This article looks at the basic interoperability requirements when communicating with the Cloud, and in particular at techniques and standards used to express and enforce wire-level contracts between communicating parties, as these parties are increasingly also contracting parties in a...

This article provides a step-by-step approach to cloning the DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB) across platforms and describes the usage of DB2 utilities that help to accomplish the task. There is no direct support in DB2 UDB for cross-platform backup and restore operations. It means one...

If you’ve followed the arc of the SOA revolution, you might have expected the current moment to be one of great fanfare and proclamations of success. SOA (was supposed to have) arrived! SOA (was supposed to be) an accepted standard for software development and enterprise architecture. ...

Distribution and communication between applications and services is a central concept in modern application architectures. In order to profit from distribution you have to keep some basic principles in mind – otherwise you can easily run into performance and scalability problems. Durin...

While there are many attempts to fix the badly broken IT architectures within our enterprises, most ‘solutions’ just put another technology layer on top of the existing technologies in hopes that the technology will somehow fix the issues. As you may have guessed, it just makes things ...

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 everyon...

Mauritius may soon emerge as the next ecologically aware data center of choice for companies from the United States to Australia, due to its progressive approach to technological investment and overall national stability. Using an innovative Sea Water Air Conditioning (SWAC) system pum...

The RESTful architectural style [1], with its URL addressable, resource oriented approach allows you to define Web services which can have multiple runtime representation in a variety of different media types. You define a Web resource, encapsulating the desired functionality within a...

"Virtualizing hardware appliances is pretty tough, it's pretty much impossible," says Intel’s Blake Dournaee in this informative and forward-looking webinar currently screening on SYS-CON.TV. Co-presenting with Oracle’s Vikas Jain, the webinar discusses three game-changing innovations....

With heightened pressure on today’s businesses from the current global economic woes, figuring out what to do next on many business and technology decision-making levels, and making sure they are the right moves, can make or break your business. Take a moment to consider the following ...

Have you noticed how people that are neck deep in complexity almost always ask for a standardized solution? And they supposedly do this to regain oversight.

And in reverse; have you noticed how people that have everything neatly packed in small modular boxes almost always as...

The Gartner Hype cycle research shows Cloud Computing as being on the peak of expectations… the very top of the hype bubble roller coaster. Vendors are looking for something to sell, and the consolidation of the data center, reducing operational cost and economy of scale are as conv...

Justifying the extra investment for developing a single-purpose service – a service expected to solve only one large business problem - instead of putting the single-purpose logic inside a non-service-oriented application can be challenging. Reuse, the most popular motivation for creat...

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) that have previously considered virtualization in the cloud but decided that it is too expensive or simply not viable should think again. Virtualization and cloud computing enables SMBs to green their operations and build IT infrastructures that are a...

While there’s certainly no shortage of opinions on the future of SOA, the reality is that SOA is very much alive. The core principles of what SOA can do in terms of cost savings, increased productivity, and the virtual elimination of information and application silos won’t go away. How...

ESB products emerged around 2002 from message-oriented middleware (MOM). Faced with market domination by IBM, MOM vendors were the first to jumpstart the ESB concept with the aim of developing a unique selling proposition. They added Web service and EAI capabilities on top of existing ...

One of the main concerns among IT architects planning an implementation of an enterprise data virtualization layer in their service-oriented architecture (SOA) or overall information system is the performance of the participating data services. Performance becomes particularly importan...

SOA C-level skeptics come in all shapes and sizes. They can be in any industry or any government agency. They can be close friends who “really like you” and no matter what, will invite you to their backyard barbeques. However, despite their differences or that fact that they may be you...

The "reset economy" has moved the business and operations maturity process of IT from "nice to have" to "must have," if costs are going to be cut without undermining operational integrity.

Businesses tend to focus their architecture on efficiency instead of agility. This clear distinction between optimising for the known versus optimising for the unknown inherently counteracts on businesses in their effort to seize any of the new opportunities that arises around them. T...

Look in the network closet in any good-sized company today and you’ll find a wide assortment of network gear: firewalls, switches, gateways, routers, hubs, bridges, the list goes on and on. Each of these devices essentially either directs or secures the packets that form the automobile...

Want to know what gets my blood pressure up? It’s when there’s both a huge shift in thinking around how we should do computing, namely cloud computing, and at the same time, there’s a bunch of information out there that causes confusion. As cloud computing hype spikes to a frenzy, so d...

Reducing the cost of IT management is one of the primary pressures for most organizations. One of the most common ways to reduce such costs is to enable the reuse of applications that developers have already created and configured for the enterprise. In the past decade, especially in t...

Cloud computing is slowly gaining credibility and traction in the enterprise world. As giants such as Google and Amazon productize their massive cloud infrastructures, moving enterprise applications to the public cloud seems a more realistic possibility. The advantages of an enterprise...

We can visualize resource starvation using an elaborate rendition of the Dining Philosophers Problem. This classic metaphor of resource allocation among processes was first introduced in 1971 by Edsger Dijkstra in his paper “Hierarchical Ordering of Sequential Processes.” It’s been a m...

Many enterprises are working with service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives using a variety of approaches. Regardless of the specific approaches undertaken, the intent is to build services and business processes for the organization to realize the benefits of SOA. However, you ne...

Market conditions are in a constant state of flux. The economy is, well, the economy. The regulatory environment shifts based on the latest business scandal and which political party holds sway. Plus, there is always a new management strategy to solve world hunger or something. As user...

System architects and engineering teams are designing increasingly complex embedded systems in order to satisfy their customers’ stringent functionality and performance requirements. In addition, within tactical systems, it’s not uncommon to require deterministic real-time behavior whi...

In today’s economy, an enterprise must have strong financial motives for transitioning to SOA. SOA’s superior technical capabilities are a strong motive for information technology professionals to make that transition. However, enterprise stakeholders are motivated by solid investment ...

In the enterprise IT environment today, modern middleware technologies make it easier to expose existing or new business applications as sets of services. However, with the mashup of cloud-based services and enterprise data center services, the visibility of how a service created today...

This article explains how an Open Source SOA Roadmap can use a typical Web application project’s funding as the basis for a successful SOA transition effort. It is the first of three articles that explains how open source technologies and techniques can be leveraged to successfully del...

Online commerce is no longer just for consumer products, but also for direct and indirect goods and services. As a result, new demands are placed on classic customer relationship management (CRM) applications. While most have successfully automated customer-facing interactions (such as...

The value of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the concept of agility, or the ability to limit risk by managing change. Today, many enterprises are fighting to make this a reality, yet few approach SOA using the right methodologies and technology, and most have yet to define the r...

According to Moore’s Law, processing speed and storage capacity have been doubling about every two years since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. Yet it seems that our propensity for building larger more complex software systems that anticipate these improvements inevitab...

As consumers we are accustomed to the end-user experience of the Internet. With HTTP and XML, you don’t need to have a specific application on your computer to make use of external data – you can just open a browser window and do a search or visit a particular Web site to find the info...

It’s always good to get an idea of the big picture before diving into the details of any technology-centric topic. For this reason, we’ll take the time to briefly mention the overarching goals and benefits associated with service-oriented computing as they relate to Web Service contrac...

When Enterprise Architecture is able to prove that it can bridge the business vision to IT’s tactical operations, its function will no longer be Hype and EA staff members will no longer need to Hope they won’t be cut. Enterprise Architecture will become an organization without which th...

The Java Community Process requires the development of not only technical specifications, but also Reference Implementations (which prove that specs can be implemented) and conformance test suites (Technology Compatibility Kits or TCKs), which are used to verify that implementations co...

Recently industry analysts, press, and bloggers have been writing about the state of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and whether it’s “dead” or in the “trough of disillusionment." These discussions have been fueled by surveys that suggest a decline in the number of organizations co...

Whenever IT professionals discuss the benefits of SOA – full utilization of IT resources, reduced infrastructure costs, and the agility to deliver new services quickly – they usually issue a caveat. They warn potential adopters of the inherent complexity of SOA, and point out that unle...