By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 21st July 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

My focus is on storage and infrastructure management so it is unusual for me to review new network-based equipment. What interests me about the ONStor Cougar announcement last week is how it might impact enterprise storage management.

ONStor's Cougar is a NAS gateway storage solution; primarily it doubles (and more) the capacity and throughput of its own Bobcat predecessor. As with the Bobcat, Cougar units can be sold purely to form a clustered NAS gateway fronting other companies' storage arrays, or with its own storage arrays attached. ONStor's gateways already front storage arrays from most vendors, the favourites being Nexsan, Engenio and Hitachi.

A gateway's performance is crucial. It can be a bottleneck to overall storage throughput but Cougar can cope with a huge 3MB/s (double that of Bobcat). Its heterogeneity to handle any array or protocol means, from a management perspective, that the overall network is largely unaffected even if the storage arrays behind the gateway are constantly being swapped out for more capacity.

Looking at raw storage capacity, both Bobcat and Cougar can start with a mere 2GB then expand incrementally—Bobcat to 1PB but Cougar on up to 4PB. In market terms, these capacity and throughput performance figures mean Cougar has broken loose from ONStor's mid-range roots into enterprise-level capacity scalability—to attack the likes of long-time suppliers such as Network Appliance (NetApp) and EMC.

The way the raw performance figures are achieved is interesting, at least to the techies. The clustered NAS filer uses a 64-bit pipelined architecture with 2xQuad MIPS processors plus the operating systems (achieving a maximum of 18 cores per system) with 8Gb/s Ethernet or 8x4Gb/s fibre channel ports and a TCP offload built in. Memory is currently 12 or 16GB (expandable to 32GB in future). As you would expect, there is full hot-swap redundancy built in—and all this in a compact 2U chassis.

What this means in practice is 840 MB/s sequential read gateway performance (basically the 8Gb/E line rate) and a still outstanding 700 MB/s sequential write (array-limited)—benchmarked to 101,000 SpecSFS operations per filer. The company claims this means it achieves 1.5–2 times the price-performance of all competitors and with linear performance scaling.

Other features include PCI Express (native QLogic or Connectix) and the ability to include data de-duplication, encryption and compression (all of which are becoming standard requirements if used in a back-up and archiving environment at least).

But what may also help turn the heads of enterprises is the surprisingly low energy consumption—300W for the 2U unit—and space-saving. ONStor says Cougar achieves 4x the space and 3x power and cooling savings for the same data capacity; the latter is partly achieved through using MIPS processors which have evolved to achieve a lean, efficient pipeline that uses less than half the power of an x86.

All of this needs to be set in the context of rocketing data storage needs—and what that means for IT management. A first thumbs up is that I see little reason for a Cougar NAS gateway to upset existing management procedures; yet it could well provide an immediate fix to storage throughput problems affecting SLAs. A by-product may be that faster data streaming applications can be handled for the first time in some businesses.

There is also a good green (as well as cost) message; wow, the world's first green Cougar! The NAS gateway with storage could immediately address limitations in a data centre with space, power usage, heat dissipation and so on—and reduce ongoing running costs. This can be taken further by the small incremental storage expansion capability; this can keep unused capacity to a minimum (without even deploying virtualisation or thin provisioning), again minimising power and space problems.

ONStor means business as it sees enterprises engaged in rapid globalisation as being prime targets. The company told me it was seeing customers adopting the largest clusters they could get, partly to get five 9s availability; it has one customer with 28 Bobcats.

Taken together these factors do provide a positive management message—and I will be watching with interest to see how the storage vendor "big boys" react.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Peter Williams (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 18th July 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

In my research on the RFID middleware market, I came across a number of vendors that were new to me. In a series of articles, I will provide a short overview of these products. The last of these is Siemens, A&D Division.

Siemens were founded in 1847 and therefore are the oldest company providing RFID middleware. Their headquarters are in Nuremberg, Germany and have offices all around the world. There are no partnerships with other hardware vendors; the solution is very much to work with their own hardware products. The major technical partnership is with Microsoft; the Windows platform forms the basis for much of the Siemens software products. Siemens have a number of implementation partners who tend to be regional.

Simantic RF consists of the following components:

• Tags - Moby and Simantic tags
• Fixed and handheld readers
• Antennas
• Interfaces for connection to the automation system (PROFIBUS, Ethernet)
  • The SIMATIC RF180C is a communication module for connection to PROFINET IO. The readers of the RFID systems MOBY I, E, D, U and SIMATIC RF300 can be operated on the SIMATIC RF180C.
  • The SIMATIC RF170C is a communication module for connecting to the ET 200pro distributed I/O system. The readers of all RFID systems can be operated on the SIMATIC RF170C.
• Software for system integration
  • SIMATIC RF-MANAGER 2007
  • SIMATIC RF600 Data Manager

Figure 1: Simantic Architeture (Source: Siemens A&D)

SIMATIC RF-MANAGER provides data and device management software for RFID applications. RF-MANAGER consists of the following components:

• The Engineering System is used to perform all the necessary configuration tasks and to parameterise the components involved. The RFID project created in this manner is subsequently executed in the Runtime system.
• Runtime can execute on the same PC as the Engineering System or on a different PC or a Microbox 420.

RF_MANAGER provides support for the implementation of the EPCglobal reader protocol layer for communication with the readers and as well provides an ALE interface for communication with enterprise applications

Depending on the scope of the RFID application, different software packages are available. Each product type contains both an Engineering System and Runtime. The packages only differ with regard to the number of readers supported by Runtime. Several Runtime licenses can also be added.

The SIMATIC RF600 Data Manager software is a server application which receives data from the Siemens RF660R readers and transfers them through an interface to a client application. The reader topology can be configured, saved and reactivated at a later time.

Reading of tag data from the reader to the PC is automated. The RF600 Data Manager includes visualisation windows for the detected transponders, such as, for example, the "data table" window where the transponder data is shown. All data can be routed to a client application via an interface where it is processed further and saved. The client application is not included in this package.

Key findings
In the opinion of Bloor Research the following represent the key facts of which prospective users should be aware:

• The transmission frequency of 1.81 MHz, 13.56 MHz or 2.4 GHz makes Simatic RF largely immune to electromagnetic interference.
• In the current version Simanic RF Manager, readers of the RF660R type are supported only.
• The SIMATIC RF600 Data Manager is not an official Siemens product. A warranty does not apply. Service and support is not provided for this software.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Simon Holloway (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 16th July 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

There is no major issue with the concept of a central database which holds details of every instance of an organisation’s servers, operating systems, hypervisors, network equipment and end-user applications, showing what is used where and the dependencies between them. That explains why ITIL promotes configuration management databases (CMDBs).

The trouble is that this takes a lot of work, some of it manual, to achieve an accurate and up-to-date CMDB and, equally important, to keep it so—so that it is really useful. In truth this is a long-term project and most businesses are not yet very far down that road.

Much of the information a CMDB will contain is still needed in order to properly manage the infrastructure and keep control of software, for instance to comply with licensing requirements without being overcharged. To stay up-to-date means keeping on top of every change that occurs. Nowadays this includes identifying when virtual servers and their contents are created or collapsed.

The only real solution is automated discovery—but even then it needs to be comprehensive and accurate. Here is where quite a few major vendor offerings are lacking.

London-based Tideway Systems has invested a lot of time and resource in getting discovery right to create its Foundation discovery software. The company has the advantage of being entirely independent of the large hardware suppliers; these, as you would expect, tend to provide a more comprehensive picture of their own equipment and software than that of competitive vendors. Conversely, a smaller privately-owned player needs to offer something extra to really compete.

The first point is that its discovery software is agent-less. According to Kosten Metreweli, Tideway's VP of product marketing, using agents will tend to pick up less than 70% of the devices on the network (as well as there being typically 10–13 different agents in a datacentre). However, the discovery has to be deep and Tideway expects its discovery to turn up some previously unknown systems when the software is first applied.

Equally important is enrichment of the bare item information, so the company leverages a trusted third party source for reconciliation. This is not unusual and is not always enough. "Our approach," said Metreweli, is for the software to work in the way a human-being would recognise [for instance] an Oracle database."

Put another way, it applies probabilities when given incomplete data which leads to further checks—a flexible approach similar in principle to what the CMDB-creators have to do manually as they work through the information they receive to try and reconcile it.

Yet it seems to me the toughest task—but potentially the most useful—is to identify all the dependencies between all software and all hardware, including use of virtual servers and their applications. Tideway has clearly cracked this. One of its major financial customers is a large global bank which, as Metreweli told me, has some 40,000 servers, thousands of business applications and millions of dependencies. This can be a nightmare for IT managers but is by no means unique among large enterprises.

The Foundation software can plot the lot, and can if required produce a Visio-style map of the whole infrastructure. However, unlike Visio, it is automatically formed from live up-to-date information—so you can show the boss what the true picture is like as at start of play the day you see him.

Browser-based tools that navigate the information will drill down to any level to help in reconciling the non-discoverable stuff and produce graphs. But perhaps the most rewarding aspect is being able to answer the request: "Show me the number of dependencies" for a piece of software. This is hugely advantageous for finding out the precise licensing situation (unlicensed, or unused but licensed) with a potentially huge and rapid payback. (As such it will logically interface with an organisation's fixed asset register.)

These sorts of benefits are what will be expected from a CMDB—but only when properly set up. So surely the priority is to go for the best automated discovery you can find—as a pre-requisite to ever achieving a CMDB. It is for enterprises to check out the automated discovery products like Tideway's Foundation to see what best suits their needs.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Peter Williams (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 14th July 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

Storage de-duplication has the potential to be used in lots of situations—and de-dupe specialist Data Domain is having to work hard to prioritise provision of new features from the opportunities it is seeing.

The starting point is using its NAS-style de-duplication storage appliances which can be installed with minimum disruption to an organisation's existing way of working. This means that, for instance, it carries out an in-line de-dupe transparently within an unchanged backup procedure. The company says this will typically achieve an immediate 20x backup disk saving and requires no management.

So my question is: "Why wouldn't you?" Yes, you have to pay for the de-dupe appliance but the massive disk capacity savings achieved means avoiding future disk drive purchases. In turn this can, for instance, greatly defer the day when your data centre runs out of capacity (space, energy) so it also fits well with a green IT policy.

Data Domain also uses this de-dupe process for a virtual tape library (VTL). The huge disk capacity saving means data can be economically retained on disk—nearline storage—for, perhaps, months before there is a need for it to go into deep tape (or optical) archive. In the meantime it is much more rapidly recoverable and accessible. With the data taking, say, 1/20th the capacity on low cost SATA disk compared with ‘un-deduped’ tape, the economics of disk versus tape is radically altered in disk's favour.

In both cases the data is accessible reasonably fast, so it provides a nearline tier which can be accessed directly for many applications; for instance Data Domain has partnerships with a couple of content search engine providers. Storage content searches are useful as input to discovery as evidence for a compliance court case.

A new Data Domain feature is Retention Lock; this can set a lock on individual files as they are archived so that they cannot be changed in any way for a pre-set period. Since this is open for the IT manager to set or change it is not suited to rigorous SEC-level compliance, but helps ensure good governance since it will firmly block user access. The company also uses a partner to provide encryption. Together these steps show Data Domain making at least tentative moves into accommodating governance, risk and compliance (GRC) needs. A data destruction verifiable delete facility is also planned this year.

In fact de-dupe is equally at home with archiving as with backup, although the nature of archiving means the space saving of, typically 75–80% or 4x, is much lower than for backup; but it's still impressive. Moreover, the process is also helping remove the demarcation between backup and archive systems which, at least longer term, should help simplify the management process.

Further ways this is supported is that sending either a backup or archive copy to a remote location, even travelling over a WAN, is practical. Now add a frequent snapshot capability which sends hardly any data as it only needs to store data tags, and you nearly have continuous data protection (CDP) and a very low-cost disaster recovery (DR) solution. You also obviate any need to physically transport newly-created tapes to a remote secure location—by sending the information over the wire.

All these are possible only because the specially-designed appliance, which draws heavily on CPU performance, achieves the necessary throughput to carry out block- and byte-level de-dupe in-line as the data is received. Any vendor providing only a software solution cannot achieve this throughput—and building an optimised appliance is not an overnight job. The alternative, so-called ‘post-processing’ de-dupe that only works on the already backed-up storage, has very little value in my book, as it needs to allocate more disk space and incurs extra management.

So, notwithstanding the economic downturn and with storage volumes set to continue soaring, Data Domain looks to be sitting pretty right now.

What of the future? Clearly, since applications can already access de-duped nearline storage in real time, there are few technical reasons stopping de-dupe being applied to tier one (even tier zero) storage and saving yet more space—except in considering when to accomplish the de-dupe. (No immediate plans for this I'm told.) What I do know is that Data Domain's own users are thinking outside the (storage) box to pass on their ideas—so some highly original future developments are entirely possible.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Peter Williams (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 10th July 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

At beginning of June 2008, I had a briefing with Gordon Benzie, Public & Analyst Relations Director, and Jean-Luc Delcuvellerie, Director of MES Product Management, Apriso.

Apriso were founded in 1992 as a spin-off from Teledyne when the latter won a contract from the US Navy for integration of their AS400s to their production lines. Since that time, Apriso has designed a second-generation solution around the concept of adaptive manufacturing, in which manufacturers adopt systems and processes that provide the agility required for extended business models and continuous improvement initiatives, while also reducing risk by maintaining strict controls over process and quality. They categorise their solution as an "adaptive operations execution platform and application suite," branded as FlexNet. They have an impressive customer base of 170 of the world's largest manufacturing organizations, in 41 countries with over 650 installations. Customers include General Motors, Lockheed Martin, Becton Dickinson, Honeywell, L'Oreal, BAT, Novelis and Essilor. Apriso divide their partners into 3 categories:

• Global Consulting: these include all the big names such as Accenture, Cap Gemini, Tata and Wipro
• Deployment: these are experts in developing and implementing repeatable, industry or regional-specific, line of business solutions built on Apriso's Operations Execution platform
• Technology: these are software and hardware vendors that complement Apriso's OES products, and include IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP

While the FlexNet platform is classified in most product reviews as an MES (Manufacturing Execution System), it actually does much more than most of these products. The key to the difference is best summarized in the following 3 key attributes of FlexNet:

• Business Process Management Suite: this is a BPMS product that provides the ability to configure manufacturing processes with little or no customisation. The Suite includes configurable dashboards, an XML-based integration broker and full lifecycle management of manufacturing processes spanning global operations.
• Unified Data Model: functionality is based on a manufacturing unified data model, which covers master, transaction and historic data. Each FlexNet application has bee built on top of this model to aid configuration. There is seamless integration and synchronisation with ERP Master Data.
• Service Oriented Architecture: the second generation of Apriso was built according to a SOA, allowing functionality to participate in end-to-end business workflows involving not just FlexNet, but other external systems such as ERP, SCM, PLM, and shop-floor control and data acquisition (SCADA).

The Global Manufacturing Suite is built on the FlexNet platform. Three separate but integrated FlexNet modules act as an integration layer to support global operations:

• Global Process Manager: besides being a BPMS engine, this module manages FlexNet configurations to ensure synchronization with all instances of FlexNet in your distributed manufacturing computing environment.
• Global Production Manager: Tracks and traces materials and products across your enterprise and those of your suppliers and contract manufacturers.
• Global Performance Manager: Built on a KPI analytics engine, provides visibility into production status, product attributes, SPC and Quality for resources, material, labour and machines, both locally and across multiple locations.

Apriso has introduced additional optional modules covering Labour, Quality Management, Warehouse Management, Production and Maintenance.

Apriso has developed an approach to global implementations that support organisations that have multi-site installation requirements. Their approach is called a Core Deployment Program. It consists of ERP best practices approach for a distributed application environment. Applying an 80/20 rule, Apriso services consultants work with the customer to identify roughly 80% of consistent business processes that apply to each of the manufacturing environments. Once this ‘Core' blueprint is established, it then becomes a standardised profile to be packaged and deployed throughout the organisation. The remaining 20% of customized local processes are incorporated by local staff, Apriso services professionals, or one of their many global solutions providers to address an individual plant's needs.

So here we have an MES with a difference. Better yet, as Apriso calls it, an OES. Besides the flexibility provided through the use of good architectural base with an enterprise data model, SOA design approach and a BPMS engine, we have a company that is providing application modules for warehouse management, production, quality management plus integration to the major ERP packages. Put this with a good partner network and there is definitely something for manufacturing organisations to consider when looking at MES, QMS or WMS for the next decade.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Simon Holloway (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 9th July 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

In my research on the RFID middleware market, I came across a number of vendors that were new to me. In a series of articles, I will provide a short overview of these products. The eighth of these is Allixon Corporation.

Allixon Corporation were founded in 2002. Their headquarters are in Houston, Texas, USA. They have offices in Thailand and South Korea. Currently they have partnership with a small number of hardware vendors that include: Alien, AWID, Intermec and Serit. There are software partnerships with Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

The key difference is that this middleware platform has been developed to expressly work with mobile phones as the input devices. The RFID equipped mobile phone reads the tag information in and sends it to the URIS mobile RFID platform. Figure 1 shows the different components of the products.

URIS Framework is a proprietary RFID framework to assist with the implementation of RFID systems. According to Allixon web site it is based on 5 years field experience in developing RFID solutions. Figure 2 shows the various components.

Key findings
In the opinion of Bloor Research the following represent the key facts of which prospective users should be aware:

• The URIS mobile RFID platform has been specifically designed for use with RFID-enabled mobile phones. It therefore supports a number of different protocols other than EPCglobal.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Simon Holloway (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Gerry Brown, Associate Analyst - BI and CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 9th July 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

A McKinsey survey recently found that boards spend around 11% of their meetings talking about performance management. Performance management is a board-level strategic issue to be sure. In my view "cross-company Performance Management" (PM) is more important to business success than "cross-company BI". However, I have struggled to find empirical evidence to back up my opinion. A German company is now delivering this proof.

Gerhard Jahn is the SONAX CIO and Controller. SONAX is number one in the car care products market in Germany and ranks among the top five in Europe. It is a medium-sized company with 450 staff which has experienced double-digit growth in many areas in recent years.

SONAX believes much of its success can be attributed to a performance management strategy that is executed using IBM Cognos 8. This system is used by one out of every two administrative employees. SONAX uses the IBM Cognos 8 BI platform to monitor its financial and sales operations in 80 countries and to guide management decision-makers across the organisation. 60 new applications have been developed on the IBM Cognos 8 BI platform in just the last 12 months.

In my technical paper "Delivering Performance Management solutions", I put forward the case that performance management is not just about software, but it extends to cultural changes as well. SONAX confirms this view and is living proof. SONAX uses Cognos Metrics Studio scorecarding to transform its company strategy into concrete and measurable indicators in such areas as customer satisfaction and product complaints.

"SONAX has developed a holistic approach to performance management based on sound business principles. Our data warehouse, our ERP system and IBM Cognos 8 are helping us to achieve our objectives. IBM Cognos 8 is preparing the way for the implementation of our corporate strategy," explains Jahn.

SONAX has five key scorecards, one for each of the two parent companies, SONAX and Hoffmann MINERAL, and three for SONAX's subsidiaries. IBM Cognos 8 data is available via an internal portal. When users log in, they first see their own personal index card and the index card activity.

SONAX has more than 10 years experience with balanced scorecards and, using IBM Cognos 8, SONAX can link different scorecards and combine them in a sequence. This helps SONAX to integrate all the company's decision-making units into a complete company-wide performance management cycle.

Cross-company performance management enables faster and better management decision-making as managers gain immediate access to a ‘single data version of the truth’. Universal data availability and data accuracy gives managers the assurance and confidence to make timely and high quality decisions. IBM Cognos 8 also increases transparency for employees, allowing them to understand how and why decisions were made. This transparency has a strong positive effect on staff motivation.

SONAX has been certified for the international quality standard ISO 9000 for many years. IBM Cognos 8 is the basis for a cross-company quality management system, says Jahn. The company uses siliceous Earth, a unique mixture of quartz and kaolin as a core component in their car care products. To protect the environment and help nature return to its original state, the company is reforesting the mining areas. The performance indicators developed in IBM Cognos 8 measure the effectiveness of the reforestation after mineral mining and ensure environmentally friendly production.

Product innovation is also very important at SONAX. The Research and Development department uses performance management to derive new formulations for car care products and to test the quality and reliability of new product recipes. "SONAX has developed a project management system that takes original product ideas through to pilot production," explains Jahn. Employees are at the heart of this innovation process. IBM Cognos 8 gives employees feedback about the results of product suggestions and details development plans over the medium term.

Alongside "hard" ROI metrics, SONAX is also focusing on "soft" factors—including improving the quality of management decision-making. Decision making is based on a balanced combination of all three human aspects—head, heart and gut feeling. Most importantly, however, management decisions are now underpinned with factual foundations provided by the performance management system.

IBM Cognos 8 is converting data into decision-making knowledge for SONAX. "IBM Cognos 8 is helping SONAX to make rapid decisions and switch between strategy, planning, controlling and reporting at the touch of a button. IBM Cognos 8 is our new key to success", states Gerhard Jahn "and we're happy about that".

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Gerry Brown (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 7th July 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

In my research on the RFID middleware market, I came across a number of vendors that were new to me. In a series of articles, I will provide a short overview of these products. The seventh of these is Vue Technologies.

Vue Technologies were founded in 2001. Their headquarters are in Lake Forest, California, USA. They have no other offices in the world. Currently they have a partnership with a small number of hardware vendors that include: Alien, Avery Denison, and Motorola. Vue have an ISV partnership with Click Commerce. They also have technical partnerships with Verisign. Their main SI relationship is with IBM Global Services.

The TrueVUE Platfrom consists of the following components:

• VUEPoints: These "smart surfaces" combine UHF antennas with RF networking capabilities to create intelligent RFID read points throughout a location. They come in many form factors and are designed to provide visibility in different areas, including on shelves, in up stock or down stock locations, on counters, in receiving areas and more.
• TrueVUE RF Networking: these use a patented approach to manage readers and antennas, so that standard RFID readers can read across thousands of antennas.
• TrueVUE Site Manager: is Vue's RFID Network, Device and Data Management software for use at individual site locations. Site Manager integrates planogram, product, and SKU data to support streamlining replenishment and misplaced workflows.
• TrueVUE Enterprise Manager: provides central management capabilities for a distributed RFID Network. Organisations can push network and device configuration to the sites. Data collected at individual sites is "rolled up" to Enterprise Manager, providing visibility into the RFID and workflow data across all sites.
• TrueVUE Exchange: provides a development interface layer to enable users to build custom applications, reports, and workflows based upon this RFID data. It uses standards-based technologies, including web services, JMS messaging and ALE interfaces.
• TrueVUE Essentials / Essentials Mobile: provides "out-of-box" RFID workflow and reporting applications, to the desktop or mobile devices. The workflows span key areas including receiving, returns, re-stocking, misplaced inventory correction, product searches and expiry monitoring.
• TrueVUE Commissioning: is centralised EPC commissioning application designed for use across numerous sites, companies, and products. It provides an EPC number management system and RFID tracking repository.

Key findings
In the opinion of Bloor Research the following represent the key facts of which prospective users should be aware:

• Site Manager goes further than the majority of RFID middleware products, in that it manages RFID infrastructure down to the individual antenna level.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Simon Holloway (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 3rd July 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

Over the past month or so, I've attended two Microsoft events. At the MMS event, discussion focused on an approach to virtualisation that showed a greater appreciation of the problems than I would have expected from Microsoft at this stage of its embryonic Hyper-V play. The approach was well beyond what the company has shown to date with Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

Then, there was an analyst event held alongside TechEd, where Microsoft's approach to service-orientated architecture (SOA) was discussed—which left me cold.

The problem is that both subjects can be closely linked, and suffer essentially from the same problems. For Microsoft to get one so right and the other seemingly so wrong just doesn't make sense.

Let's start with virtualisation. A key part of virtualisation is in managing the provision of applications to virtual servers. Here, the general approach is to create a complete stack made up of the operating system, application server and application alongside any dependent software, and use management tools to provision this image as and when required.

The problem is you soon end up with many images of different applications and different application versions. Each of these images has its own copy of an operating system—yet the operating system will require continuous changes through the application of patches and upgrades, as will the application itself.

Patching hundreds or thousands of images becomes a major problem, and managing a virtual environment can become an unexpected nightmare. Microsoft's approach is to use a modelling capability, currently still under a project code-name of Oslo. The idea is that physical images are not actually held—instead, a model or a description of an image is held. This model will state that the real image needs this operating system, this application server and this application, plus any other dependent functions, and will create this dynamically, on the fly.

Therefore, in theory, you only need to hold one master image of an operating system. As you patch this one master copy, all the models that require an operating system will pick up the new patched version automatically as the stack is created dynamically.

All very much common sense and workable.

Now, let's move to the SOA side. The messages about Microsoft's first forays into SOA were a little muddled but at least there was promise through the support of web standards and standard repository technologies.

Microsoft has had some time to refine its message and ensure that it is at the forefront of the subject. What we were presented with at the analyst event was a sorry tale of how SOA was great for knitting together existing applications. And there was me believing that SOA was all about creating discrete pieces of reusable functions that could be put together as composite applications.

Now Microsoft tells me it is a replacement for the old enterprise application integration approach.

Now I know that Microsoft does understand the composite application approach to SOA but it doesn't seem to get the importance of it, nor how to get this across.

The thing is that a composite application needs to be constructed dynamically, based on a set of criteria that needs to be held within a model. Is this beginning to sound a little familiar?

Project Oslo provides the basic characteristics to manage this. Through referring to Microsoft's functional repository—its own version of a Universal Description Discovery and Integration engine—a model can easily be constructed that defines the functions that a composite application will need, as well as the "contract" data that the functions will need.

What do I mean by the "contract" data? Well, an SOA function in itself has little knowledge of what loads are going to be put on it.

During its design and development stage, the developers will have allowed for the function to be able to cope with a certain workload, and possibly for the function to expand this workload to an extent if more virtual resources, such as CPU or memory, are thrown at it. Problems arise if the composite application needs more than the function can provide.

The model needs to be able to negotiate a contract, based on identifying functions that can be scaled to meet its needs, or to see if multiple instances of a function can be provisioned to meet the need through load-balancing.

This approach needs a complex modelling capability that is flexible and understands the context of the business process it is serving. And this is where I believe Oslo comes in.

By bringing SOA and virtualisation together through Oslo, Microsoft can tie together two of the most important technologies happening in IT at the moment.

Surely this is what organisations are looking for—a means of creating dynamic composite application stacks, based on SOA functions, which can then be provisioned on dynamic application server stacks based on dynamic virtual images?

For Microsoft, the problem seems to be in getting different teams to talk adequately to each other. The Oslo team needs to expand its remit somewhat, and the virtualisation and SOA teams need to be co-located to reap the benefits of the synergies that underlie the two approaches.

With this combined approach, Microsoft will still not conquer the world, but will make life for .NET developers far easier. It may even make some J2EE devotees think twice, as they see the benefits of a single approach.

Interestingly, another area that was covered at MMS was Microsoft's first true foray into supporting heterogeneity, through the launch of its Cross-Platform Extensions (CPE).

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Clive Longbottom (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 2nd July 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

One of the forgotten but vital areas of manufacturing is operations management of the processes that happen between the taking of orders and their delivery back to a customer. Many initiatives such as Lean Manufacturing and TQM have been focused at improving this process, however it is my experience that certain parts of the whole seemed to have been missed by many of the well-known ERP packages, and so a special software market has grown up. These packages are targeted at all levels of the manufacturing spectrum from the very large enterprise to the small manufacturer. They provide mechanisms to control the allocation of the resources to keep in balance supply and demand. One of the players in this market is Symphony Metreo, part of Symphony Technology Group. At the end of May 2008, I had a briefing with Bennett Indart, their VP of Marketing and Business Development.

The Symphony Technology Group was founded in 2002. They have a mission statement to invest in and operate excellent technology companies. The combined revenues of the group last year reached $2.1 billion, which represented a double digit growth over the prior year. The Group has some 7,000 employees. The group includes Aldata, Capco and IRI as well as Symphony Metreo. Symphony Technology Group is also a significant minority shareholder many other companies including Lawson.

Symphony Metreo have their headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Besides their Operations Management suite they have 2 other product lines: Enterprise Pricing Suite and Performance Management Platform. The company was formed in 2007 by combining SymphonyRPM with Metreo. They have some 200 customers worldwide, including Hagermayer, Owens Corning, Honeywell, Linksys and Harris Stratex. The Performance Management Platform is OEM'd by Agile, IRI and Sungard BancWare. IBM Global Business Services are the main implementation partner and both IBM and SAP are technology partners.

Symphony Metreo has the following stated hypothesis, "Financial planning and operational execution are disconnected in many companies in terms of management approach, business systems and processes resulting in inconsistent performance, misaligned objectives and myopic decision making."

Figure 1: Solving the disconnected planning and execution processes (Source: Symphony Metreo)

What Symphony Metreo sees is that there is a disconnect not only horizontally between the management of price, operations and offerings, but also vertically between strategy, for instance of financial management, which is done at the aggregate level, and the tactical everyday world in operations. These disconnects lead to barriers and inefficient information exchange, which lead to missed opportunities. Symphony Metreo's FS&OP product solution puts in place a strategic functional planning layer that connects the top-down financial plan to the bottom-up operational layers, and breaks down the silos, for a more efficient and proactive business.

FS&OP Manager aligns the organization, so that it easier for operations to formulate responses to the market, competitive pressures, and unexpected events that further the strategic goals of the organisation. It monitors the events affecting forward supply and demand, and highlights the changes that have the biggest impact on corporate targets. FS&OP Manager has analytics and modelling capabilities which can be used by operations decision-makers to:

• Monitor performance in real time,
• Model decisions in a collaborative process with other areas in the business, and
• Execute decisions to internal systems with write-back capabilities.

Symphony Metreo FS&OP Manager provides the following capabilities:

• Projections: the solution can be used to predict a trend by extending current time-based data forward. Several forecasting and smoothing algorithms are provided, or the use can use their own methods.
• Collaboration: share live scenario models for joint cross-functional problem solving and issue resolution. Seamless integration with standard email systems.
• ScenarioFlow: guide users through each step of the operations planning workflow using a set of configurable analysis workflow templates.
• Advanced Analysis: support for all the common analysis capabilities, e.g., drilling, pivot, drag-n-drop rows and columns, hide/show dimensions, and more.

Symphony Metreo compliments FS&OP Manager with a suite of Enterprise Pricing Solutions that help to complete the Operations Management vision by bringing together the disciplines of Volume and Price management together for an Integrated Business Planning view of Revenue across the organization. Symphony Metreo's suite of pricing solutions includes:

• Price Planner, which bridges the gap between the pricing assumptions required to hit the financial plan, and resulting price points required at product segment level to achieve it. Additionally, it supports the continuous improvement of the Price Plan.
• Guideline Manager, which is a price setting application. It gives organizations the ability to manage and execute pricing strategies across products and segments and to deliver consistent segment level guidelines to the field in order to meet business objectives.
• Price Manager, which allows pricing and product managers to quickly manage their price strategy versus the competition and to set new prices and measure the impact of these price changes to continuously keep pace with changing market dynamics.
• Vision, which analyzes and highlights problem areas by providing a means of understanding where current pricing policies are leaving money on the table and providing a strategy for gaining market share.
• Response, which evaluates customer sales requests to create guidance on obtaining profitable deals by applying best practice.
• Deal Analyzer, which allows companies to assess deals by evaluating different scenarios for deal improvement, and by providing visibility to key information that can lead to leakage control and margin gains. It contains a time-based alert system with support for multiple alert type including Price, Discount, Margin, Multiplier, Customer, Product and Sales Person.

Symphony Metreo is a technology enabler of "Make The Number Approach" developed by Mark Payne. This approach supports all functions within a business. MTNA allows a business to continuously plan, decide, and adjust the future demand and supply activity, in order to maximize profit potential. So if your company has those sorts of issues, Bloor would recommend a close look at Symphony Metreo's FS&OP Manager and the complementary pricing solutions.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Simon Holloway (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 25th June 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

Those like me who are bit long in the tooth may remember Relational Technology (RTI), the original developers of the Ingres relational database management system (RDBMS) that ultimately lost out to Oracle in the RDBMS wars of the early 1990s. Ingres never actually died, it got bought by a company called Ask Corporation in 1990 which itself was bought by CA in 1994.

Never comfortable in the CA stable, Ingres eventually extracted itself in 2004 and re-emerged as an open source company. When meeting with the current management team this week, my comment that "if you can't sell it, give it away" was countered with a list of more positive reasons for the move. Such as the fact that Ingres would be further ahead of open source rivals technologically than it could ever hope to be of its commercial ones (which amounts to pretty much the same thing).

Perhaps the main benefit was for CA itself, which retains a share in Ingres. Many of CA's other products had been adapted to use Ingres as the underlying database. Customers who already had and RDBMS objected to having to buy Ingres as well, but things became more palatable if the database component was free.

Whatever the background, if the numbers are to be believed, Ingres is doing OK. Its mantra seems to be that (very) mature technology that is now free (apart from service charges aka Red Hat Linux etc) can't be bad. Even better since your developers, alongside Ingres' in-house team of 100, can see the code and make changes to it too.

Its customers seem to agree. Ingres always was, and still is targeted at the high end database users. This includes many legacy enterprise users that have expanded their use of Ingres and as well as some new customers. Ingres is courting the ISV market too, its business model especially suited to those considering a move to SaaS (software as a service) who might find the CapEx required for an enterprise Oracle investment just too much. Here it will find competition from Microsoft SQL Server and Sun's MySQL, and may encounter another old sparring partner - Progress software.

Ingres' revenue doubled from 2006 to 2007, albeit from a relatively low base. However some of that appears to be down to cross-company accounting as it eased its way out of CA. CA retains 20% ownership, but it has backing from Garnett & Helfrich Capital who own 60% of the rest.

Once in place, databases are hard to shift, so Ingres is not about to knock Oracle of its perch any time soon. However, Ingres is back on the menu for those in a position to review their database technology.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Bob Tarzey (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 13th June 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

Bloor Research has just released a technical report and market update covering RFID middleware. But what does this mean?

RFID middleware is the first level of software that one comes across in the complete RFID stack. This software performs the necessary tasks of converting the information picked up by readers, event processing, applying business rules, performing a series of functions from aggregations and filtering to looking-up data that converts this data into meaningful business information. Of course it also has to co-ordinate he management of the readers and the writing of data onto the RFID tags.

Many flavours of RFID middleware are currently available. A number of start-up companies typified by OATSystems, GlobeRanger and RF-it Solutions have developed solutions. The EAI vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SEEBURGER were very quick to adapt and enhance their offering to support the requirements of RFID middleware. Traditional RFID middleware also often offers some degree of device management, such as remote monitoring or configuration. A number of application vendors have developed RFID middleware. In this case there are two distinct approaches:

• Build it yourself: in this category are vendors such as SAP and Manhattan Associates
• Build on top of a middleware product: in this category fall vendors such as Infor, 3M Supply Chain Solutions and Red Prairie

RFID Middleware Architecture
Figure 1 shows the architectural model that Bloor sees as necessary to support all of the requirements.

Figure 1: The Bloor Sensory Network middleware architecture 2008

The components of RFID middleware include:

• Device Management, in a RFID/Sensory Network sense, is about activating, configuring and controlling the peripheral devices in the network, be these mobile or fixed. This includes routines to distribute applications, data and configuration settings to these remote devices
• Edge Event Process Management is concerned with an environment for the development of business processes usual through BPEL, a runtime engine with an associated API, and a management environment (often referred to as business activity monitoring - BAM). Simulation is a key deliverable.
• Business Rule Management System (BRMS) is a software system used to manage and support the business rules of an organisation. The main class of BRMSs maintains rules that are executed in a production rule system but also maintained in a repository with a user interface suitable for business users to create, read, update and delete them.
• Integration is concerned with the ability to interface to the back-office applications that run enterprises. In the main this facility is provided by another product in the portfolio.
• Device API is where the information collected on the devices, such as RFID readers or barcode readers is translated into business information. The device API is used to disconnect the devices from the implementation in the RFID middleware itself, in such a way that you can "hot-swap" devices.
• A development environment which should interface with standard development environments such as Microsoft Visual Studio for .NET and ECLIPSE for Java. The key is for IT developers to be able to work in a familiar environment and to be able to exploit these existing tools. The same is true for business users but here the tools they are most familiar with will be Microsoft Office Suite or other office suites.
• Master Data Management capability to support EPCCIS

Market Overview
Since Bloor published their first list of vendors in December 2007, there have been some additions to the list as well as some departures. The departures include 2 well-known names: TIBCO and SoftwareAG webMethods.

There are 3 vendors who are offering a repository (really a master data management database) to support the EPCIS standard. These are IBM, Oracle and SAP. There are a number of new entrants (SkandSoft's Setu, Omnitrol Networks, Supply Insight) who are also providing support for EPCIS but without seeming to use a repository.

The market is also seeing the entrance of a number of combined software and hardware solutions, particularly in terms of network boxes. For organisations that are cost conscious, combining RFID middleware on to existing network routers is a very compelling consideration. There are 3 key vendors offering solutions in this space: Cisco Application-Oriented Networking (AON) for RFID; Reva Systems Tag Acquisition Processor (TAP); and Omnitrol Networks.

Because SAP's AII solution provides no device management capabilities, a market of specialist products from niche vendors has grown up to provide this capability. Two that caught Bloor's eye were: Advanco SA of Belgium's Advanco RFID Controller (ARC); and noFilis Ltd of Germany's CrossTalk.

The final market trend is the support for mobility. Microsoft made an announcement at the beginning of May 2008 and others already there are Allixon Corp with their URUS mobile RFID platform and NoFilis CrossTalk.

Vendors researched for the paper include:

The technical report and market update can be downloaded free of charge from www.blooranswers.com. There are also a number of product evaluations available on the site.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Simon Holloway (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 12th June 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

There is plenty of ‘hubbub’ in many countries around whether customers are getting the broadband speeds advertised by their internet service providers (ISPs); highlighted again most recently in the UK with a series of populist news items. A new code of conduct from the UK's telco and media regulator, Ofcom, aims to stop what many believe is an attempt by the industry to mislead customers.

Now it is fair to wrap the industry's collective knuckles to stop "up to 8MB/s" claims, when many customers are so far from the telephone exchange that the reality is the best they'll achieve is 2MB/s—far better to let the customer know what they can expect. However, just like the UK motorway speed limit allows you to drive ‘up to’ 70mph, it is not always possible when congested—and connections to the internet are far more congested than any motorway.

First the link from premises to exchange is dependent on the quality of the (generally) copper connection, and the speed it can bear over its length. The upper limit of the ‘up to’ numbers in the industry typically describe performance over a short high quality hop, rather than each subscriber's experience, which is always going to be lower.

Next the connection capacity may be shared, or contended, with others. For consumers that typically means 50 households sharing 1 line, with some low cost providers pushing that up to 100 to 1, and many small business tariffs offered a slightly better ratio of 20 or 10 to 1. With averaged, random, traffic in bursts, like emails, browsing and the odd download, that's not going to be too much of an issue, but with more consumers and SMBs using internet telephony/VoIP, streaming music or video, or highly interactive services, the problem will increase dramatically.

There's also the challenge of inequality in the connection speeds up or down. The ‘A' in ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) is important as it means more bandwidth downstream, for downloading, and only a fraction for uploading. Sending large emails is much slower than receiving them, but crucially for business users who may be sending large amounts of data up into the network—using the internet for remote backup storage—this is another potentially problematic limitation.

Recent Quocirca research shows that small and medium businesses (SMBs) are increasingly using the internet for more business critical activities—a quarter for voice over IP telephony (VoIP), over a third for network storage, one in six for video conferencing—with more planning to do these activities over the coming year.

Given this, those SMBs that rely on the internet for running parts of their business should be more aware of the limitations of different offerings from service providers. Unfortunately, many of those interviewed were unaware of the true impact of sharing a connection with other users—contention ratio—or the difference in upstream and downstream connection speeds.

While the general public might not be expected to be aware of these nuances, these interview respondents were, in the main, responsible for the IT and communications investments of their companies, but with so many other things demanding their attention, this has not yet been deemed as being sufficiently important. They are, after all, probably consumer users too, and have been fed the industry marketing messages about raw bandwidth, and been led astray by the ‘up to’ promise.

With an ever greater dependence on the internet for all manner of activities, SMBs now need to look more closely at the service they are getting, and discriminate between different offers on more than raw advertised speed, taking into account how capacity on offer better matches their usage patterns and needs of the networked applications they plan to use. On top of these technical criteria, they also need to assess reliability, support and service suitability.

ISPs and their services should no longer be measured solely on simple capacity—time to mind the quality, not just feel the (band)width.

For more information and advice on the internet service provision challenges facing SMBs, download Quocirca's free report "Soaring not Surfing".

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Rob Bamforth (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 5th June 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

In my research on the RFID middleware market, I came across a number of vendors that were new to me. In a series of articles, I will provide a short overview of these products. The fourth of these is Loftware, who market enterprise printing solutions.

Loftware was founded in 1986 and therefore is one of the original organisations working in the barcode and RFID market. They have their headquarters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the USA. They have IHV partnerships with all the major printer players in the RFID market, including Alien, AWID, Intermec, Matrics, Printronix, ThingMagic and Zebra. Loftware also have ISV relationships with 3M Supply Chain Solutions (also known as 3M Highjump) and Oracle. They have an SI relationship with IBM Global Services.

Their stated experience is some 20 years of producing solutions for the automotive industry. Customer case studies include: Drugstore.com, Johns Hopkins, and American Pharmaceutical Partners (APP) in the healthcare sector; Goodrich Corp. in Automotive; Cannon Business Solutions, Harley-Davidson and Jessops in Retail; Sentai Software and Flextronics in Logisitcs.

The Print Server acts as a middleware component between medium to large-scale business systems and marking devices such as barcode and RFID label printers. The Print Server prints labels and RFID smart tags generated by any ERP/MRP and/or WMS systems. It includes interfaces that allow it to work with applications that are hosted on diverse operating systems including UNIX and Microsoft Windows Server. These host applications that offload barcode label and RFID tagging to the Print Server which translates the request into device specific code before sending it to the printers. The Loftware Print Server includes an RFID Reader Module that supports RFID reader hardware via a .NET API. This provides a common language for these RFID readers regardless of the hardware and tags being used.

The RFID Reader Module also comes with a Reader Simulator. This allows an implementation team to create, test, and troubleshoot their reader solutions without recreating a production environment.

The Connector establishes a high-speed 'connectivity bridge' between enterprise applications and the Print Server. The combination of the two products enables enterprise applications to generate barcode and RFID smart labels across large networks of thermal-transfer printers.

Loftware Label Manager is a barcode printing software application that allows the user to design and print barcode labels in a 'stand alone' environment that does not require integration into larger business systems.

Figure 1: Loftware product architecture example (Source: Loftware)

Key findings
In the opinion of Bloor Research the following represent the key facts of which prospective users should be aware:

• With the Print Server, application programmers no longer have to write and maintain device specific code every time a labelling requirement changes.
  • The Print Server provides some important runtime features concerned with error handling:
  • Print jobs are automatically recovered and restarted in the event of an unscheduled system shutdown.
  • Client programs are notified of system shutdown so that they can take appropriate action.
  • If a printer is offline for any reason, jobs are queued and printed when the printer comes back online.
• The Connector supports 'Filters' being setup which cause it to retrieve or calculate any data that is missing from the request 'on-the-fly' at print time.
• The Reader .NET API provides full control of readers for pallet operations and for the verification of smart labels.
• The complete solution provides support for EPCglobal-based mandates and includes support for SSCC, SGTIN and SGLN.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Simon Holloway (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 29th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

In my research on the RFID Middleware market, I came across a number of vendors that were new to me. In a series of articles, I will provide a short overview of these products. The third of these is WareLite, who provide a grid-based event driven integration product called BOSS that sits upon a .NET platform.

WareLite was founded in 2000 and has its headquarters in Andover, Hampshire in the UK. They also have a sales office in Milan, Italy. Not surprising when you consider that the CEO and one of the founders is Italian—Elena Pasquali. WareLite have a very small set of partners, that include Motorola and IBM. The latter is using BOSS as part of its retail proposition.

WL BOSS (Business Operating Support System) is a grid-based, event driven Enterprise Application Platform for Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP). A WareLite business process is a piece of complex logic triggered by an elementary, low-level event, such as a sensor signal, providing an automated, complete business response to such an event. On receipt of the signal, the WL BOSS computer ‘grid' selects an appropriate business process and executes it, propagating modified enterprise data to any number of databases.

Figure 1: BOSS Architecture (Source: WareLite)

BOSS is made of 3 layers:

• The Solutions layer contains all the Enterprise Business Logic in the form of collections of Business Rules, Business Processes and the Events and Agents that trigger them.
• The Infrastructure layer provides the following services:
  • Persistence Providers built on top of a standard RDBMS manage persistence for all global persistent objects.
  • Node Managers are responsible for the execution of transactional business processes.
  • Lock Managers provide contention resolution
  • Scalability: WL BOSS provides scalability as a service both at execution level (Node Managers) and at persistence level (Persistence Providers). This means that developers can develop single-threaded solutions that will be executed as multiple, completely parallel threads by WL BOSS on computer grids made of as many Node Managers and Persistence Providers as needed to provide the required capacity
• The Presentation layer is based upon XML.

For an RFID solution, WareLite have added some additional components to WL BOSS:

• RFID Abstraction layer (RAL)—provides the translation of RFID tag data from reader into XML. It also provides data aggregation support where a number of reads of the same tag have occurred in a sort space of time.
• RFID Simulation tool

Key findings
In the opinion of Bloor Research the following represent the key facts of which prospective users should be aware:

• As a result or the architecture of the persistence layer, all business rules can have immediate access to all enterprise data. This means that different development teams, not communicating with one another, will develop event driven solutions for WL BOSS that will be natively interoperable.
• Developers do not need to take care of transaction management, determinism and scalability when developing solutions.
• WL BOSS does not expose any proprietary interfaces or APIs. Events are presented to BOSS as XML frames via message queuing

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Simon Holloway (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 28th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

A silo'd approach to information management—with each department or division jealously protecting its IT information assets—is common in a large organisation. There may be some security benefits in this structure, but appropriate information from each department has to be made available to the central management systems.

A similar silo'd situation arises in regard to corporate governance, risk and compliance (GRC) tasks. GRC needs to pervade the whole enterprise to be efficient and effective, with a silo'd approach generally to the detriment of its functioning.

This is typically exacerbated by a series of overlapping functions. Although titles vary, there is nowadays commonly the equivalent of a chief risk officer (CRO), chief finance officer (CFO), chief compliance officer (CCO), security manager, and an internal audit manager function—and, somewhere in the middle of this, because everything nowadays revolves around IT systems, the CIO.

Each of these will be backed by a group of people and systems—who are all after some of the same information (mixed with some specific to their needs alone), but presented in the way they are used to using it, historically different for each. Nor is any one them going to roll over and change to fit software for one of the other functions; this will not give them what they need in the way that they want it.

A knock-on effect of the silo'd approach is that each group will typically gather this common information from other departments separately. Where this means other departments need to complete questionnaires and complying with assessment requests, those departments could be wasting time gathering overlapping information and repeating answers on forms for one or other of them.

According to Gordon Burnes, VP of sales and marketing at GRC software supplier OpenPages, one enterprise the company dealt with was using no less than 40 different solutions at once. Whatever else this achieved, it certainly did not make for good governance. "Assessment fatigue from constantly supplying information means quality goes down," Burnes told me.

Unsurprisingly, OpenPages believes it has cracked the problem. It has certainly come face to face with it in many big-named enterprises which it can name among around 250 customers in the US and elsewhere. The principle OpenPages uses is simple enough but that does not mean it is easy to do.

OpenPages (version 5.5 recently released) uses a central repository for all risk and compliance data, and this includes frameworks, libraries, policies, entities, processes and accounts. So the repository can hold all the information—both quantitative and qualitative—that all the GRC-affected departments normally collect.

Parameters are set for each piece of collected data to denote which departments need it and which do not—immediately revealing the potential for consolidation, including consolidation of common activities such as the assessments, into a single platform which is process-driven. A flexible front end means each compliance or risk group can view the information in the format it prefers (even down to one department using "A, B, C" and another "1, 2, 3" for the same information).

Probably the biggest benefit of this approach is that it is adaptable to fit the existing company risk and compliance methodology; risk assessments, for instance, can be applied at any enterprise level. Risk and compliance management can then be integrated into the everyday business processes with the minimum of disruption—and the new software can be gradually implemented over time.

I am sure most serious GRC software vendors will ultimately conclude this is the most practical approach to go for the large enterprises. (Where other software does this it should then only be a matter of features, functionality and benefits, despite what major vendor consultancies who advise on GRC may say.) However, there is one other thing that is needed in order to make this happen.

"It needs a mandated approach," said Burnes. In other words, this needs to be driven with top-down authority. It needs the CEO's blessing and possibly more than that to make sure the CFO, CRO, CCO et al all give it whole-hearted support, and the CIO gives priority to its implementation.

In the end, this has to be done top-down and enterprise-wide—or the business will be left with even more exposure to risk and legal sanction for non-compliance than it is already.

Useful Links:

• Post Comment | Read Comments
• Send Page Referral
• Contact Peter Williams (Private)
• Social Bookmarks: Delicious | Digg | Reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon