David Linthicum

While the hype rages around cloud computing, most cloud implementations go the way of the private cloud and avoid the public clouds for now.  Private clouds are exactly what they sound like.  Your own instance of SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS that exists in your own data center, all tucked away, protected and cozy.  You own the hardware, you can hug your server. However, what defines a private cloud these days could also mean systems that are remotely hosted but dedicated to a single enterprise, and, in some cases, provided out of a public cloud data center as a virtual private cloud.  Thus any cloud infrastructure that's dedicated to a single organization is getting the "private cloud" label.  This includes the emerging relabeling of existing enterprise software and hardware solutions, looking to deliver cloud-in-a-box private clouds. If this sounds confusing, it is.  The te... (more)

Open SOA Collaboration

Last month an alliance of leading vendors announced progress on specifications to define a language-neutral programming model for application development in SOA environments. They call this specification Open SOA Collaboration. In essence, they are proposing a new standard to create and manage IT, making the process of integrating different third-party SOA technologies "less onerous," they say. Or, we can call this a standard way of delivering services, making it easier to work and play well together. So, who's in the gang? BEA, IBM, Oracle, and SAP first got together last Novem... (more)

SOA - Loosely Coupled...What?

With the advent of Web services and SOA, we've been seeking to create architectures and systems that are more loosely coupled. Loosely coupled systems provide many advantages including support for late or dynamically binding to other components while running, and can mediate the difference in the component's structure, security model, protocols, and semantics, thus abstracting volatility. This is in contrast to compile-time or runtime binding, which requires that you bind the components at compile time or runtime (synchronous calls), respectively, and also requires that changes ... (more)

Where XML Fits With EAI

Fundamentally, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is about loosely coupling applications and data stores together to solve intraenterprise business problems. Its strength is facilitating the free flow of information from any system to any other system, one-to-one or many-to-many, with each of those systems gaining access to perfect external information in real time. EAI typically integrates ERP packages, such as SAP, PeopleSoft, and Baan, in addition to customer relationship management (CRM) packages, databases, and older mainframe systems. EAI also allows organizations to e... (more)

Remember ebXML?

While there are many standards that look like ebXML, ebXML is the first horizontal standard designed to address the exchange of information and adherence to inter-enterprise processes. However, in attempting to reach this lofty goal, ebXML is also a complex standard and takes some understanding before we can comprehend its value to the world of application integration and electronic business. So, why do we need the ebXML standard? It's really a matter of leveraging the Internet to automate how we do business in real time, leveraging common processes and common information format... (more)