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WSO2 to Present Technical Webinar on How to Migrate Enterprise Applications to the Cloud Using the WSO2 Stratos Cloud Middleware Platform

April 23, 2012 by BPELforum

WSO2 to Present Technical Webinar on How to Migrate Enterprise Applications to the Cloud Using the WSO2 Stratos Cloud Middleware Platform

WSO2 delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud

Palo Alto, CA (PRWEB) March 15, 2012

Cloud computing enables enterprises to cost effectively extend the reach of their applications and readily adapt to changing demands. However, a successful migration requires not only the ability to provide full cloud-native functionality—such as multi-tenancy, elasticity, self-provisioning and metering—but also seamless integration with on-premise systems that need to remain behind the firewall. To help IT architects, developers and managers address these demands, WSO2 will present a free webinar entitled, “Roadmap to the Clouds – How to Easily Migrate to the Cloud Platform Using WSO2 Stratos.”

The one-hour WSO2 technical webinar on cloud migration will run Wednesday, March 21, from 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. PST. For more information, visit wso2.org/library/webinars/2012/03/quotroadmap-clouds%E2%80%9D-easily-migrate-cloud-platform-using-wso2-stratos.

The webinar will examine how the WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware platform can be deployed in various infrastructures, including public and private cloud environments, to provide facilities such as self-provisioning, multi-tenancy, elasticity and metering. The session also will cover how enterprises can use WSO2 Stratos to efficiently move service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications to the cloud while supporting many industry standards such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), OpenID, eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML), and the WS-* family of Web service specifications.

The webinar will be presented by Selvaratnam Uthaiyashankar (Shankar), a senior software architect who is part of the WSO2 cloud platform team. Shankar is a recognized industry expert in security and cloud deployment. Equipped with an in-depth understanding of the elements of security, he brings quality insights into the architectural aspects of securing an enterprise whether on-premise or in the cloud.

About WSO2

WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them. For more information, visit wso2.com and the WSO2 OxygenTank developer portal at wso2.org, or check out WSO2 on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and FriendFeed.

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Filed Under: BPEL News Tagged With: Applications, Cloud, Enterprise, Middleware, Migrate, Platform, Present, Stratos, Technical, using, Webinar, WSO2

Active Endpoints Announces Support for WS-BPEL 2.0 with New ActiveBPEL 3.0

August 25, 2010 by BPELforum

Shelton, CT

Active Endpoints, Inc. (www.active-endpoints.com), the leading provider of SOA orchestration products and services, today announced the availability of ActiveBPEL 3.0. The ActiveBPEL product family includes open source and commercial SOA orchestration solutions that are standards-compliant and platform-neutral, forming the foundation for fast, cost-effective business and systems integration. Among other important capabilities, ActiveBPEL 3.0 comprehensively supports the forthcoming WS-BPEL 2.0 standard, which will be officially published early in 2007.

ActiveBPEL 3.0 allows SOA application developers and ISVs to leverage the power of the BPEL 2.0 standard while preserving prior investments in BPEL 1.1 processes. ActiveBPEL 3.0′s pluggable architecture complements all SOA IT infrastructures and offers an independent, best-in-class solution for building, testing, deploying and managing BPEL-based applications.

“We are very pleased to see commercial support for the forthcoming WSBPEL 2.0 standard in the new versions of ActiveBPEL Designer and ActiveBPEL Enterprise,” said Derek Mathieson, Principal Architect, Workflow and e-Business Applications, CERN. “By allowing us to automatically migrate BPEL 1.1 processes to 2.0 using ActiveBPEL Designer, and by supporting seamless side-by-side execution of BPEL 1.1 and 2.0 processes in ActiveBPEL Enterprise, Active Endpoints is providing CERN all the flexibility we need to transition to the 2.0 standard on our own terms.”

Enterprise developers and systems integrators use ActiveBPEL to significantly reduce the time and complexity of implementing SOA applications, from proof of concept to deployment. A large and growing group of businesses now use ActiveBPEL in demanding environments across financial services, government, telecommunications, and other industries. ActiveBPEL is also the embedded, best-in-class BPEL solution for many leading software providers who look to Active Endpoints for competitive advantages when including BPEL in their own products.

In response to input from hundreds of customers and partners, ActiveBPEL 3.0 offers new capabilities including:

Support for all WS-BPEL 2.0 process constructs and semantics

Automatic migration of BPEL4WS 1.1 processes to the new WS-BPEL 2.0 standard, preserving users’ investments in existing 1.1 processes

Seamless, side-by-side execution of BPEL4WS 1.1 and WS-BPEL 2.0 processes, allowing phased migration to WS-BPEL 2.0

Enhanced message routing based on WS-Addressing to streamline and improve the execution of long running processes

Policy-driven message exchanges based on WS-ReliableMessaging

BPEL Sub-process execution, allowing process components to be executed within the lifecycle of their invoking processes

“The forthcoming WS-BPEL 2.0 standard represents a critical inflection point for SOA,” said Fred Holahan, Active Endpoints’ chairman and co-founder. “For the first time, organizations have a broadly adopted foundation upon which to create composite, process-driven SOA applications. In addition to comprehensively supporting the WS-BPEL 2.0 standard, ActiveBPEL 3.0 delivers the advanced capabilities our customers and partners need to power their enterprise-class SOA applications.”

The ActiveBPEL 3.0 product suite includes the following:

ActiveBPEL Engine: a commercial-grade, open source runtime environment for executing BPEL processes. The ActiveBPEL engine is the most widely used BPEL technology available today, delivering commercial-grade BPEL capabilities to the open source community.

ActiveBPEL Designer: a high-powered, Eclipse Ready™ design environment that allows information analysts to visually create and test BPEL process flows. The ActiveBPEL Designer includes many advanced features, speeding developers through the tasks of building sophisticated composite applications.

ActiveBPEL Enterprise servers: enterprise-class BPEL servers that satisfy a multitude of BPEL deployment requirements – from mobile and desktop applications to advanced departmental and enterprise-wide production environments, including:

o ActiveBPEL Enterprise for Apache Tomcat

o ActiveBPEL Enterprise for JBoss® Application Server

o ActiveBPEL Enterprise for IBM® WebSphere® Application Server

o ActiveBPEL Enterprise for BEA WebLogic® Server

o ActiveBPEL Enterprise for the Microsoft® .NET Framework (available in January 2007)

ActiveBPEL Designer allows users to create and test BPEL processes, and then deploy those processes to ActiveBPEL Enterprise servers that scale from desktop to data center and meet the most rigorous performance demands.

Active Endpoints also offers BPEL Fundamentals training updated to reflect the WS-BPEL 2.0 standard. Access to extensive online and self-help BPEL and SOA-related resources is available at Active Endpoints’ web site www.active-endpoints.com.

Availability

The ActiveBPEL 3.0 engine is available for immediate download at www.active-endpoints.com/ga3. The ActiveBPEL 3.0 Designer is freely available for immediate download at www.active-endpoints.com/ga3. For general information or to purchase ActiveBPEL Enterprise Server products, contact Active Endpoints at +1.203.929.9400 ext. 709, or by sending an email to info @ active-endpoints.com.

About Active Endpoints, Inc.

Active Endpoints is the leading provider of SOA orchestration solutions. Active Endpoints’ solutions enable organizations to build and deploy composite, process-driven information systems based on BPEL, the SOA orchestration standard. From open source to mission critical deployments, Active Endpoints empowers IT organizations to quickly adapt to evolving customer demands – reducing the cost of integration, leveraging infrastructure investments, and enabling the sharing of business processes with customers, partners, and suppliers. More financial services, government, telecommunications, high technology, and retail organizations use Active Endpoints’ solutions than any other BPEL technology. Headquartered in Shelton, Connecticut, Active Endpoints is privately held. More information is available at www.active-endpoints.com.

ActiveBPEL is a trademark of Active Endpoints, Inc. Eclipse and Eclipse Ready are trademarks of Eclipse Foundation, Inc. JBoss is a registered trademark of JBoss, Inc. IBM and WebSphere are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. BEA and BEA WebLogic Server are registered trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. Microsoft is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners.

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Filed Under: BPEL News Tagged With: Active, ActiveBPEL, Announces, Endpoints, Support, WSBPEL

Batch Processing in a Services World

July 22, 2010 by Tom_Laszewski

This article will explain how BPEL and job schedulers (most recently branded as Workload Automation
suites) provide an integrated solution that can satisfy the needs of batch and real time processing in a
services-orientated infrastructure. Industry leading distributed job schedulers, workload automation
(WLA) products, are offered from UC4, Orsyp, CISCO and Advanced Systems Concept, Inc. Oracle
offers an industry leading BPEL Process Manager that runs on a variety of Java EE containers.

The full article is here: http://bpelforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/BPELWorldArticleBatchProcessingInAServicesWorldv2.pdf

Filed Under: BPEL, BPEL News Tagged With: active batch, appworx, batch, BPEL, ca7, JCL, job scheduling, Legacy, mainframe, Migration, Modernization, Oracle, orsyp, scheduling, SOA, tidal, uc4, Web Services, wma, workload automation

Figthing Process Fragmentation

April 28, 2010 by BPELforum

Professionals all over the world in Information Technology are fighting the never ending battle against project creep, missed deadlines and cost overruns. The lack of success in doing so seems to indicate that there is a deeper problem that has to be solved first. After analyzing customer projects for 20 years, I may have discovered a key element of this problem. Well, it actually is not a unique discovery, because it is likely that every professional in IT has run into the same situation but has looked at the consequences and not at the cause.

It seems that process fragmentation is the root cause of most unsolved IT problems.

It starts with the meta-process of IT Change Management that requires that a business application (made up from processes, tasks and actvities itself) is first analysed, then developed, tested, integration tested, rolled out and then put into production by different IT departments that distance themselves ever more from the business user. Current Change Management has however emerged over many years because of a quality requirement that is totally unreasonable in its expecations and thus has driven IT applications off the cost scale. 99.99% availability makes sense for infrastructure but not for a business service front-end. It is also not necessary as we can see from Internet use.

Here a more human problem enters the landscape. What is it that management wants from IT? One of the interests is higher productivity, meaning that less people can achieve a certain amount of throughput. The second is ensuring the quality of the work performed independant of the people and ideally enable an untrained person to perform the work needed. People are in fact put last, and that creates the problem for IT. Putting people first – employees AND customers – would make a world of difference. People are actually seen seperated from the business when they really are the business.

The current approach to the above is to analyse the business process and encode decision making into rigid rules. The resultant simplistic 2D-flowcharts and IF/THEN rules can however not properly represent the business activity that the user needs to perform his job well and to user satisfaction. It is pretty obvious that a fragmented, rigid 2D flowchart cannot represent a 4D event-driven, dynamic world that is not fragmented. Process or application monitoring does not help, as it only tells you if the defined processes are executed as defined. Business intelligence might tell you that some expected numbers are wrong but not where to improve the process. Even if you know how to improve the process, you then need it developed, tested and put into production. This loop is long and expensive as mentioned before. The business also looses its ability to adapt to market changes.

Right here, IT Change Management has to change and consolidate with application or process development. Ideally, it would already include application or process analysis with the resultant documentation that becomes part of the application. Right here, it too becomes obvious that state-of-the-art application development using programming languages such as Cobol, Java or C++ with APIs are unable to cope. This is where the SOA concept developed that tries to create a flexible definable layer between the front-end application and the back-end service. But current SOA approaches do not deliver these aspects of Change Management and are built on either Java programming with UML modelling or jBPEL with BPM modelling. Extactly that creates another even more complex layer of fragmentation and spoils the potential benefits of SOA. Adding additional fragmentation layers such as outsourcing and governance simply does not seem the right approach to achieve shorter projects and more agility.

The application solution is to see business process not as step-by-step fragments but as a collection of business services that do not much more than bundle and hold the case related business communication and information content. The content is state/event driven and implicitly creates the progression of the business case to its completion. Business professionals must be able to interactively define the business services they need (I propose by recording or training) without the use of flowchart analysis tools that are completely abstract to a business user and do mostly require later use of programming tools anyway.

The current IT process segment of defining and testing such services (processes) must not be seen as a programming effort but as part of normal business activity. The business department must be agile enough to provide the input to the power users defining services and be willing to test and fine-tune such applications. A gradual and interactive development approach like that it not really new but was first suggested in 1990 as Extreme Programming using programming languages. The difficulty of achieving reasonable system stability with compiled languages ended that approach. The project benefits of Extreme Programming can however be achieved with an application platform that includes analysis tools, deployment and monitoring/tuning as part of it‘s Change Management.

In short, what IT needs is a defragmented approach to Change Management and a defragmented approach to creating business services (a.k.a. as processes). In fact, that implies that a much further reaching consolidation of user frontend processes is necessary, and that includes BPM, CRM , ECM and SOA.

Max J. Pucher is the founder and current Chief Architect of ISIS Papyrus Software, a globally operating company that specializes in Arificial Intelligence for Business Process and Communication. He has written several books, frequently speaks and writes on IT and holds several patents.

Filed Under: BPEL News Tagged With: Business Application, Business Service, Business User, Consequences, Customer Projects, Discovery, Figthing, Fragmentation, Information Technology, Infrastructure, Internet Use, Landscape, Meta, Overruns, Process, Productivity, Quality Requirement, Root Cause, Scale 99, Seperated, Throughput, Untrained Person

Why a Business Architecture?

April 28, 2010 by BPELforum

The main goal of a Business Architecture is to enable the business to improve customer service quality through a better transparency, flexibility and adaptability of business operations. The market environment changes more rapidly and the use of technology by customers dramatically influences how a business can operate. Financial services calculation processes, marketing programs, business rules and content change already weekly rather than monthly.

However, if a business architecture has to be modelled, encoded and assembled by using a large number of tools and software components it cannot provide the benefits. Today’s heavily fragmented and hardcoding-integrated IT systems (including SOA) are too rigid to enable rapidly changing business environments. Most IT departments do not focus on adaptability and innovation because they have been requested to focus on lowering cost and system stability. Therefore, six month rollout cycles are the norm with three month being the exception. Business users expectations of stability and executive demands for lower cost are incompatible with the ability to achieve a flexble and adaptive, competitive IT infrastructure. Efficiency is still the main IT goal, with effectiveness a far-off second and agility being no more than an overused buzzword.

Combine this with the misconception that running a business can be pre-planned and therefore encoded into processes and rules, with decisions being taken by predictive analysis based on historical (or better outdated?) business data. I propose that good business decisions are always taken by experienced people who use intuition to combine relevant data in business context. After billions of IT investments neither process management nor business intelligence have delivered the promised wonderland of the automated enterprise that the board can run remotely from the beach. Why?

Neither BPM nor BI consider the human side of running a business and therefore fail to produce a nimble, agile organization. Based on unproven management theories and over-optimistic information technology benefit claims a huge IT bureaucracy is now necessary to manage a complex technology stack. Control and use of the technology stack is only feasable through outsourcing partners and the necessary complex contracts reduce corporate agility even more. Billions are spent by the IT monopolists for marketing to sell an illusion of the IT-controlled business that does not exist and is not achievable by the proposed complex means.

The above situation was the reason for ISIS Papyrus to develop a new IT platform that does not require a huge technology stack and does not need complex programming but a simple modeling and rule definition methodology to build a flexible and adaptible Business Architecture that is mostly under the control of the business and not the IT department.

Agility AND innovation happen on the people level. BPM and SixSigma trash out the people empowerment slogan but fail to deliver because in neither approach people are given the freedom to do things as they see fit as long as the goals are achieved. Enterprise 2.0 is a countermovement to the bureaucratic IT-Governance approach, but if it is simply putting Web 2.0 behind the firewall without giving the user access to plausible business data entities there is not such thing as empowerment.

William of Ockham wrote in Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate: “The explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible and not invent further entities to explain a theory.” He was a friar and felt that the one entity of God would explain everything. Bertrand Russel translated it to: “The simplest explanation is usually the best.” Translated further to IT means that coded software systems or process solutions that require substantial resources to be model a business and even more to then adapt it to changing needs make things more complex than necessary. Flexibility AND adaptability by the user – while ensuring transparency and maintainability – are the key capabilities of modern systems. SixSigma adds a lot of bureaucratic complexity that is certainly not in line with Occam’s Razor. Let’s simplify …

A detailed description of Business Architecture features of the Papyrus Platform you will on my Papyrus Architecture blog.

Max J. Pucher is the founder and current Chief Architect of ISIS Papyrus Software, a globally operating company that specializes in Artificial Intelligence for business process and communication. He has written several books, frequently speaks and writes on IT and holds several patents.

Filed Under: BPEL News Tagged With: Adaptability, Architecture, Business, Business Architecture, Business Context, Business Decisions, Business Environments, Business Intelligence, Business Rules, Business Users, Buzzword, Customer Service Quality, Good Business, Main Goal, Market Environment, Marketing Programs, Misconception, Predictive Analysis, Relevant Data, Running A Business, Software Components, System Stability

Similar Posts

Active Endpoints Announces Support for WS-BPEL 2.0 with New ActiveBPEL 3.0

Batch Processing in a Services World

Figthing Process Fragmentation

Why a Business Architecture?

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