Commentary

The Cloud Transition: What Does It Mean For You?

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EDT

We are standing on the threshold of a new transition in information technology and communications; a radical departure from current practice that promises to bring us new levels of efficiency at a vastly reduced cost. Cloud computing is full of potential, bursting with opportunity and within our grasp. But, remember, that clouds always appear to be within our grasp and bursting clouds promise only one thing: rain!

Why SOA Needs Cloud Computing - Part 1

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:30:00 EDT

It’s Thursday morning, you’re the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, and you just called your executives into the conference room for the exciting news. The board of directors has approved the acquisition of a key competitor, and you’re looking for a call-to-action to get everyone planning for the next steps.

Perhaps SOA is More Strategy Than Architecture

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:00:00 EDT

On Thursday, September 10th, 2009, I moderated a panel at the 1105 Group’s Enterprise Architecture Conference in Washington, DC entitled, “SOA Goes Mainstream – An Industry and Government Roadmap.” On the panel we had two Federal government agency representatives and two industry representatives, with one of the industry representatives providing a FedEx case study as the basis for their SOA experiences.

Cloud Computing Adoption - Part 1 of 5

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:45:00 EDT

Cloud computing is becoming a ubiquitous concept. It has mass-market implications for the technology industry, and it is advancing at speeds rarely seen with any major technological evolution. As a business leader, do you know why cloud computing is important to you? What parts of your business should you be migrating to the cloud? Do you know what you don't know about cloud computing?

Announcing the Federal Technology Events Calender

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:15:00 EDT

If your focus is on Federal IT you have no doubt long realized there are an incredible number of conferences and events in this domain. As an aid to long range planning I’ve built a public calendar titled the Federal Technology Events Calendar. This calendar uses Google Calendar technologies so it is fast and [...] Related posts:

The SOA Marketing Paradox and the Wizard of Oz

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:15:00 EDT

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) presents a challenge to software marketing people like none other in recent history. On the one hand, SOA has been the top enterprise software bandwagon to jump on for the last four years or so, but on the other hand, many vendors have struggled to tell the proper SOA story for their products in a way that leads to increased sales and happy customers. The reason SOA presents such a formidable challenge is at once both subtle and obvious. After all, SOA is architecture -- it is a set of best practices enterprises follow to organize their IT resources to meet the needs of the business. SOA, however, is not, and never will be, a set of product features. And therein lies the rub. How do you position your product as a SOA product when SOA consists of best practices, not product features?

Oracle Has Made a Big Commitment to Java

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:45:00 EDT

Today, Chuck Phillips, president of Oracle, said that Oracle was committed to provide “A Single Stack of Technology to Simplify Enterprise IT”. In order for a “Single Stack” to successfully simplify IT, Enterprise Software practitioners must commit their entire Enterprise Architecture to a single vendor.

Oracle 11g Fusion Middleware LiveBlogging and News Analysis

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:30:00 EDT

So what does this say about Oracle's strategy for forming SNORKEL, the Sun acquisition? Well, at the risk of reductio ad absurdum, having bought BEA and Sun, Larry Ellison sees Java as the new SQL

WebSphere vs WebLogic: IBM and BEA Spar Over SPEC Results

Tue, 16 May 2006 13:30:00 EDT

Benchmarks can mean whatever you want them to mean, it has always seemed. Although useful as a rough guide to performance, and sometimes price/performance, technology companies are famous for interpreting complex benchmark results as victories over their competition and them employing visual aids such as planes, snails, and automobiles to demonstrate their point.

What's Wrong with Web Applications

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Criticizing something as wildly successful as the World Wide Web seems a bit radical and potentially unpopular. There is no doubt that Tim Berners-Lee's elegantly simple invention enabled an unprecedented revolution in the way computers are used and by whom.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Cameron Purdy, Tangosol

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio interviews Cameron Purdy, president of Tangosol, about Coherence, which handles clustered caching and distributed computing.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Eric Newcomer, CTO of IONA

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio interviews Eric Newcomer, CTO of IONA, about IONA's middleware solutions.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Mark Potts, HP

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio interviewed Mark Potts, HP's CTO of adaptive management, about their adaptive enterprise strategy and how HP is integrating its products with BEA's WebLogic Platform.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Brad Micklea, Quest

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio spoke to Brad Micklea, product manager of Quest's APM Suite for J2EE, about the new release.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Jeff Sposetti, Compoze Software

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio interviewed Jeff Sposetti, CEO of Compoze Software, about groupware and portal environments.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Lewis Cirne, Wily Technology

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio talked to Lewis Cirne, founder and CTO of Wily Technology, about application performance management and Wily's release of their new Wily Portal Manager.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Chris Cummings, Interwoven

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio chatted with Chris Cummings, Interwoven's vice president of marketing, about enterprise content management software, WorkSite MP.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Matt Link, H&W Computer Systems

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio talked to Matt link, an account executive with H&W, about their enterprise software solutions.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Andrew Herrgott, Attachmate

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio interviewed Andrew Herrgott, product manager at Attachmate, about SOA and data centers.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Brian Murphy, PANACYA

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio spoke to Brian Murphy, vice president of sales and marketing at PANACYA, about next-generation systems management.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Greg Dierickse, Documentum

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio talked to Greg Dierickse, senior product marketing manager at Documentum, about enterprise content management.

SYS-CON Radio talks to John Baisch, senior product manager, H&W

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio talks to John Baisch, senior product manager at H&W, about their enterprise software solutions.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Bob Lee, Cyanea

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio spoke to Bob Lee, Cyanea's vice president of product management, about Cyanea/One and application performance management.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Al Campa, Panscopic

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio interviewed Al Campa, founder and executive vice president of Panscopic, about their embedded reporting engine and how it works with WebLogic.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Jim McQuaid, NetIQ

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Radio chatted with Jim McQuaid, product manager for NetIQ, about their AppManager platform suite, which includes a WebLogic module.

Web Services Security Progress Report

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 00:00:00 EST

For the past several years there has been widespread agreement that the adoption of Web services for production applications will be limited, particularly for B2B transactions, until standardized security mechanisms, designed specifically for Web services, become available. While some applications can be adequately protected using the familiar SSL and TLS security protocols, their limitations make them unsatisfactory for many others.

Data Center Automation

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 00:00:00 EST

Automation is coming to a data center near you. It promises to cut costs, speed up deployment, ease problem diagnostics, and protect your applications against man-made and natural disasters.

What's WS-I Up To?

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 09:06:40 EDT

Eighteen months ago, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, and a number of other companies who have invested in the future of Web services got together and formed WS-I, the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization.

Getting a Handle on Rogue Transactions and Execute Threads

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 13:59:56 EDT

Many production J2EE applications suffer from rogue transactions. A rogue transaction is a particular use case or click-through in the application that results in enormous resource consumption or unusually high response times when compared with its peers.

Transactional Web Services

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 00:00:00 EDT

What are ACID transactions? How do they change to work with Web services? And how do the ACID guarantees work when you must use compensating actions?

Improving Performance, Avoiding Hung Threads, and Keeping It Simple

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 13:17:16 EDT

If your application is experiencing serious performance problems, I recommend that you perform a thorough analysis to determine the root cause.

The Language, the Server, and the JVM

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 13:06:37 EDT

If you were to trace the origins of the excitement about Java, you might go back to May of 1995 when Sun first announced Java at SunWorld '95. The sexiest part of the show was HotJava, a browser written entirely in Java and capable of downloading smart content to the desktop.

Application Performance Best Practices

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 00:00:00 EDT

Q. With respect to logging, how much of a good thing is too much of a good thing? A. Logging is a powerful application tool that, in my opinion, has been under-utilized.

The Race to Create Standards

Tue, 27 May 2003 00:00:00 EDT

The number of Web service business process (BP) specifications trying to make their way to standards status makes it difficult to tell who is doing what, especially given that many efforts are redundant.

Keeping Memory Leaks and Stalled Threads in Check

Tue, 27 May 2003 00:00:00 EDT

There are several different categories of memory-related problems that I've seen in the field. The most common of these is the memory leak. A Java memory leak is the result of objects remaining referenced after an application has completely finished using them. This tends to happen when an object that has a long lifespan within your application holds references to other objects with short lifespans.

Benchmarking, Tuning, and Manageability

Tue, 22 Apr 2003 00:00:00 EDT

This month, I'll look at benchmarking and tuning your applications, and how to make your Java runtime more manageable. And, I offer some advice on how your developers can keep their focus on development work.

Stay Up and Running

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 00:00:00 EST

Everywhere I go developers, operations people, and IT executives ask me how best to keep their mission-critical applications up and running at peak performance. To address these concerns, WebLogic Developer's Journal is introducing a new column to answer questions from real WebLogic users like you on a range of Java application management topics.

Simplifying Infrastructure Software

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 00:00:00 EST

Adaptive computing, self-healing systems, Grid and on-demand computing, autonomic computing.... Vendors from all sides are throwing buzzwords around, a new one every day or so it seems. This month we'll try to make sense of it all by looking at what is here today, what will be here tomorrow, and what is mere science fiction. More important, we'll examine how these new ideas impact your ability to develop and deploy applications.

Confronting Complexity in a Cost-Sensitive World

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 00:00:00 EST

One of the most enjoyable parts of my job is traveling around the world and talking to CIOs about the many pressing challenges of managing today's heterogeneous IT infrastructure. It's clear to me that in today's difficult economy, it is not that CIOs are 'not spending' money. They're just spending the money that they have more wisely.

IT's Challenges for Performance Management

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 00:00:00 EST

The explosion of Web services has spawned significant new challenges for IT and the technologies they use. With the infrastructure requirements for WebLogic applications growing more complex, the addition of Web services suddenly expands the management focus to systems and applications residing outside of IT's control.