TOGAF 9 advances IT maturity while offering more paths to architecture-level IT improvement

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium, in early February delivered TOGAF 9, an enterprise architecture framework. TOGAF 9 represents a departure for enterprise architecture frameworks in general.

It's larger, more mature, and modular to allow folks to enter it from a variety of perspectives. It takes on a much more significant business services and accomplishments perspective. [Read more on a panel discussion about the importance of enterprise architecture.]

While IT practitioners and architects will be looking over TOGAF 9 deeply, it’s also going to be of interest to the business side of the enterprise and offers a way for them to understand more about how IT can service their business needs. [I also last week spoke to Allen Brown, the CEO of The Open Group on trends in IT.]

To gain deeper insights into how IT architects can bring value to businesses, I recently interviewed two TOGAF experts, Robert Weisman, CEO and principal consultant for Build The Vision, and Mike Turner, an enterprise architect at Capgemini.

Here are some excerpts:

I can see architecture being an integral part of the business planning process. It structures the business plans and makes sure that the objectives are realizable. In other words, we can use the acronym SMART, specific, measurable, actionable, realizable, and time-bound. What TOGAF 9 does is provide an overarching vision and capability with which to cooperate.

I see architecture as a set of tools and techniques that can help you achieve what you want to do as a business. Taking architecture in isolation is not necessarily going to achieve the right things for your organization, because you actually need to have the direction as an input for architecture to support achievement of a particular outcome.

Architecture is really a vital tool for is being able to assure that the correct business outcome is achieved. You need to have a structured approach to how you define the problem space that businesses are facing, then define the solution space, and define how you move from where you are right now to where you want to be.

TOGAF 9, first of all, is more business focused. Before that it was definitely in the IT realm, and IT was essentially defined as hardware and software. The definition of IT in TOGAF 9 is the lifecycle management of information and related technology within an organization. It puts much more emphasis on the actual information, its access, presentation, and quality, so that it can provide not only transaction processing support, but analytical processing support for critical business decisions.

The gestation took five years. I've been part of the forum for five years working on the TOGAF 9. Part of the challenge was that we had such an incredible take up of TOGAF 8. Once a standard has been taken up, you can’t change it on a dime. You don’t want to change it on a dime, but you want to keep it dynamic, update it, and incorporate best practices. That would explain some of the gestation period. TOGAF 8 was very successful, and to get TOGAF 9 right, it was a little longer cycle, but I think it’s been well worth the wait.

If you look at the industry in general, we're going through a process where the IT industry is maturing and becoming more stable, and change is becoming more incremental in the industry. What you see in architecture frameworks is a cycle of discovery, invention, and then consolidation that follows, as consensus is reached.

One thing that’s really key about TOGAF 9 is that it takes a lot of ideas and practices that exist within individual organizations or proprietary frameworks, building a consensus around it, and releasing it into a public-domain context.

Once that happens, the value you can get from that approach increases exponentially. Now, you're not talking about going to one vendor and having to deal with one particular set of concepts, and then going to a different vendor and having to deal with another set of concepts, and dealing with the interoperability between those.

You're in a situation where the industry agrees this is the way to do things. Suddenly, the economies of scale that you can get from that, as all the participants in the industry starts to converge on that consensus, mean that you get a whole set of new opportunities about how you can use architecture.

TOGAF 9 is, in certain ways, an evolutionary change and in certain other ways a revolutionary change. The architecture development methodology has basically remained similar. However, transforming the architecture from concept into a reality has basically been expanded pretty dramatically, with a great many lessons learned. So, architecture transformation is a large one. Various architectural frameworks have been incorporated into it.

A great many concepts that allow enterprise architecture to be molded with operations management, with system design, portfolio management, business planning, and the Governance Institute's COBIT guidelines and other industry standards have also been incorporated into TOGAF.

Also, there's been a major contribution by such companies as Capgemini, with respect to artifacts and structure. The content meta model is a huge contribution.

The term SOA is old wine in new bottles. It's been around for a long time. If you just have a service catalog, if you have duplicate services, it becomes very evident. That’s one of the advantages of the repositories -- you can have an insight into what you actually have.

TOGAF, from its outset in the early 1990s, has been service oriented for that. Just by applying TOGAF, you have a chance of doing your Gap Analysis, of having the visibility into what you have, which makes it not only efficient, but effective from a business perspective.

TOGAF allows you to understand what makes your business good and then identify what your services are in a way that considers all the different angles. Once that’s defined, you can then put the right technology underneath that to realize what the business is actually looking for. That’s something that can have an absolutely transformational effect on your business.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

View more podcasts and resources from The Open Group's recent conferences and TOGAF 9 launch:

The Open Group's CEO Allen Brown interview

Live panel discussion on enterprise architecture trends

Reporting on the TOGAF 9 launch

Panel discussion on security trends and needs

Panel discussion on cloud computing and enterprise architecture

Access the conference proceedings

General TOGAF 9 information

Introduction to TOGAF 9 whitepaper

Whitepaper on migrating from TOGAF 8.1.1 to version 9

TOGAF 9 certification information

TOGAF 9 Commercial Licensing program information

Who makes most rain from IBM-Amazon cloud deal? Oracle.

It just goes to show how perplexing the gathering cloud marketplace is that the punditry are hesitant to meaningfully analyze this important development.

But Amazon -- with a history of bold and long-term bets -- and IBM -- with a history of making markets whether it's right about the future or not -- have made the best of bedfellows in the deal announced late Wednesday.

Why? Because IBM has taken the cloud bait ... big time. And Amazon has just partnered with the best enterprise IT channel on Earth.

Together they form the irresistible gravitational black hole from which Microsoft can not escape. And Google is building another black hole right next door. And so is Salesforce.com.

Can Microsoft change universal physics? Not likely.

What this deal means is that Microsoft will need to adopt the cloud model all the more quickly and comprehensively -- across its software lines, not just a few. It's going to be Live Stack, not just Live Mesh. It's going to be buy once, run any which way.

It's build your on-premises cloud on IBM and insure against peaks and troughs with the elastic AWS hand-off. No more 20 percent utilization on umpteen licensed servers to guarantee reliability (I'm talking to you, Exchange Server).

And given the IBM license pincher move, the fungible enterprise-AWS licenses scheme will help shrink Microsoft's margins all the faster and deeper as a result. IBM will be selling cloud economics against Microsoft Software Assurance economics with a world-class and hungry sales force. Ouch.

You see, IBM can monetize across more business types -- hardware, storage, professional services, systems integration, infrastructure software, groupware software, specialized outsourcing and applications, and a lot more. Microsoft not so. IBM can adopt the cloud aggressively and find new innovative models from its diversified portfolio. Microsoft is hoping for the best with developers more than the operators, because it has no choice (and Wall Street knows it).

I don't expect Microsoft to do any similar deal with any cloud provider other than Microsoft. IBM, on the other hand, can do similar deals with any cloud provider with the chops to produce the reliable and cost-effective compute fabric that's open to its SuSE Linux stack. The more clouds the better for IBM, while Microsoft will compete against those clouds. It's the MS-DOS license deal in reverse at a higher abstraction.

Amazon, too, can tee up any number of enterprise software providers to channel the humongous global enterprise software market to AWS ... from a tickle to a stream to (who knows?). But that's still good money. And Amazon has a huge and growing lead in the ecumenical cloud department.

So we come to Oracle. Larry Ellison's entertaining position on cloud is a hedge. He knows the substantial cloud economy is inevitable, and he knows its at least 10 years in the making. And he knows the transition will be ugly and bloody.

Best to let those two old antagonists IBM and Microsoft beat the crap out of each other, with Amazon as Burgess Meredith's Mickey Goldmill to IBM's Rocky and Microsoft's Apollo Creed. Then the build, buy or partner decision can be made by Oracle after all the money has been taken from the traditional enterprise data, applications, development, infrastructure and integration model (which has plenty of legs).

It's too soon to tell whether the rainmaker-enabled marketplace approach of IBM (remember Java, Linux, n-tier) will beat out the shoot-for-the-moon strategy of Microsoft when it comes to the cloud. But I like Oracle's margins better through 2016 as the battle ensues.

Strong IT architecture doubly important in tough economic times, says Open Group expert panel

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium, last week delivered TOGAF 9, an enterprise architecture framework. As part of the festive opening ceremony for TOGAF 9's arrival, a panel of experts examined the value and role of enterprise IT architecture in light of a dynamic business environment.

The topics also addressed how IT can better communicate and collaborate with the business interests around them. To gain deeper insights into how IT architects can bring value to businesses, I had the pleasure of moderating the panel discussion at The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego on Feb. 2. [See a related interview with The Open Group CEO Allen Brown.]

Panelists included Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Janine Kemmeren, enterprise architect at Getronics Consulting and chair of the Architecture Forum Strategy Working Group in The Open Group; Chris Forde, vice president and technology integrator at American Express and chair of the Architecture Forum in The Open Group; Jane Varnus, architecture consultant for the enterprise architecture department at the Bank of Montreal, and Henry Peyret, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Here are some excerpts:

The degree of change that we're seeing in the economy and its implications for businesses are -- Nick used the phrase Tsunami during his presentation earlier today -- and that’s really not an understatement. What you have to do is keep your eye on the ball, and the ball is not enterprise architecture. The ball is where the business needs to manage and operate itself effectively.

When the rules change, you can’t just reach back into the same old bag of tricks around architecture. You have to sit down with your partner and say, "Okay, what has changed? Why has it changed, and how do we respond to this?" You need good people with good heads on their shoulders to be able to do that.

... There are a lot of issues with the way IT operates. But in having a conversation about enterprise architecture and moving the business ... We don’t want to have the conversation about architecture. We want to have the conversation about what it is that’s going to make their business more effective. Some of those issues may be inter-business unit related, not specific to IT, and that’s a good conversation to have.

... The problem that IT has had perennially is that we have over promised, we have under delivered, and we have overcharged. The whole idea of adopting more consistent practices is that hopefully you can avoid having to reinvent the wheel every time and stop making all those damn mistakes.

The thing we can’t do is go back to the business and start talking technology to them. They're not interested in how we support them. What they're interested in is that we should, at a reasonable cost, be reasonably flexible, be absolutely reliable, and be creative. Lag is a big problem. We have to address their concern that we are a partner who is responsive.

So, my short advice is that we have to learn to talk to the business better in their terms, become more tuned in, translate whatever solution we have, and express it back in the terms of that problem. I don’t know what that problem would be in anyone else’s business, but don't mention SOA and don't mention the cloud.

One thing that's probably going to be useful is a degree of transparency into the IT function. When the business clearly understands what’s driving the quotes coming back to them, they're in a better position to determine what kind of investments they really need to make. In the course of developing that transparency, it causes IT to be more introspective about the way it operates.

There’s a certain set of conversations that needs to occur about how effective the IT operation actually is. This is also in context with other business units. We talk about IT as if it's separate from the business, when, in fact, it's a component of our business operation just like others. It has a certain level of importance and a relationship to certain types of technology, but it isn’t the be all and end all.

We just have to get into a better conversation with the business partners about what’s driving the behaviors in IT, and transparency is one way to do that.

The new way to demonstrate value is to explain that we will be able now to make something faster in terms of time to market, time to design, and time to deliver. All of those things are what we call key agility indicators.

It's the flexibility aspect, again, but not the flexibility that every IT provider is talking about. Why? Because they are not defining what type of flexibility they are talking about. We need to specify a key agility indicator at a business level.

We need also to assess our process to say that perhaps we need to deliver that in three months. Unfortunately, our current process and systems are able to deliver that only in five months. How could we shorten that? How could we bring in new practices and new ways to do that, or perhaps a new technology?

At the end of the day, that’s what enterprise architecture is all about. It's not about devising frameworks. It's about making your performance consistent, rational, and understandable.

What I think we have to fear is lag and inertia. That’s what we really have to fear. One of the things I have actually been very cheered about with TOGAF 9 is that it's taken some important steps in the right direction, in terms of making the practice and the learning of enterprise architecture more accessible, and it's modularized things.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

View more podcasts and resources from The Open Group's recent conferences and TOGAF 9 launch:

The Open Group's CEO Allen Brown interview

Deep dive into TOGAF 9 use benefits

Reporting on the TOGAF 9 launch

Panel discussion on security trends and needs

Panel discussion on cloud computing and enterprise architecture

Access the conference proceedings

General TOGAF 9 information

Introduction to TOGAF 9 whitepaper

Whitepaper on migrating from TOGAF 8.1.1 to version 9

TOGAF 9 certification information

TOGAF 9 Commercial Licensing program information

Interview: The Open Group's Allen Brown on advancing value of enterprise IT via architecture

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium, last week delivered TOGAF 9 at the organization's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego.

At the juncture of this new major release of the venerable enterprise IT architecture framework, it makes sense to examine the present and future of The Open Group itself, some of its goals, and what else it does for its members.

The global organization is actively certifying thousands of IT architecture practitioners, while using the commercial license to increase the contributor flow of best architecture practices back into TOGAF. Think of it as open source for best architecture principles and methods.

To better understand how The Open Group operates and drives value to its members, I recently interviewed Allen Brown, president and CEO of The Open Group.

Here are some excerpts:

The role of architecture is more important right now because of the complexity, because of the need to integrate across organizations and with business partners. You've got a situation where some of the member companies are integrated with more than a thousand other business partners. So, it's difficult to know where the parameters and boundaries of the organization are.

If you've trained everyone within your organization to use TOGAF, they're all speaking a common language and they're using a common approach. It's a common way of doing things. If you're bringing in systems integrators and contractors, and they are TOGAF certified also, they've got that same approach. If you're training people, you can train them more easily, because everyone speaks the same language.

One member I was talking to said that they've got something like 500,000 individuals inside their infrastructure that are not their own staff. So this is a concern that's becoming top of mind for CIOs: Who's in my infrastructure and what are they doing.

We've got, on one hand, the need for enterprise architecture to actually understand what's going on, to be able to map it, to be able to improve the processes, to retire the applications, and to drive forward on different processes. We've also got the rising need for security and security standards. Because you're integrated with other organizations, they need to be common standards.

... Security is now becoming top of mind for many CIOs. Many of them have the integration stuff sorted out. They've got processes in place for that, and they know how they're going to move forward with enterprise architecture. They're looking for more guidance and better standards -- and that's why TOGAF 9 is there.

We're now looking at other areas. We always look at new areas and see whether there is something unique that The Open Group could contribute where we can collaborate with other organizations and where we can actually help move things forward.

We're looking at cloud. We don't know if it's something that we can contribute to at this point, but we're examining it and we will continue to examine it.

The Open Group is broader than just enterprise architecture. The architecture forum is one of a number of forums including Security/Identity Management, the Platform, the UNIX standards, Real-Time and Embedded Systems, Enterprise Management Standards, and so forth. A lot of attention has been focused on enterprise architecture, because of the way that TOGAF has contributed, and some of the professional standards have raised.

TOGAF 9 really needed to add some more to TOGAF 8. In March 2007, I did a survey by talking to our members -- really just asking them open-ended questions. What are the key priorities you want from the next version of TOGAF? They said, "We need better guidance on how to align with our business and be able to cascade from that business down to what the IT guys need to deliver. We need more guidance, we need it simpler to use."

TOGAF 8 was very much focused on giving guidance on how to do enterprise architecture, and the key thing was the architecture development method. What they've done now is provide more guidance on how to do it, made it more modular, and made it easier to consume in bite-sized chunks.

Those were the two key driving forces behind where we were going, a more modular structure, and things like that. Trying to do those things, the members focused on how to bring that forward, and it's taken a lot of work.

Then they've added other things like a content framework. The content framework provides a meta model for how you can map from the architecture development method, but it also provides the foundation for tools vendors to construct tools that would be helpful for architects to work with TOGAF.

There are a couple of other things that we've done. First, we've introduced the IT Architect Certification (ITAC) program. That provides a certification to say not only that this person knows how to do architecture, but can demonstrate it to their peers.

... We've had to deal with much larger numbers of members and contributors, but it's not just TOGAF. It's not just a case of having a framework, a method, or a way of helping organizations do enterprise architecture. We're also concerned with raising the level of professionalism.

The ITAC certification is agnostic on method and framework. You don't have to know TOGAF to do that, but you have to be able to convince a board-level review that you do have experience and that you're worthy of being called an IT architect.

It requires a very substantial resume, and a very substantial review by peers to say that this person actually does know, and can demonstrate they've got the skills to do IT architecture.

If you can imagine a large consortium where you've got 300 member organizations -- which is a lot of people at the end of the day -- and everyone is contributing something and a smaller number is doing a real heavy lifting, you've got to get consensus around it. They have done a huge amount of work.

There is a capability framework, not a maturity model, but it's way of helping folks to set up their capability. There are a lot of things that now in TOGAF 9 that have built on the success of TOGAF 8, it has taken a huge amount of work by our members.

The great thing about TOGAF 9 is that we've had such a great reception from the analysts, bloggers, and so on. Many of them are giving us recommendations, and they say, "This is great, and here are my recommendations for where you go."

We've got to gather a lot of that together, and the architecture forum, the members, will take a look at that and then figure out where the plan goes. I know that they're going to be working on things more general, as well as TOGAF in the architecture space.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

View more podcasts and resources from The Open Group's recent conferences and TOGAF 9 launch:

Live panel discussion on enterprise architecture trends

Deep dive into TOGAF 9 use benefits

Reporting on the TOGAF 9 launch

Panel discussion on security trends and needs

Panel discussion on cloud computing and enterprise architecture

Access the conference proceedings

General TOGAF 9 information

Introduction to TOGAF 9 whitepaper

Whitepaper on migrating from TOGAF 8.1.1 to version 9

TOGAF 9 certification information

TOGAF 9 Commercial Licensing program information

Citrix brings high definition to virtual desktops with XenDesktop 3 and HDX

Citrix Systems last week delivered a one-two punch in the battle for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) differentiation with the introduction of XenDesktop 3 and Citrix HDX high-definition technology, promising to lower costs associated with servers and storage in the data center.

XenDesktop 3, a key component of the Santa Clara, Calif. company's Citrix Delivery Center now incorporates several of the HDX technologies, providing a richer multimedia experience for user and increasing the number of desktops per server. According to the announcement, the latest version of XenDesktop can also host twice as many virtual desktops from a single server.

Also, the new version can deliver Microsoft Windows desktops from a common set of centrally managed images that can be run either as a hosted application in the data center or locally on a PC or thin-client device.

Another feature is the HDX media streaming capability, by which Desktop 3 sends compressed media streams to endpoint devices and plays them locally. This allows IT administrators to have the applications run wherever it's more efficient and cost effective.

I'm still curious about Abode Flash presentations via XenDesktop VDI. Desktone and Wyse have been working on that for some time. Wyse is also partnering with Citrix, but I didn't see any mention of Flash (perhaps in a genuflection to Microsoft?).

Management of VDI is also simplified in XenDesktop 3 with a fully integrated profile management, which provides a consistent personalized experience for each user every time they log in.

The new features include broad support for smart-card security, which moves virtual desktop capability in those markets -- government, financial services, and healthcare -- that rely on smart-card authentication.

Rounding out the new XenDesktop capabilities is USB plug-and-play capability for transparent support of all types of local devices, including digital cameras, smart phones, MP3 players, and scanners.

I'm a big fan of VDI and think it offers even more in a strapped economy. If netbooks are all the rage, then why not VDI too (or VDI on older PCs that can't well run Vista or Windows 7?)

Also announced Wednesday was the HDX high-definition technology, which adds enhancements for multimedia, voice, video, and 3D graphics. It also includes “adaptive orchestration” technology that senses underlying capabilities in the data center, network and device, and dynamically optimizes performance across the end-to-end delivery system to fit each unique user scenario. This allows HDX-enabled products to leverage the latest user experience innovations developed by third-party software, server, device and processor partners.

Six categories of HDX technologies work together to provide multimedia capability. These include a broad range of new and existing technologies that extend throughout the Citrix Delivery Center product family.

• HDX MediaStream – Accelerates multimedia performance by sending compressed streams to endpoints and playing them locally.

• HDX RealTime – Enhances real-time communications using advanced bi-directional encoding and streaming technologies to ensure a no compromise end-user experience.

• HDX 3D – Optimizes the performance of everything from graphics-intensive 2D environments to advanced 3D geospatial applications using software and hardware based rendering in the datacenter and on the device.

• HDX Plug-n-Play – Enables simple connectivity for all local devices in a virtualized environment, including USB, multi-monitor, printers and user-installed peripherals.

• HDX Broadcast – Ensures reliable, high-performance acceleration of virtual desktops and applications over any network, including high-latency and low-bandwidth environments.

• HDX IntelliCache – Optimizes performance and network utilization for multiple users by caching bandwidth intensive data and graphics throughout the infrastructure and transparently delivering them as needed from the most efficient location.

Citrix XenDesktop 3 will be generally available from authorized Citrix partners this month, and from the Citrix website at http://www.citrix.com/xendesktop. Suggested retail pricing begins at $75 per concurrent user.

Open Group debuts TOGAF 9, a free IT architecture framework milestone that allows easier ramp-up, clearer business benefits

As part of the 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference here in San Diego this week, The Open Group has delivered TOGAF version 9, a significant upgrade to the enterprise IT architecture framework that adds modularity, business benefits, deeper support via the Architecture Development Method (ADM) for SOA and cloud, and a meta-model that makes managing IT and business resources easier and more coordinated.

One of my favorite sayings is: "Architecture is destiny." This is more true than ever, but the recession and complexity in enterprise IT departments make the discipline needed to approach IT from the architecture level even more daunting to muster and achieve. Oh, and slashed budgets have a challenging aspect of their own.

Yet, at the same time, more enterprise architects are being certified than ever. More qualified IT managers and planners are available for hire. And more dictates such as ITIL are making architecture central, where it belongs, not peripheral. The increased use of SOA, beginnings of cloud use, and need for pervasive security also auger well for enterprise architecture (EA) to blossom even in tough times.

TOGAF 9 aims to remove the daunting aspects of EA adoption while heightening both the IT and business value from achieving good methods for applying a defined IT architecture. With a free download and a new modular format to foster EA framework use from a variety of entry points, TOGAF 9 is designed to move. It also begins to form an uber EA framework by working well with other established EA frameworks, for a federated architectural framework benefit. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

I'll be blogging and creating some sponsored podcasts here in San Diego this week at the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, so look for updates on keynotes, panel discussions and interviews.

I'm especially interested in how architecture and the use of repositories help manage change. This may end up the biggest financial and productivity payback from those approaching IT from a systemic and managed via policies and governance approach.

Well-structured EA repositories of both IT and business meta-model descriptions solves complexity, adds agility, saves puts organizations in future-proof position. They can more readily accept and adapt to change -- both planned for an unplanned. Highly unpredictable and dynamic business environments benefit from EA and repository approach, clearly.

TOGAF 9 is showing the maturity for much wider adoption. The Architecture Development Method (ADM) can be applied to SOA, security, cloud, hybrids, and federated services ecologies. There is ease in migration from earlier TOGAFs, or from a start fresh across multiple paths of elements of EA. Indeed, TOGAF 9's modular structure now allows all kinds of organizations and cultures to adapt TOGAF in ways that suit specific situations and IT landscapes.

The Open Group is a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium, and some 7,500 individuals are TOGAF certified. So far, 90,000 copies of the TOGAF framework have been downloaded from The Open Group’s website and more than 20,000 hard copies of the TOGAF series have been sold.

If architecture is destiny, that TOGAF is a philosophy on taking control of your IT destiny. Better for you to take control of your destiny, than the other way around, I always say.

Progress Software's Actional Diagnostics gives developers better view into services integrity

Progress Software has leveraged technology from recently acquired Mindreef's SOAPscope to help detect and mend service integrity issues early in the software development cycle.

The Bedford, Mass. company last week announced the development of Progress Actional Diagnostics. This standalone quality and validation desktop product allows developers to build and test XML-based services, including SOAP, REST, and POX. Once services are identified for use, developers can inspect, invoke, test, and create simulations for prototyping and problem solving. [Disclosure: Progress is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Progress also last week held its annual analyst conference in Boston, and it was clear from the presentations that the plucky company is expanding its role and its value to the business solutions level.

As a major OEM provider to other software makers, the Progress brand has often played second fiddle to other brands in the Progress stable (some from acquisitions), such as Sonic, Actional, Apama, DataDirect, IONA, and FUSE. But the company is working to make Progress more identifiable, especially at a business level.

Progress, TIBCO and Sofware AG are the remaining second-tier software infrastructure providers, following a decade-long acquisitions spree and consolidation period.

As such Progress, with annual revenues in the $500 million range, is also setting itself up to move from SOA and SaaS support to take those capabilities and solutions (and OEM model) to the cloud model. Among a slew of glowing customer testimonials at the conference last week, EMC showed how a significant portion of its burgeoning cloud offerings that are powered by Progress infrastructure products.

I think we can expect more love between EMC and Progress, as well as more Progress solutions (in modular, best of breed or larger holistic deployments) finding a place under the hood of more cloud offerings. That will be double apparant as the larger players like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft create their own clouds. We're heading into some serius channel conflicts as these clouds compete with a rapidly fracturing market.

I was also impressed with the OSGi support that Progress is bringing to market, something that should appeal to many developers and architects alike.

Back on the product news, Actional Diagnostics includes a new feature called Application X-Ray, which allows developers to see what happens inside their service. For example, they can see how downstream services are being used, what messages are sent on queues, details of Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) invocations, database queries, and other relevant interdependencies along their transaction path.

This helps them identify why tests have failed or why services are not performing as designed, so that a service can be reengineered as needed before it moves to production.

In addition, load checking lets users test the performance and scalability of services before they are delivered to a performance testing team. Developers can check dozens of simultaneous threads or users per service, monitor CPU utilization and how much Java VM is being used. These are the kinds of integrity backstops that will be in high demand in the cloud and for PaaS buildouts.

Actional Diagnostics is currently in beta testing with customers and will soon be available as a free download. Developers interested in being sent an alert when the software download is available can register at: http://www.progress.com/web/global/alert-actional-diagnostics/index.ssp.

Visibility and control over API use is crucial as enterprises ramp to SaaS and cloud models

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: Sonoa Systems.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

As established enterprise IT expectations meet up with cutting-edge cloud delivery models, there's a clear need for additional trust and maturity in order for enterprises to further adopt cloud-based services. Enterprise IT expectations on visibility, control, and security to software as a service (SaaS), and cloud-based applications delivery need tools that manage the applications use and the use patterns for providers.

This podcast examines how one SaaS provider, Innotas, has developed a more matured view into services operations and application programming interfaces (APIs) and how they can extend the benefits from that visibility to their customers. We'll hear how Innotas, an on-demand project portfolio management (PPM) service, derives more analytics from network activity and thereby provides mounting confidence in how services are performing.

To better understand how Innotas has better managed services based on service level agreements (SLAs) monitoring, I recently interviewed Tim Madewell, vice president of operations at Innotas, as well as Chet Kapoor, CEO of Sonoa Systems.

Here are some excerpts:

Innotas is an on-demand PPM solution. We focus on IT organizations and provide software access via a standard Web browser for managing projects, as well as non-project work within an IT department. ... One of our differentiators was that being on-demand and multi-tenant from day one enabled us to be one of the early adopters in the SaaS world and in subscription-based software.

We have seen how the attitude around SaaS has matured and evolved. SaaS has become more standard and available, and as the technology has matured, especially around security, the acceptance level for SaaS has improved. One of the things that benefit us is in focusing on IT. Typically this type of change in acceptance for software starts within the IT organization itself.

To be a business application in a SaaS model today means that you have to step up and be enterprise class. We look at ourselves as an extension of all of our customers' internal IT and operations groups and we need to live up to those same standards. ... Once we get past the initial security challenges, folks are very interested and concerned about reliability and performance.

When [applications were] traditionally inside your four walls, there was a greater sense of control. As soon as you step into the cloud or with any SaaS provider, some of the benefits and the value proposition is that they control it, they manage it for you, but you're giving up some control. Building that confidence and acceptance into the solution is important, and ties back to being enterprise class.

Sonoa helped me identify problems or potential problems earlier. When I turned up the ServiceNet product it decoupled the traffic from my Web users, my end-users, the traditional users from my back end, and from my API.

That visibility gave me some input into when my servers were getting hot or heating up. I was seeing a lot of activity and started to differentiate if this activity was generated through the front end or through the back end.

So, my immediate return was to give my operations team a solution and a tool that gives them better visibility and then to control some of that traffic on the back-end. ... With this visibility I'm able to put in some controls that will give me the ability to look at how I make more and better use of the capacity that I have today.

You always start by wanting to see the needle, because you can’t move the needle, if you don’t see it. ... I want to know who is using my service, what are they using it for, how long are they using it, things like that. You have to have visibility into the services you provide.

The next thing you say is, "Okay, now that I have visibility, I want to start putting in some security access control." ... And you want to start by saying, "I want to give priority access to priority customers." ... And, they want it to be available at a scale where all their customers are getting it.

We've been working with companies like Innotas to get them through this evolution. Some customers choose to get our technology in the form of appliances. Some of them do it in the form of software, as Tim has. And, some of our customers are choosing to get our technology right in the cloud itself where they do not have any data-center whatsoever.

The easier we can make it for enterprises to access the information for their composite applications through APIs, the more successful companies like Innotas are, and there is more adoption. IT and enterprises end up saving money.

We're very familiar with the different user types in an application. You may have view-only users, standard users, or power users. We can take the same view on the back end with Web-services. There are certainly different levels of users or different levels of service you could provide for users, depending on their needs. ... Now, I've got the ability to take a look at offering some tiered services or tailoring my back-end user type and then tying that to my revenue model.

[Enterprise] customers will write applications or custom applications, where they probably want to use Oracle or SAP inside the firewall and maybe have another custom application of some sort, Innotas or Salesforce.com or whatever -- outside. They want to write a composite application, a mashup, or whatever you decide to call it, and they want all these different services.

A critical need that we find is that customers start to get nervous. It's not so much with the Innotases of the world, because they are fairly secure. They run like an enterprise application, but it’s available in the cloud. It happens when you start using things like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and people are starting to put custom applications there. ... They probably do it in a very hybrid model because I don’t think on-premise computing is going away.

What we’re finding is there is a need for a way to govern what goes on outside the enterprise. Govern could be a fairly heavy word, so let me be more specific. You want to have visibility into, how many accounts I have at EC2, for example. ... They want to have some visibility into what is happening with the cloud. Then, as they get more visibility, they want to see if they are paying extra for SLAs and how the SLAs are being mapped.

The second aspect of this is that it's probably a new revenue stream for Web 2.0 and SaaS companies, as well as enterprises. They've maximized or have worked very hard on their channels, whether user access or a browser-based channel. Now, they have an opportunity to go after a different set of folks who are trying to not just go off and use Innotas through a browser or Salesforce.com through a browser.

If you really think about the person who is doing a mash up, every consumer is probably going to be a provider at some point, and every provider is going to be a consumer at some point. ... [We] have been working on taking what Sonoa provides with a ServiceNet product, and making it available as a service. We have some customers that are already going in production. It's something that we will start talking about in the very near future.

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