MWD on IT-Director.com

On SOA governance: for SOA, read CPOA?

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:43:00 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I was the happy recipient of a review copy of the excellent Todd Biske's SOA Governance book. Todd's Outside the Box blog is one of those rarities where every post is worth... [Read More...]

Are you capable of watching your technical debt?

Bola Rotibi, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:03:00 +0100

Bob McIlree wrote an interesting blog at the start of October about watching the amount of 'technical debt'. The term is one that I had not previously encountered. Ward Cunningham first defined it... [Read More...]

The death of middleware

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:15:00 +0100

I've been spending a fair bit of time this week talking to a journalist I've known for years, Danny Bradbury, for a series of features he's writing on the middleware strategies of some of the big... [Read More...]

Notes on PDC: Windows Azure

Bola Rotibi, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:14:00 +0100

There were always going to be high expectations for Microsoft's 2008 Professional Developer Conference (PDC). This was the first PDC without Bill Gates at the helm, and let's also not forget that... [Read More...]

Interviewing Avaya on Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP)

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:06:00 +0100

The other week I participated in a podcast interview with Avaya's Gordon Loader, discussing Communication-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). This is something that Avaya's been talking about for some... [Read More...]

Software Delivery InFocus podcast - ALM challenges and direction in the real world

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:58:00 +0100

Following the first Software Delivery InFocus podcast which we published in September, October sees Bola Rotibi's second podcast episode, in which she discusses a series of questions focused on the... [Read More...]

Microsoft announces Office Communications Server R2

Angela Ashenden, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:00:00 +0100

Almost 12 months to the day after Microsoft launched its realtime messaging, presence and conferencing server, Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), the company today announced the follow-up... [Read More...]

Notes from a BPM conference

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:04:00 +0100

Last week I spent a couple of days in London, at IRM's 2008 Business Process Management Conference Europe, where I took in most of the sessions and also ran a session myself. I've been meaning to do... [Read More...]

SOA governance and data governance - separate or one in the same?

Neil Macehiter, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:23:00 +0100

Joe McKendrick (once again!) has another post which caught my blogreader today. This time he is pondering the relationship between SOA and data governance:If data governance is inadequate ?... [Read More...]

Hmm indeed Mr McKendrick - that should be "an over-simplistic definition of 'SOA'"

Neil Macehiter, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:26:00 +0100

Joe McKendrick over at ZDNet has been pondering CIO SOA Advisor Nicholas Petreley's definition of SOA:a networked subroutineNo wonder Joe's not sure about it! Nicholas' definition is closer to that... [Read More...]

Ignore the spin: Microsoft's membership of the OMG is good news for all concerned

Bola Rotibi, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 05:16:00 +0100

Tony Baer's one of the analysts who's picked up on Microsoft's recent announcement that it's joining the OMG and backing UML and BPMN. His post is pretty interesting and outlines some of the relevant... [Read More...]

IBM, Business Event Processing, and CEP: behind the bag of spanners

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:30:00 +0100

Earlier this week I attended an IBM press and analyst summit on the topic of Business Event Processing. To coincide with this, the company made some announcements on its BEP leadership, with over... [Read More...]

ECM vendors collaborate on interoperability standard

Angela Ashenden, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:57:00 +0100

Yesterday EMC, IBM, and Microsoft jointly announced Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) - a new specification designed to enable interoperability between content management... [Read More...]

Software AG goes in an interesting direction for SOA governance

Neil Macehiter, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:32:00 +0100

As part of yesterday's release of the latest iteration of its webMethods Insight product Software AG announced an OEM partnership with Progress Software. This announcement adds the Actional runtime... [Read More...]

A new MWD FM podcast series: Software Delivery InFocus

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:43:00 +0100

After an extended hiatus, we're relaunching our podcasting efforts with a planned series of discussions focusing on the challenges and issues associated with software delivery processes and... [Read More...]

Cisco strengthens collaboration portfolio

Angela Ashenden, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:15:00 +0100

Cisco today announced its acquisition (which is expected to close by the end of October) of email and calendaring startup, PostPath, for the princely sum of approximately $215 million. The PostPath... [Read More...]

Businesses aren't machines, and enterprise architecture can't make them so

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:50:00 +0100

Via Service Oriented Enterprise, I recently picked up an Infoworld blog post by SOA journeyman David Linthicum, where he makes a couple of very strange points about SOA and ESBs. It may be, of... [Read More...]

Collaborative mind mapping

Angela Ashenden, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:55:00 +0100

I don't usually blog about individual briefings from vendors, but I've just had a fascinating briefing from Mindjet, a company which has developed an interactive, collaborative mind mapping solution... [Read More...]

IBM's identity management becomes user-centric: HP's identity management exit strategy

Neil Macehiter, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:54:00 +0100

Courtesy of InternetNews on Tuesday I learned that IBM has added support for OpenID, Windows CardSpace and Eclipse's Higgins Identity Framework to its Tivoli Federated Identity Manager (FIM)... [Read More...]

Oracle makes its "enterprise 2.0" play

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:18:00 +0100

Along with an assorted collection of other analysts and journalists, on Friday I sat down for a conversation with Charles Phillips. The invitation came pretty much out of the blue a couple of... [Read More...]

A week of firsts

Bola Rotibi, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:50:00 +0100

You might think having been a senior analyst for 8 years that I'd have seen most things. Well, this has definitely been a week of firsts for me.My first ever JavaOne conference; my first week in... [Read More...]

Which comes first: process or service? Part 2

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:50:00 +0100

The question of how to combine BPM and SOA came up a lot here at TIBCO's TUCON user event - and, a little disappointingly, the standard response seems to typically revolve around reinventing the... [Read More...]

Which comes first: process or service? Part 1

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:55:00 +0100

Over the years I've been helping to run MWD I've been to quite a few events, talked to many enterprise IT folks and talked to many tech vendors, too - and one of the topics that comes up most often... [Read More...]

The Mysterious Oracle

Angela Ashenden, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:33:00 +0100

As part of my research into all things collaboration, not least through my development of our forthcoming continuous advisory service, I have regular briefings with software vendors to find out what... [Read More...]

Linux: innovation platform or commoditising force?

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:39:00 +0100

A few days ago Matt Asay wrote a piece on Linux's use on Wall Street in his Open Road blog. He recounted how one of the MDs from Bank of New York Mellon saw open source as the foundation of choice... [Read More...]

Just like buses ...

Neil Macehiter, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:20:00 +0100

... you're waiting for an identity management acquisition and then along come three at once. This time it's IBM which has acquired 40-person, privately-held Encentuate. If you think that Ecentuate's... [Read More...]

More acquisition activity in the identity space

Neil Macehiter, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:16:00 +0100

Hot on the heels of last week's acquisition of Credentica by Microsoft, Ping Identity announced yesterday that it has acquired the Sxip Access business... [Read More...]

A privacy-enhancing acquisition for Microsoft

Neil Macehiter, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:47:00 +0100

Microsoft has acquired Canadian cryptography specialist Credentica. This news sees Microsoft reverting back to its more traditional approach of acquiring small (Credentica is a team of three)... [Read More...]

Google launches Google Sites

Angela Ashenden, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:31:00 +0100

Google is once again treading on Microsoft toes with the launch of its newest product, Google Sites. The new offering allows users to create and manage their own websites, and is based on the wiki... [Read More...]

The lore of averages

Neil Ward-Dutton, Macehiter Ward-Dutton — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:45:00 +0100

I was chatting to a friend who's a top-notch Java developer over the weekend: we were shooting the breeze about Groovy, Rails, Spring, Hibernate and various other Things That Get People Excited... [Read More...]