ZapNote: WestGlobal

Many vendors approach the problem of managing Web Services from the technology perspective. After all, Web Services expose IT resources in an IT infrastructure. WestGlobal, however, takes the perspective of the business user. Their view is that Web Services expose business functionality that serves the needs of the enterprise’s lines of business. Therefore, WestGlobal’s management platform enables business managers to control how well an enterprise’s Web Services infrastructure is meeting business requirements such as customer satisfaction, revenue generation, and cost savings. After all, the business should drive the technology, not the other way around.

SOA Tools & Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best practices as well as an analysis of the tools that are currently available for building Service-oriented architectures.

ZapNote: PRAJA

In this information-overload, rapid-fire environment of informed decision making, business users of all types need the ability to quickly assimilate information from a wide range of data sources, develop business insights from this information, monitor and react to the changing business environment, and create and disseminate new ideas and initiatives throughout the enterprise. Continual Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solutions allow users to be interactively informed of information in an event-driven manner. Through its ExperienceWare application suite, PRAJA provides a robust, patented Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solution and development platform that organizes content around events and contextually organizes vast amounts of structured and unstructured data in a unified, context-aware view.