web service," Kolawa explains, in a contribution to this month's JDJ, "and a growing number already have two or more related Web services. Managing multiple related Web services is considerably more challenging than managing the same number of separate, unrelated Web services." Kolawa continues: "To use these related Web services to achieve your business goals, you need to consider how high-level operations pass through the Web services, then determine how to implement this high-level flow- from start to finish. This can be accomplished in two ways: - By programmatically coding the application logic required to tie the involved elements together. - By using an orche... (more)

iTKO LISA to Exhibit at SYS-CON's SOA World and Virtualization Conference & Expo

SYS-CON Events announced today that the leading global SOA and virtualization technology provider iTKO to exhibit at SYS-CON's upcoming SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 West, colocated with the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo, (www.virtualizationconference.com), which will take place November 19-21, 2008, at the Fairmont Hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California. iTKO's LISA SOA Testing, Validation & Virtualization solutions mitigate the business risk of change and complexity in enterprise IT environments, while increasing trust across teams and shared technology assets. LISA's Complete, Collaborative and Continuous quality coverage provides validation of every component of SOA workflows throughout their lifecycle, from web apps, to web services, databases, messaging layers, legacy objects and application servers. Developer... (more)

Agile SOA Across the Lifecycle - Part Five: IT and SOA Governance

This is the fifth of a six part series of posts on the Agile SOA life cycle. Here we will at look at IT and SOA Governance. With the introduction of agile, spiral, and scrum development methodologies, the traditional waterfall development approach of testing a near-finished app at the end of many Agile development cycles won't be agile at all, as the elements of the application are constantly changing.  Traditional models of IT governance will also not work. To aggravate testing, the service-oriented architecture (SOA) design pattern is used to make IT  more responsive to changes requested by business. New process tooling has been introduced to specifically assist in the cataloging of service assets, and organization of policies governing SOA. This new set of tooling created to support SOA revolves around governance platforms like HP Systinet / S2, SAG Centrasite, S... (more)

Governance Makes Cloud Payoffs Possible

It's hard to over-estimate the importance of performance monitoring and governance in any move to cloud computing. Yet most analysts expect cloud computing to become a rapidly growing affair. That is, infrastructure, data, applications, and even management itself, originating as services from different data centers, under different control, and perhaps different ownership. What then becomes essential in effectively moving to cloud adoption is proper cross-organizational governance. There needs to be a holistic embrace of such governance -- with a full spectrum of technologies, services, best practices, and hosting options guidance -- to manage the complexity and relationships. The governance strength will likely determine if enterprises can actually harvest the expected efficiencies and benefits that cloud computing portends. To learn more on accomplishing such visibility... (more)