Citrix releases new application/XML acceleration appliances

The XML appliance market has been sluggish since around 2005, but some say advanced messaging protocols and the rise of cloud computing may bring these devices back to the forefront. Over the past decade, XML appliances have gone from hardware-based XML acceleration and security to full-blown business-to-business integration tools.

Some find it convenient to have many of their integration and security features centralized in an appliance layer.

Just this month Citrix Systems released five new NetScaler Application Firewall appliances targeted at public and private clouds, as well as Web applications. One of the major functions of the NetScaler appliances is performing SOAP, XML and HTML security checks. The company offers both hardware and “virtual” appliances.

Where in the early 2000s these sorts of appliances were looked at more as a performance booster to XML crunching, Citrix is selling NetScaler as “application accelerators.” These newer devices include a host of features, including: traffic management, load balancing, content switching, content caching, SSL acceleration, Web application firewalls, network optimization and application performance monitoring.

Long gone is the heyday of the pure-play XML accelerator.

Tibco updates Spotfire in-memory analytics package

Middleware giant TIBCO Software Inc has launched TIBCO Spotfire 3.1, described as an updated in-memory analytics platform for predictive analytics. The package now supports services that allow central deployment and execution of models based on S+ and R programming languages for statistical app creation. Continued »

Software AG builds “social BPM platform” out of IDS Scheer purchase

Enterprise IT vendors sure have been busy trying to make their products more “social” lately. At the CeBIT conference in Germany last week, Software AG released the beta version of what it is calling a “social BPM platform.” This entails a set of features that leverage cloud computing to allow collaborators to work together across organizational and geographic lines.

The offering, ARISalign, is built on top of Amazon Web Services and makes use of the ARIS technology that Software AG acquired in the purchase of IDS Scheer in July. The social network component provides groups and forums where users can collaborate with project stakeholders and communicate with other users, even those outside of the enterprise.

As in a social network like LinkedIn, users can develop a professional profile, add a picture and message one another. Since the product is run from a cloud computing environment, users access it through a browser. The company is sending the message that ARISalign is easy enough to use that employees in just about any department can have some bearing on process discovery.

Even so, the primary function of ARISalign seems limited to process discovery and modeling without execution. Does your enterprise spend enough time modeling business processes to need an internal community built around it?

While Software AG is calling this platform the “Facebook of BPM,” there is no word yet on whether users will have the option to send a “poke” to fellow collaborators or tag them in a photo.

SearchSOA.com’s parent company acquires ebizQ.net

TechTarget, SearchSOA.com’s parent company, today announced that it has acquired ebizQ.net, a provider of news and tips on SOA, cloud, and BPM. EbizQ.net is known for looking at these technologies from a business perspective.

Read the full press release from TechTarget.

David Linthicum chairs new SOA data integration community

Where do architects go to learn about data integration? Author and SOA expert David Linthicum is heading up a new online community where SOA architects can share their expertise on what Linthicum calls the “last mile of SOA.”

“What’s tripping up SOA architects today is they really don’t have a rudimentary understanding of how to do data integration in the context of SOA,” said Linthicum. “So we have a tendency as a community to define simple services and call that SOA without a good focus on how those services integrate with the back end databases.” Continued »

Novell confirms $2b unsolicited takeover offer from NY investment firm

Novell Inc., an enterprise network software and services vendor out of Waltham, Mass, has confirmed the receipt of an unsolicited $2 billion takeover bid from New York-based private investment management firm, Elliott Associates, L.P.

Elliot made an offer of $5.75 per share in cash yesterday after the close of the markets. The company already owns 8.5% of Novell’s common stock, which makes Elliot one of the largest shareholders.

In a letter to Novell’s board of directors, Elliot Portfolio Manager Jesse Cohen wrote that his firm had been keeping an eye on Novell for a “considerable period of time,” writing:

Over the past several years, the Company has attempted to diversify away from its legacy division with a series of acquisitions and changes in strategic focus that have largely been unsuccessful. As a result, we believe the Company’s stock has meaningfully underperformed all relevant indices and peers.

While Novell is perhaps best known for its work in the inception of the local area network, the company has come to specialize in Linux. Novell owns Suse Linux and leads the Mono project, a free and open-source .NET development framework with multi-platform support.

For SOA vendors, healthcare industry a new gold rush?

It seems as though the healthcare industry is weathering the recession pretty well—or so it looks from what some vendors have been investing in lately. Both Oracle and Axolotl Corp. released products today at the 2010 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference. Continued »

Complex Event Processing with streaming databases

Startup StreamBase Systems attacks the CEP space with a unique streaming database architecture that allows data records to be processed before they are stored. The company set up an exchange for CEP developers looking to share components and the like. Continued »

Happy birthday, Ajax – son of SOA

By Jack Vaughan
XML-based Web services were the most direct antecedent for SOA. They also spawned Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. We often tend to focus on the server-side advances in services, but we should not overlook the services advances on the front-end, and Ajax is chief among them.
This hit home recently as the SearchSOA.com crew gathered for an Ajax birthday party. You see, it was five years ago on February 18, 2005, that Jesse James Garrett coined the term ”Ajax” to represent a design style that was giving new life to browser client architecture and, perhaps, changing the server-side architecture as well. We invite you to read our conversation with Jesse James Garrett and other architecture thought leaders in “Ajax Web application development turns five.” Continued »

Happy birthday Ajax

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, more commonly called Ajax, turned five today. As SearchSOA.com reports, it was on Feb. 18, 2005 that user interface expert Jesse James Garrett first coined the term.

As the story goes, Garrett had developed a prototype Ajax application for a client. The application tested so well with users, and was radically different from the team’s previous approach, that Garrett was asked to pitch it to the company’s president. Continued »