The two Press Releases from HP (my post from April 11, 2006) were published at 4 other places:
HP unveils SOA architecture for financial services (pdf)
Helvetia Patria Doubles Return on Investment with HP Service-oriented Architecture (pdf)
HP introduces multi-market SOA frameworks (pdf)
Helvetia Patria Doubles Return on Investment with HP Service-oriented Architecture (pdf)
First beautiful springtime week-end and a lot of stuff to do in the garden because of the bad and cold weather in the last time:
Gosh, my “back to the roots”, I like that so much :-)
[via TechCrunch]
TechCrunch posted about a really very informative, extensive and dense Fortune’s article – Microsoft’s new brain – about the role of Ray Ozzie by Microsoft, their new strategy, etc.
A must-read, if you would like to apprehend (partly) what is going on in Seattle.
But the chairman and the CEO already had so much confidence in Ozzie – a renowned programmer who had created Lotus Notes, one of software’s biggest triumphs – that he had become Gates’ proxy. Since the retreat, Ozzie’s responsibilities have expanded even further. The white-haired, soft-voiced 50-year-old is spearheading the companywide transformation agreed upon at Robinswood.
“I cannot overstate the importance of what Ray Ozzie has done here,” Gates says. […]
Put simply, Ozzie’s assignment is to Webify everything: To intertwine Microsoft’s entire product line – software for consumers, software for businesses, Xboxes, all of it – with the vast and ever-growing power of the Net.
“Everything we do should have a presence on the Web,” Ozzie says. […]
Ozzie can do what Gates no longer can – not only formulate strategy but also help implement it by working with the troops. People tell stories of the approachable Ozzie having long conversations with low-level programmers by the coffee machine about security strategies or other arcana.
“Ray brings people together in a way others don’t,” says Blake Irving, head of Internet communications products at MSN. “He’s sort of a grand unifier across the company.” […]
But many of the company’s leaders, including Gates, were impressed with the way Ozzie looked at technological challenges.
“Ray really starts with the customer,” says Windows and MSN boss Kevin Johnson. “He looks at things ‘outside in,’ as he says, not technology-out.”
Many executives now concede that Microsoft tended to take the opposite approach – focusing first on the technical possibilities and only later on what customers really wanted.
As a senior executive puts it, “Our customers buy our products in an integrated fashion, but we build them in a siloed fashion.” […]
Ozzie remembers “vigorous disagreement” over business models based on advertising revenue, vs. those based on transaction fees or traditional licensing.
“It’s clear that in the consumer realm, online advertising is this new economic engine,” says Ozzie. “It’s not as obvious how that engine is applied in the enterprise market.”
But the companywide excitement about the potential of online advertising is palpable. MSN’s Blake Irving calculates that annual worldwide advertising spending amounts to about half-a-trillion dollars, vs. total software industry revenue of about $120 billion.
Though he won’t get very specific, Ozzie says that he is amazed at the amounts Microsoft is spending, and that the cost of building the physical infrastructure for Web services will be a major barrier limiting the number of players in this business.
“The people who could build a viable services infrastructure of scale,” he says, “are companies that have both the will and the capacity to invest staggering amounts of money – staggering amounts.” Think billions, many billions. […]
Microsoft has to move before Google or even Yahoo! offers its own large-scale services for businesses over the Web. Up to now those companies have focused on consumers, but it’s widely believed in Silicon Valley that Google, at least, will soon launch corporate e-mail services to exploit the infrastructure it’s already built for Gmail.
(Google is rumored to have a million servers around the world and, according to a knowledgeable source, is already the top electricity user in at least one large U.S. state. Google would not comment.)
Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data. It even has a name for that future service: Live Drive. With Live Drive, all your information – movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever – could be accessible from anywhere, on any device.
Google apparently has similar plans. An internal memo accidentally posted online in March spoke of company efforts to “store 100 percent of user data” and mentions an unannounced Net-storage system called GDrive.
Dr. Bernd Pischetsrieder, Chairman of Managing Board Volkswagen AG, declared:
“…We have two strategic business fields:
The relationship between the two strategic business fields is reciprocal.”
Crazy and very disturbing to see how far this very efficient, fully-automatized and huge car producer is now depending on….Financial Services.
A great example of fuzzy frontiers between Industries.
[via Scoble]
I haven’t known this code for life from Miguel Ruiz, good stuff.
Be impeccable with your word – Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
Don’t take anything personally – Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
Don’t make assumptions – Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
Always do your best – Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.
It’s vital to ensure a balance between business and technology needs from the get-go.
Another great article about our ecenter story and our SOA approach published by InfoWorld, based on a great interview from China Martens made last week (link, pdf). The article is also mentionned on java.net.
Some abstracts (strange to quote myself ;-).
“One thing to understand is that the implementation of SOA takes time, it’s a journey,” Didier Beck, the head of eBusiness Center at Helvetia Patria, said Wednesday.
He cautioned against rushing headlong into an SOA deployment. Instead, he suggests a company spend time at the start of the project to come up with a vision followed by a road map with milestones for what it hopes to achieve both technically and in a business sense with the deployment. It’s vital to ensure a balance between business and technology needs from the get-go, Beck added.
Goals for eBusiness Center included speeding up application development and promoting reuse of common components. Helvetia Patria also wanted to be able to develop applications that could then be used by a variety of distribution channels such as the Web and intranets instead of having to write applications separately for every channel.
Helvetia Patria went live with its first application developed based on eBusiness Center in February 2002, according to Beck. Since then, the company has put in place four to six new applications per year, he said. Development times for new applications are now between four and eight months, making development two to three times faster than was previously possible.
Update: the same article from China is also published at ComputerWolrd Australia (link, pdf).
[via BetaNews]
Umh, that is interesting :-) Some remarks from Ellison about the acquisition of JBOss by RedHat. Have a look.
Oracle, most known for its database software, is considering whether to release its own Linux distribution, and has even discussed the possibility of buying Novell in the process. The news, revealed Monday by the Financial Times, follows the purchase of JBoss by Red Hat.
With JBoss providing software that competes in the business market with Oracle, Red Hat has become a potential rival. Red Hat is the largest distributor of the Linux operating system, which Oracle relies upon to sell its own products. “We have to re-look at the relationship; so does IBM,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told the FT.
“I’d like to have a complete stack,” Ellison said, referring to both applications and the operating system they run on. “We’re missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.”
According to the FT report, Oracle has even considered acquiring Novell, the second largest Linux vendor thanks to its purchase of SUSE. But at this point, such talk is merely explorative, Ellison says.
Hewlett-Packard published two press releases about our ecenter case. You can find both posts at the HP Newsroom or at Yahoo Finance:
Some extracts:
“In the past, we were spending a significant amount of time and investment maintaining multiple IT environments that created more challenges than opportunities for us,” said Didier Beck, head of the eBusiness Center, Helvetia Patria Group. “HP is a true partner who worked with us every step of the way to create a solution that could speed our entry into new sales channels and market segments.” […]
Helvetia Patria turned to HP to implement a centralized Internet-based platform for the insurance industry that links information among its employees, partners and customers across Europe. […]
The resulting eBusiness Center helped Helvetia Patria by substantially decreasing time to market for new products and helping to expand distribution channels. Additionally, SOA opened new opportunities to expand partnerships (for example, with brokers and agents) and enter different segments of the insurance market.
The HP SOA also has helped the company lower business transaction costs by improving efficiencies through repeatable processes and consistent data on clients, policies, claims, benefits and accounting.
“Four years ago, we found ourselves dealing with a disarray of sales channels built on various software applications all across Europe,” said Nick Stefania, deputy head, eBusiness Center, Helvetia Patria. “We used HP’s SOA framework to help solve this problem, and after just months, our eBusiness Center has operated so successfully that we’ve spun it out into a standalone company, called eSolutions Center. The SOA has enabled more seamless communications between sales channels, better access to real-time information and, as a result, better service for customers. In short, the new architecture has definitely played a key role in the eSolutions Center’s success.”
[via BetaNews]
Linux vendor Red Hat announced Monday it has entered into an agreement to acquire JBoss, maker of middleware, or software that connects disparate systems and applications to facilitate faster and cheaper development. Red Hat will pay $350 million in cash and stock for the company, with another $70 million payout based on performance.
With the acquisition, Red Hat says it will transition to service-oriented architectures (SOA) in order to enable running next-generation Web applications atop a low-cost open source platform. JBoss has a similar business model to Red Hat, offering service and support for its open source middleware applications.
Have a look also at the official press release from RedHat.
