Quick bits: Jonathon Schwartz’s goodbye tweet - Oracle buys AmberPoint - Middleware in the data center

Last week, in the wake of the Oracle-Sun merger, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz left. He tweeted on the way. This week Oracle was back buying, grabbing SOA governance software maker AmberPoint. Such software is useful as middleware moves deeper into the corporation. Here are a few quick bits … Continued »

IBM buys into MDM with Initiate Systems purchase

Where last month much of the news was on BPM acquisitions, the spotlight has recently turned to master data management (MDM). On Wednesday, IBM announced a definitive agreement to purchase Initiate Systems, an MDM company out of Chicago that specializes in the health care sector.

This news comes just a week after data integration vendor, Informatica bought MDM provider Siperian for $130 million.

IBM says Initiate Systems’ software brings together data from separate systems managed by hospitals, doctors’ offices and payers and helps speed the adoption and exchange of electronic medical records.

The focus of MDM is working with non-transactional data entities. This type of data, which can be customer records for example, is often referenced in a number of places throughout a system.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz resigns via haiku tweet

Perhaps having to do things the Oracle way didn’t sit well with the Jonathan Schwartz, the ponytailed CEO who recently oversaw the demise and acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Schwartz has just announced his resignation from Sun - with a haiku on Twitter:

Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku.                     Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more

Oracle had just finished its acquisition of Sun Microsystems last week. According to the New York Times, Schwartz is the first Fortune 200 boss to tweet his resignation.

Service-oriented architecture for FAA system to integrate weather reports

Harris Corp. meteorologists have used SOA to integrate weather information into the Next Generation Air Transportation System. They discussed their work at last month’s American Meteorological Society (AMS) conference in Atlanta. Continued »

Pegasystems says Agile BPM this way comes

SOA projects suffered at times from the usual project culprits – a fatalistically long ‘long view,’ feature bloat, scope creep and just an overall case of boil-the-ocean ambition. Somewhere along the way BPM stepped up and began seeding a great many smaller projects carefully designed to pay off fairly quickly. Where services were in place, these BPM projects had a potentially longer useful life span. Either way, the notion of incremental advance began to take hold in SOA as well as BPM. Continued »

SearchSOA, the video – the first season

Playing at the moment on the SearchSOA Video Library is “Middleware Minute” in which Rob Barry and I kick around some thoughts on the news of the day. In this case we discuss recent BPM mergers and Oracle’s recently disclosed roadmap for Sun. Also, we are not so far into the New Year that it is not worthwhile to visit with the OMG’s Richard Soley as he looks at the news of 2009 and looks forward to 2010. These videos can be on the new Apple iPad!

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SearchSOA Video Library - SearchSOA.com

Oracle gets EU approval on Sun purchase

by Jack Vaughan

Java was one of the major sea changes in the history of application development. It brought some ease of use to objects as well as a usable set of standards for distributed computing. With word last week that the European Union had okayed Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems, the possibility of another sea change must be considered. Continued »

Microsoft urges Congress to address cloud computing privacy concerns

Now that Microsoft Azure is commercially available and begins charging for use in February, Microsoft has taken its enthusiasm for cloud computing to Congress. This week Microsoft SVP Brad Smith called on U.S. legislators to enact a “Cloud Computing Advancement Act,” which would protect consumers and provide the government with new tools to address issues of data privacy and security. Continued »

Ted Neward talks JavaScript, Scala, architecture and more

Well known enterprise systems consultant Ted Neward recently spoke with TheServerside.com about some topics he will cover at this years TSS Java Symposium. The Q&A session discusses ECMAScript (JavaScript), pragmatic architecture, changes in the Java community and the new programming language, Scala.

Neward said a lot of developers are mistaken about thinking ECMAScript is “some bastardized rip-off of Java.” He said the language has first-class support for functions and lets users change the behavior of a library if they don’t like the functionality. This provides some significant power.

“JavaScript is not just about the browser, it’s another programming language that has full access to the JVM,” said Neward. “It’s about time developers started to exploit that.”

Scala is important, on one hand, because it focuses on programming in the functional mindset, Neward said.

The other thing is Scala represents what I consider to be a generational advance in terms of programming language approach and syntax. There are a lot of things I can do with the Scala language that I really can’t do with the Java language, and certainly not easily. A lot of people criticize Scala for being far too complex, but a lot of what they’re criticizing as being complex is not really baked into language—it’s essentially the library that makes up the Scala experience.

On pragmatic architecture, Neward said he was trying to build a sort of “periodic table of elements for software.” When developers are looking to implement architectural components, he said it is important to have an overview of all the parts involved.

IBM signs Panasonic onto cloud computing SaaS collaboration suite

IBM recently inked an important agreement with Panasonic, which is ditching Microsoft Exchange for IBM’s LotusLive collaborative SaaS product. Panasonic will deploy LotusLive to its work force of more than 300,000, which many say makes this the largest enterprise cloud computing deal yet. Continued »