ZapThink Podcast: Practical SOA Energy & Utilities Sneak Peek

Special ZapThink “Sneak Preview” Podcast for January 24, 2008 features:

James Jones, Director, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), BP

Rusty Foreman, DCT Enterprise Architecture, BP

Patrick Bhirdo, Endigo Energy

Richard Green, Principal Analyst, DTE Energy

David Anderson, Solution Architect, BEA Systems, Inc

John Michelsen, Founder & Chief Architect, iTKO

Dan Finerty, Director, Product Marketing, DataDirect Shadow

Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink

Listen to this Podcast and you will get a “Sneak Peek” at what all the presenters will be speaking about at our Practical SOA: Energy and Utilities event in Houston, TX on February 5, 2008.

DataDirect Technologies Named Key Enabler for Service-Oriented Data Access in ZapThink Report

“SOA presents business functionality and data as abstracted services — as organizations move to this paradigm, the reliance on data becomes even more critical,” said Jason Bloomberg, ZapThink analyst and managing partner. “Should the data access in an organization fail to perform, then the services at the center of the architecture will also fail. As such, it’s important to choose best-of-breed data access middleware as a critical building block for any SOA initiative. The DataDirect Connect® family of data access tools fits the bill.”

Read more at: Yahoo! Finance

ZapThink Calls DataDirect’s Data Access Technology Instrumental to SOA

“SOA presents business functionality and data as abstracted services — as organisations move to this paradigm, the reliance on data becomes even more critical,” said Jason Bloomberg, ZapThink analyst and managing partner. “Should the data access in an organisation fail to perform, then the services at the centre of the architecture will also fail. As such, it’s important to choose best-of-breed data access middleware as a critical building block for any SOA initiative. The DataDirect Connect® family of data access tools fits the bill.”

Read more at: ebizQ

SOA needs Data. Data needs SOA. Now Repeat.

If you’ve been following me, you know I’m all about the data when considering SOA. Services are indeed important, however the understanding, management, and use of data is something that needs to be the foundation of your SOA, as with any architecture. As I always say, you need a semantic or data-level understanding of your problem domain, then services, then processes.

Truth-be-told many neglect the data, and data connectivity, when designing and building their SOA. This mistake typically causes project failure, or even worse ineffective SOAs that really just add to the complexity of the core architecture. That’s not good.

Read more at: InfoWorld

DataDirect Technologies Brings Expert Series Architect Tutorials to St. Louis

SOA luminary, author and avid blogger, David Linthicum, joins
respected leaders in the fields of data connectivity, integration
and software development as a featured speaker. As principal
and CEO of the Linthicum Group, a consulting organization
recently acquired by ZapThink dedicated to excellence in SOA
product development and implementation, Linthicum has formed or
enhanced many of the ideas behind modern distributed computing in
wide use today.

Read more at: DataDirect Press Release

DataDirect Technologies’ Expert Series Architect Tutorials to Feature SOA Luminary and Prolific Author David Linthicum

DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS – News), today announced the schedule and agenda for its popular Expert Series Architect Tutorial event series. The free seminar series will take place Oct. 4 in St. Louis, Oct. 11 in Toronto and Oct. 16 in Irvine, Calif. The multi-city event provides attendees with first-hand knowledge and how-to advice from industry experts skilled at building and deploying high-performance software applications using state-of-the-art data access, mainframe integration and XML query technology.

Featured speakers are respected leaders in the fields of data connectivity, integration and software development who are skilled at developing modern IT architectures which support advanced application development practices. Joining DataDirect executive thought-leaders is internationally known Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 expert, David Linthicum.

Principal and CEO of the Linthicum Group, a consulting organization recently acquired by ZapThink dedicated to excellence in SOA product development, SOA implementation, corporate SOA strategy and leveraging the next-generation Web (Web 2.0), Linthicum has formed or enhanced many of the ideas behind modern distributed computing in wide use today. He has authored more than 800 articles and columns for major computing publications; pens the widely popular InfoWorld blog, “Real World SOA;” and has written several computing books including the just published, “Next Generation Application Integration: From Simple Information to Web Services.”

“Through its Expert Series, DataDirect has created a unique forum where architects and software development managers can exchange ideas with the world’s foremost experts on data access,” said David Linthicum. “I’m pleased to be a part of this event and to share my knowledge and experience on navigating the complexities of SOA.”

Read more at: DataDirect Press Release

Service-Oriented Data Access

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources and data to meet the changing needs of the business. Implementing SOA depends upon the IT organization being able to build interoperable, robust, reusable, and composable Services that abstract the underlying application functionality and data in the organization. To put this building block vision of SOA into practice requires a solid technical foundation, which includes a persistence layer that facilitates interaction with heterogeneous data sources that store and provide the structured and unstructured information that the enterprise runs upon.

The key to enabling SOA with such a persistence layer, in turn, depends upon abstracting access through data access technology. Technologies such as JDBC, ODBC, and ADO.NET play an integral role in the design and development of a SOA Data Services strategy. With best-of-breed data access technology in place, the organization stands a good chance of succeeding with their SOA efforts. If an organization drops the ball on data access, however, it’s unlikely the Services will exhibit the key building block characteristics the organization needs to meet their agility requirements.

ZapForum Podcast: Case Study: Web Services at a Midsize Bank

ZapForum Podcast for September 21, 2007 features

Guest Experts Mike Zink, Database Analyst & Developer, Roger Lanka, Manager of Client/Server Development, Shawn King, Programmer/Analyst, and Jason Bowling, Programmer/Analyst, First Merit Bank.

Listen to this Podcast and you will:

• Get a real-world sense as to how a midsize bank is leveraging Web Services
• Understand how mainframes play in a Microsoft environment
• Gain insight into how reusable Web Services can reduce costs and provide agility

ZapForum Podcast: Semantic Integration & SOA

ZapForum Podcast for May 21, 2007 features

Guest Experts Ken Rugg, Vice President Products, DataXtend, Progress Software.

and Bradley Falk, Chief Architect, Western Region, Online Business Systems.

Listen to this Podcast and you will:

• Define semantic integration, semantic models, and ontologies
• Understand the relationship between semantic integration and SOA
• Learn about the limitations of semantic integration

Building Data-Rich SOBAs in a Heterogeneous Environment

Presentation for the DataDirect seminar tour in May, 2007.

Presents a top-down view of how data integration supports SOA initiatives. Includes a discussion of SOBAs and mashups.

32-slide PowerPoint in PDF format.