ICTY Toronto 2008: Lower Operational Costs and Improving Quality of Service Using Application Virtualization

September 17th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008 1 Comment »

This presentation was subtitled: Accelerate Business agility and cost savings with websphere virtual enterprise.

THis address the question, “How can you minimize the amount of ‘whitespace’ (deadspace) on machines when typical infastructure relys on being able to process peak performance”. Can we instead somehow provision for average performance and leverage more machines when the peak occurs?”

Top Trends for next 3 years “Green IT” (use less resources) and” Virtualization 2.0″( dynamic infastructure based on demand).

Application infastructure virtualization: Create ‘one big appserver’ that can handle demand.

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise is the IBM solution for this issue – Lower TCA, Increase flexibility, Better manage health & performance.

The product does this via service policies, it appears this is configuration done in the websphere administration console-likeuser interface.

Can introduce a concept of Chargeback – Bill each department for application utilization of the application server pool.

Not just for WebSphere, also works for WebSphere CE and Tomcat.

Virtualize the application server AND the hardware on top of each other.

End Notes, Begin Opinion. 

I found it weird that this product was discussed in a one-day Impact Comes To You event. The session with Martin discussed how people need to stop selling SOA as an IT initiative but rather a business value one. The next session we get is how to micromanage your servers, an extremely IT focused presentation.  I did find this session interesting in the quest to get a java JVM to be five 9’s in the real world but it’s not exactly the best topic for a one hour session during a tight one day conference.

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ICTY Toronto 2008: A Smart SOA Approach in Any Economic Climate

September 17th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, Project Zero No Comments »

This session was delivered by Martin Wildberger, IBM VP and Director of the Toronto Software Lab.

This session was attended by around 70 people, a pretty large turnout for one of these all-day events.

Martin asked the crowd if they were from the line of business side or the IT side. I didn’t see a single hand raised for the LOB, so as expected most people in the crowd are interested in SOA from an IT perspective.

There was a slide about comments from Gartner regarding “Don’t postpone SOA…. Reprioritize your road map”

  1. “… [prioritize] projects that will turn an ROI faster”
  2. “…address lower-cost projects sooner”
  3. “Choose SOA projects were reuse of established systems is prevalent”

This is a great heuristic to determine SOA project candidacy and prioritization.

Martin went through a set of slides about the success of SOA at various companies and the capabilities that can be leveraged to increase ROI.

WebSphere sMash was also brought up as an integral product to the story.

Also, this is a slide that I’ve seen so many times, I wish someone would redesign it in a new color:

Avoid the notion of explaining SOA in terms of IT. Explain it in terms of business value, agility.

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IBM Impact comes to you: Toronto

September 17th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008 No Comments »

As I wait for my next contract to start, I was given the opportunity to attend the Toronto version of the Impact Comes to You held at the IBM Toronto Lab (where I used to commute daily when employed by IBM).

My goal today is to blog any interesting points or developments that occur throughout the day.

Today’s agenda:

8:30 AM 	Registration and Coffee
9:00 AM 	Welcome and Introduction
9:15 AM 	Keynote Presentation: A Smart SOA Approach in Any Economic Climate
10:00 AM 	Lower Operational Costs and Improving Quality of Service Using Application Virtualization
11:00 AM 	Refreshment Break
11:15 AM 	IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances
12:15 PM 	Lunch and Demonstrations
1:15 PM 	SOA Success Story
2:00 PM 	Improve Business Agility Through End-To-End Process Visibility
3:00 PM 	Refreshment Break
3:15 PM 	Help IT Executives Make and Execute the Right SOA Governance Decisions
4:15 PM 	Closing Remarks

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Impact 2008: SOA Jam – “Foster an External Community for Practitioners”

April 11th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, Service Oriented Architecture, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News 4 Comments »

I’m going to use this post to record the discussion that generated during the Impact 2008 SOA Jam for my idea about “How IBM can foster an external community”. Now that Impact is over, I’d like to keep a copy of it’s point in time, and also allow any future readers to add comments.

Foster an external community for non-IBM practitioners
Dan Zrobok 10 Apr 2008

Abstract

As a non-IBMer who works within the product stack, I find it next to impossible to get the information that I need to make the products a success. The goal is to have IBM create a vibrant external community that is equivalent to the internal one.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Impact 2008: SOA Jam – “ESB: Too Many Products, Skill Spread too thin”

April 11th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, Service Oriented Architecture, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News, WebSphere Process Server 1 Comment »

I’m going to use this post to record the discussion that generated during the Impact 2008 SOA Jam for my idea about “Too ManyESBs, Skill Spread too thin”. Now that Impact is over, I’d like to keep a copy of it’s point in time, and also allow any future readers to add comments.

ESB: Too many products, Skill spread too thin
Dan Zrobok 10 Apr 2008

Abstract

If you want an ESB you can use: WAS, WPS, WESB, DataPower, Message Broker. Based on my selection, I have to find deeply skilled resources on that specific product. Is IBM spreading the community too thin?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Impact 2008: Final Day – Blogs

April 11th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere News No Comments »

I guess theres generally two days where a lot of activity on a conference will occur: the start and the end. The following is a list of bloggers who have commented on Impact 2008:

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Impact 2008: SOA Jam Day 3

April 10th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News No Comments »

So today is apparently the final day of the SOA Jam at Impact 2008. Overall I saw a few overall themes in the ideas:

  • Ideas on how to engage the business with SOA
  • Tons of Ideas on How to create a “Smart SOA” community
  • Ideas for needed case studies mostly from a generic non-provider viewpoint.

The one I’m most enthusiastic about is creating a community, so it was nice to see the largest proportion of ideas occur around it. I guess the ball is now in IBM’s court to begin the next steps towards resolution. I’d sure like to know (and be involved) in as much as possible but I’m going to assume these things will occur behind closed-confidential doors.

Overall, the SOA Jam turned in 73 ideas with 289 comments. We started off with 22 ideas and 70 comments, then 44 ideas and 146 comments. There was a real explosion of activity yesterday with double the usual 70 comments. I don’t know why IBM decided to end the jam a day early. I’m hoping it’s because there’s some kind of aggregation session they want to do on Friday.

As for my own ideas, “Too Many ESBs” turned in 152 views and 24 comments of it’s own. It broke down to most people agreeing with the premise and I think that ‘neilwd’ summarized the solution the best:

If we can start to build more standardized ways of engaging with technologies that fulfill common functions, that will really help companies find people from broader skill bases.

Along that line, I realized something. IBM has spent a considerable amount of time to embrace open standards on the transport level, data modeling level etc but we’ve never really seen any standard emerge on the user interface side other than the usability. Is that the result of a lack of focus, that the job is too hard to implement or what it would reduce branding opportunities amongst vendors?

Anyway I’m happy with the road this idea took during the Jam. It’s 2nd in most views and 2nd in most comments.

I’m also satisfied with my plight for an external community (8 comments, 72 views). I picked up a few email addresses of people who are also interested in the topic so I’ll try and see what I can do from that avenue. Again, unless theres some IBM buy-in though, it will be extremely difficult.

All-in-all, I feel like the Jam was just starting to gain momentum and was cut short but it remains to be seen when the doors will actually close.

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Impact 2008: Web 2.0 Social Networking Missing In Action

April 10th, 2008 dan Posted in Best Of DZ.com, Impact 2008, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News 2 Comments »

Over a twitter yesterday, James Governor lamented about the lack of official web 2.0 happenings a conference where we’re all talking about mash-ups, integrating communities and mass enablement. IBM’s youTube Channel has a single 1 minute video from day one, theres a twitter account created of the name “Impact2008“* which has no activity. Heck, even IBM’s official blog hasn’t been updated past day one.

(*unknown who it was created by, but as far as I know there is no official twitter).

It would have been cool to say, allow participants to ask questions in keynote Q&A over twitter as well as the microphone. Maybe presenters could offer informal times to talk to eager listeners once the session is over. How about if IBM aggregated the Impact ‘blogosphere’ and gave us a single place to look for what people are saying about the conference? What if I’d like to try and track down Steve Mills for a two minute interview. Where is he? There’s six thousand people walking around. If I want any of those things, it’s completely dependent on my own social network to make it happen. If I don’t happen to have a person in my list then it’s left to fate and circumstance if we’ll ever meet. Once again, we need IBM to take the first steps to make this happen. It’s great that I now follow the guys from RedMonk and various people who tagged #impact2008, but it’s still just the voices of the people ‘in the dark’ (non-IBM). Without IBM, we can talk all we want about changes that are needed but there’s no buy in from the sole required enabler. The idea that IBM can show up at predetermined times on the calendar, fire-hose the community with information and then disappear are long dead.

It seems like the conference itself is actually an accurate reflection of the state of the SOA community as a whole. You’ve got a large mass of people who would do a great job collaborating with each other and networking, but no catalyst to make it happen. Instead of being energized as part of a broader community, you get isolated and bored. I think I see that effect in how the number of articles/twitters/blogs about Impact 2008 has dropped off significantly from the first day to the third. Even the #impact2008 tag has one message on it over the last 13 hours.

In the SOA Jam, about 80% of the ideas relate to social networks and how to build communities but we’re already failing on a very small scale with people in the same physical location! How can we expect to snap our fingers and create a vibrant self-sustaining community on the large if we can’t do it on the small?

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Impact 2008: YouTube Participation

April 10th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere News No Comments »

Looks like I kind of missed one of the big boys of the internet for coverage of Impact 2008. YouTube actually has a few videos posted:

  1. If you like your summaries in ’80s montage’ format, “IBM Impact 2008 Conference – Day 1 Highlights SOA” is the video for you. It’s complete with generic background music and no voice-overs at all.
  2. YouTube user ‘hallsoa‘ is apparently the IBM channel for Impact 2008, but there hasn’t been any update since Day 1.
  3. Go figure there’s not much video on anything being said, but there’s lots on the B-52’s from lzzrdboy.
  4. If comedy is more your thing (although the B-52’s pretending to be relevant today is extremely funny) you can check out Quantum27’s three videos from the ‘Who’s Line Is It Anyway?” skits. Video 1, Video 2, Video 3 (w/Robert Leblanc).
  5. Congratulations to Juris Kaža for actually providing original video content by interviewing both Steve Mills (Software Group Senior VP) and Jason McGee (Project Zero). You can follow his videos on youtube via user name Lettlander.
  6. If you are just pro-IBM propaganda, you can check out the overall IBM YouTube Channel ‘IBMtveditor

Not exactly a ton of content, but given video editing is generally time consuming, I can let it slide I guess.

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Steve Mills Responds to My SOA Jam Idea about ESB

April 9th, 2008 dan Posted in Dan Zrobok, Impact 2008, WebSphere Community 1 Comment »

Well I must say I was taken aback when I saw that that my SOA Jam ESB question was responded to by Steve Mills:

Steve Mills is a senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. In this capacity he is responsible for directing the development, marketing, sales and support of IBM’s software portfolio. Mr. Mills is a member of IBM’s Operating Team, Performance Team, Values & Integration Team and the Asian Task Force.

It’s not everyday that you get someone at Steve’s level to respond to something you say. Of course, I’ll be right back in there with my rebuttal but this definitely made my day.

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Impact 2008: Impressions of Day 2

April 9th, 2008 dan Posted in Design Decisions, Impact 2008, Project Zero, WebSphere Process Server No Comments »

Day two is in the bag, the B52’s are B-50-done. Perficient and MTS Allstream gave a session about SOA Patterns that I thought was today but was actually yesterday. Oops. Here’s the abstract if you have a time machine:

TSP-2518 – Effectively selecting integration patterns
Brent Legris, Perficient, Inc., Senior Technical Architect, Olivera Zatezalo, MTS Allstream Inc., Sr Manager, Integration, BT&IT

The foundation of knowledge that rests beneath service oriented architecture (SOA) encompasses a myriad of integration patterns not only messaging, enterprise service bus and orchestration, but shared databases, ETL, operational data stores, and others. Effectively selecting between integration patterns is a critical capability to develop as your SOA evolves, in order to avoid running around with a hammer thinking everything is a nail. This session interactively develops various integration scenarios, discussing pattern alternatives and their effective implementation. We will discuss the tradeoffs of different approaches, but close with guidelines that can be consistently followed to exploit the capabilities of an enterprise infrastructure.

Level: Intermediate

What I like about this presentation is that it’s about patterns and decisions and trade-offs, but primarily focuses on WebSphere Integration Developer and WebSphere Process Server. I like it when patterns come ‘out from the mist’ and you actually see them implemented in a system. I’m a developer at heart. Hopefully the presentation slides will be made available on the Impact site.

The other thing I heard a lot about was WebSphere sMash the IBM commercialized, supported version of Project Zero.

As for other impressions of Day 2, I don’t really have any. It seemed like a normal day at a conference in Vegas to me.

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Impact 2008: Free Certification Testing

April 9th, 2008 dan Posted in Certification, Impact 2008 No Comments »

If you are attending Impact 2008, don’t forget that you are allowed to write three IBM certification tests for free this week!

I’m a big fan of free, so I always max out my conference allotment. If you need some suggestions for tests, check out my previous entries about my impressions having written SOA Solution Designer, WebSphere Integration Developer and WebSphere Process Server.

I firmly believe that anybody attending this conference can pass the 664 and 667 tests on SOA. 664 titled SOA Fundamentals is something that most people will pass implicitly if they half-listened to any of the speakers this week. 667 titled Architectural Design of SOA Solutions is the 2007 revisement to 665 which I passed with no studying, again if you’ve actually implemented anything to do with SOA you should pass.

Happy Certing!

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Impact 2008: Impressions of Day 2 – SOA Jam

April 9th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News No Comments »

It’s now day two of SOA Jam and it’s has been running for about 48 hours now. While the overall rate remains the same as yesterday, it feels like there’s more going on in the Jam.

As of today, we have 44 ideas and 146 comments. It look like the Jam will produce about 20 ideas and 70 comments a day. I still think this number is low for a conference with attendance this large. I wonder if IBM could have done a better job quantifying exactly what they are going to do with the ideas once the 72 hours are complete.

Also ThinkPlace itself isn’t exactly easy to understand. We have ideas in the first “Peer Review” stage. I don’t understand what exactly is required for someone to claim themselves as a catalyst in order to get to to stage 2 “Accepted by a Catalyst”. It’s even more unclear what the elusive stage 3 is as no ideas have made it that far. It’s great that IBM wants to solicit ideas from the field, it’s bad if they’re just shuffled into a database to die.

As for my own ideas, the momentum that they generated originally has fallen off. The external community idea has 6 comments, 58 views (top 15% in views) and has been accepted by a catalyst. What I’m supposed to do with it now is unknown. I’d love to have the ability to work with IBM and see what can/can’t be done in this space and I plan on maintaining contact with the catalysts (from IBM and Wells Fargo), but I’m uncertain of what real change will be brought.

The “Too many ESB product” idea originally began as “No really, theres too many ESBs, simplify them down to one” but as the comments came in I realized that it’s not the runtimes that need to be ‘immediately’ normalized but rather the tools. There’s little logical reason why mapping messages is a different tooling construct for all five products. This idea is currently languishing on page 2 with 9 comments but 90 views (2nd or 3rd most views in the Jam). But it’s still stuck in the “Peer Review” state with no catalyst. This issue isn’t quite something a non-IBMer can pick up and run with.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, head over to the Impact 2008 SOA Jam and go vote for my ideas participate in the community. The Jam ends Thursday at 10am pacific.

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Impact 2008: My impressions of Day One – Blogs & Twitter

April 8th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, WebSphere Community No Comments »

I like Twitter for it’s honesty and humor, and I have enjoyed reading all the blogs that mention IBM Impact 2008. One thing that is a little surprising to me is that the universe of blogs on the topic is pretty low. My list of links includes about 6-8 people that I’ve been able to track down. 6000 attendees and not that many open opinions to read. What has been written, though, is very well done. It’s refreshing to be part of a community that critically thinks and decomposes the noise from the signal.

I’m a little too busy to go back and comment on the specifics of the postings, but I look forward to hear what Day 2 had to offer.

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Impact 2008: My impressions of Day One – SOA Jam

April 8th, 2008 dan Posted in Impact 2008, Reviews, WebSphere Community, WebSphere News No Comments »

Seeing how I’m not at Impact 2008, my impressions are going to be more geared towards what I see being said in the blogs, the twitter stream and the participation in the SOA Jam.

My first impression comes from the SOA Jam, where I think I’ve posted two pretty good ideas. The first being that we desperately need IBM to foster an external community. The other that the ESB products overlap too much, reducing the pool of skilled applicants. IBM says that 6000 people are in attendance for this conference, yet the total number of entries after day one of the Jam is 22 with 70 comments. That means that we’re jamming with 0.3% idea generation and 1.1% commenting participation rates (assuming no duplicates). I find this to be very low for a Jam that ends Thursday morning. It will be interesting to see what happens the rest of the week with the numbers. I’m not sure if there is any actual active promotion of the jam going on, or participants just don’t care.

As for my contributions, they seem to be progressing at an acceptable rate. I’ve got five comments about the external community where most are in agreement and three on the ESB. The external community is the one that I hope sinks in and takes hold. It’s low hanging fruit that IBM can leverage, whereas modifying the architecture for various products is more of a dream that I’m hoping finds roost in the head of someone who matters.

On the ESB side, I’m getting kind of what I expected: some agreement some disagreement. The disagreements usually come when someone makes the point that they are all targeted to different users. I say that at a high level, they all do the same thing. I accept that the runtimes are unique and will likely never change. That doesn’t preclude changing the tooling to be uniform.

I’m a developer, I’m already implementing systems (in WID) in an abstract way with boxes that represent functionality and lines that represent relationship. Why can’t what runtime I choose to deploy my solution to be abstracted as well?

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