Category Archives: SOA
Time For Clarity On The Role Of Business Analytics
Accenture’s Kishore Swaminathan recently put together his thoughts on business analytics, and very accurately laid out promise of analytics for today’s organizations: “In my view, analytics is something much more than a technology with an ROI; it’s a transformational phenomenon that will fundamentally change how business discourse will be conducted and decisions made.”
Analytics, then is following a path that bears a striking similarity with the rise of service oriented architecture, which I tracked in recent years – not a single technology, group of technologies, or not necessarily even a technology at all, but a new way of doing business.
I was one of the authors of the SOA Manifesto, crafted at the end of 2009 to articulate the values and principles of service orientation. The SOA Manifesto was modeled directly from the Agile Manifesto, which articulated the goals of Agile development processes, which emphasize an ongoing dialogue with business end-users as projects progress. (more…)
Now, Data Services Move Into The Cloud
In previous posts here, we talked about the evolving importance of data services, particularly as they fit into service oriented architectures. Now, as more SOA thinking is elevated into work with private and cloud configurations, it’s only natural that the notion of cloud-based data services also becomes a greater part of enterprise discussions and planning.
Informatica has been doing a lot of work in this area, from Informatica Cloud Services offering fundamental functions such as data synchronization, data replication and data loading for salesforce.com, to a range of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings offering integration tools and platforms. Clearly, there are a lot of advantages to be gained by offering the essential elements of data management and administration through cloud-based services. Sets of data services can be offered through a private cloud hosted and managed within the enterprise or through cloud offerings from third-party partners.
That’s why it was interesting to hear what the folks at Burton Group, a division of Gartner, had to say about this space. (more…)
Next-Generation Data Virtualization Series Part 2 – Characteristics
So, where have I been since my last blog? Well, I have been working on our new Architect to Architect webinar series on data virtualization, which is very exciting for me as I get to rub shoulders (virtually speaking) with hundreds of industry architects.
The interactive nature and record attendance at these webinars have made one thing very clear – data virtualization is indeed top of mind. In my last blog we discussed the concept and how data virtualization is different or a superset of traditional data federation, especially as it overcomes many limitations of the latter. Wayne Eckerson did a great job at tracking the evolution of data federation in a recent webinar and blog. (more…)
Welcome To Informatica World 2010
Welcome To Informatica World 2010
Our annual gathering takes place this week in Washington D.C. We have a fabulous agenda with many significant keynotes, together with a packed agenda of breakout sessions – including over 40 presentations by you, our customers. An enormous amount has happened since we last gathered two years ago – remember last year when we were in the middle of the great recession when we held our “Deep Dive” preview of Informatica 9 to our closest customers and partners under NDA?
We followed the Deep Dive with the launch of Informatica 9 in November last year, followed by many new releases of our cloud service and other products within our Platform. We have deployed new communities and launched the Informatica Marketplace. We extended our Platform into Complex Event Processing, Master Data Management and Ultra Messaging. We have been recognized by Gartner as a leader in their magic quadrants for Data Integration, Data Quality and Customer Master Data Management. Forrester have positioned us as a leader in “Information-as-a-Service” and Data Quality and for the fifth consecutive year we are ranked number 1 in customer satisfaction. (more…)
Data Virtualization Series Part 1 – What is it?
We have all heard of data federation and of late we have also been hearing how simple, traditional data federation often gets passed off as data virtualization. Let’s get back to basics and take a hard look at what the real need is.
Data federation is not a new concept. When it first arrived on the scene many years ago, technologists got excited as it offered a way to quickly access numerous disparate data sources without physically moving data. Years passed and the term kept appearing in research paper after research paper – but what did not happen was the anticipated widespread adoption. TDWI’s Wayne Eckerson does a great job at tracking the evolution of data federation in his recent webinar and blog. Simple, traditional data federation does one thing and only one thing well – it creates a virtual view across heterogeneous data sources, delivering data in real-time, typically to reporting tools and composite applications. In its very simplicity lay its downfall.
The “Business” Needs Critical Data “Now” – We Need The Next Generation Data Federation Technology “Yesterday!”
There is a lot of talk about using data federation, Enterprise Information Integration (EII) or data virtualization to deliver new data to the business, on-demand. However, do existing approaches cut it?
I have been following the data integration space for many years now, and like many of you, I have wondered about the viability of data federation as a data integration approach. Not because it does not hold promise – it does – it has many advantages as a fast, flexible and low cost approach to integrate multiple and diverse data sources in real-time, without the need for physical data movement.
However, according to the numerous architects that I have had the pleasure of meeting with on the Informatica 9 World Tour, simple or traditional data federation has not been able to live up to its immense promise. And why is that I asked – the reasons were many…
Why is the New SOA Data Integration Architecture Group on a Roll?
Because there is real need! Period! Even after investing heavily in agile architecture approaches such as SOA, IT organizations are finding it extremely challenging to solve complex data integration issues.
If you are involved in defining or re-defining a data architecture to enable composite applications and portals to effectively leverage data in an SOA, here is where the discussions are happening.
If you are looking to enhance your existing data architecture to ensure that business intelligence reports can quickly leverage data that is not in your data warehouse, you will find your answers here.
If You Have A Data Integration Round Hole, Don’t Buy Square Pegs
I’m often taken aback by the focus on technology as “the solution,” and not as an approach to the solution. One of the reasons I blog for Informatica is because they do focus on the solution and not the tool. Believe me, vendors will sell plenty of tools if they provide those tools in the context of the solution.
So, how do you find the right data integration tool? It’s really a matter of understanding your own data integration requirements, and creating baseline models for what the existing “as is” state is. This means you must understand your data at the structure and model levels, or, more simply put, you must understand what you have, where you have it, and what it’s doing. (more…)
The Unfinished Architecture: Panel Explores SOA’s Data Integration Imperative
What is holding back effective data management as part of service oriented architecture? As SOA enters a new phase of maturity, too many companies may still be overlooking its “architecture” aspect (the “A” in SOA), and therefore not realizing all the benefits that can be attained.
There is still a tendency to view SOA as a technology initiative, and thereby miss its most crucial role in the business – making information accurate, timely and accessible. My Perspectives community colleague Ash Parikh, who is also Informatica’s tireless advocate of quality data services, observes that architecture – “the most foundational piece of SOA” – is often absent from SOA projects as companies attempt to pile on solution after solution.
Ash was part of a recent Webcast panel discussion that explored the latest opportunities and challenges as SOA enters the cloud era. (more…)
Rethinking Data Virtualization
I’m looking forward to doing a Webinar on data virtualization this Thursday, April 22nd. Why? Because this is the single most beneficial concept of architecture, including SOA, and it’s often overlooked by the rank-and-file developers and architects out there. I’m constantly evangelizing the benefits of data virtualization, including integrating data from many and different data sources in real-time, and enabling query-based applications to get data from multiple systems.
The idea is pretty simple, really. Considering that there are many physical database schemas within most enterprises, and typically no common view of the data, data virtualization allows you to map many physical schemas to virtual schemas that are a better representation of the business. For example, a single view of customer data, sales data, and other data that has the same logical meaning, but may be scattered amongst many different physical database systems, using any number of implementation models. (more…)
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