02:01:54 pm, Categories: Computers and Internet, Open Source, Business Intelligence, 414 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
The Art of Picking Your Poison - Open Source and the Choice of an Application Architecture, Eugene Ciurana, Leapfrog Enterprises
Eugene has a rich background in IT infrastructure, and has been implementing open source and contributed code to various projects since 1997, as well as being an advocate for OpenOffice.org, Mule ESB, Apache and other open source projects.
Eugene described the job of an enterprise architect, starting with... a joke, and ending with the ability to describe your architecture in both technical terms and business terms. The best enterprise environments are a mix of closed and open source solutions - choosing the right mix is the job of the architect.
Beware of vendors being Marketectures.
Architecture is vendor and technology agnostic.
Today, open source is often the cutting edge technology in any given segment. This can be a barrier for some risk-adverse organizations to adopting an open source solution. Education, and non-vendor education in particular, is the path to overcoming this barrier.
Eugene recommends spending at least 30 minutes a day following the trends in your industry, and not just through traditional means such as trade journals, but check out digg, reddit, slashdot, etc.
Evolving an architecture from a typical point-only integration is very difficult, and Eugene went through a case study from early 2000, to prove the point. Of course, one problem with many architectures, that I've seen, is that they often lead to silos of information, duplication of information, and poor data quality. With point-to-point, each problem becomes a new, involved project, each with their own interoperability problems, and with higher expense. [Eugene's case study reminded me of a situation we hit, where a customer had rolled out a brand new order management system - in Pick/Universe - 10 years after Dr. Pick had died.]
This brings us to SOA and resource oriented computing [ROC], wherein services provide not only data but computational capability. One can leave their enterprise applications in place, and supplement with open source software within a SOA using ROC.
When looking at open source, assure that there is a strong, active community.
The first question when evaluating any technology, any product, is "does it solve your problem?" and if not, it doesn't matter if it's open source or not.
Eugene feels that open source is very good for infrastructure, because it's not domain specific. As an adjunct to this, Eugene feels that open source is not, and will not for at least five years, be good for domain specific applications. With this, I disagree.
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The Open Source Solutions Blog is a companion to the Open Source Solutions for Business Intelligence Research Project, sponosred by InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc. This Blog, a Wiki and Lens will be used to develop, support and publish the findings of our research into enterprise open source projects.
InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc. (IASC) performs research in the areas of data analytics, collaboration and remote access.InterASC Professional Services, a service mark of IASC, provides strategic consulting and project management for data warehousing, business intelligence and collaboration projects using proprietary and open source solutions. We formulate vendor-independent strategies and implement solutions for information management in an increasingly complex and distributed business environment, allowing secure data analysis and collaboration that provides enterprise information in the most valuable form to the right person, whenever and wherever needed.
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