David Chappell Blog

Today is the day we officially launch Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Fusion Middleware 11gR1 is the result of a herculean effort that is 3+ years in the making.

The major areas of investment have been –
- The completion of the integration between Oracle and BEA products into unified suites. This matches to the month the schedule that we had committed to publicly when announcing the BEA Strategy last June. This continues our excellent track record of buying best-of-breed software and integrating it together into a common environment.
- Improving the efficiency of modern data centers by extending the capabilities of Application Grids. We now take advantage of new hardware and software advancements such as multi-core processors, 64-bit addressable memory, RAM-based storage, 10GB Ethernet systems, and virtualization to allow large sets of compute capacity and memory to be pooled together into virtualized grids or “clouds” that are lower cost, easier to manage with more flexible capacity to respond to business needs.
- Providing new Identity Management and Security technology to consolidate how users, their identities, and entitlements are managed, audited, and controlled to lower costs and improve security on Application Grids.
- A unified and declarative toolset with which Business Users and developers can work together to develop Business Applications & capture the behavior of the applications in metadata.
- A unified Business Process Platform with which to orchestrate humans, applications, and information into processes that can be monitored and optimized in real time, and providing a common Enterprise Portal through which people can find the Enterprise resources they need, to share them with others through personal productivity and social computing tools

Even though we are integrated into a set of suites, we are also still committed to being hot-pluggable with other technologies. We continue to support multivendor environments, and have extended our open standards support with better support for WS-*; SCA, New Identity Management standards; WSRP 2.0 Support; BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and BPEL4People to name a few. In addition we expand our definition of hot-pluggable to now exploit new IT infrastructure trends that are mainstreaming by integrating FMW with these new technologies. For example we have created a new facility to build and deploy virtual appliances allowing organization to exploit Virtualization more effectively.

For more information, go here
Cheers,
Dave

Evening Networking Event event in just 2 days!

Hi Folks,
This Thursday night, 23-Jul-2009 5:30 PM EDT - 9:00 PM EDT, I'll be participating in a panel discussion on the subject of the viability of selling SOA to the business. Other esteemed panelists include Anne Thomas Manes, Dana Gardner, Brenda Michaelson, Sandy Rogers, and of course the Zapthink Boys Ron and Jason. If you're in the Boston area I hope to see you there. Here's the registration link . Hint, use the secret code "ZAPDISC" to get a 50% discount on the event.

Details below:

ZapForum Boston: "SOA: The Night of the Living Dead" Evening Networking Event
23-Jul-2009 5:30 PM EDT - 9:00 PM EDT
M.J. O'Connor's Irish Pub
27 Columbus Avenue
Boston, MA

Dave

Customer Case Study to be featured at Burton Group Catalyst Conference next week.

I have been working with Carl Dumont, the CTO of Wellpoint, for some time now on integrating Application Grid into Wellpoint’s SOA projects. Next week, at Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference in San Diego, I will co-present with Carl on two exciting projects that both involve using Oracle Application Grid in a SOA environment to cache results from service calls to dramatically reduce load on backend systems.

We will present a Cost Benefit Analysis and PoC findings that show 1) Improving response times, reducing down time, and reducing customer abrasion for customer facing applications, and 2) Saving $MMillions in MIPS charge by offloading mainframe usage by integrating caching of results from mainframe service calls in the SOA layer.

Here is the title and abstract for the talk -

Cost-Benefit Analysis: Using SOA and Application Grid to both enhance performance and availability of customer facing applications and reduce mainframe usage charges

The cost of hosting applications on mainframes can run in millions per year. How much of that is allocated on excess capacity and for peak loads and otherwise goes unused? Even for non-mainframe applications, how do you measure the cost of system downtime to your business? What is your customer abrasion factor for self-service apps that are slow to respond and sometimes fail? How can SOA help? SOA, when combined with new advancements in distributed caching and application grid technology can dramatically improve response times for sluggish applications, and also dramatically reduce the cost of mainframe MIPS. How do you explain this to the business?

This session, presented by a CTO who wrestles with these issues every day, will discuss a Cost/Benefit Analysis and Proof of Concept that takes us through 2 use cases: 1) Measuring the "customer abrasion factor" resulting from unresponsive self-service applications, and using SOA and Application Grid technology to dramatically improve customer satisfaction. 2) Quantifying the cost of excess capacity for mainframe hosted applications, and Using SOA and Application Grid to dramatically reduce mainframe MIPS usage.

We hope to see you there. If you can’t make it drop me a line and I can arrange to come and talk to you and your co-workers about it.
Dave

Hi all,
I recently took a cue from Mike Piech, who has been doing some video white board sessions, and decided to do some of my own that discuss how customers are using SOA and Application Grid together to increase customer satisfaction, improve response times for customer facing applications, reduce load on backend systems, and generally build apps that scale with predictable latency. A general introduction on the subject is found here ,
And a discussion of how customers are using the “service result cache” pattern reduce load on backend systems can be found here –

Enjoy,
Dave