Twitter is all the rage these days, so we're jumping on the bandwagon. You can follow our official line at twitter.com/edhorst_ap. We plan to use Twitter to update all those interested in getting the latest from AmberPoint.
Of course, we're still novices with Twitter. Others seem to have taken the medium quite a bit further. We're not surprised to see our competitors following our Twitter feed, but it is a bit alarming to see them practically stalking anyone's tweets that mention "AmberPoint". And we've seen a few proactively reach out to our existing and prospective customers with fictitious information (much like my observation in a recent post on shopping for a new car).
We can't tell how Twitter will evolve. Is it reasonable to stalk and spam users in Twitterland with unwanted messages and posts? Email provides spam filters -- what does Twitter offer?
At AmberPoint, we'd like to establish a policy to not abuse social chatter. If you wish to follow us, we'd love it. If you wish to interact with us, we'd be happy to respond. However, we plan to avoid spam-like "@joe buy amberpoint" sales pitches to the denizens of Twitter. Perhaps that might be good etiquette for Twitter to proliferate. Imagine being bombarded by salesmen from the another telephone company just because you happened to mention you were using Comcast!
A "Do-Not-Tweet" list, anyone?
Back to management topics. Twitter does remind us of the principles underlying Business Transaction Management. With BTM, you follow the trace of a transaction in real-time, as it flows across a distributed application environment. A transaction can update you on its status along the way, letting you know if there was a problem mid-flight. Of course, that remains the holy grail for BTM. Not all systems are built to provide updates. In fact, most don't. That’s where AmberPoint gets creative. Our technology generates these transaction tweets for you. All you need to do is to follow!
Friday, April 24, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Recommended Reading
I should get to blogging more often, but I don’t. So I’d like this opportunity to comment on two successive posts our friend David Linthicum recently made on the InfoWorld site.
David comments on the growth of SOA in a recent post, "SOA is growing...and nobody is surprised". The title alone was interesting. In addition to its increasing adoption, "SOA" seems to be maturing as an architecture and technology stack. Organizations are a lot more cognizant of their business goals for SOA projects and know the tools they need to be successful with those projects. More importantly, they realize the importance of succeeding with their initial projects. Initial success bootstraps adoption, not to mention funding for more projects and a gold star for the project champion! SOA survives as services, as BPM, as Cloud, as Web 2.0, as APIs and more. Services are services. Use them for integration. Use them for reaching out to your business partners. Use them to quickly roll-out new business applications. Use them to create a more agile business environment. As long as the business needs justify the use of this technology, give it your favorite name, go forth and use it!
A more recent post, "Cloud computing needs governance to be successful", comments on the need to extend governance to Cloud computing. In my opinion, and I hope David would agree, Cloud is just another paradigm that layers on top of service orientation. How do you access the Cloud? Via services. How do you Cloud-enable your system? Via services. How do you leverage Cloud infrastructure? By decomposing your application into services that can independently leverage the Cloud platform to scale and adapt based on demand. Ultimately, we’re looking at a massive shift to distributed application development. As VMWare puts it, virtualization and Cloud are the new mainframe. We think it’s a distributed mainframe. So, Cloud services need governance and the issues are even more acute when you now have the choice of running a service on both an on-premise and off-premise Cloud. Imagine a transaction that kicks off in your private data center, hops onto Amazon’s Cloud, makes a few trips to SalesForce.com, and then bounces back into your enterprise. Consider the security implications for such a transaction. More importantly, how do you follow such a transaction, and ensure that it actually delivered business? Governance matters...
Thank you David – might I propose renaming "Real World SOA" to "Real World Applications"? I really don’t know of applications out there that don’t leverage services in one way, shape or form.
David comments on the growth of SOA in a recent post, "SOA is growing...and nobody is surprised". The title alone was interesting. In addition to its increasing adoption, "SOA" seems to be maturing as an architecture and technology stack. Organizations are a lot more cognizant of their business goals for SOA projects and know the tools they need to be successful with those projects. More importantly, they realize the importance of succeeding with their initial projects. Initial success bootstraps adoption, not to mention funding for more projects and a gold star for the project champion! SOA survives as services, as BPM, as Cloud, as Web 2.0, as APIs and more. Services are services. Use them for integration. Use them for reaching out to your business partners. Use them to quickly roll-out new business applications. Use them to create a more agile business environment. As long as the business needs justify the use of this technology, give it your favorite name, go forth and use it!
A more recent post, "Cloud computing needs governance to be successful", comments on the need to extend governance to Cloud computing. In my opinion, and I hope David would agree, Cloud is just another paradigm that layers on top of service orientation. How do you access the Cloud? Via services. How do you Cloud-enable your system? Via services. How do you leverage Cloud infrastructure? By decomposing your application into services that can independently leverage the Cloud platform to scale and adapt based on demand. Ultimately, we’re looking at a massive shift to distributed application development. As VMWare puts it, virtualization and Cloud are the new mainframe. We think it’s a distributed mainframe. So, Cloud services need governance and the issues are even more acute when you now have the choice of running a service on both an on-premise and off-premise Cloud. Imagine a transaction that kicks off in your private data center, hops onto Amazon’s Cloud, makes a few trips to SalesForce.com, and then bounces back into your enterprise. Consider the security implications for such a transaction. More importantly, how do you follow such a transaction, and ensure that it actually delivered business? Governance matters...
Thank you David – might I propose renaming "Real World SOA" to "Real World Applications"? I really don’t know of applications out there that don’t leverage services in one way, shape or form.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Security Isn't Just "Security" Anymore
Companies deploying composite applications often think of security as a complex and daunting aspect of their initiatives, ivolving PKI, Identity and Access Management solutions and so on. But security is often just a matter of knowing what's going on. At AmberPoint, we've been talking about how "Situational Awareness" is critical for the security of composite applications. And that means you not only need to watch your service-enabled apps. You also need to be able to look in on your EJBs and JDBC connections to see what's going on.
I recently spoke with an AmberPoint customer, a large mobile phone retailer, who confirmed this. Their business goal is to integrate as many partners as possible to enable cell phone activation. They're starting with around 500 services, and for Phase I AmberPoint monitoring meets their security requirements!
How is that? Well, they need to get a handle on what's out there. That’ll help prevent rogue services. Rogue services are usually not malicious--they're just orphaned services, test apps that (somehow) slipped out into production, or an "unofficial" integration point that made a developer's life easier at some point in the past. Preventing all this is the first step on the road to trustworthy composite applications. And you need to keep in mind that an intermediary or broker approach won't let you rest as easily as the broad coverage you get from a BTM solution like AmberPoint.
I recently spoke with an AmberPoint customer, a large mobile phone retailer, who confirmed this. Their business goal is to integrate as many partners as possible to enable cell phone activation. They're starting with around 500 services, and for Phase I AmberPoint monitoring meets their security requirements!
How is that? Well, they need to get a handle on what's out there. That’ll help prevent rogue services. Rogue services are usually not malicious--they're just orphaned services, test apps that (somehow) slipped out into production, or an "unofficial" integration point that made a developer's life easier at some point in the past. Preventing all this is the first step on the road to trustworthy composite applications. And you need to keep in mind that an intermediary or broker approach won't let you rest as easily as the broad coverage you get from a BTM solution like AmberPoint.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Vendors & Rants
I recently found myself in the market for a new car. Given the buyer's market, I decided to look at a larger pool of candidates—which is probably a good idea no matter what product you’re looking for these days. There were several good options in my chosen price range. There’s the Prius, the Jetta, the new Mazda, and the new Insight, among others.
As I visited each dealer, it was interesting to hear them compare and contrast their cars against the others. The VW folks, who were touting their Diesel cars, said the Prius is all hype and that its fuel savings is overshadowed by its battery issues. The Toyota folks were of the opinion that the Prius is the best selling car in the market, period, and that that anyone who drives anything else is silly to do so. The Mazda folks didn't dare venture into the mileage debate. They positioned around the performance and fun aspect. And so on.
Ultimately, my selection was based on my needs, not the car salesmen’s commentary or any brand positioning. More importantly, my choice took into account the entire sales experience including internet-based price quotes, visits to the dealerships, test-drives and the individuals I dealt with. Too negative a commentary or too pushy an approach puts me on high alert! I like to know that I can trust the person I'm interacting with.
No matter the product, you will always run into salespeople and evangelists who try to vilify their competition. However, it’s good to keep in mind that baseless comments, speculation and obsession with denigrating competitors ultimately say more about their companies and products than it does about the competition they're bashing.
We face these same issues in our market. We have competitors who watch every change on our website, critique it, then turn around and copy the same graphic, marketing message or product terminology they just finished bashing. Tolerating this kind of behavior is one of the costs of leadership. At AmberPoint, we have focused on building an experience that our customers rave about. My customers always have feedback for the product, both positive and negative. However, there is nothing but praise for our field and customer support staff. Kudos to those teams!
It would behoove you to search the blogosphere (and now twitto-sphere) for your own competitors. Rest assured, you’ll find interesting comments from them aplenty. How you respond to them defines you and your company.
This week we are announcing some truly unique capabilities in the area of Business Transaction Management. Having announced SLA Management and Exception Management for business transactions in the past, we ran into many customer scenarios where proactive detection of problems was next to impossible. Software systems always find a way to surprise you!
That’s why we’re rolling out an end-to-end Transaction Saftey Net™, a rich set of capabilities that help organizations manage the risk of their business transactions. Have a read here.
As I visited each dealer, it was interesting to hear them compare and contrast their cars against the others. The VW folks, who were touting their Diesel cars, said the Prius is all hype and that its fuel savings is overshadowed by its battery issues. The Toyota folks were of the opinion that the Prius is the best selling car in the market, period, and that that anyone who drives anything else is silly to do so. The Mazda folks didn't dare venture into the mileage debate. They positioned around the performance and fun aspect. And so on.
Ultimately, my selection was based on my needs, not the car salesmen’s commentary or any brand positioning. More importantly, my choice took into account the entire sales experience including internet-based price quotes, visits to the dealerships, test-drives and the individuals I dealt with. Too negative a commentary or too pushy an approach puts me on high alert! I like to know that I can trust the person I'm interacting with.
No matter the product, you will always run into salespeople and evangelists who try to vilify their competition. However, it’s good to keep in mind that baseless comments, speculation and obsession with denigrating competitors ultimately say more about their companies and products than it does about the competition they're bashing.
We face these same issues in our market. We have competitors who watch every change on our website, critique it, then turn around and copy the same graphic, marketing message or product terminology they just finished bashing. Tolerating this kind of behavior is one of the costs of leadership. At AmberPoint, we have focused on building an experience that our customers rave about. My customers always have feedback for the product, both positive and negative. However, there is nothing but praise for our field and customer support staff. Kudos to those teams!
It would behoove you to search the blogosphere (and now twitto-sphere) for your own competitors. Rest assured, you’ll find interesting comments from them aplenty. How you respond to them defines you and your company.
This week we are announcing some truly unique capabilities in the area of Business Transaction Management. Having announced SLA Management and Exception Management for business transactions in the past, we ran into many customer scenarios where proactive detection of problems was next to impossible. Software systems always find a way to surprise you!
That’s why we’re rolling out an end-to-end Transaction Saftey Net™, a rich set of capabilities that help organizations manage the risk of their business transactions. Have a read here.
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