Oracle continues acquisition trail with telco service broker

Oracle announced on Feb. 10 that it has agreed to buy Convergin, provider of a J2EE-based service broker for the telecommunications industry. Through this acquisition, Oracle said it hopes to offer a carrier-grade, standards-based IT platform that allows communications service providers to evolve their service delivery capabilities.

Oracle said the transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

Just a few days before this news broke, Oracle announced that it is buying AmberPoint, a vendor of SOA management and governance tools. Most notably, Oracle’s game-changing acquisition of Sun Microsystems got European Union approval in January.

TestMaker offers scriptless testing for RIAs and SOA

Testing can certainly be one of of the less glamorous responsibilities of an application developer. For teams looking for a shortcut, performance management company Apprenda offers a tool that it claims reduces test creation to mouse clicks.

TestMaker, now in version 5.4, is an open source product used to create tests for rich Internet applications and SOA. The product provides IT with out-of-the-box methods for functional testing, load testing and business service monitoring.

Apprenda says features in TestMaker 5.4 include the following:

• Scriptless, point-and-click test creation
• Root Cause Analysis and Correlation using Glassbox and Dynatrace monitoring services
• Improved failure analysis
• Continuous Integration Environment support for Hudson, Bamboo, Collabnet TeamForge, Ant, JUnit
• Updated support for latest versions of Selenium, SoapUI, Bluenog and Icefaces

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!

Related
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 »