soarce

Have you heard the news about event-driven architecture (EDA)? Maybe not, because there doesn't seem to be much news about EDA. But wait...there just might be more and more as "event-driven" businesses will need this notion to stay competitive. Joe McKendrick wrote about this area and mentioned John Bates, who in the article, is considered the father of event-driven processing. Remember this: that data is always on the move. Joe wrote that certain businesses are concerned with data on the move. Two in particular are the airlines and financial trading.

I entered this article because I can't help but put commodity futures trading and EDA together. The way I see the situation is that a commodity futures trading business would benefit from EDA. Let's go back to last fall when the corn market took off to new highs. Frankly it was events that shaped that market. One "event ", a major one,  was ethanol. The need for more corn when the supply was at an historic low. Granted the ethanol news doesn't have the "hot off the wire" persona that it did back in November and December of 2006, and the ethanol frenzy has cooled down some, but there is bound to be more events to plug into an event-driven system to gain a benefit. One recently was the British/Iran situation and the oil market. 

Joe's article is very good. He really went to task and delivered a story that gives EDA a fair shake.  He quoted Todd Biske who challenged event-driven businesses to think of themselves in the context of an event-driven business. These businesses must be in a position to realize the value of events. These businesses also need to think of the SOA side. Afterall a commodity futures broker must give service to the customer after an event has taken place, such as a crop or weather report.   

One item that's worth noting is risk. EDA and SOA have to be correctly balanced. Don't create too many event-driven applications without some type of filter to sift through the events to priortize them. In other words, don't over-leverage. Joe was right when he said EDA will evolve in its own right.

technorati: event driven architecture in blog posts

Posted by 81859mike at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you need a good resource on SOA vendors, this entry from service-architecture.blogspot.com is excellent. The assessments include summaries. The ratings and the categories are explained at the end of the entry.

technorati: soa in blog posts 

Posted by 81859mike at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Create the vision. Create workspace applications. Get an architect. Sounds easy enough, but wait...where do the users come in? What about the enterprise? The new applications want to penetrate the enterprise with a thin line that's hardly there. Visual development tools are being upgraded.

Selling a product needs much strategy, or I've been told. Selling is done by so many people in an organization. The more organized the organization, the more strategy goes with selling a product. One might think more architecture is needed, but strategy is not architecture. But selling takes a vision that aligns with business needs. Business goals should be broken down to immediate and long-term. Customer relations is surely a goal that can't be ignored. There needs to be a good balance.

This is where the enterprise portal comes to mind. Portal infrastructure need to be looked at since it can be implemented to solve business problems and help productivity and ROI. The key job of the portal is to increase business.

Posted by 81859mike at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Business intelligence is about finding information from structured data. But what if you need to find information from unstructured data? Is there a business intelligence source that can find information from the company intranet? Or from internal blogs within the organization? Yes. The answer is Search.

There has been a wall put up between BI and Search. One reson is that the two have had trouble working together. Many want the two to work together for everyone who needs the information. Custom-designed portals or dashboards that combine the two are possible. The wide variety of desktop search tools like the free Google Desktop make it possible for detailed search queries across multiple data sources.

A change in infrastrucure will most likely be needed to enable a good integration of combined Search and BI tools. The possibility of traditional search results from the traditional sources and from structured data sources is worth a try.

technorati tag: business intelligence 

technorati tag: google enterprise developer community

technorati tag: search 

Posted by 81859mike at 06:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)