Monday, January 15, 2007

Integrating and Extending BIRT I reviewed a book proposal recently for the publishers Addison Wesley, and in return I got a free copy of Integrating and Extending BIRT. I'm keen to understand what this Eclipse project has to offer from a tool development perspective. Trying to find the time to read it is the challenge. 5:31:11 PM    comment []

Friday, September 29, 2006

Taking advantage of BAM derived business intelligence For many years I developed real-time data distribution, display and analysis software for the financial markets front office. Traders are a great example of a human BAM. Traders watch real-time data feeds for business activity that interests them. They filter it using both their mental skills and their workstation software. They bring historical context to their analysis, doing complex event processing and running rules in their heads and in their spreadsheets. They make decisions and execute trades that affect the state of the market, altering the business activity they are monitoring. The trader is looking for opportunities with their "business", as opposed to looking for problems. The goal of BAM is not just to know that everything is running smoothly, its to look for opportunities to improve things. It is not surprising that Business Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence software has its origin in the financial markets. Having a real-time view of our business operations is largely pointless if we cannot rapidly effect change to put problems right and take advantage of new opportunities. Building business processes on the agile, SOA-enabling, orchestration and services technology provided by an Enterprise Service Bus is the key to taking advantage of new opportunities and fixing problems before they cost us money. The ESB is a natural way to collect, correlate and feed the raw data required by the BAM layer, it then allows us to rapidly improve our processes in response to changing conditions. Feeding aggregated business intelligence back into processes in real-time creates interesting possibilities. Suppose we’re orchestrating a supply chain. If we have a number of Courier services in the supply chain, that the Shipping service can request pickups from (i.e. pickup packages at the various Warehouses for delivery to customers), we can monitor the timeliness of the pickups and check for Couriers falling behind, failing to pickup on time and failing to deliver at agreed SLAs. We can feed this business intelligence back into the Shipping service, so that it favours couriers meeting their SLAs. 3:39:31 PM    comment []

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Enabling effective BAM with the ESB By now most folks understand the advantages of running and orchestrating key business processes using SOA principles and Enterprise Service Buses, like the web service standards based Cape Clear ESB. There is a lot of business activity taking place on the ESB, and it'd be great to be able to monitor that, gather the intelligence and analyze what our businesses are telling us. In other words putting the ESB and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) together. One of the key issues when considering BAM is being non-invasive. A BAM should be able to collect the data it needs to present a real-time dashboard of business state and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), without you having to engineer that into your applications. Another key issue is correlation. Lots of bits of data and process state go into creating a holistic picture of a business process. A BAM needs to be able to tie all those bits together. Different systems often use different keys to identify a particular instance of a process. Sometimes the interaction between systems is terse e.g. in a synchronous request/response scenario the response message might not even have a process identifier. This can make it difficult for the BAM to create that holistic view and show you everything you want to see. Fortunately, both of these issues can be addressed very effectively by the ESB. When business services are exposed on an ESB, the bus is handling all the messages as they flow between services. These messages and their orchestrated flow between services define a large part of the process. The ESB itself can event out these messages to the BAM, there is no need for invasive engineering - so collection is free. The ESB is already doing correlation, internally it knows what process instances it is dealing with, so it can add that information to the messages it sends to the BAM, together with a whole bunch of other useful stuff like timestamps and source and destination services. Sometimes of course, things happen inside of applications that are invisible to the bus, and may be difficult to collect, but that are important to know. Again the ESB can help by exposing its BAM collection function as just another service that applications can invoke. With the Cape Clear ESB we're enabling effective BAM. We're doing a whole bunch of other great stuff to make BAM easier too, I'll post more on that soon. In the meantime, how about a new TLA: SAM - SOA Activity Monitoring :-) 12:44:24 PM    comment []

Saturday, May 06, 2006

Landed at the Cape I've wanted to get into the SOA and Enterprise Service Bus space for some time now. When an opportunity arose to join Cape Clear Software, the leading ESB vendor, I was excited by the prospect and impressed by the people I met. From a technical perspective, it fit nicely with my keen interest in Eclipse tooling on the one hand, server technology, and enterprise architecture in general. So pretty much the whole kit and kaboodle then! This is clearly a red hot space right now, and rightly so, SOA is changing the way we do so many things. Cape Clear have a stellar SOA platform that is ready to go out of the box, giving you tons of loosely coupled integration options that work first time. So I charted a course, and I've just landed at the Cape. One of the things I'm going to be helping Cape Clear do is to define extension points for BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). More on that later. 8:35:11 PM    comment []

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Farewell PaceMetrics In a few days time I'm finishing up at PaceMetrics, the company I've been with for the last three years. Leaving Pace was a tough enough decision for me. I joined on an up curve just as the company was starting to build its fourth generation BAM (Business Activity Monitor), and winning a huge deal with a tier one investment bank. To deliver that project and productise it, I was lucky enough to quickly assemble one of the best software development teams I've ever had. This team was world class, all experienced, seasoned, innovative, agile engineers. We had a really stellar project manager and business architect in Colm Toolan, and a super professional services team, and the result was PaceMaker 4: - fully Java, J2EE (POJOs of course!) and JMS based, leveraging best-of-breed open source components and tools - loosely coupled components communicating asynchronously using XML-based messagess - a simple maven based build - a super-scalable, fully reliable, and architecturally innovative BAM engine - thanks James :-) - a scalable web front end built on some pretty cool caching technology - enterprise ready monitoring and management through JMX from our own custom web based admin console - Eclipse based tooling (courtesy of yours truely) Its been a great few years, but in the end I've been tempted away by the shimmering lights of SOA and ESBs. I'll post more on that in a couple of days. 5:43:52 PM    comment []

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