System iNetwork

October 2007

October 29, 2007 4:02 PM

Masterful Marketing in a Jaded Age

It's not news that Baby Boomers have started reaching the retirement age this year. But rather than focus on the strangely pessimistic attitude some people are taking about this "looking forward" (i.e., with regards to such bugaboos as "retiring droves of System i experts" and "swollen Medicare budgets"), this is just as easily a moment to "look backwards" and notice something exciting coming out of this event.

Particularly, I'm talking about marketing. Because of the fact that Boomers are starting to retire, it means that something has become true that never was before. And that is that for the first time in history, the people currently in the work force, IT or otherwise, have spent their entire lives being marketed to by mass media, especially television. What that in turn means is that in order to attract the attention of all those advertising-jaded potential product buyers, companies are going to have to be clever to a new order of magnitude about marketing those products. I think that's something to look forward to, and in fact it's already starting.

Whether your professional focus is on your company selling widgets to the general public, software to IT people, or IT services and value to your enterprise's internal "customers," competing for mindshare is tougher than ever, and those who excel in that today will be tomorrow's winners. BtoB, a "magazine for marketing strategists," recently cited some of the best marketing ideas it has seen for 2007 in BtoB's Best 2007, a special issue. Some of those examples are worth keeping in mind, particularly those from the computer industry.

Let's start with Microsoft and Vista. When you think about it, there are many businesses that really don't need to upgrade from Windows XP. It's a perfectly adequate OS, and the vast majority of users probably only use a quarter or less of the available features. Yes, it has some problems, and yes, there's the big stick of Microsoft probably dropping support for XP down the road. But how do you get people who really don't need to change yet to upgrade before then? Microsoft came up with some carrots. First there was the idea of putting the Microsoft Ribbon, Vista's new toolbar, across the MSN homepage. This let 42 million people try it out and removed one major hesitation in many of those people's minds about adopting Vista. Second, Microsoft ran a kind of "word of mouth" marketing campaign via Windows Live Messenger that let users select a cause or charity to which Microsoft donated some ad revenue whenever someone communicated via Instant Messaging. The outcome was more people getting familiar with IM, seeing how it could improve their lives, and generating more demand for it.

Last spring, Hewlett-Packard offered March Madness, an online promotion in cooperation with Yahoo that worked to provide a higher profile for H-P's Personal Systems Group and Printing and Imaging Group products. The campaign generated 1.2 billion impressions and, according to a followup poll H-P conducted with participants, caused a correlation between visitor frequency and a favorable impression of H-P's products.

BtoB also gave an award to TIBCO Software, a business-integration and process-management software vendor, for its viral marketing campaign on Youtube called "Greg the Architect," a series of videos using dolls that portray a systems architect at a "typical" company who must humorously overcome impossible difficulties with SOA-related software projects.

How about IBM's slightly similar recurring TV and magazine ad campaign featuring a cast of archetypal IT people? The fuddled bossman, the confident nerd, and a host of seemingly clueless end users who are always doing something crazy looking. Maybe they're not making you buy a new server every month, but don't they at least make you stop and see what they're up to this time? It's like a comic strip with an ongoing story line. But the mere fact that the ads attract you, a person who's grown up on steady diet of ten-second spots in your cereal bowl that you've become used to screening out, says something about the thinking behind it.

In the System i market, at least one vendor is trying out viral marketing, somewhat appropriately given the product type. Bytware recently launched its i5virus game to promote its Standguard Antivirus product. The game involves solving a mystery about a virus attack on a financial company and starts out by having participants view a YouTube video that introduces them to some online helper characters.

But promoting ways of having fun on the job isn't the only way to a consumer's heart. For several years, BCD International has pushed its Nexus web portal by giving the product away free (with paid annual maintenance). According to Eric Figura, BCD's sales and marketing manager, this program "has been extremely effective for both clients and BCD. We have well over 700 organizations that have implemented Nexus Portal so far. Nexus has become a very big competitive advantage for us over other web application development solutions."

Even if you're not trying to sell a product in the classic sense, the degree to which we all have to function in an information-overloaded culture is reflected in the personal level by how much we all have to market ourselves as professionals. Even to hang on to our jobs sometimes, and certainly to vie for promotions, it's necessary to not only deliver competence but also to cultivate an image of competence. And for IT departments in general, which have been collectively struggling for a seat at the big table in enterprises for years, much of the advice on how to do that is summed up in the motto "Market Yourself Better."

To make the System i market thrive, in addition to having many great products that run on a great platform, I think we all need to pay a little more attention to the marketing side of things. How can we make the project in front of us a bit more memorable? A bit more entertaining? A bit more useful? Creative and clever marketing ideas can not only make work life a little more fun for all of us but also help keep the engine of our market stay strong.

Posted by on October 29, 2007 at 4:02 PM | Comments (1)

October 23, 2007 3:16 PM

E-Mail: Eating Us Alive, and Worse

Halloween's just around the corner. Maybe now's a good time for us to huddle around the monitor and tell scary stories. Here's one. It's all about e-mail.

Even if you've never used an SMTP or POP3 server to send e-mail directly from your System i (see Dan Riehl's article on the topic if you want to know how), e-mail probably plays a huge role in your life. Large enough that maybe you'll be interested in some thought fodder on the topic. The short story is that e-mail as a means of business communication is going from dominant to overwhelming. Professionals are losing as much as two hours a day of productivity to dealing with it. Worst of all, not only is e-mail archiving contributing to storage problems, but also if the archiving isn't handled properly, you could be increasing your enterprise's exposure to potential litigation. So while I realize that e-mail is, for most of us, a PC-type problem, if you're a System i shop that isn't at least thinking about some of the implications of e-mail, you may have a slight tunnel-vision problem.

We'll start with a news flash, seemingly from last century in a way, that was released just a few weeks ago when Dimension Data, a South African IT services company that specializes in helping clients plan and manage network infrastructures, announced the results of a study it commissioned called "The End of Communications as We Know It." The study reports that e-mail has passed telephony as the primary means of business communication. One hundred percent of study participants reported using e-mail as a technology for communicating, compared to 80 percent for land-line telephones, 76 percent for mobile telephones, and 66 percent for instant messaging. The study surveyed 390 IT managers and 524 enterprise users (presumably using a mixture of platforms) in 13 countries in North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Although the volume of my e-mail traffic swamped my incoming telephone calls around the time Y2K stopped being a problem, this study shows that it's happening to most people now and probably has actually been the case for a while. Dimension Data speculates that this is because people would rather e-mail someone than call him or her on the phone. This makes some sense intuitively because you have time to think about what to write in an e-mail, whereas on the phone your stutters, flubs, lame metaphors, and off-the-cuff stupid statements are instantly irrecoverable. Dimension Data's answer is to unify all your communications with their help, but that's another story.

What surprises me most about Dimension Data's study is that 70 percent of those surveyed reported that e-mail impacts positively on their productivity, with instant messaging, blogs, and softphones (i.e., VOIP) most often reported as being disruptive to productivity. That seems like an opposite finding from a study released last December by CohesiveKnowledge, a company that, I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn, sells a book on how to deal with the problem. That study analyzed 1,000 corporate-employee surveys about e-mail use in 2005. (Admittedly, this information is a little old, but I think it's a safe bet that, if anything, the numbers such a study would find here in 2007 would be worse.)

The sobering summary of results is that even back in 2005, professionals spent an average of two hours a day processing e-mail, with 30 minutes of this occurring after business hours. Survey takers estimated that 25 percent of it was wasted time because that many messages were less than useful, if not outright spam. This is the equivalent of 15 wasted days per year per employee. Those surveyed also reported an average of 41 messages a day, 54 percent said they "often" receive messages about their e-mail storage being over their limit, and 88 percent agreed that they "often" receive unnecessary e-mail. (Stop and think about how many jokes, cartoons, videos, cute kitty/doggie/baby pictures, and links to websites that you never knew existed you get per week that are sent to you deliberately by well-meaning friends and relatives.) Perhaps the most amusing finding of this study is that 75 percent reported that their colleagues regularly overuse the "reply-to-all" button, while only 14 percent admitted they overuse this feature. Uh-huh!

Our e-mail is eating us alive, and I don't think this situation means that not enough people use spam filters, either. Although it's true that software of that kind can filter out some of the most obvious spam, some of it still gets through. How much good are spam filters really doing us when, in most cases, they simply dump the suspected spam in a repository, and then you have to go look through it all anyway to make sure someone didn't send you a legitimate business offer or an important message from a Hotmail account!

Finally, there's the problem of what happens to all that e-mail after you receive it. What's important to keep, what's OK to throw away? Even if you only get 41 messages a day, that's 41 value judgements you have to make. The impulse is to be safe, to keep it for a while "just in case" you need to reference it or produce it to prove something. Obviously, that adds up to lots more time handling e-mail, and more storage space. Did you realize that it's a potential legal hassle for you?

Cue our final study, one released just two weeks ago by Recommind, a search-software provider (not for System i, by the way). This study points out that many enterprises can't meet the electronic discovery processes currently mandated by law. It seems that as a result of amendments made to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) last December, organizations can be required to produce "a copy of, or a description by category and location of, all documents, electronically stored information, and tangible things" relevant to most legal proceedings within 14 days of being so requested!.

Could that possibly be a problem for you if you had to produce a particular e-mail message from last year in 14 days? If you have all your storage onsite, how do you find what you need? If you're like many companies that hold such materials at external locations outside a company-controlled retention process, according to Recommind, you might have to use expensive "legal-hold" retention processes to corral that information. If you don't, you could be subject to monetary penalties (Recommind characterizes them as "severe") for failure to produce evidence.

I'm not trying to be excessively alarmist, but hopefully you have started thinking about e-mail as a bit more of a double-edged sword. We can't do without it. For the moment it's an inextricable part of the way we all do business. But as a user, think about finding a way to cut back a little on the frivolous e-mail traffic you send and allow others to send you. For the sake of your company's efficiency, perhaps you should think about offering some e-mail productivity classes to your users. For the sake of your company's finances if it should ever be involved in a legal action, think about how you can find a particular piece of information in the mountain of data your users are forcing your enterprise to save every day.

Posted by on October 23, 2007 at 3:16 PM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2007 10:22 AM

ITIL: System Management's Stylish Business Suit

Although it's not getting much mileage so far in the System i world, for quite some time there has been a system-management methodology on the scene that might be worth a look, especially for companies at the larger end of the SMB scale. It's called the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Although its origins have been traced as far back as IBM's "yellow books" of the 1980's (that was a four-volume series of books titled A Management System for Information Systems), ITIL is a nonproprietary, conceptual framework that embodies methods of managing IT services. Originally offered by the U.K.'s Office of Governmental Commerce, ITIL is a five-volume library that focuses on, respectively, service strategy, service design, service transition (i.e., change management), service operation, and continual service improvement. (Ultimately, there are 34 volumes dealing with separate issues.) ITIL's initial goal was to provide guidance for a central IT authority for the U.K. government, an idea that eventually succumbed to political infighting over whether such a function should be controlled by the government or industry. However, ITIL provides a structure for planning IT strategy for enterprises, both public and private. It's many of the traditional system management issues dressed up in a stylish business suit.

More concretely, ITIL attempts to provide a structure that helps IT managers think more strategically about how their piece of the enterprise pie serves the greater whole. Although many parts of ITIL aren't attuned to small businesses, there are a number of issues it touches on that should sound familiar to everyone, such as application sizing, asset management, availability management, IT budgeting, capacity planning, help desk, incident management, security management, and service-level agreements. The British Standards Institute formulated BSI15000, and the International Organization for Standardization created ISO20000, two IT service-management standards based on ITIL.

Although originally launched in the late 90s, ITIL V3, the latest iteration of the framework, was published just last May and updated ITIL to be more Internet-centric and to focus more on integrating IT with business rather than simply supporting it.

ITIL isn't a silver bullet, of course. It's a huge amount of information and can seem overwhelming in its entirety. But I think it has some value for System i people. For one thing, it's always good to take time to look at the IT picture for your organization in a strategic way, regardless of your work role, because a good idea can come from anywhere. If you should happen to be thinking about changing companies, thinking strategically about IT challenges is something that an IT person can carry quite usefully from job to job.

Another advantage is that because it's a framework and somewhat modular, companies can follow the parts of it that make sense for them and ignore the parts that may be impractical to implement because of company size or financial limits. In fact, some experts recommend that approach to getting started with ITIL: pick one part of it you're already doing and see if its recommendations for that area contain some information that's useful to you in a practical way. This should be particularly true for companies concerned with service-level agreements, offering software as a service, and moving to a web-services model.

Finally, in my opinion anyway, one of the strengths of the System i is that because it performs certain tasks so well, such as running applications supported by databases, platform users might benefit especially from the more organized approach to those specialized areas that ITIL can offer.

Although a quick search of the web didn't turn up too many System i software vendors who are touting their products as specifically supporting the ITIL concept, there are a few. Perhaps not surprisingly, France-based ARCAD Software's ARCAD-Skipper, ARCAD-Observer, and ARCAD-Customer solutions are tailored to ITIL support. Aldon's Application Lifecycle Management suite uses ITIL practices as a basis for its design. MKS offers MKS Integrity for ITIL, a version of its change and configuration management solution that supports ITIL. Tango/04 Computing Group's website notes how its VISUAL Message Center product helped customer Capgemini, an outsourcing company, meet an ITIL implementation goal.

I'm sure there must be numerous other vendors whose products might help companies meet ITIL requirements, whether or not that capability is currently part of their online marketing materials. I invite those companies to alert us to this in response posts.

If you're interested in more information on ITIL, there are some resources. The U.K. Office of Government Commerce offers primary documentation. ITIL Central is a vendor-neutral information source. The IT Service Management Forum is U.S.-based, and the IT Service Management Forum International is an international, organization for IT professionals interested in ITIL.

Posted by on October 16, 2007 at 10:22 AM | Comments (1)

October 8, 2007 2:33 PM

Why Do Some Vendors Make Getting Web Info So Hard?

I have a gripe, and I'm wondering how many people out there share it with me. My gripe is that there are a surprising number of product vendor websites that make it illogically difficult to get information from those sites about the products their companies offer.

I've never actually confronted a vendor about this, and I don't mean to imply all the violators are in our market -- they're not. I'm not going to name names, either. But if any of what follows strikes a distant chord with you, whether you're a software vendor or not, take a look at your own website and see if your company might not be guilty of at least one, if not a few, of these sins.

So as not to pick on anyone but to make the examples concrete, let's hypothesize a company that's looking for an application that's not actually available for the System i, but we'll pretend it could be. In honor of it being October, let's say you're the IT manager of a company that wants to offer fantasy baseball leagues to the public next season. You've got a shiny new 525, and you need a piece of software to run on it that compiles baseball statistics and lets users rank players based on any given statistic, for starters. Other features would be gravy, maybe gravy worth having, but it depends on what they are. But you don't want to talk to a salesperson yet. You want to get a feel for what's out there, what features are pretty standard in the available products, what special options only one or two packages might offer, what a general ballpark (pun intended, blush) price might be. After all, when you actually do call a salesperson, you certainly don't want to sound like you're some ignorant mark who's calling a salesperson of baseball statistics software for the first time, do you? So off you go on a search of baseball statistics application vendors' websites.

The first kind of website you find is what I'd call the "it's all about the marketese" website. It's the kind of place where you can't find any product information except vague generalities. These sites have tabs you can click to be directed to "product information," but when you get there, what you find is less than helpful. You find such treats as short documents full of lofty statements about paradigms and strategies, incisive statements on the importance of baseball statistics software to the community, and maybe a press release full of quotes from the vendor's own company officers about how theirs is the finest example of baseball statistics software they've ever seen. But what statistics does it track? Well, it doesn't say. Can you sort the data? It doesn't say anywhere that you can . . . or can't. And so on.

The second kind of website I'd call the "deeper mystery" website. It's more normal looking. It has some docs that actually describe some product features. That's helpful. It may even have white papers or a case study or two that describe the software in action or show an actual example of what it did for some company. More helpful. OK, so you're ready to put them on your short list. Oh, but does the software run on the System i? Ahhh, now they have you. After searching every document you can access, you can't even find verification that it runs on a Windows PC! It must run on Everycomputer, that mysterious machine that so many marketing departments seem to assume that all companies have, so why should they bother with niggling little details like the supported platform or OS? And what version of i5/OS does it support? Are you kidding?

Whew, let's move on to site three! But this one proves to be one of those "Oh, no, you're not gettin' nuttin' outta us for free!" sites. This one lists its products, each with a one- or two-sentence description that tells you "for sure, this is a baseball statistics software vendor all right," but not much more. But there's the promise of much more here. The site says it offers all sorts of information: testimonials, reviews, charts comparing (unfavorably, of course) competing products to this vendor's wonderful offering, maybe even some actual user docs. But there's one little catch. To access any of it, you have to fill out a long demographics form in which you identify yourself, your company, your phone number, your e-mail address, your company's gross income, your annual IT budget, how much you're willing to spend on baseball statistics software. . . and you're not allowed to submit the form if so much as one field is left blank. It's about everything you don't want to get into right now. And if you should bite like the good little fishie they hope you are, don't be going down the hall for the rest of the day because sales people will be calling momentarily.

Let's escape to website four. But oops! This is an "is this really a business?" website. This is the kind of website that has a few static pages that describe the business, but not necessarily any products. (Except for one product, unnamed, about which there's someone expositing on the tweak the company made to some piece of code buried somewhere in the product, which the vendor is offering as a public gesture towards openness, but comments in the code date it to early 1999.) There are testimonials about the enterprise, but virtually nothing about offerings. If you want that classified information, you have to fill out one of those anonymous request forms that are automatically e-mailed to "info@anycompany.com" (but at which the intern responsible for checking this e-mail account was laid off two months ago, and this was one duty no one thought to reassign). There's no clue about where this company might be located. There's maybe not even a phone number. You have to contact them their way or not at all.

On to site five. It's a megacorporation! It must have what you need. Oh, boy, look at all that statistics software! Five different packages, 50 different options. A GUI in Farsi for the Middle Eastern customers! You've got it made! Just call the 800 number. Oh, but . . . all available operators are busy. And when you do get through, the connection is dropping out, you have to repeat your request twice. "I'll transfer you." A phone ring, changing to another kind of phone ring, after five rings changing to a third kind. The guy who answers has an Indian accent, and there are pauses between what the two of you say while the satellite relays your words. "Sells department? You want sells? I'll transfer you," and you immediately get the "busy-circuit signal." You're punted, go back to start.

Pricing? Who carries pricing info on their website? That might lead to comparison shopping, and we can't have that! Even though in so many cases the actual price a company pays for software is totally subject to negotiation, most companies refuse to even show a nominal "list price." That would be giving away too much information.

Now admittedly these are worst-case examples, some merged together. But I've encountered every bad feature I've mentioned somewhere, nearly always multiple times. I'd love to hear from any of you who have experienced some even more outrageous instances.

I have to ask myself how vendors let their websites get this way. I imagine there must be some companies who think that if they're vague enough, people will have to call them on the phone, and then their crackerjack sales people will be able to sell a 500-seat license before the caller knows what hit them. Perhaps there are others who lack confidence in how their products stack up against the competition, so they keep it vague until someone can parachute in to the potential customer site and overwhelm them with superior friendliness, market expertise, and prompt customer service. Unfortunately, I think all too many times it's worse than that. The real problem is that the website isn't looked upon as a primary sales tool, just as an adjunct. "We'll upgrade it when we have some extra money some time." "We'll add a marketing doc when the (overworked) VP of sales writes one for us." "People who surf the Net for info aren't serious buyers, they're just browsers."

These attitudes seem illogical in the 21st century, and they are. But they're still a reality at too many companies. You'd think, at the very least, that companies in the computer industry would get beyond this mentality. Most have, but there is still a minority out there who don't get it, even as they merrily cut their own throats. How obvious does it have to be that your nice building and lovely campus aren't the public face of your company to a majority of your potential customers any more? Maintaining a website that describes your products, actually lists specific features, explicitly states in some easy-to-find place (buried on the last page of some white paper doesn't count) what versions of i5/OS your product supports, and shows a price (even with a "your mileage may vary" disclaimer) would be ever so helpful. It might even attract an actual customer. Why does it seem, though, that for some companies, this is still asking too much?

Posted by on October 8, 2007 at 2:33 PM | Comments (9)

October 2, 2007 1:08 PM

Business Process Integration: Sorting Your Spaghetti

LANSA made headlines this week by announcing the October 15 release of LANSA Composer, a business-process integration (BPI) application for the System i. To summarize it very briefly, it's a solution that lets even nontechnical users map out the data connections, software integration steps, and document outputs for applications. Then Composer automatically generates the code to make these connections happen. It takes a "top-down, process-centric approach," to quote the press materials, to helping organize how information moves to support business activities, among other functions.

This type of application brings home to us once again the value in general of computer automation to business. Particularly in larger corporations, the interconnections between business processes, the applications that help drive them, and the data sources that feed them are often complex enough to make the most diehard spaghetti coder proud. Any application that lets someone other than a developer be able to use graphical symbols to map, and by extension reorganize, these processes, can be helpful to the bottom line. This is particularly true in some of the intangible ways, such as the time saved for people and computers when processes are realigned in a more efficient way. So it's good to have applications like LANSA Composer for the System i because it helps System i shops enjoy this kind of mainstream benefit even though the platform remains something of a minority enthusiasm in the business world in general.

However, Composer has a drawback, and that's that it's Java-based. So if you're not running JVM on your System i and don't have immediate plans to, Composer is a solution that will remain beyond your grasp for a while.

Unfortunately, that's also true of virtually every other integration application for the System i! That's because for the System i, Java seems to be an indispensible feature for nearly every application of this type. When I say "this type," I really mean several types. Most of Composer's competitors term themselves "transaction integrators" or "enterprise application integrators (EAI)" and are the kinds of products that developers rather than end users use. LANSA Composer's ability to let ordinary end users (e.g., manager types) use graphical representations to plot application relationships makes it stand out, but it's not the only solution that enables System i application integration.

Composer is based on LANSA Integrator, a product that's been available for years. Integrator enables application-to-application and B2B transactions via XML and Java services. Primarily aimed at facilitating e-business, Integrator also provides such services as secure PDF documents for contract documents, information exchanges between ATMs and backing systems, and SMS updates on transactions or deliveries. Two other Integrator functions, though, are enabling the integration of Java services with RPG, Cobol, and C applications and the ability to publish or use third-party web services via the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). We'll return to those in a moment.

IBM's WebSphere includes several EAI or process integrators. These include WebSphere Business Modeler, WebSphere Integration Developer, and WebSphere Process Server. These let you model business processes and integrate existing business applications with each other. However, to get these solutions, well, you have to buy WebSphere.

Magic Software's iBOLT Business Integration Suite helps developers integrate legacy applications with other databases and other applications. It includes a modeling environment that lets users create and map business processes and flows, a deployment module, and a monitoring component. However, it requires the Apache server (or by extension, WebSphere).

EXTOL Business Integrator is a family of products that provides an application server and runtime repository that indirectly integrates applications by automating data inputs and outputs. It also offers user-defined process models. Like LANSA Integrator, though, its primary focus is e-commerce: It's mainly used to facilitate integration between "front-end EDI systems and back-end applications and data."

Red Oak Software recently upgraded its Legacy Integrator, a transaction- and application-integrator solution for System i, System z, and Unix servers. Java-based and running under NT and Unix, Legacy Integrator nonetheless can pass data to and from System i applications and applications on other platforms via 5250 Java emulation. (Red Oak also offers the coincidentally named Legacy Composer, which transforms legacy application functions into Java-based objects for integration with other applications and works with Eclipse).

TIBCO Software's TIBCO BusinessWorks is "standards-based integration backbone" that accomplishes EAI without Java and runs on the System i. It has two problems, though. First, it only runs under AIX, not i5/OS. Second, it requires a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Jacada's HostFuse is a solution that integrates legacy applications by "service-enabling" them, and it runs under i5/OS. However, it's for developers and also requires an SOA structure.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of solutions for System i application integration. In addition, there are a number of other product types that one could argue foster it.

For example, you could make the case that most enterprise resource planning applications embody significant elements of both BPI and EAI because they unify multiple business functions, if not multiple applications, into a single system. Solutions that can schedule application jobs can also provide a functional way of determining a sequence of application actions and data flows. SOA, pretty much by definition, is a means of integrating business processes by turning the applications that support them into web services. This is where the LANSA Integrator SOA functions come in and where many solutions that facilitate building an SOA overlap strongly into the BPI concept, so much so that it's hard to know where to draw the line between them. (Not for nothing, then, is the SOAP acronym being changed lately to mean "Service-Oriented Architecture Protocol," an amusing example of one time when an acronym is driving the jargon instead of the usual other way around.)

So to return to LANSA Composer, which started off this whole train of thought, we can say that this is a product that is also somewhat distinguished by what it isn't. It isn't a product that's just for programmers. It doesn't require WebSphere or Apache server. It doesn't require an SOA. And it isn't primarily just for e-commerce applications.

It's too bad, though, that we don't have an application like LANSA Composer that runs natively under i5/OS and is aimed at nontechnical users. It makes sense that Java provides a unified way of providing the integration services that LANSA Composer does, and that facility of Java's is no doubt one of the reasons LANSA based Composer, and all the other vendors based their integration products, on that language.

However, not everyone wants to use Java, even though many enterprises could use a BPI app...

Posted by on October 2, 2007 at 1:08 PM | Comments (2)