Jan Baan launches Web services firm
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The enterprise software legend shifts his attention to Web services. Say hello to start-up Cordys and its integration software.
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IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Computer Associates have jumped aboard in support of the WS-Eventing specification for subscribing to Web services-based events, joining original developers Microsoft, BEA Systems, and Tibco Software.
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Company adds to Flex, its Flash server software for Java developers.
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Cordys Inc. announced a new Web services-based platform designed to create more efficient and collaborative business environments.
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Bob Brauer, co-founder and vice president of business development for StrikeIron, talks about his new online service that eases the pain of discovering, understanding and using Web services.
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It's designed to let business users easily create and publish dynamic Web sites.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems is planning a dynamic application infrastructure codenamed "Project Genesis," for building next-generation business applications that incorporate technologies including mashups. BEA sees a new generation of flexible, dynamic, and real-time composite applications emerging built on concepts like SOA, said Alfred Chuang, BEA Chairman, CEO, and president, during the BEAWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday morning.Â  "Genesis is a system that radically simplifies the way that we create, operate, and govern dynamic next-generation applications," said Chuang. Genesis is expected to be a set of products enabling the whole lifecycle of dynamic business applications, including the ability to build mashups and dynamic business infrastructure, according to the company. "The goal is the 24-hour product [development] cycle," with Genesis, said Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA Workshop business unit. Dynamic applications focus on individual needs. "Dynamic business applications are tailored to the individual, to be tailored for the person so the user doesn't need to switch from app to app to complete a task," Chuang said. The Genesis platform will feature user-based pricing and incorporate SaaS capabilities, Chuang said. The company's Workspace 360 technology serves as the development environment for Genesis. Packaged applications can no longer be the focus, according to Chuang. "We cannot innovate with packaged enterprise applications because we can't afford to work with them. They're rigid and monolithic systems," he said.Â  Chuang did not immediately provide details on when Genesis would be available. Chuang stressed the evolution of the Internet as a tool for self expression and productivity. He also touted mashups, describing them as generally Web-based applications that leverage consumer-oriented sites for external facing audiences. But mashups now are spreading to the enterprise. "Mashups are an example of how the world is changing so rapidly," with mashups available for purposes ranging from finding the 100 best fishing holes in the United States to rating dance moves, he said.Â  Following Chuang's presentation, Comcast CIO Andrew Baer touted his company's use of SOA after presenting an overview of the company's video, cable Internet and voice products. The company is building an infrastructure featuring SOA and intended to provide for business flexibility. "I want us to be in apposition where if the needs to come up with a new idea, in many, many cases from a technology perspective, we can launch that in 24 hours," Baer said. "We are firmly committed to SOA and a set of loosely coupled, coarse-grained services with all kinds of implementations underneath that," said Baer. Comcast is using BEA products, such as the company's AquaLogic Service Bus and the WebLogic Server application server. Comcast has goals such as improving its call center with a productivity portal for 20,000 customer service representatives. Also at the conference, BEA announced the first product component of its WorkSpace 360 environment with the release of BEA AquaLogic Registry Repository 3.0. The repository can provide shared metadata management and structured workflow processes. Also, the registry is designed to improve and management and governance of SOA deployments. Featured in version 3.0 are advanced workflows to automate approval-based processes, a metadata interoperability framework, an Eclipse plug-in, and built-in best practices. WorkSpace 360 has been described by BEA as a set of tools allowing for participation of different roles in an SOA lifecycle.
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JBoss has added business process management (BPM) to its growing roster of open source software. The company has hired Tom Baeyens, the founder and lead developer of jBpm, an open source workflow engine.
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JBoss founder Marc Fleury has resurfaced as a paid advisor to Appcelerator, a startup based in Atlanta that makes a toolkit for developing rich Internet applications (RIA).Red Hat bought JBoss, a maker of open source middleware, in 2006 for $350 million. The outspoken Fleury oversaw Red Hat&#39;s JBoss division until quitting early this year, and since then has largely avoided the limelight.He said he hopes to raise Appcelerator&#39;s profile in the increasingly crowded RIA space, which is led by the likes of Adobe&#39;s Flex, among others.&quot;The big dog is clearly Flex,&quot; Fleury said, but &quot;the fact that it is so crowded and there is no clear winner is also an indication there is a market of opportunity.&quot;Fleury described his role with Appcelerator as his &quot;first engagement with the industry&quot; since leaving JBoss. &quot;I liked the product, I liked the tech, and figured I could help.&quot;But Fleury said he essentially remains retired: &quot;My other projects include family.&quot;Fleury is the second former JBoss employee to join Appcelerator, following the company&#39;s hiring of Ben Sabrin as vice president of strategy and business development.The company describes its Appcelerator Platform as ideal for creating what it calls &quot;service-oriented user interfaces.&quot;The platform provides an abstraction layer that allows developers to use AJAX and DHTML without needing to program in JavaScript themselves, and provides a widget library for pulling together common components. The platform is available under a GPLv2 license, and the company has created software development kits for Java, Ruby, PHP, .Net, and Python.&quot;We&#39;re really focusing on RIA-enabling the enterprise,&quot; said CEO Jeff Haynie.
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BEA Systems today unveiled an architecture and toolset designed to help companies moving toward SOA by separating out business processes from packaged applications.
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Cisco Systems gives its Web services business a boost with the acquisition of Reactivity.
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(InfoWorld) - SAPÂ is stepping into uncharted waters with the launch of itsÂ hosted business applications service, codenamed A1S,Â on Wednesday. The move will give it a head start over Microsoft and other rivals, but could also mean SAP learns the hard way that offering hosted ERP on a wide scale is difficult to do. Offering business applications on demand, also called software as a service (SaaS), is not new. But most services, including those from trailblazer Salesforce.com, have focused on customer relationship management or human resources management, only a part of ERP (enterprise resource planning). Those functions are easier to offer as a hosted service, since managing sales and payroll tends to be fairly standard across industries and countries. ERP as a whole is more complex, involving tasks like supply chain management, procurement and accounting, for which requirements and regulations can vary greatly. "It's less standard across industries, but even more importantly across geographies. The regulatory differences are profound even between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg," said Bo Lykkegaard, a research manager with IDC in Denmark. Even the existingÂ leader in hosted ERP, NetSuite, has found it difficult to offer the services widely outside the U.S., according to Lykkegaard. "They've been selling mostly CRM internationally, which is easier to localize because it's mostly a question of currency and sales tax." "Hosted ERP is still nascent, and that's what A1S is largely about. That's what makes the A1S launch today so interesting," he said. SAP executives are giving the first public demonstration of A1S, aimed at midmarket companies with up to about 2,000 employees, in New York on Wednesday. They are also expected to unveil the name for the service and possibly pricing. The software is being tested by a handful of customers now and is likely to be rolled out gradually next year starting in the U.S. and parts of Europe. The complexity of hosting ERP software has prevented Microsoft from announcing plans to offer its Dynamics ERP applications as a service, although its hosted Live CRM software is being released this quarter. "Software as a service makes a lot of sense for CRM, because the offering typically goes in with very little customization -- a sales process is a sales process," Klaus Helge Andersen, corporate vice president for Microsoft Business Solutions, said in a recent interview. "ERP has more deep vertical content, and all the multitenant platforms I know about don't have a customization model that works well for individual customers." SAP is expected to show in New York Wednesday how it gets around this problem. It has touted the benefits of A1S at some length but hasn't shown publicly yet how it works. It has said it will be quick and easy for businesses to set up, with interfaces tailored for industries and users. And it promises to open a new market for ERP for smaller companies wary of its complexity, much as Salesforce.com opened doors for CRM. Lykkegaard has seen A1S and said it is built from the ground up as a hosted service, and that SAP has done much to make it easy to use. Customers can look at the software on the Web and try configuring it before they purchase it, "so what used to be a presales exercise the customer can do for themselves," he said. "Then when you configure a business process it's all model-based, so you choose a business process and the user interface will change correspondingly. It's procedure driven." "They truth will be in the details, and we'll see that when some of these midsize companies start to work with the software," he said. Besides NetSuite, SAP will face competition from many small companies offering hosted ERP in local markets. In addition, Deloitte & Touche has been offering hosted ERP using Microsoft's Dynamics software in some European countries, Lykkegaard said, although Deloitte declined a request to discuss it. The rewards are potentially big. IDC projects revenue from on-demand applications to increase almost 60 percent in 2007, and grow at a compound annual rate of 32 percent over the next five years. In 2006, hosted applications accounted for about 3 percent of all software applications revenue. That will increase to 10 percent by 2011, Lykkegaard said. "Keep in mind that's revenue from licenses and maintenance, not just new software licenses, so it's a very profound impact," he said.
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SiteKreator, an award-winning service which enables small businesses to instantly design and host elegant, feature-rich and engaging Web sites, was selected by the editors at CNET Webware as a finalist in the first ever "Webware 100" awards.
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InfoWorld - BEA Systems will fit its Weblogic Server Java application server with improvements geared to Web 2.0, SOA and interoperability with Microsoft&#39;s .Net platform, the company said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Wednesday.
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Server and software company prepares new foray into market for dot-com infrastructure.
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More open-source software for businesses: The Apache Software Foundation is launching a project for a Java process automation server.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Kim Polese, the woman who coined the term "Java," has found a new job. At the Web 2.0 conference hereÂ Thursday, she will unveil a startup called SpikeSource that will provide enterprise support services for open-source software.