05:13:48 pm, Categories: Computers and Internet, Mobile, Open Source, Business Intelligence, 258 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
I recently joined Twitter. I must share the following:
Roebot: #e20 note to organizers: If your panelists do NOT know what SOAP and REST are they prolly shouldn't be on a mashup panel!!! WTF!! about 5 hours ago from twhirl
-- Aaron Roe Fulkerson on Twitter
To which I responded:
Joseph_di_P: @Roebot SOAP is what you use in tub to get clean; REST is what you do in tub when not using SOAP :-D Easy, yah! about 1 hour ago from Hahlo in reply to Roebot
-- my response on Twitter
I know, I know, all the important stuff happening in the Open Source BI related world this week, and this is what I blog about. Is it a sign of dementia when you crack yourself up? 
Here's some of the more important stuff that's been happening:
There's much else to do, including some additions to our linkblog with open source for MDM and more open source communities. But, I'm tweeting. 
01:00:27 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, 2260 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
The highlight of JavaOne for me has become supper with Gianugo Rabellino, the founder and CEO of SourceSense. For now, each year…
"'The time has come,' the Walrus said, 'To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings.'"
-- from the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" within Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
… For our conversations are wide ranging and thoroughly engaging as we indulge our enjoyment of fine food and open source.
This year, Gianugo has been in the USA several times, for the Open Source Think Tank and the Open Source Business Conference, and on business. An employee of SourceSense even had a gig in the town in which I was raised. Unfortunately discovering it to be the arm pit of the United States. Ah well, it's why I live in the SF Bay Area now. 
We talked of tempering chocolate, unusual eating habits of various cultures, the worsening economy, European vs USA political views, and Gianugo even had me read, while sober, the Pronunciation Poem. [I flubbed a few words, and disagree with some of the rhymes given that my dialect is as Philly as a Chesse Steak.]
But we also talked about Open Source; all the open source related conferences and blogging and work and newsworthy activities of the past few months. Here are some of my thoughts.
This one has been bubbling around in my head for years. Open Source, in and of itself is NOT
It is a philosophy that can provide the framework for those three things with which it is most often identified. The variations among what the open source philosophy means to each of its followers can best be seen from the proliferation of licenses, business models and methodologies all claiming to be open source.
To me, the open source philosophy is very simple, and it can be applied to solutions for some very complex problems and concerns: the source is available to anyone who obtains the end-product, whether one has obtained the end-product through a no-cost download or through a purchase agreement of whatever type. The "source" may be the "source code" for software, but, to me, it should be whatever specifications and design documentation are required to recreate the end-product in either the original or a modified form.
There are a variety of reasons that a developer, an engineer, an inventor, a creator, might what to subscribe to an open source philosophy. And each individual or business must decide if those reasons make creative and economic sense for them. Once one has decided to subscribe to open source, or any philosophy, then all your other decisions will only lead to success if they are logically consistent within that philosophy. The licensing language, business model, economic forecasting, internal processes and external relationships should form a coherent whole within the underlying philosophical framework.
Organizations often look for the silver bullet or the golden mantra or the platinum ring that will solve their problems, lead to dominance in the marketplace, or allow them to rule them all. So we hear a lot of talk about the "best" open source business model. This search ignores that fact that there are open source solutions for many markets. Without going into specific verticals, let's just consider four general, horizontal markets that are addressed by open source software.
No one business model, no matter how generically expressed, could satisfy these four disparate markets. Monetizing these areas will come from combining innovative and traditional packaging of support, customizations, system integration, training, licensing, and subscriptions.
Automated maintenance, repair and update networks might work very well for monetizing IT infrastructure, but might be insufficient for the other markets. Ad based monetization, directly or through partnerships with ad networks like Google's, might work for some end-user applications. Putting out the begging bowl, asking for PayPal contributions might also work. But for many open source projects, there simply isn't any path to monetization.
One area that I think has been insufficiently explored, and might well be the only path to success for the Enterprise Application open source vendors is Software as a Service. The SaaS approach, whether through partner channels or directly, is the most sensible means of monetizing a wide variety of open source applications. Embrace the open source philosophy, leverage the strengths of flexibility and community in the licensing, business models and processes, and monetize through SaaS delivery into vertical and niche markets.
And for the rest, just acknowledging that your company is a software company embracing an open source philosophy, and building appropriate support and licensing structures will be the best path.
Developing a community around a product is not unique to the open source world. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SAS, SPSS, IBM, etc, etc, etc have all developed and supported great communities made up of ISVs, VARs and Users. The difference however, is that open source projects are very dependent on their community. Conversely, communities are strongest when there are no artificial limits to communication.
I think that most companies are embracing at least this one ramification of the open source philosophy. Though it seems to me that when the source isn't open, the community can only converse and support each other in surface issues.
One area though, where open source vendors still seem to be uncertain, is the definition of community, and what groups make up their community, and if they must develop different communities for different categories of members: developers, users, non-software contributors, paying customers, or partners. I think this is self-defeating. There is only one community for each project: those who want to be involved and will benefit from that involvement, ultimately to the betterment of the project, whether directly or indirectly, whether monetary or not, whether contributing code or documentation or use cases or testing or playing around with the project or complaining about it or just soaking up the ambience. Can any open source project community manager give a valid reason why any of these should be excluded from the community or ignored?
Whether we're talking about senior IT management, the CIO, or the purchasing department, the idea of freely downloading the fully operational, unlimited version of a product, and using it for research, prototyping or production, without handholding, cosseting or sales incentives is complete anathema to those making purchasing decisions.
Did you ever see a "vendor bake-off" among products from Oracle, IBM and SAP without vendor involvement, without vendor sales engineers fine-tuning and providing weeks of free labour? Is there any open source company that provides a corporate jet and box seats at the super bowl? And is there anyone who has ever been part of selling (internally or as a vendor) a large, big-budget enterprise project to a CIO or purchasing committee, who doesn't believe that such freebies and perks are essential elements to the approval process?
Many, too many, open source vendor CEOs believe that bloatware (more features than most users will use), vendor lock-in and lack of interoperability, and high prices of initial licenses are the problems CIOs worry and that open source software solves. They think success will come from "80% of the capabilities for 20% of the cost" of their closed source competitors. I don't believe any of it. CIOs worry about being beat up by the business side and greasing the squeaky wheel. The two highest costs in a data center are people and energy, not licenses or maintenance agreements. Implementation costs: hardware, software licenses, personnel and training, are spread out over three to five years with appropriate tax implications. For really large projects such as a full ERP or data warehouse, there is at least a ten year life expectancy. Why do you think that there are so many mainframes and COBOL applications still around? The implementation costs were written-off long ago, and the on-going support costs are minimal because they still JUST WORK. Those with an eye to economics are more concerned about the total cost of ownership over the complete 10-year lifecycle of a capital project, than with the 10% or less of those costs that go towards initial software licenses.
So, if the only way for open source vendors to become big players, or as one CIO put it, to "move out of the junior varsity", is to look like the big players, to provide pre-sales engineering and collateral beyond a T-shirt, then what will this do the business model and the belief in "20% of the cost"? It will destroy it. This is why there are more openings for sales & marketing than for engineers at open source companies today.
Open Source Vendors will grow and evolve and come to operate more and more like the big players they're destined to become. As long as they continue to adhere to their form of the open source philosophy, are internally consistent and true to the logic of their open source framework, they'll continue to benefit from the true value of open source: flexibility and community knowledge to a greater degree than can be achieved by any closed-source vendor or any isolated, enterprise data center with home-grown solutions. Speaking of which…
This is another point I've been hammering for years. Traditionally, IT shops were either build or buy. The build shops were very development oriented and created custom solutions to implement business processes and support business users. The buy shops bought COTS software, and either convinced the business that the software they bought implemented industry best practices, or spent millions of dollars in customization.
Build shops suffer from isolation and the total burden of maintaining and updating the software they built. When the only developer left who remembers and understands the code, retires, faith often becomes the best practice for ongoing support. 
Buy shops suffer from ongoing dependancy on the vendor(s) and ongoing compromises for the users.
Build shops should be (but often aren't) more flexible to respond to changing business needs, and can be more valuable to the business.
Buy shops can be more reliable and cost-effective - really. But not always.
One result of Y2K [remember that?] was that most IT departments became much more of a blend of build and buy, with buy decisions winning out. Coupling this with the facilitation of distributed workgroups made possible by the Internet expanding world wide, and offsourcing [outsourcing operations to offshore companies] decimated many corporate data centers by solving the personnel and energy cost problems. Guess what? Implementation and licensing and maintenance costs remain the same. Some CIOs use offsourcing as the reason that they don't use open source; the outsourced vendor isn't familiar with it, and has no incentive to use it.
As companies bring IT back inside, and as its importance to the business is once again realized, open source offers a third path to the traditional build or buy. However, offsourcing will still be a substantial part of the solution, and should lead OSVs to recognize the importance of offsourcing vendors and embrace them as partners and very important channels.
The IT shop that responds to the business using open source can be both flexible and well-supported. The open source vendors that make such IT shops succeed through flexibility and reliability will be the most successful ones. This can be achieved through the OSVs growing their support, professional services and training organizations, or by partnering with all sizes of PS, VAR and outsourcing firms, or both.
The real conclusion is that bringing the open source philosophy to fruition in business is still an evolving process. The advantages gained by the openness of the source and the strength of the community is being recognized by both the IT shops and the OSVs. While there are cost savings to be had, OSVs need to stop relying on initial licensing cost reductions as their main selling point, and begin to market the advantages to the IT shop of using open source: responsiveness to changing business needs and increasing reliability over time, all while providing the best TCO and ROI.
There's a lot more to be said on all of these topics and opinions, and maybe I'll even get the time do so. 
10:03:15 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, 381 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
Startup Camp is a mix of traditional conference panels and an open space "unconference".
The juxtaposition of the two is a bit jarring in some ways. 'Tis somewhat like going from a warm fuzzy blanket [panels] to an exhilarating plunge into the chilly North Pacific [unconference sessions]. Actually, panels have been losing their appeal over the past few years. A good panel is a lively debate. The panelists engage each other. A good panel is both entertaining and informative. Too many panels today bring to mind an event from my college days. This is an unfair analogy but I'll tell the story anyway.
The only diner within walking distance of the college was the S&W [or, as it was traditionally known, the "Slut & Whore" - hey, don't yell at me; it describes the area well. Think of the Tenderloin in SF on a bad night.] Anyway, after an all-night study session, or maybe a drunken game of Diplomacy, we made a visit to the S&W in the wee hours for some coffee and rice pudding. Among the other patrons were two old transients [a.k.a. hobos, stumblebums]. They were at opposite ends of the diner, but seemed to be having a loud argument on who was the greatest baseball player of all time. After a while, we realized that they weren't arguing. They were merely proclaiming in loud voices on the same subject. OK, the panels aren't that bad, but getting close.
Another problem with panels today is that most panelists blog. If you are at all interested in the subject, it's likely that you read their blogs and already know their opinions.
Ah well, onto the good part.
The unconference sessions are intimate and, as mentioned before, exhilarating.
The only problem is that there are so many great topics being discussed at the same time, that it's like being in a candy store: you don't what to grab onto, there are just too many choices.
But you can read all about what happened on the Startup Camp wiki, if the attendees upload their notes. Just follow the links from the Startup Camp Unconference schedule at the bottom of the page.
Tomorow will be running back and forth between Startup Camp and CommunityOne. Can't wait.
11:58:04 am, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, 453 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
Today, I'm at Startup Camp, in conjunction with CommunityOne, which starts tomorrow, in conjunction with JavaOne. The schedule is online, but this is a camp, an unconference, and the rules are different.
The introduction is over, and the keynote with Jonathan Schwartz and Om Malik is going on now.
A question from the audience, essentially that there is no simple, online solution for a Java developer to just go online and develop, led to an interesting side discussion where I'm seated about what it means to be a developer. The old folk at the table, have a much broader definition of a developer, and the skills they should have, than the young'uns, who are more focused on just one language, and just code monkey banging away.
The first panel is starting up, moderated by S. Neil Vineberg, President, Vineberg Communications. The topic is branding, and how the brand comes out of the founders and the culture that they create.
One interesting point for me, is that while the panel is discussing the importance of branding, and that the brand can flow from the founders' personality and the culture, I have found that if the founders are too focused on creating a brand, and selecting their brand category, they'll fail to infuse their brand with their personality, that is, the brand can seem sterile and contrived. Branding is very important, but, to me, it must come naturally from the company if it is to truly reflect the company. Of course, sometimes you have a founder that you need to keep locked in a closet, feed caffeinated drinks and pizza, and never, ever let them talk to the customers.
The use of social media is a given today, especially for startups. The use of Ning [why doesn't PeopleAggregator ever get a mention?] and the growth of social network platforms for startups [others] to grow their own social networks is a great indicator of this.
For all the talk of social media, the message of this panel seems to be that traditional methods, through PR, is still the best way to reach out and get your message across; especially outside of the technology centers like the SF Bay Area. However, it seems to me that when the panel starts talking about what's really effective, they use terms like "community" and "authentic conversations". It also seems that creating markets and driving markets is the better than pushing a product, in terms of success, and in terms of getting noticed.
The morning is done. I'm looking forward to networking and learning throughout today and tomorrow, to CommunityOne and seeing Michael Coté at Redmonk's Unconference, and a great conversation with Gianugo Rabellino at JavaOne and for supper on Thursday.
11:05:53 am, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, 30 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
InfoWorld has made downloads available for selected presentations from this year's Open Source Business Conference. The links will take you to PDF files. But, Matt, where are your video mashups?
04:55:09 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, ETL/EAI/ESB, 427 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
The community has been brought together for the final campground session. Rather than sing kumbaya, we've been teased with t-shirts, toys and books from O'Reilly and being treated to a demo of a hot deployment by Travis Carlson. 'Tis all drag-and-drop goodness, with dragging jar files (bundles) as connectors and apps from a MacOSX Finder into Mule and watching the results in Terminal.app. Ohhh! Ahhh! Safaris shows Mule saying "Hello Travis, welcome to MuleCon" 
OK, I'll admit that this is pretty neat and should satisfy the most addicted user of Tibco wizards. This won't appear in Mule Enterprise Edition until after the 2008Q3 release of Mule EE 2.0.
One little aside… I was talking to an ex-TIBCO employee who said that as old as TIBCO is (grew out of a Teknecron business that was founded in 1985 and became an independent business in 1997), the user even only draws about 400 people. This is only the second MuleCon [there was a sort-of pre-MuleCon in 2006 at a bar in London, but let's not count it), which last year drew around 100 folk and this year brought in around 240. That's phenomenal growth and shows the excitement that good software can bring to its users.
Questions for the Campground from Day 1 and some new ones.
Dave gave some closing remarks and that's all 'til next year.
02:12:04 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, ETL/EAI/ESB, 508 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
This first user track session is a panel, once again moderated by Michael Coté of Redmonk with John Davies, Technical Director and Head of Research at Iona, Eugene Ciurana of Leapfrog, John Rowell, CTO of OpSource, and John Gardner, Principal Consultant at MomentumSI. My take away from this is that Mule, perhaps open source in general, allows a company to better balance their risk as they test out the potential rewards while implementing tactically against strategic goals. A great metric from Eugene is that the most wait time he has ever had with Mule for a support issue is 90 minutes from opening a ticket to getting some sort of answer, and this is what keeps selling him on Mule vs proprietary solutions. Cost is a factor in ROI, and Mule wins out on not just initial costs but also costs less in need for training, on-going support, consulting, and maintenance; but beyond this, the flexibility of Mule and ability to integrate it with the infrastructure, and the openness not just of the code but in the company and personnel also adds to the return, as does the "cool" factor.
Having now seen Coté moderate two panels now, I have to say that he's one of the better moderators I've seen.
The second session is "A Quantum Leap in Ease of Use: Introducing Mule IDE 2.0". First let me say that having a nice, GUI IDE will help with the ROI perception, in that it is often the perception that development can be quicker and more efficient if done in a nice, pretty GUI. I happen to disagree, but I'm old and like CLI and typing more than clicking. Let's see what these guy's say. Yep, yep, yep… they're showing a pretty drag-and-drop GUI configuration editor. I took the one-day training at last year's MuleCon, and found that configuration through editing XML files to be very easy, and to help with understanding what Mule was doing. There was a contingent of attendees who complained that they didn't have their Tibco Wizard. This should help placate that contingent. Ah, the Mule IDE 2 is pre-alpha, though you can get it on the Forge. The release is expected to be in 2008Q3. The demonstration of the Mule IDE 2.0 plugin for Eclipse looks good; in addition to the GUI, one can still see the underlying XML.
John Davies, Technical Director and Head of Research of Iona spoke on Financial Messaging in Mule. The concept of losing a message in an investment is literally unthinkable. One interesting tidbit is that MS Excel is the only MS products one finds in an investment bank. John went over the front/middle/back office requirements, and the place where Mule is found is in the middle where XML is heavily used, usually over MQ & JMS. Using Artix, Mule, and GigaSpaces on an Azul box, provides essentially linear scaling and throughput is so high, performance is so great, that the need for transactions and supporting transactional relational databases is eliminated, thus increased performance allows increasing performance even more.
12:27:44 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, 549 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
The final session of MuleCon2008's second morning is a panel based upon "Are you Smarter that a Fifth Grader", moderated my Michael Coté of Redmonk. The panel consisted of Dave Rosenberg, Larry Augustin, Jason Maynard and Matt Asay.
The first question was what gets these folk excited in the shower in the morning: SaaS, Web2.0 enterprise/consumer Mashups, or other newly hyped trend. SaaS and mashups seem to be joined in the answers as a way for business users to get around IT by buying what they need on a credit card and expensing back this "rogue IT" service. The question evolved into "Is open source a given?". The answer was "yes" and the discussion segued back into how all these things, SaaS, mashups, open source, allow business users to get what they need quickly. Coté then asked if this meant that there was a "work life retooling" going on that was allowing traditional IT departments to work with Rogue IT implementations. While the consensus seems to be that IT departments were indeed going through the work life retooling to allow Rogue IT implementations, such as with WiFi hot spots or open source, I have to disagree. Every IT group with which we've worked has many regulatory, compliance or responsibility issues that preclude them from allowing Rogue IT. However, if a technology shows its value, even if that value can not be quantified in simple cost-benefits analyses, that technology will be brought into the organization under the IT umbrella, one way or another.
The floor was opened to questions from the attendees.
I asked if the panel would discuss MDM being useless without SOA and vice-versa. They pretty much declined, but Jason did discuss some of his own experiences. The bottom line is that the concepts are difficult, and are only starting to be embraced by developers and companies.
Another question asked why there seems to be so little uptake of open source ERP. I would like to ask the same about OSBI, but didnt' need to do so, as Matt brought it up. At this point, open source seems to fill niches within a given enterprise, and one can build a niche OSBI solution more easily than a niche ERP solution. Larry also pointed out that many large organizations in the US have ERP implemented, and they're not going to rip it out to go open source; however, if you look at other markets, where ERP implementations didn't happen [as part of the Y2K fixes], you can find uptake of open source ERP.
Another attendee pointed out the only the oldest dinosaur can question the quality of open source, yet one still must go underground to implement ERP in most organizations. The panel discussed the difficulties of getting through procurement at a large company, and how tactical implementations [back to rogue IT] rather than strategic are often more plausible. It seems to be a matter of market education, and that takes time. Matt also talked about the post-procurement process, and how that is made easier by open source in that the risk is much less.
BPM, SOA, real-time-enterprise… This nirvana, or any other TLA, doesn't really exist in any enterprise, and many of these concepts are hard sells, whether implemented with open source solutions or not.
04:46:29 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, ETL/EAI/ESB, 263 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
The final session for today goes into System Management of Mule and the the additional products that mitigate risk in SOA deployments. This was definitely the most heavily attended of the user sessions.
MuleHQ is a dashboard that provides device-level management of app servers, databases and other assets. Policy driven alerts that allow management against the SLA is also provided. The server side performs auto-discovery of services and assets of which Mule is aware. Mule components, connectors, routers and endpoints are monitored by MuleHQ. MuleHQ is still Hyperic.
The presentation on Mule Saturn started with the challenges of integration, as well as supportability and maintainability of the integration solution. Mule Saturn provides a reduction in discovery of problems and recovery from them to allow meeting SLAs by "instrumenting Mule" to allow increased monitoring and proactive response through Mule Saturn and MuleHQ. Mule Saturn provides a view into the integration process and data flow for business users, whereas MuleHQ provides monitoring for the technical users. There is role based access to allow editing of the XML only by designated users.
The first use case provided was for a Supply Chain Integration. The examples considers a batch of POs containing two orders, one that succeeds and one that fails. Drill down through hyperlinks is possible. Essentially, the use case walked us through Mule Saturn.
The second use case went through the workflow of approving an employee's expense report with a similar walk-through of Mule Saturn showing a failure in the process where the manager never approved the expense resulting from an email failure to communicate.
04:01:28 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, 368 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
Ron Park, VP of Engineering at MuleSource, gave a comparison of the Community and Enterprise editions of the Mule products starting with Mule 1.5 then Mule 1.6.
Ron also introduced Jackie, who is in charge of technical publications, and Scott Yuen, who heads support and services. These two areas are of noted improvement over last year [when neither really existed] and what is being made available today to Enterprise customers. In addition to formal documentation and support, there is a knowledgebase available to subscription customers, which contains over a thousand articles.
MuleHQ 3.1 new features include:
It should be noted that MuleHQ is intended for stand-alone Mule implementations, and not when Mule is embedded in other SOA tools.
Mule Saturn is included in the Enterprise edition to provide data visualization for a light-weight business activity monitoring service.
Mule Enterprise 1.6 should be out by May, 2008. Again it will include MuleHQ and Mule Saturn, as well as some premium connectors for JDBC, Apache CXF and native WebSphere MQ support.
Mule Enterprise 2.0 will have even more documentation [see Jackie] and the major difference will be the Migration Tools for Mule Core. There will be more premium connectors, such as for FTP, and improved reconnection strategies. Improvements and architectural enhancements to Mule Saturn and MuleHQ are also part of the roadmap. MuleHQ will also have changes to the plug-in architecture, moving forward towards hot deployments.
The community version of Mule 2 is available now, but there will be maintenance releases to Mule Community edition 1.4.
There will be features that will be in Mule Enterprise that won't be in Mule Community. Hot deployments and clustering/fail-over are examples of such features. How these features will be licensed is still being investigated with the lawyers. Mule IDE is open source and available, as is Mule Galaxy for governance, but the two of the working together are an Enterprise feature add.
As MuleSource evolves, I think the differences between the Community and Enterprise editions, the licensing, and the ability of the community to add enterprise-like features to the Community edition will be very dicey. We'll have to wait and see.
02:58:51 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, ETL/EAI/ESB, 138 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
OpSource provides web operations for SaaS companies. They deliver about 250 on-demand applications involving billions of transactions per day. The backend is Mule. OpSource using the best solutions to their challenges, open source or proprietary, which says a good deal about Mule.
Their opportunity is DATA. By creating a canonical data model, they have a single set of SQL and XML schmas for the data model resulting in the ability to create ODS and DW. The other opportunity is SERVICES for their customers and their customers' customers.
The solutions was to implement and ESB for Integration/SOA, which resulted in a fully multi-tenant version of the Mule ESB. OpSource Connect is reliable and scalable, and fully PCI compliant.
The use of Mule led to the discovery of Mule partner U1 Technologies and their Ambrosia messaging platform.
And they're hiring.
02:42:40 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, ETL/EAI/ESB, 305 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
The second session in the first user breakout is by Craig Sutter, Technology Director of VetSource.
VetSource deals with many challenges from the multitude of partners' and manufacturers' integration points to regulatory requirements. Existing platforms don't scale, and are often in older, proprietary Java frameworks.
The objective that led to VetSource choosing open source solutions is flexibility without vendor lock-in. One reason to use Mule is the ability to use POJO based services.
[I broke away real quick to return a call to a friend from back East. He'll be in SF on the 24th, so don't bother me that day.]
Other reasons to use Mule:
The entire platform is OSS: Xen VM, CentOS 5, MySQL 5, Wicket, Cayenne, Spring and an open source veterinary application. This approach, and the use of Mule allows them to reuse and repurpose older web applications and legacy services. Other services are basic POJOs exposed through a RESTful API. Craig mentioned that he would like to see some changes in the way REST is implemented in Mule, and then mumbled that he'll be talking to the Mule guys later today about that. The difference between this and what might happen would a customer do the same at a BigProprietaryVendor World conference, is that the Mule guys will listen. I also wouldn't be surprised if they implement those changes over the next several weeks, or provide a way for Craig's folk to do so in a maintainable fashion.
One example of the complexity involved is that they may pass an order for a drug that has special shipping and handling requirements directly to the the manufacturer or specialized distributor via EDI using a Mule connector.
02:16:51 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, ETL/EAI/ESB, 245 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
The afternoon sessions are split into a Developer Track and a User Track. I decided to attend the User Track. The first speaker was Shigemoto Fujikura of OGIS International speaking about the S2Mule project that they implemented. As part of an all encompassing project affecting dozens of system, the first target was an HRM system, with the first application being a mainframe skills management system that was being migrated to an ERP system. Microsoft Excel was used as a client by the executive staff against the old system, and they desired to continue to do so under the new system. By using SOA, they were able to define the system boundaries through the system interfaces, and were able to allow MS Excel to access the SOA network [SOAP] using VBA. They began the project with the 2005 open source Mule ESB project, as it allowed them to start small and execute trials to test out decisions quickly.
Searsar2 is a widely popular open source framework in Japan making Java dependency-injection simple with aspect oriented programming. The S2Mule project brings Mule into Seasar2.
Hiroshi Wada of the University of Massachusetts has been working with OGIS International to use modeling techniques to define non-functional properties in SOA separately from functional requirements to allow the reuse of services and connectors in different contexts. The Mule ESB has provided the test platform for their use of UML, business process modeling notation [BPMN], feature models and aspect oriented programming.
10:55:50 am, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, ETL/EAI/ESB, 561 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
The rest of this first morning of MuleCon2008 seems to be devoted to partner and customer use cases. The afternoon will be breakout sessions separated into a user track and a developer track. This is in stark contrast to last year's MuleCon, where the first day was training on Mule, while the second day was filled with alternating sessions devoted to core developers talking about the roadmap and users telling their stories. This change, coupled with the higher attendance indicates to me the maturation of Mule and MuleSource.
Jahan Moreh, VP Technology of U1 Technologies spoke about high performance messaging using Mule. He started off giving talking about messaging standards such as Java Messaging Service (JMS) and Advanced message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). He gave a very good overview, almost a tutorial, on messaging in general and the trade-offs involved in high performance messaging.
Eugene Ciurana, Director of Systems Infrastructure at Leapfrog Enterprises, Inc. spoke on "Son of SOA: Resource Oriented Computing and Event Driven Architectures" PDF download. Eugene provided an entertaining look at the limitations of SOA and the challenges and rewards of implementing SOA at Leapfrog, from the perspective of Charlie the Farting Dog. Well, not quite, this was an example of the upcoming Tag from Leapfrog reading a book. Leapfrog is very driven to implement new systems in very short timeframes using best of breed components. Of most interest to me is the shift towards consuming resources, blurring the distinction between services and data sources. All components of a system are viewed as resources to be consumed synchronously or asynchronously. there is no distinction between data, objects or services and there is no dependency on a programming language or framework. Programs map logical and physical locations through identifiers in traditional computing models. Resource Oriented Computing defines resources through verbs and logical identifiers, much like REST, but not exactly. Eugene went into a good comparison of how Java, REST and ROC handle Resource, Identify, Resolve, Compute, Immutability. Eugene selected Mule ESB as his ROC Backbone (workflow, transactions, transformations, logging and routing) and for the Resource Container. Extending the web protocols to go beyond the four REST verbs is easy within Mule. The initial ROC implementation took about 60 days, with developers just writing POJOs and everything deployed as a single JAR file. The ESB backbone is actually as many identical implementations of Mule as he needs, thus he can scale the backbone horizontally as much as needed. To summarize Eugene's conclusion, complex systems are easier to code and maintain if implemented as small blocks which can be mapped as resources that can be consumed in a stateless fashion reducing implementation costs by 70% and maintenance costs by 30-40%.
Roy dela Paz of Biogen Idec [Nasdaq: BIIB] provided a "Customer Case Study: Move over Proprietary, Here's Come Mule". The BEA Weblogic Integration Platform v8.1 has been in use at BIIB for internal and external data integration since 2004, but the learning curve has been steep [very abstracted, proprietary, non-standard development environment], it's been unstable [Nagios scripts have helped here], and it hasn't scaled well. Mule came back into play through a "water cooler conversation" and investigation showed that Mule provided the required capabilities in a lightweight, stable, scalable package using standard XML and POJO development skills. Roy compared the complexity of Weblogic vs Mule as that of the Sideways Bicycle vs a normal single-speed bike.
10:08:31 am, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, ETL/EAI/ESB, 927 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
Mahau, the Director of Marketing gave the introduction. There are more than double the number attendees this year as last. All members of the core development team are here.
Dave Rosenberg provided the year in review.
Dave began discussing that building good products is important, but building the right products is equally important. Customers have been successful in SOA when the use an ESB as a foundation. Governance [Mule Galaxy] is the next important step. Mule Saturn for data monitoring and MuleHQ for system monitoring & management round out the Mule offerings.
The MuleForge has a lot of new material from developers in 118 countries.
From the survey that MuleSource recently conducted with their users, while up-front cost is a consideration, the most important value from open source software is that the users get a feeling of control by having access the code.
When Dave talks about the growing ecosystem, it now includes over 40 partner companies.
Ross Mason, creator of Mule and CTO & co-founder of MuleSource provided the Mule Product Updates and Roadmap session.
A year ago, there was the mule project being transitioned from an open source project to an enterprise product, including the announcement of MuleHQ.
This year, the open source offerings are the Mule ESB, Mule Galaxy, Mule IDE and the MuleForge.
The Mule community edition will have major releases this quarter and another planned for the last quarter of this year and Ross presented the 2008 timeline.
Mule 2.0 has had a lot of architectural changes under the cover. More visible to the users will be schema-based configuration. There will be expression evaluation support [Xpath, XQuery, Groovy, Context information for routing, transformations, etc].
Mule Galaxy is a registry and runtime governance that is deeply integrated with the Mule ESB.
Mule IDE is Eclipse based.
Mule Enterprise 1.5 goes through an extensive QA, testing and platform certifications processes. It also includes MuleHQ that allows things like profiling, and Mule Saturn (beta) that allows visualization of the flow through Mule.
The community edition will have more frequent releases but will be potentially less stable.
Mule Enterprise 2.x will add some premium connectors, such as for Websphere MQ. Migration tools will be added to MuleHQ and Mule Saturn. The migration tools include even easier migration from Mule 1.x. One major change in 2.x is the addition of SOA Runtime, hot deployment of components. When one has a service running in Mule, and one changes the message format for a long running transaction, hot deployment allows a way to gracefully change over from the older to the newer format, without shutting down.
Mule Galaxy Enterprise provides for Clustering, Microsoft Office Indexes, PDF indexes, Workflow, Replication/federation, Premium (task based) documentation and QA.
Ross provided a few use cases.
The Mule IDE (promised to be fully functional and stable by the end of the year) allows one to create, debug and deploy new instances of Mule, while using Mule Galaxy to share artifacts and design time policies. While developing in the Mule IDE, one can extend the functions of the instance by getting components from the MuleForge.
Within Mule Galaxy, is something called Mule netboot, which is essentially a bootstrap node for Mule. Mule HQ can discover these nodes, which can be configured to download its configuration from a Mule Galaxy URL. Mule netboot then starts up Mule ESB. This is much simpler than the current Mule patch manager method of deployment.
Monitoring Mule with MuleHQ provides triggers and alerts for things like error and load conditions. Mule Saturn provide more of a business view, while Mule Galaxy provides the runtime governance as to who/what is using the service and how.
Ross is now providing a tour of MuleForge. One strong aspect of MuleForge is that it allows folk to create a connector, for example, and then release & manage it through the MuleForge. There are also proposals for projects, so that one can seek help in creating, or at least in determining interest in, certain connectors or extensions for Mule.
There is a certification process for projects
MuleSource is now doing targeted distributions from MuleForge, for example, a REST pack that allows for ATOM publication that provides not just a code bundle, but also instructions, descriptions and definitions on using the pack.
As noted in our pre-OSTT thoughts, and in some of our OSBC notes, that over there have been some holes in the open source offerings, most notably around governance. The release of Mule Galaxy will be filling this hole. From last year's MuleCon I had noticed that there was a dichotomy among the users after the training, some who embraced the XML editing for configuring Mule and others who missed their wizards. The schema-based configuration and the seamless integration of the Mule IDE should help to satisfy both camps.
Dave came back up to garner suggestions for the ending campground. The audience suggested:
In a move that was anticipated by industry insiders for several months now, MuleSource CEO Dave Rosenberg announced at the opening breakfast for MuleCon2008 that MuleSource had made successful hostile bids for Microsoft, Oracle and Google - pending SEC approval, which is expected soon.
As part of his OSS (Open Source Swashbuckling) strategy, Dave laid out his roadmap for each of the three, soon-to-be-absorbed companies.
Microsoft will be dismantled, as it has obviously outlived its usefulness. The main value from the company is in its many developers and .Net community, all of whom will be set free to work on innovative products in the open source realm.
Dave admitted that the only reason for the Oracle purchase was to obtain access to the BEA Tuxedo, providing Mule with much needed COBOL connectors. Oracle database business has been undermined in recent years by MySQL for dot-com and Web2.0 applications, PostgreSQL for enterprise transactions, and LucidDB for BI. The applications business is increasingly being owned by Compiere [pronounced in the Italianite way] and OpenBRAVO. Partnerships are being planned with these open source companies.
Google has lived off of open source projects and will now be giving back in a big way. As soon as the acquisition is complete, all Google code will be released under AGPLv3. All Google's products will be redesigned to conform to a new SOA and MDM strategy, to allow for even more efficient enterprise mashups.
What more is there to say? Get ready to ride the Mule, and welcome to the new world order.
03:02:09 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, 350 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
There's a blank space in the agenda for this time slot. A panel has been brought together to discuss if open source companies can survive the M&A. The panel includes Harold Goldberg, CEO, Zend Technologies, Ben Sabrin, VP, Sales & Business Development, Appcelerator, Zack Urlocker, EVP of Products, MySQL, and Rex Wang, VP, Product Marketing, Oracle.
The community, the employees, the product - everything could change.
Zend and MySQL are strong partners, as over 50% of development on top of MySQL is in PHP. Sun acquiring MySQL initially was upsetting, but more from the standpoint that the world needs strong, independent open source companies. The two companies are dedicated to supporting the overlapping communities through the transition and to maintain the direction of MySQL. Sun and MySQL, whether still being in the honeymoon period or indicative of long term cultures, are having open, supportive conversations.
Red Hat and JBoss had no such conversations, and the cultural shift was very negative, though the results may be positive.
Harold brought out that there are three types of M&A: acquire a business, consolidate markets, purchase a piece of technology. Open Source doesn't make this different.
Sleepycat was acquired by Oracle two years ago, and it was announced at OSBC 2006, and thus has been the longest in the transition. Sleepycat personnel were integrated with comparable groups within Oracle, e.g. Sleepycat engineers joined database engineering, marketing joined marketing, sales formed with sales folk from other recent Oracle acquisitions, a new sales group focused on embedded databases and small devices. Though this integration and dispersal happened over many months, and some processes, such as the release cycle are still done the Sleepycat way and may never transition to the Oracle way.
There are gradations of M&A transition & integration policies, ranging from complete absorption into the new culture, to maintaining the acquired company intact while the acquiring company learns the new business. Most acquisitions fail. It's too early to tell how these acquisitions will run, but a lot depends on the M&A experience and competency of the acquiring company.
02:37:50 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, 315 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
I haven't been doing any "live blogging" this OSBC. Yesterday was very hectic. I did some interviews, attended some sessions, and had many great conversations. Today was less hectic, and I even got to pull out the MicroTrak to record a podcast with Brian Reale of ProcessMaker.
I actually got to this panel session early enough to grab a piece of table and set-up my laptop. This panel is "Open Source: Out of the Server, Into the Network" moderated by Larry Augustin, Managing Director, Augustin Ventures and comprised of Artur Bergman, Director of Engineering, Wikia, Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO, Funambol, Kelly Herrell, CEO, Vyatta, and Mark Spencer, Founder and CTO, Digium.
Much of the conversation in the first part of the panel centered around Cisco as a monopoly, pricing of "enterprise class" at three or four orders of magnitude over similar items from the the local electronics store, and adapting Linux for network use. What I heard was the commoditization of the network. The same discussion I was having with the CEO of a communications VAR 10 years ago. At that time, the industry was going through a sea change where the old way was to have system engineering as a free, value-added service as part of the sales process for large, multi-million dollar PBX, EDGE Router, telecomms & networking deals. The new way hadn't been decided yet, but the margins were being forced down to under 15% - commoditization. Today this panel was talking about COTS hardware running specialized open source software to replace network gear and PBXs - commoditization.
But where's the value? Fabrizio hit the nail on the head: community, the power of community and using open source to build a community. Why is there value in community? I think we can sum this up with customization, localization, and common needs.
Larry summarized it as a vertical market coming apart horizontally.
Great session all the way around.
01:19:04 pm, Categories: Business, Computers and Internet, Open Source, 538 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
I met with Bill Soward, President & CEO, and Greg Schneider, Vice President Marketing of Adaptive Planning. Adaptive Planning provides packaged solutions for business performance management (BPM), but I think that the best description of Adaptive Planning is that they provide focused BI tools, both on-demand as SaaS and on-premise as open source software, which is licensed under GPLv2.
Since its founding in 2003, Adaptive Planning has tripled its customer base year over year, and has grown to over 220 customers, with 90% of these being customers of the on-demand SaaS. However, approximately half of the largest customers use the open source on-premise version. Most of these customers are companies with 100 to 2500 employees. In toto, they've taken US$29 million in VC funding.
The open source version is available from SourceForge and
